An Unoccupied Place: Theoretical Emulations of the Subject

Abstract

More than thirty years ago, Jean-Luc Nancy was urged by his American and Italian colleagues to invite several French philosophers to address “post-subjectivity” in a special issue of the journal Topoi entitled “Who comes after the subject? ” What Nancy’s colleagues provided was not in the end so much a deconstruction of the subject, but more a critique and, of course, a reflection on the conditions that make the question itself possible. The question as stated was ambiguous: it could be read in the spirit of deconstruction, and the answers made to it would then be various options for a non-subjective reconfiguration; or it could be interpreted as a forecast or even a hidden threat. In any case, “Who comes after the subject? ” is to be read as relevant to the future, an invitation to prognosticate and an opening up of perspective. What conceptual movement are we making when we think about “conditions of possibility,” that is, when we produce a critique in accordance with the precepts of the Kantian transcendental method? The “condition of possibility” is a principle of seriality, a movement in search of the conditions of conditions; hence, the critical maneuver can be performed indefinitely. But there is a logically possible alternative to a “condition of possibility” if we change the terms of the search from conditions of conditions to the possibility of possibility. To think of the “unoccupied place” of a subject means that the attempt is not working with the category itself, but instead with its conceptual context because the category itself can be interpreted as a presence. The thinking in the issue of Logos introduced by this article represents a slice of modern speculative, theoretical, hermeneutic work neither in the tradition of transcendentalism nor explicitly outside it, but alongside it. At the same time, some of the efforts being proposed are devoted to classical topics and problems of the conceptual field in question (the historical subject, capabilities, action), and some others demonstrate how the problems of the transcendental tradition are projected onto political theory, sociology and cybernetics.