The Rift in the Subject: A Late Global Modernist Dilemma

Abstract

The article looks at what the author describes as the ‘rift in the subject’. It explains a phenomenon stationed between tradition and modernity, as experienced by young Muslims living in the USA. This experiential standpoint explains their capacities as social actors to engage in forms of collective action that have taken on conflicting global dimensions. The author argues that the experience of living between several geographies of selfhood, (1) defies causal models of cultural continuity and rupture; (2) conflates eastern and western modernities; (3) poses challenges to the western notion of recognition as the most appropriate model for explaining lives claiming radically different forms of cultural difference. In this regard, the young Muslim subject, rather than being a cultural exception, as implied in the ‘clash of civilization thesis’, is a harbinger of how profoundly engrained the problem of difference has become within the western paradigm itself.