The Subject Is Coming Back

Abstract

The whole history of social sciences?and even more of natural sciences?could be summed up as the elimination of the concept of the subject. Natural sciences do not refer to a God who would have created the universe. A mathematician answered Napoleon, who had noticed the absence of any reference to God in his book: "Your Majesty, this is an hypothesis it was not necessary for me to introduce." Anthropocentric views of the universe have been eliminated, the Darwinian theory of evolution broke the barrier which separated man from other species. More recently, Freud limited the notion of consciousness to be the "skin" of psyche, which is in contact with the outside world but which does not control most of the psychological processes. A large part of the intellectual history of the late nineteenth century, of the "fin de si?cle," especially in German-speaking countries, can be interpreted as the rupture of the subject. From Von Hofmansthal to Musil, the subject is figured out as an empty place. An extreme point seemed to be reached when the concept of structure conquered a central place in social sciences, especially in linguistics and in anthropology and, for different reasons, in economics. What is left aside of these "natural human sciences" is hermeneutics, the analysis of texts and of intellectual constructions, which does not refer either to the concept of subject. The intellectual life of the 1960s and the 1970s has been dominated by post-structuralist thinkers. Among them, Michel Foucault announced that the concept of man is disappearing like the wind erases a movement of the sand on the dune. Finally, we are reluctant to refer to human rights because we are afraid that this general concept conceals, in a voluntary way or not, real situations which must be defined in terms of power relations and concrete actors. We have suffered discovering that very often references to universalistic notions are used by the most powerful groups to fight against class, national or cultural movements.