Tragic Modern Subjectivity

Abstract

Being alienated by a mystifying ‘Other’ has premised the possibility of conscious subjectivity since Schiller and Kant.1 According to most readings of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit — particularly the sections on ‘Self-Certainty’ and ‘Self-Consciousness’, which are arguably the most influential model of modern subjectivities — the self is depicted as engulfing the other in order to satisfy desire, but also, paradoxically, as needing that very other it supersedes to achieve external recognition of itself as self-conscious being. When seen in opposition to the self, in turn, the other is perceived as an all-powerful, constraining force that robs the self of its autonomy. In so far as self-realization is based on the conflicting movement of cancelling the externality of the other through which the other recognizes the self, the other becomes the ‘most awesome of stumbling blocks in the self’s march to fulfilment’,2 a threat that simultaneously constitutes and thwarts the self.