What Becomes of the Subject?

Abstract

More than twenty-five years ago, Jean-Luc Nancy posed question, Who comes subject?1 Nancy's formulation sought to encourage responses to or of that went beyond terms of reductive proclamation of the subject's simple liquidation (Cadava, Connor, and Nancy 1991,4-5). Crucially, who in Nancy's question signaled that critique of subject does not imply abnegation of questions of subjectivity, but in coming after temporality of questioning would be opened to futurity: we continue to ask who? but answer is no longer prescribed (as the subject). In these terms, crisis of subject so remarked by contemporary philosophy would not be understood as marking a theoretical stasis or as closing down questioning; rather, question of subjectivity (who?) would become a site of inquiry and opening.Although posed a quarter of a century ago, Nancy's question is worth recalling now as a gauge to measure contemporary critical discourse. What is particularly striking in this light is absence of kind of plural and dynamic inquiry that Nancy's question promised, a mode of inquiry that would be sensitive to historicity of subjectivity and multiple trajectories to which it might give rise. Instead, we witness stubborn persistence of the frozen in instant (Augenblick) of its perennial deconstruction. How many times does analysis of a text unearth or discover claim to presence of the only to show how text disrupts, unravels, or deconstructs it? And how many times do we trace operation of power through disciplinary production of the in social practices and institutions, only to chart multiple nodes of resistance that transgress and subvert its terms? This is not to denigrate or disallow subversion, or disruption, or resistance, or any other of these terms; nor is it in any way to call for an affirmative intellectual culture. It is rather to point to a curious temporal structuring which appears to be remarkably prevalent within contemporary theory. Where Nancy's question envisages or critique as a moving beyond subject (who comes after?), we inhabit a theoretical Groundhog Day that is perpetually suspended at moment of subject's deconstruction-which means that subject endures and becomes oddly durable in its perpetual deconstruction.One way of understanding this predicament is to identify a failure in thinking historicity of subjectivity. This failure becomes apparent when we recall near-ubiquity of expression the Enlightenment and role that it often plays in contemporary theory.2 Despite being nominally tied to a historical moment and a geographical region, the Enlightenment appears as an unchanging configuration of subjectivity which endures today exactly as it was in its initial formulation some three centuries ago. Perennially recurring and perennially same, the Enlightenment must be deconstructed over and over again. But, crucially, its has no issue or outcomes, and so cannot generate different possible configurations of subjectivity. Instead, there is only perpetual oscillation between subject's claim to full presence and its dispersal, fragmentation, disruption, and subversion. For all claims for deconstruction and subversion of subject, it would appear that it remains resolutely and implacably in place, pristinely awaiting its next and subversion.A sense of this failure to think historicity of subjectivity becomes palpable if we set it against an alternative approach, namely Gillian Rose's account of post-Reformation subjectivity. For Rose, Enlightenment subject has not remained perpetually frozen but carries potential to develop and mutate in unexpected ways. Indeed, it is itself recognized as a moment within a larger set of histories that she characterizes in terms of the unintended psychological and political consequences of Protestant Innerlichkeit (inwardness) and worldly asceticism (Rose 1998, 87; emphasis in original). …