Subject - Radical Philosophy Archive

DOSSIERFrom structure to rhizome:transdisciplinarity in Frenchthought (2)Subject(Re-/decentred)Alain de Libera1Modern French thought, ‘structuralism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postmodernism’, Marxism as well, arecurrently associated with the so-called ‘death of thesubject’. Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’, the celebrated‘death of Man’, the declining popularity of the rational,Kantian, transcendantal subject, reigning over whatLyotard called ‘metanarratives’,1 are all parts of theprocess. Foucault’s rejection of the subject is unequivocally linked to his views on history, more precisely tohis criticism of the role played by ‘the sovereignty ofconsciousness’ in history. His plea against ‘continuoushistory’ and his full-scale attacks on ‘the sovereigntyof the subject’ are closely related:Continuous history is the indispensable correlativeof the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may berestored to him; the certainty that time will dispersenothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity;the promise that one day the subject – in the form ofhistorical consciousness – will once again be able toappropriate, to bring back under his sway, all thosethings that are kept at a distance by difference, andfind in them what might be called his abode. Makinghistorical analysis the discourse of the continuousand making human consciousness the originalsubject of all historical development and all actionare the two sides of the same system of thought. Inthis system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than momentsof consciousness. In various forms, this theme hasplayed a constant role since the nineteenth century:to preserve, against all decentrings, the sovereigntyof the subject, and the twin figures of anthropologyand humanism.2By ‘decentrings’ of the subject Foucault means‘the researches of psychoanalysis, linguistics andethnology’, which ‘have decentred the subject in relation to the laws of his desire, the forms of his language,the rules of his action, or the games of his mythicalor fabulous discourse.’3 ‘Decentred’ does not mean‘dead’. Foucault’s 1981–82 lectures at the Collège deFrance dealt with The Hermeneutics of the Subject,that is with the self, the ‘care of the self’ and ancientethics. It was not at variance with the proposals ofThe Archaeology of Knowledge: if archaeology issupposed to challenge the ‘transcendental dimension’,if its aim is to ‘free history’ from the grip of the ‘twinfigures of anthropology and humanism’, that is of the‘constituent consciousness’, if its aim is even ‘to freeThe first part of this dossier – on ‘Structure’, ‘Sex’, ‘Science’ and ‘Networks’ – appeared in Radical Philosophy 165, January/February 2011, pp. 15–40.The dossier consists of revised versions of papers presented to the conference ‘From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought,1945 to the Present – Histories, Concepts, Constructions’, held at the French Institute, London, 16–17 April 2010. It was organized by the Centrefor Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), now located at Kingston University, London, and supported by the Cultural Service of theFrench Embassy. The conference functioned as a pilot for a broader two-year project, ‘Transdisciplinarity in the Humanities: Problems, Methods,Histories, Concepts’, for which an AHRC research grant has recently been awarded, to commence in September 2011. Regular updates on events andpublications associated with the project will appear at www.kingston.ac.uk/crmep/transdisciplinarity.R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 7 ( M a y / J u n e 2 011 )15

history from the grip of phenomenology’, it is clearthat The Hermeneutics of the Subject does the job inits own, particular way: it surely breaks with ‘historicalphenomenology’, while contributing to a ‘history ofsubjectivity’ as described in Dits et écrits:[the project is] to study the constitution of thesubject as an object for himself: the formation ofprocedures by which the subject is led to observehimself, analyse himself, interpret himself, recognizehimself as a domain of possible knowledge. In short,this concerns the history of subjectivity’, if what ismeant by the term is the way in which the subjectexperiences himself in a game of truth where herelates to himself. 4The Subject and/or The Self. One could rewrite Foucault’s statement using ‘Self’ and ‘Selfhood’ insteadof ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’. One could even writea whole book on the topics. This book exists. It isSoi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another), byPaul Ricœur.The late Foucault and the late Ricœur had somethingin common. Indeed, while analysing the divergencesbetween the French soi, the English self, the GermanSelbst, the Italian se and the Spanish si mismo from aphilosophical grammatical point of view (following theteachings of the linguist Gustave Guillaume in Tempset Verbe, 1965), and focusing on the omnipersonalreflexive pronominal value of soi, as preserved when itfunctions as the object of a noun, Ricœur mentions Lesouci de soi, The Care of the Self, ‘Michel Foucault’smagnificent title’. 5 But, of course, his philosophicalintentions in Oneself as Another are rather differentfrom those of Foucault. One deserves special attention:taking account of the equivocity of the term ‘identical’,depending on whether one understands by ‘identical’the equivalent of the Latin ipse or idem, Ricœur showsthat this equivocity determines two important issues,personal identity and narrative identity, and that itis related to what he calls ‘a primary trait of theself, namely its temporality’. Throughout Oneself asAnother Ricœur maintains the thesis of the distinctionbetween sameness, the idem-identity, and selfhood(ipseity), the ipse-identity and the view that ‘identityin the sense of ipse implies no assertion concerningsome unchanging core of the personality’. He also hassome ideas on the relationship between his own workand Foucault’s herméneutique du sujet, characterizinghis own philosophical project as a herméneutiquedu soi, hermeneutics of the self, as a counterpart toFoucault’s book.Considering the expressions ‘philosophies of thesubject’ and ‘philosophies of the cogito’ as equivalent,16holding ‘as paradigmatic of the philosophies of thesubject that the subject is formulated in the first person(ego cogito), whether the “I” be defined as an empiricalor a transcendental ego’, whether ‘posited absolutelyor relatively’ – ‘in all of these instances, the subjectis “I”’ – Ricœur suggests that ‘the style specific to thehermeutics of the self is best understood if one has firsthad a chance to take stock of the amazing oscillationsthat the philosophies of the subject appear to present,as though the cogito out of which they arise wereunavoidably caught up in an alternating sequence ofoverevaluation ad underevaluation.’6 The transdisciplinary concept of ‘style’ is important. ‘The philosophy ofthe subject has never existed; rather, there have beena series of reflective styles, arising out of the work ofredefinition which the challenge itself has imposed.’I cannot comment here on those oscillations, those‘styles’. It should be enough to say that Ricœur’spurpose is based on a distinction between philosophyof the subject or philosophy of the ego (egology), onthe one hand, and hermenutics of the self, intended asdedicated to the question of acting, on the other hand.An agent capable of acting, and of suffering: this isthe subject, or better said the self, as conceived byRicœur. Its place stands ‘at an equal distance from thecogito exalted by Descartes and from the cogito thatNietzsche proclaimed forfeit’. History, phenomenologyand ontology are connected in Ricœur’s considerationof the subject. To be ‘able to establish the concrete tiesby which the phenomenology of ‘I can’ and the ‘ontology of one’s body are related to an ontology of the self,as an acting and suffering subject’, ‘a long journeythrough and beyond’ the ‘philosophies of subjectivity’is required. The ‘assurance of being oneself acting andsuffering’, ‘even if it is always in some sense receivedfrom another’, this ‘self-attestation’, not the Cartesianego, are Ricœur’s basic concern: they have to do withpersons and ethics. It is only at the ‘ethical level’ (inthe final section of the book) that one comes to thereal picture: confronting ‘narrative identity, oscillatingbetween sameness and selfhood, and ethical identity,which requires a person accountable for his or heracts’. ‘I never forget to speak of humans as acting andsuffering.’ Thus, hermeneutics of the self is concernedwith what Ricœur calls the question Who? (distinctfrom the question What? and the question Why?).‘We never leave the problem of selfhood as long aswe remain within the orbit of the question Who?’; itis concerned with imputation, that is: with the moralsubject of imputation, or, better said, ‘the articulationof ascription and imputation in the moral and legalsense’.7