The Death of the Subject: The Autopsy Report (original) (raw)
The Death of the Subject: The Autopsy Report
Chingshun J. Sheu
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University
The death of the subject can mean two, interrelated things: It means either that the autonomous individual of consciousness-the phenomenological subject-is no longer a valid concept for philosophy; or that metaphysics no longer has a solid foundation (the philosophical subject), if it ever had one to begin with.
I will start with the first meaning. Is the subject of the Cartesian cogito no longer valid? To answer this question, we must first know what the subject is. We start from René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. In six meditations, Descartes uses what we might anachronistically call the transcendental reduction to uncover what exactly exists necessarily despite the most pessimistic doubts about the sensory world. He arrives at the famous conclusion that, since he thinks, he must exist: “[T]his pronouncement ‘I am, I exist’ is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind” (18/25). 1{ }^{1} The question here is: How does thinking and existing enter into a causal relationship? Cogito ergo sum means that thinking leads to existing; logically speaking, then, not existing would mean not thinking; but could there be something other than thinking that leads to existing? Descartes himself is doubtful, “[P]erhaps it could also come to pass that if I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist” (19/27).
Immanuel Kant might have agreed. His transcendental idealism, according to his Critique of Pure Reason, is based on the presupposition that humans are all rational and therefore synthesize the same a priori perceptions of space and time, without
- 1{ }^{1} The second number refers to original Latin pagination. ↩︎
which “nothing can be thought or known, since the given representations would not have in common the act of the apperception ‘I think,’ and so could not be apprehended together in one self-consciousness.” Understanding, the faculty of knowledge, depends on the synthetic “unity of consciousness” that gives rise to objects; without it, my perceptions would not necessarily be my perceptions (156-57/137-38b). 2{ }^{2} And without a subject, a me, these perceptions would be mere phenomena.
Friedrich Nietzsche disagrees with both Descartes and Kant. Regarding Descartes’s linking of thinking and being, Nietzsche points out in Beyond Good and Evil that there are “a whole series of daring assertions” embedded in the sentence “I think”: “that it is II who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that . . I know what thinking is” (23/16). 3{ }^{3} He instead postulates that thought comes of its own accord, whether we want it to or not, and that the leap from “thinking” to the “I think” is an unfounded one based on the faulty logic of grammar (24/17). He also deconstructs free will, as is wont to be the case after deconstructing the subject: To Nietzsche, will is made up of sensation, thought, and the affect of the command; these three together form the synthetic concept of the “I,” which can only give rise to the agency of action when it overcomes resistances (25-27/19).
In another section, Nietzsche takes issue with Kant: When Kant says he perceives by means of a faculty, Nietzsche points out, he’s merely saying that he perceives by means of a means of perception: Vermöge eines Vermögens (18-19/11). Thus for Nietzsche, Kant is saying nothing at all. 4{ }^{4}
- 2{ }^{2} The second number refers to original German pagination; “b” refers to the second edition.
3{ }^{3} The second number refers to section; emphases in original unless otherwise noted.
4{ }^{4} For a more detailed exploration of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Descartes, Kant, and metaphysics in ↩︎
We see here that the phenomenological subject has been plagued by criticism from a very early stage, yet it is still a serviceable concept. Jean-Paul Sartre sees the subject as both transcendence and facticity, for-itself and in-itself, mind and body (to put it crudely). Whereas Nietzsche believes the I to be an illusion, Sartre takes the reductive unity of transcendence and facticity to be bad faith: Humans are what we are not, and are not what we are, and trying to reduce one to the other is phenomenologically incoherent, not to mention dishonest (100). And against Kant, Sartre denies the complete imperceptibility of noumena (McCulloch 105-06). On the whole, Sartre tries to incorporate the criticisms against the phenomenological subject while still preserving its coherence.
If ever the phenomenological subject was in danger of perishing, it was under structuralism. Structuralists such as Claude Levi-Strauss tried to upright deny the philosophical importance of the phenomenological subject, instead emphasizing the relations between positions in a structure (Caws 304). This reductionist view of the subject, along with structuralism’s bias toward the synchronic and relative neglect of diachrony (Copleston 417), gave rise to poststructuralism. To give just one example, the “death of the author” is premised on the stand-alone validity of each individual text; the author is seen to no longer be the sole authority of meaning in the text. But this also obstructs any analysis of the diachronic evolution of textual discourse, as Foucault recognized when positing his corrective concept of the “author-function.” He suggests four main characteristics of the author function (I have added emphases and notes to highlight diachronic concepts):
[It] is tied to the [constantly evolving] legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses; it does not
- general (the lattermost of which has to do with the second half of this paper), see Sarah Kofman’s “Descartes Entrapped.” ↩︎
operate in a uniform manner in all discourses, at all times, and in any given culture; it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a text to its creator, but through a series of precise and complex procedures; it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class can come to occupy [alternately over time]. (1485)
As this example shows, the “post” of poststructuralism manifests itself in one respect as the recovery of diachronic history and, as a direct result, a historicized, contextualized subject (Schrift 4-6). Foucault’s efforts are exemplary in this regard. His major conceptual premise, taken from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals and seen throughout his oeuvre, is that all concepts (or manifestations of concepts), including that of the subject, are historically and discursively constructed (Schrift 47). The subject as we know it today was formed through the various conceptions of ethics and care for the self that appear throughout history. As Foucault says in an interview, “I believe . . . that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in Antiquity, on the basis, of course, of a number of rules, styles, inventions to be found in the cultural environment” (“Aesthetics” 50-51). By tracing this history through Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Foucault both historicizes and contextualizes the subject (Schrift 47-51).
And similarly for deconstructor Jacques Derrida, whose motto, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” which he later explained as “there is nothing outside context” (136), served as the rallying cry for deconstruction and poststructuralism in general. Contrary to popular belief, Derrida did not want to liquidate the subject; in fact, he once said, "I believe that at a certain level both of experience and of philosophical and scientific discourse, one cannot get along without the notion of the subject. It is a
question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions" (qtd. in Schrift 27). His point is simply that there is no absolute concept of the subject outside of however it is situated.
So we see, somewhat surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), that the subject is not dead. Rather, the state of the subject today is that it is a coalescent formation of nonoriginary thoughts and wills and various historically discursive constructs. Such is the phenomenological subject.
The question of the philosophical subject is a bit more complex. The word subject comes from the Latin sub-iectum, that which lies underneath; the same meaning can be seen in the word sub-stance. Both refer to the Aristotelian concept of a grounding or foundation of metaphysics, a First Cause, if you will (Wood 58-59). For something to have a foundation means that this foundation has to be other than that which it grounds, so if we seek a foundation for all of being, it must be outside being-God. Unfortunately, God is dead, killed by the logical contradiction of a causa sui, or self-cause. As Nietzsche says, trying to be the causa sui of oneself is akin “to pull[ing] oneself into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness” (28/21).
But then, without the philosophical subject, what is to become of philosophy? In daily life, the contradiction of existing without a cause does not lead us to implode, but for philosophy, which takes the logical relations of identity, difference, and contradiction as its building blocks, the death of the philosophical subject seems like a death knell. And yet, we are still philosophizing today. How is this possible?
We recall that God died with Nietzsche, to come to terms with which has taken us more than a century. Structuralism, in its disregard for extra-structural concerns and questions of diachrony, ignored this problem altogether; but poststructuralism falls right into its jaws. So how does it get out? By decentering the center.
The question is one of the center and its margins. This is an idea that stretches back to criticisms of the Enlightenment and is most prominent in postcolonialism. As long as there is a center, there will always be margins, in the sense that the center is more prominent and viewed in a better light than its margins are. If we solidify the structure (be it philosophical, societal, or what not), then those on the margins will be marginalized for no better reason than that they are not at the center. The poststructuralist project of decentering the center is directed at this problem.
This focus on decentering is also an impediment to poststructuralist discourse, for if anything is posited, then it becomes the new center with new concomitant margins. Thus, it is difficult to ascertain exactly who is or is not a poststructuralist, and what the central tenets are. There seems to be a fuzzy consensus on the first question, answered in a sleight-of-hand way by appealing to chronology (after structuralism) and nationality (predominantly French). The answer to the second question seems clearer: The central idea is “context,” as mentioned above, followed by the more problematic “difference.”
The idea of context is that, just as there is no center without its margins, the center is the center because of its margins. Derrida’s early work on speech and writing (e.g. “Plato’s Pharmacy”) attempts to show how the metaphysics of presence values presence more highly because it is not absence. The margins are structurally essential to the center. The concept that separates the center from its margins is difference; thus, poststructuralists strive to ameliorate and normalize difference. Nietzsche (who, because he is neither French nor preceded by structuralism, is often regarded only as the “forefather” of poststructuralism) emphasizes that difference is the default arrangement of the world, and that it is we who form sameness through the use of concepts and ideas (104-05/192); Gilles Deleuze, with the same goal of normalizing difference, shows in Difference and Repetition how difference, in the guise of a "dark
precursor," actually has many of the same structural functions as sameness, including the function of connecting elements (145-47).
One step further than amelioration is displacement. Here I will conclude by briefly sketching out the poststructuralist themes of Alain Badiou’s philosophy, which is a part of my current research. Badiou’s philosophy tries to account for real, qualitative change in the world. His methodology uncovers the structure of being and appearing in order to formalize the effects of real change. He uncovers mathematical set theory founded on the void as the inscription of being (Subject 56), and the use of sets allows him to conceptualize the “generic” set, whose elements are pure difference and cannot be absolutely discerned (Being 370), thus normalizing difference.
The employment of set theory also allows for formalization of the event: The eventual set ex={x∣x∈X,ex}e_{x}=\left\{x \mid x \in X, e_{x}\right\}, where XX is a specially defined set called the eventual site (179). A set that belongs to itself (ex)\left(e_{x}\right) results in circularity, so that whether this eventual set exists or not is undecidable-it must be taken on faith. To be a faithful subject to a truth procedure convoked by an event is to participate in the truth procedure’s forcing of previously inexistent knowledge into the encyclopedia of the new situation. This process subjectivates bodies within the truth procedure against the old situation. We see here that addressing the problem of the philosophical subject leads Badiou to reformulate the phenomenological subject into a pure form whose content is any body that is formalized (or “subjectivated”) by it (Logics 391-2).
Let us now turn to the question of the center. For Badiou, someone who is not affected by an event is merely a human animal; an Immortal, on the other hand, is a subject (Ethics 12), which again is merely a subjectivated body-subjectivation itself is pure form and devoid of content. Thus, we see that the center is occupied by nothing. This is embodied in one of Badiou’s eventual guardrails, what he calls the evil
of simulacrum: A true event comes from the void; what arises to force the known into a situation is a structurally identical simulacrum (73).
Another guardrail is the evil of disaster, and this illumines the possibility of a decentered structure: No truth procedure should attempt to force every point of a given situation lest the human animal be sacrificed for the empty form of the subject (86). Being faithful to an event exacts costs on the subjectivated body that are paid at each point of a situation at which the body must reaffirm its fidelity (Second 116). With the absolute forcing of a situation comes an absolute cost; without the human animal, there is no body to subjectivate (84). Rendering impossible an absolute truth imports context into the structure to continually displace the center and its margins, thus achieving a poststructurally coherent philosophy.
The subject has not died-it has merely become in-different.
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