On the Futures of the Subject :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

On the Futures of the SubjectABSTRACT This paper is mean as an inquiry regarding contemporaneous critical assays of subjectivity. In response to the contemporary politics of representation, both in expressions of essentialist identity politics and in versions of social constructivism, and their synthesis of all pedagogical practices in transfers of power, I wish to project the question of the subjects futures. I choose to discuss the limits of the interior, monadic subject for consideration not only its diachronic and contemporary effects in the politics of representation, but also for the possibility of thinking beyond it. In the spirit of Foucaults ethical project only a special kind of curiosity and a thinking otherwise could, if luck and wit permit, allow us as individual subjects to go beyond ourselves. view otherwise, when possible, could also suggest going beyond ourselves collectively in the creation of provisional critical pedagogical and ethical community.The notion of a decentered subject, now stick on to postmodern thought and practice, remains elusive. As a sometimes notorious, sometimes vogue tenet of cultural politics, the multiple, positioned subject breaks from traditional anchorages, whether theological, philosophical and political and their cultivation of experience. Most difficult for public critical reception are accounts of fragmentation and centerless identity, fueling charges that a moral vacuum has been excavated. The risk of losing any guarantee to permanence, come in and a planned purpose to life is too great a secular leap into the void for most modern individuals to accept. While the specters of social fragmentation have been recognized as modes of experience under reifying modern social relations, the split subject, from Descartes to Freud and, on into postmodernisms displacements, a nostalgia for a substantial, core self persists. This paper is intended as an inquiry regarding contemporary critical assays of subjectivity. In response to the contemporary politics of representation, both in expressions of essentialist identity politics and in versions of social constructivism, and their implication of all pedagogical practices in transfers of power, I wish to project the question of the subjects futures.I choose to discuss the limits of the interior, monadic subject for consideration not only its historical and contemporary effects in the politics of representation, but also for the possibility of thinking beyond it. In the spirit of Foucaults ethical project only a special kind of curiosity and a thinking otherwise could, if luck and wit permit, allow us as individual subjects to go beyond ourselves.