On the Futures of the Subject :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

On the Futures of the SubjectABSTRACT This paper is intended as an inquiry regarding coeval critical assays of ideaivity. In response to the contemporary authorities of representation, both in expressions of essentialist identity politics and in versions of mixer constructivism, and their implication of all pedagogic 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 single its historical and contemporary effects in the politics of representation, but overly for the possibility of thinking beyond it. In the spirit of Foucaults honest project only a special course of curiosity and a thinking otherwise could, if luck and wit permit, allow us as individual subjects to go beyond ourselves. Thinking otherwise, when possible, could also suggest way out beyond ourselves collectively in the creation of provisional critical pedagogical and ethical community.The notion of a decentered subject, now affixed to post ultramodern position and practice, remains elusive. As a sometimes notorious, sometimes vogue doctrine of cultural politics, the multiple, positioned subject breaks from traditional anchorages, whether theological, philosophical and political and their cultivation of experience. or so difficult for public critical reception are accounts of fragmentation and centerless identity, refueling charges that a moral vacuum has been excavated. The risk of losing any guarantee to permanence, mark 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-importance persists. This paper is intended as an inquiry regarding contemporary cri tical 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.