The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 33
that reconstitutes itself indefinitely and claims to reinscribe the impossibility of the subject’s identification with the symbolic order (Derrida 1981: 46,
1995: 713). Thus, even the category of the real appears to conceal and dis-
place that which cannot be represented and the unconscious still ‘forces [upon discourse] the inscription of its very refusal’ (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe
1992: 82). This metaphysics of representation arguably also pervades Lacan’s conception of the subject, which some of his critics claim remains resolutely tied to the Cartesain cogito even as he tries to subvert its foundation by displacing and reconfiguring its primary attributes upon the plane of language.
What, then, are we to make of Lacan’s anti-humanism?
Set within the linguistic structures which make the Cartesian subject of
enunciation possible, it seems that the subject of certainty must relinquish its metaphysical status. Lacan decentres the cogito and takes the philosophy of the subject to its limit. No longer the author of meaning, the subject is authorised by the signifier that appears in its place. Thus, against Descartes’
idea of cogito ergo sum, Lacan writes, ‘I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think’ (1977:
166). Does he nonetheless continue to theorise the subject according to the same series of questions (albeit now inverted) framing the constitution of the Cartesian subject? By identifying the cogito as ‘at the centre of the mirage that renders modern man so sure of himself even in his uncertainties’ (Lacan 1977: 165), Lacan’s subject arguably remains tied to a certain metaphysics
of subjectivity. Against this view Slavoj Žižek has insisted that Lacanian
psychoanalysis exposes the excessive kernel of the cogito and the hole or blindspot in the structure of representation (Žižek 1999). The paradox
of the subject certainly infuses Lacan’s thought; the concept of structure
cannot function without it. As to whether his thought contains a point of
excess that may bring something other than the subject to bear upon these
discussions, this is a question we must postpone until our final section.
The attention to the realm of language and the ontological status of the
subject continues in the writings of Derrida, although here there is no
attempt to establish a theory of the subject. Whilst Derrida’s early works are Untitled-2 214
16/10/2013 16:39:45
structure and subject
201
written against the backdrop of structuralism, as indicated in so many of his interviews, his approach does not fit easily into an anti-humanist position.
As we have observed already, such a dichotomy is an unhelpful one because
such a principle of reversal: either constitutive origin or determined effect, cannot adequately recognise that the continued relevance of the subject does not issue in its delayed return or resurrection. Deconstruction does not simply break with the discourse of the subject but instead tries to locate and scrutinise that which remains excluded in the construction of the subject.
Through its vigilant readings and critiques, deconstruction seeks to undo
forms of discourse that centre the subject in relation to knowledge using
the metaphysical qualities of self-presence, transparency and identity to
confirm its authorship. Such representational thinking is built on the sup-
pression of difference and alterity. Derrida calls this passing over or masking of difference the movement of différance understood as the condition for the possibility of every sign and meaning, every subject and movement of history. It is, he writes, ‘the nonfull, nonsimple, structured and differentiating origin of differences’ (Derrida 1982: 11). It envelops the subject, forever preventing and stalling its attempts to become a subject and ensuring that the moment of closure or containment of subjectivity (as ego, as subjectum) never quite arrives. In this way, the deconstruction of the subject recognises that the subject’s condition of possibility is also the condition of its impossibility.
A paradox thus lies at the heart of the subject: the gesture that summons
it into existence is also the one that establishes its eccentric existence (see Williams 2001). The subject only persists through a certain ceasing to be.
Derrida departs from structuralism in his insistence that ‘structures are
to be undone, decomposed, de-sedimented’ and their logic reconsidered
in terms of how such an ensemble can be constituted (Derrida 1985: 278).
He thus deconstructs structuralism’s ‘nostalgia for origins, … desire for a centre’ instead affirming a free play of structure that ‘passes beyond man
and humanism’ (Derrida 1978: 249, 264). But deconstruction operates upon
the infra-structure of metaphysics and cannot extricate itself from its conceptual edifice. In this sense, the condition of the paradox we have theorised in relation to the subject is wholly inevitable for deconstruction:
Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and
economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and their atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work. (Derrida 1981: 24, emphasis added)
Untitled-2 215
16/10/2013 16:39:45
202
tHemes: structure and subject
Derrida calls this the doublebind, the permanent risk of being inside and
outside the metaphysical tradition that must be permanently negotiated. We
might argue that the condition of this doublebind infests the positions of
both Althusser and Lacan, the former in his desire to establish a pure science for Marxism freed from the impurities of ideology, and the latter in his effort to describe the dimensions of subjectivity across the three registers of its structural existence: symbolic, imaginary and real. Although both endeavour to escape it with more open structuring moments (overdetermination,
the real) the status of the risk described above remains nonetheless.
The paradox at the heart of the subject can now be expressed more clearly.
On the one hand, contemporary theorists of subjectivity wish to undermine,
displace and deconstruct the subject and, on the other hand, attend to its
insistence and ineluctability to reconfigure it in some way. Such a paradox must not, however, be confused with the desire on the part of the human
sciences to discover and name the innermost recesses of subjectivity and
hence restore its centrality and its stability. Such an epistemological project is doomed from the start, as Michel Foucault reminds us in The Order of Things, with the image of the subject as an empirico-transcendental doublet (at once an empirical subject and a transcendental object of knowledge)
trying to gain self-knowledge when its stability and self-certainty are open to question (see Foucault 1970). Are we to understand all the strategies to (dis)locate and (de)construct the subject advanced by the human sciences
as merely attempts to fill out the subject to a state of plenitude of meaning once again? Are all reflections on the subject to founder and fall back upon this kind of metaphysical subjectivism?
In the case of the writings of Foucault, the answer must be a resounding
‘no’. As with Derrida’s strategic questioning of the constitutive power of
the subject, we do not receive any clear solutions. In his early archaeological analyses, Foucault describes an anonymous structure of discourse where
the rules governing statements create the conditions for sense and impose
certain limits on speech, thought and action. Nonetheless, if (following
structuralism) the subject here becomes an effect of discourse, it is not
wholly determined. Instead, a struggle for subjectification occurs, and the subject must be made to occupy and function according to these discursive
rules. The body must inscribe within itself the principle of subjection. As Foucault’s writings change their emphasis to a genealogical analysis of the body and power, subjection takes the form of a struggle where resistance
and transgression accompany the hollowing out of an interiority, and may
also be a site of transformation and possibility: a becoming other of the
subject (Foucault 2005; Deleuze 1988). Indeed, whilst Foucault may take
Untitled-2 216
16/10/2013 16:39:45
structure and subject
203
the principle of subjection to its limit-point, in his later work he does pay considerable attention to the different ways in which the history of norms
has produced the subject and shaped its ethical conduct. Like power, ethical practices create modes of subjectivation wherein new formations of subjectivity may be stylised. There is, therefore, no form of power without the complement of a retroactive freedom that produces a surplus of subjectivity, a force of being as desire, as resistance, in the folds or margins of power/
freedom. Like Derrida, Foucault offers us no theory of the subject. Neither constitutive nor constituted and without the power of determination, the
subject is that not quite determined effect of discourse, structure and power.
In this way, what we might still today continue to call the subject must live out this paradox or vacillation within and outside the moorings of power; a paradox that takes the place of its own constitutive power.
Conclusion
This chapter has traced the dynamic intersection of subject and structure
in a range of (post)structuralist positions. It has been observed throughout this discussion that the concepts of subject and structure are inseparable.
We began by questioning the conceptual utility of the concept of the subject today, and asking how one might, in the wake of poststructuralism, think the space of the subject anew. We need finally to broach this question once again.
We have also noted the grammatical ambiguities inherent in the idiom of
subjectivity, where the many derivations of its possible meaning (particularly as subjectum and subjectus) contribute to the paradox haunting its multiple configurations. Indeed, I have argued here that the subject persisting within all the positions considered above (and, of course, there are many others that are not considered) is at once decentred and rendered an effect; clearly, it is a subject that persists only through a certain ceasing to be a substantial unity with a sustained essence and identity. As an unresolved potentia (of desire, force, affect), perhaps something altogether different may be seen to open
up alongside or outside the concept of the subject. It is this, I argue, that allows one to think the space of subjectivity anew. Whilst we must remain
vigilant regarding the risks attendant in the grammar of the subject – as well as the theoretical cul-de-sac one reaches when all powers of determination are merely transferred to another structure lying behind or outside the subject
– the present philosophical and political utility of the subject may not be doubted and is evidenced in many contemporary works.
We have already identified the beginnings of such a preoccupation with
the space of subjectivity in the later writings of Althusser. In conclusion, I Untitled-2 217
16/10/2013 16:39:45
204
tHemes: structure and subject
would like to take up and push further his formulations (see also Williams
2012). Together with Spinoza, Althusser was concerned with the production
of the subject: how the subject was constituted and how forms of individuality were composed and preserved over time. Indeed, when Althusser writes
repeatedly of the idea of a process without a subject, and with no assignable end, he has in mind an ontology where the conditionality and singularity of the
subject emerges via an aleatory, quasi-anonymous process. Writing about the same problem in Spinoza, Balibar similarly notes that it is the regard for a process of consciousness without a subject that makes it impossible to speak of the subject in Spinoza (Balibar 1992: 50). I have elsewhere proposed that Spinoza’s conceptions of affect (as both a power to affect and be affected) and conatus (as a generative, yet fractural force pulsating through all living forms) be understood as processes without a subject (Williams 2010).
Such a perspective considers affect as an impersonal force that overflows
the subject, passing through, between and beyond the subjects who remain
to all intents and purposes its effects. This force field can only be explored through a relational ontology that recognises the transindividual structure through which subjects are produced. This structure works also to twist and unravel that which it produces, such that the subject is a doubly inscribed register of being, perpetually deconstituted and reconfigured by the encounters and practices (be they material, semiotic, ethico-political) that surround it (see Williams 2010: 257, 2012). Here the distance between Althusser and
Foucault is not that great, especially when one considers their reflections on the state of the subject with, and through, Spinoza. What we find in
such reconfigurations of the subject is a novel formalisation of the concept of subjectivity without the subject, where that which we may retrospectively think of as the subject emerges only in and through the process that permits its circulation.
References
Althusser, Louis (1973), Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Graham Lock, London: New Left Books.
Althusser, Louis (1984), Essays in Ideology, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso.
Althusser, Louis (1996), Writings on Psychoanalysis, ed. Oliver Corpet and François Matheron, New York, NY: Comumbia University Press.
Althusser, Louis (1997a), The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. François Matheron, London: Verso.
Althusser, Louis (1997b), ‘The only materialist tradition, Part 1: Spinoza’, in W.
Montag and T. Stolze (eds), The New Spinoza, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.
Untitled-2 218
16/10/2013 16:39:46
structure and subject
205
Althusser, Louis (2003), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed.
François Matheron and Loiver Corpet, London: Verso.
Balibar, Étienne (1992), ‘A note on “Consciousness/Conscience” in the Ethics’, Studia Spinozana, 8, 37–53.
Balibar, Étienne (1997), ‘Spinoza: from individuality to transindividuality’, Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahauis, Delft: Eburon.
Balibar, Étienne (2003), ‘Structuralism: a destitution of the subject’, Differences, 14: 1, 1–21.
Balibar, Étienne, Barbara Cassin and Alain de Libera (2006), ‘Subject’, Radical Philosophy, 138, 15–41.
Baugh, Bruce (2003), French Hegel, London: Routledge.
Butler, Judith (1997), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Butler, Judith (1999), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth century France, 2nd edn, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988), Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (2004), ‘How do we recognize structuralism?’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–74, trans. M. Taormina, New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference, London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques (1981), Positions, London: Athlone Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1982), Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1985), ‘Letter to a Japanese friend’, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and Différance, Coventry, Paraousia Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1995), ‘For the love of Lacan’, Cardozo Law Review, 16: 3–4, 699–728.
Foucault, Michel (1970), The Order of Things, London: Tavistock.
Foucault, Michel (1987), ‘Maurice Blanchot: the thought of the outside’, in Foucault/Blanchot, New York, NY: Zone Books.
Foucault, Michel (2005), The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–82, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel (2010), The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–83, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gutting, Gary (2001), French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gutting, Gary (2011), Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2005), Multitude, London: Penguin.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2009), Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University.
Hyppolite, Jean (1974), Genesis and Structure in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Untitled-2 219
16/10/2013 16:39:46
206
tHemes: structure and subject
Hyppolite, Jean (1997), Logic and Existence, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Kojève, Alexander (1980), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. J. Nichols, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lacan, Jacques (1977), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, ed. J. A. Miller, London: Routledge.
Lacan, Jacques (1986), Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lacan, Jacques (1988), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–55, trans. S. Tomaselli, ed. J.
A. Miller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lawlor, Leonard (2003), Thinking Through French Philosophy, Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
