ABSTRACT
The assertion that discourse constitutes its object, or that there is no outside of language, is now commonplace within interdisciplinary scholarship. Close attention to the workings of language and of representation has undermined the self-certainty of the Cartesian subject and emphasized the contingent nature of knowledge and of truth. Disciplinary subject divisions are increasingly difficult to maintain as a result, especially as the dissolve and mix of Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Performance and Critical Studies have achieved academic legitimacy. The destabilizing possibilities of intellectual work that discovers a constitutive incoherence in both “the knowing subject” and “the subject known” is increasingly clear, even if many of its practitioners continue to feel besieged and isolated within conservative institutions. Yet, the political desirability of destabilizing the identity of “the subject” and its normative prescriptions is often argued in a way that excludes the possibility of destabilizing the identity of power itself. How, for example, do we credential a particular mode of engagement as politically savvy and presumably preferable if the grounds of truth, intentionality, judgment, and responsibility are so entirely compromised? We are used to recognizing the signature of a writer’s attempt to be so credentialed in certain conventions. It is manifest in the choice of a particular vocabulary, in the kinship connections with certain proper names, and in the conceptual alignments that authorize specific forms of writing as critical writing. If, however, the question of identity is the enduring subject of all of these inquiries, then the identity of “the political” must be similarly fraught.
