ABSTRACT
The quote above, from a collection of essays entitled Who Comes After The Subject?, captures the spirit of post-structuralist scepticism vis-à-vis the notion of the human subject. Post-structuralist thought questions both the idealist take on rational man as free to ‘transcend’ the world, and the reductionist materialist assumption of man as a mere product of impersonal processes. At the same time post-structuralist thought does not absolve itself of the task, which is not ‘fundamentally different from that of science and art,’ to rethink the question of the subject following the ‘death of man’. Indeed, for Deleuze, the ‘subject’, like other all philosophical concepts, fulfils several functions in fields of thought which are defined by internal and external variables and, therefore, it may not simply ‘die’ when one wants it to, unless new functions in new fields discharge it.2 In this spirit, the collection mentioned above centred on the theme of the ‘radical passivity’ of the subject. Indicatively, the opening chapter ‘Another Experience of the Question, or Experiencing the Question Other-Wise’ by Sylviane Agacinski turned that question from one of ontology (subjectivity is . . .) to that of witnessing the weakness that remains following the demise of the self-present subject.3 The important theoretical question, she argued, was not that of ontological philosophy; not: who or what takes the place of the autonomous and reasonable man of action, but, rather, how it becomes possible to address such a question to some-one in particular.4 In other words, to ask the question of the subject otherwise than as autonomous actor requires an openness to the experience of weakness.5
