ABSTRACT
Any number of accounts of western modernity will place a distinct notion of the subject as its alpha and omega. This tacit notion of the subject structuring the very idea of rationality, anchoring politics and setting the premise for moral reflexion, grows out of a Cartesian philosophical universe that has thrived for centuries. The critical re-readings of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche at the close of the 19th century, followed by many others, began to expose and analyze the assumptions of this distinctly Cartesian subject: it is rational, autonomous, sovereign, self-conscious, self-present, unified, stable and, above all, free. More recent research in gender studies, critical anthropology and subaltern studies has added awareness that the subject passed on through the Cartesian heritage is also male, Eurocentric and northern. By extension, a wide range of critical accounts of the modern subject have, in the last decades, emphasized the historical situation of the subject, its social and cultural setting, its politics and its inscription in a field of power.
