ABSTRACT
The political subject is in for a comeback. After three decades of (post-) structuralist unease regarding the very notion of the subject, contemporary continental or ‘post-continental’ thought (Mullarkey, 2007; James, 2012) has come to reassess and reassert this notion. Recalling the title of the well-known anthology Who Comes after the Subject? (Cadava et al., 1991), one is tempted to answer: the subject him-, her-or maybe it-self. Yet, this reassertion is evidently not a matter of rehabilitating a constitutive or transcendental subject as a foundation of political (or other) practices, but rather of tracing its formation in these practices. Nonetheless, the fact that the subject is an immanent effect of practices
does not mean that it is entirely produced by the existing regimes of power and knowledge, rationalities of government or apparatuses of control. The subject must be rigorously distinguished from the more general notion of agency, whose modes may well be prescribed by the existing order. Contemporary theories of political subjectivity, articulated in different ways and contexts by such different authors as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, JeanLuc Nancy and Jacques Rancière emphasize the way the subject emerges through what we shall call a dis-identification from its ‘place’ in the world. Subjectivity is not merely irreducible to a positive identity but actually emerges in the act of distancing or subtracting oneself from one’s identity, insofar as the latter is a product of power relations and governmental rationalities. While the (post-)Foucauldian governmentality approach tends to emphasize subjectivation as a process of the subject being formed in the practices of government, the theory of the subject that we shall outline in this chapter emphasizes the formation of the subject against these practices. Of course, being against is only possible within what one is against, hence it would be facile to speak of a wholly different site of subjectivation. What changes from the Foucauldian approach to subjectivation to the more recent accounts of Agamben and Badiou that are the primary inspirations for our approach, is less the site than the vector of subjectivation, which is directed from within what in the Foucauldian-Deleuzean idiom was termed positivity, apparatus
(dispositif) or diagram (Foucault, 1990: 77-89; Deleuze, 1988: 21-37), and what we, following Badiou, shall term ‘world’, to its exteriority, outside or the void. Nonetheless, even this shift is hardly a matter of the abandonment of the Foucauldian approach to subjectivity as such; after all, Foucault’s own late theorization of the subject unfolds under the aegis of the critical question ‘how not to be governed’, as the ‘art of not being governed quite so much’ (Foucault, 1997: 44). In this chapter we shall address the conditions of the emergence of the
practitioner of this ‘art of not being governed’ (Foucault, 1997: 45). It is important to emphasize that these conditions pertain strictly to the possibility of the emergence of the subject and not to the actualization of this possibility, which remains contingent. In our approach, political subjectivation is not a matter of necessity – it is perfectly possible that there aren’t any political subjects in a given situation, context or world. Nonetheless, as this chapter will demonstrate, the possibility for subjectivation does exist in any situation and indeed emerges from its very structure. Our task is therefore restricted to outlining the general logic of subjectivation: how is something like a subject possible at all? How can there emerge, in any given world, characterized by a certain positive relational order, a figure defined by a distance it takes from this order and the possibilities of agency it prescribes? In the following section we shall outline the background for our argument
in Badiou’s phenomenology of worlds and introduce the figure of the ‘inexistent’ as the object of political practice. We shall then proceed to develop a formal notion of the subject as a worldly being that subtracts itself from its intra-worldly identity and contrast it with non-political, reactive and obscure forms of subjectivation. We shall elaborate this notion in the context of the recent messianic turn in continental philosophy, addressing both the advantages and the limitations of the messianic account of the subject in Agamben’s reading. The penultimate section discusses the question of the composition of the political subject in a critique of two approaches to this problem, the spontaneist valorization of the inexistent and the dogmatist overstating of subjective capacity. In the conclusion we shall reaffirm the dependence of the subject on the specific attunement or mood (Stimmung) that enables its subtraction from the order of the world.
