ABSTRACT
The subject was either the point where truth and value were to be assessed, or the fundamental building block of all collective action and order. Truth had to be theorised in terms of perception, understood on the scale of eyes and hands. Morality was to be grounded in legally binding theories of personal choice and individual responsibility. Martin Heidegger sees subjectivity as an historical phase, a development in the unfolding of philosophy that must inevitably be superseded. For Michel Foucault, subjectivity is never spontaneous. Power/knowledge always intervenes between us and even our most intimate experience. Theory, therefore, is everywhere proposing the subject as both the most critical and important, but also the most elusive and abstract, phenomenon. In the end, these attributes cross-multiply with one another. Theory believes that our subjectivity is inseparable from a certain type of representation, one that automatically pairs our shapeless intensity with an endlessly elaborating formalisation.
