ABSTRACT
Contemporary continental philosophy is famous, even notorious, for its radical views on 'the subject': that is, the individual as conceived in modern European cultural terms of reference. Continental feminism has its own vision of the subject, particularly the female subject, to add to this debate; a subject lacking in the characteristics of a patriarchal tradition of humanist thought, with its belief in there being a fixed centre, or essence, to every subject. The major philosopher of post-war existentialism is Sartre's associate Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose most sustained engagement with the topic of the subject can be found in his Phenomenology of Perception, where that subject is conceived of as a process of self-constitution. Deleuze and Guattari have an even more radical, one is also tempted to say eccentric, vision of the subject than their structuralist predecessors. Lyotard gives a conception of the subject that is less fragmented than Deleuze and Guattari's or Derrida's, as well as much more explicitly politically oriented.
