ABSTRACT
Once upon a time-modern time-there lived a subject. This subject was seen as the autonomous, pre-social, and transhistoric source of truth and rationality and of its own identity. It was the point from which the universe could be moved. We have been told that this subject is no longer with us: It has been decentered, it has reached its end, it has died. And yet this death of the subject “which was proudly proclaimed urbi et orbi not so long ago” (Laclau 1995, 93) has been succeeded by a new and widespread interest in questions about subjectivity and identity. As Ernesto Laclau has suggested, the death of the Subject with a capital S may well have been the precondition of this renewed interest. Perhaps, as he writes, it is “the very impossibility of referring any longer the concrete and fi nite expressions of a multifarious subjectivity to a transcendental center that makes it possible to concentrate our attention on the multiplicity itself” (Laclau 1995,
93). The subject thus seems to have moved from the center of the universe to the center of contemporary discussions and practical and political interest. What we are therefore witnessing today, as Laclau puts it, is “the death of the death of the subject,” the “re-emergence of the subject as a result of its own death” (Laclau 1995, 94).
