Can Subjectivity Be Salvaged?

Discourse on subjectivity reached its culmination in modernity. German Idealist accounts of self-reflection, Hegel and his "master-slave" narrative, and Husserl's transcendental ego exemplify this intensive interest in identity formation. Setting aside the theoretical complexities of those approaches, we see that their concerns boil down to the issue of what we are and how we achieve our unity and homogeneity as living and knowing subjects. Such unity is taken for granted since it is regarded as the chief attribute of rational beings. Postmodern reactions to speculative philosophy, however, recant, among other things, the ontological and epistemological optimism of this discourse.¹ Still, in spite of the initial excitement caused by newly formulated theories about the liquidation of the subject, this debate can by no means be considered settled. Most of the contemporary defenders of subjectivity acknowledge the faults of the old accounts but are reluctant to go as far as effacing the subject by sweeping away either its autonomy and freedom or its agency and self-transformation.

Dieter Henrich argues, plausibly, that "there was an epoch in which subjectivity was discovered but this does not mean that subjectivity was invented."² In my opinion, this comment implies, first, that self-acquaintance is not the outcome of a particular and historically locatable discourse but is rather an unavoidable— even if unconscious—presupposition of any lived experience. We are conscious of our unique being in the world not because some theory has disclosed it to us but because we have such fundamental feelings as human beings. Second, the intensification of interest in self-reflection during a specific epoch does not necessarily entail that theories of self-consciousness characterize that epoch exclusively: we cannot presume that other times have lacked conceptions of subjectivity or that future philosophies can dispense with all accounts of it. Even a theory of the liquidation of the subject is a theory of subjectivity, after all. What is most plausible about Henrich's remark is the tacit claim that to relinquish a theory that views the subject as the absolute origin of all certainty does not amount to proving the experience of self-familiarity illusory or expendable. Thus, all postmodernist attempts to reduce the origins of subjectivity to a specific era—to the time of Descartes, Neuzeit, the Enlightenment—are bound to misfire because they confuse the reconstruction of the problematic (around which theories of the subject revolved) with the reconstruction of subjectivity itself.

My title is a question—"Can subjectivity be salvaged?"—which indicates a concern more than a claim. The word can and the question mark are meant to convey that my concern for subjectivity operates within confines, which are specifiable. It is definitely not the self-regarding (egoistic) dimensions of identity that we should rescue, for they do not seem to be in particular danger, theoretical or practical, in our time. Even if they were threatened, more altruism and openness to alterity is something we could live with. Moreover, my title does not refer to the kind of idealistically conceived subjectivity that is transparent, always identical, self-referential, and therefore very poorly informative about the "I" as concrete and situated existence. The sense I give to the term subjectivity I borrow from Lévinas: "The I is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity throughout all that happens to it."³

To the question "Can subjectivity be salvaged?" I could offer perhaps two kinds of answer. One is a long answer and presupposes a new direction in research. That new paradigm, unlike older accounts of subjectivity, would be sensitive to otherness within the self as well as outside it and would be critical of both modern individualism and the postmodern discourse of "the death of the subject." The other answer is short and cannot be more than suggestive and inconclusive; it cannot by definition play the role of the long response. This article embodies, I am afraid, the...