Beyond "The Subject": Individuality in the Discursive Condition

Identity is, above all, an accomplishment, a particular work, a particular act. Identity is not something separate from responsibility, but on the contrary, is its very expression.

Václav Havel ¹

The postmodern condition famously throws into crisis Foucault's "founding subject" of history and with it many of the liberal values that Eurocentric societies have taken for granted for at least several centuries. Once the existence of the irreducible "individual" is contested, what becomes of identity, autonomy, agency, moral freedom, and collective responsibility? In short, what becomes of the liberal values associated with individuality once we suffer the loss of that atomic subject, that irreducible cartesian cogito, that free-floating monad that grounds so much of the European philosophical tradition before post-structuralism? Fearing catastrophe, some have mounted now-familiar efforts to rescue that liberal subject.

This essay works toward the definition of a new kind of subjectivity which might refigure our sense of liberality. The questions involved have to do with the possibilities available beyond the subject of liberal tradition. What are the possibilities for subjectivity outside the confines (some say constrictions) of that personal identity called by Levi-Strauss a "miserable treasure"? Beyond the traditional subject of Descartes and Locke, what possibilities exist for autonomy, freedom, and responsibility--things that have for so long been associated with post-medieval modernity?

In approaching the postmodern problem of subjectivity, the important first step is methodological. The most influential discussions of it have been grounded in philosophical texts, so that literary texts have only figured marginally, if at all, as quotation-quarries and exempla; little attention has been paid to the sheer fact of literary language, its particular power to turn convention aside, to reform the act of attention, to ground and limit the very formulation that is prior to any discussion at all, philosophical or practical. Languages are our tools of thought, the essential precursors of practice. If, as Saussure said a century ago, languages are above all systems, then literary texts are the most highly achieved specifications of those systems. This essay seeks its confirmations, then, in the work of contemporary writers because they provide for contemporary readers a range beyond what is conventionally imaginable.

To take only one example, consider the bearing on subjectivity of the way great writers like Proust or James experiment with the powers of language. Both emphasize the "associative volatility of language" as Malcolm Bowie so splendidly put it in describing Proust for a lecture audience. It is precisely Proust's ability to push his language to the point of catastrophe, of coherence lost, that teaches his readers its powers and limits. These threats are the very things that make Proust invigorating to read.

Something similar can be said of Henry James, the first author writing in English actually to situate subjectivity at the perilous margins where syntax fails. James, especially in his magnificent late work, forces his readers to cruise that boundary. In such texts, it can be argued, subjectivity is most liberated precisely at the point of breakdown. This is not at all a psychoanalytic point; psychoanalysis is not required for a reader to recognize the necessary bond between risk and freedom.

The difficulty and even violence of language in late novels like The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove enact the psychic stress involved in powerful interpersonal transactions even on apparently mild occasions. On the portentous occasion when Milly Theale returns from an ominous appointment with her doctor at the end of "Book Fifth," we get nothing like a result; in fact we get the whole of "Book Sixth" before her problem returns into focus. Instead, we get masking luncheon conversation concerning American scenery and a silent friend's unasked question as to what news Milly has had from her doctor. "What had she had from him? It was indeed now working upward again that Milly would do well to know, though knowledge looked stiff in...