Sociology, Psychoanalysis, and the Modern Subject

One might think that the problem of the subject has been exhausted by the debate that has taken place between post-Kantians and structuralists over the past several decades. In fact, this is true enough—at least if one considers the preferred arguments, the speculative arsenal, that has been mobilized by both positions in this debate. Still, it is now widely claimed, in France and elsewhere, that this debate had been overly theoretical, leaving the real problems of contemporary society quite untouched. With the works Alain Ehrenberg and Pierre-Henri Castel have devoted over the past 10 years to transformations in the self-understanding and psychopathological structures of individuals, the question of the subject is now re-emerging in quite a new way, one equidistant from both subjective idealism and the postmodern critique of the subject.

This renewal seems to have come from elsewhere [from outside philosophy]: namely, from an empirical examination of the social practices of individualism. This shift has not been without effect in philosophy, however. One could say, in this regard, that a reexamination of the concept of modernity is now required—for the latter concept is not, in fact, exhausted either by its supposed postmodern transcendence, or by the «philosophical discourses of modernity» that it confronts [reference here to Jürgen Habermas’s book of 1985, The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures (Habermas 1987)]. I would say that a sociological revival of the concept of modernity has become possible, a revival centered on a certain way of viewing the notion of the subject as a special product of modern societies. This implies, with special clarity in the writings of Ehrenberg and Castel, that we are ready to hear anew the key theses of the French sociological school of Durkheim and Mauss, to extract them from their premature burial in the prehistory of structuralism and from their affiliation with a post-Kantian Republicanism in the French style. This implies as well that one take inspiration from Marcel Gauchet—by following the various paths Gauchet has pursued in characterizing the historical condition of modern persons, where the figure of the ‘subject’ is at the very center.

Let us begin then with Gauchet. What Gauchet’s work has taught us, and what we must now learn once again to orient ourselves within the social sciences, is the fact that the notion of the ‘subject’ arrived late, and as a way to capture a certain experience of individualism. Every society reserves a place for the ‘individual’ as an example of the species—that is, as a physical or biological entity; just as it also reserves a place for the ‘person’ as the point of origin of actions and thoughts—as a being capable of acting according to reasons and of giving itself goals. Briefly put, ‘person’ and ‘individual,’ as articulated in the personal consciousness of the individual human being, are notions of anthropological significance—not in the sense of deriving from human nature, but in the sense that they appear, conjoined, in every society that exists or has ever existed. By contrast, the notion of subject is recent and singular; it is a historical product of modern Western societies.

But this latter notion expresses a profound alteration in how one understands the notions of both individual and person. The fact that the emergence of this notion [of the subject] has now expanded to a global scale, inspiring quite distinct tensions in the diverse cultures in which it operates, does not refute its initial localization. Marcel Gauchet has succeeded in specifying the nature of this change in the experience of the person/individual, to such a point that we are now inclined to think and speak, more and more explicitly, of the subject. A prerequisite for this notion—for the idea more than the word—is what Gauchet terms the ‘exit from religion.’ This notion [of the subject] needs to be understood formally, as limited to an experiential pattern the individual/person makes of himself: that is, as autonomy in the literal sense: consciousness...