Who/What, Before/After: The Unrest of the Subject

Although the contributions to this special issue of Cultural Critique address the question of what comes after the subject from quite distinct vantage points, they are nevertheless marked by a surprising degree of convergence. The position around which they converge, however, is less a matter of doctrinal agreement or theoretical orientation than what we might call a common uneasiness with two of the assumptions contained in the question that serves as the title of this issue: (1) that the subject has or will have given way to a successor, whether by a historical necessity that assumes the form of a linear succession in which what comes after is superior to what comes before, or through the unpredictable outcome of struggle that in no way guarantees the triumph of the better over the worse; (2) that after the subject, after the time of the subject, comes the time of a "what" rather than a "who," the time of a nonsubject, perhaps nonhuman or transhuman, that by definition cannot be subjectivized (even if in a literal sense it can be "subjected"), a position that by substituting "what" for "who" introduces the note of disquiet or unease that joins the essays here. Of course, the very fact that the title takes the form of a question means that these assumptions are in one and the same gesture evoked and problematized, and all the more so in that the question alludes very directly to the title of Jean-Luc Nancy's well-known collection, Who Comes After the Subject? (1991). How can we be so sure that there is an "after" that would come to be occupied by something or someone and, perhaps more important, what is at stake in our belief or conviction that there is an "after" which would be an end or limit to a "before," if not its destiny? That these questions, already posed by the contributors to Nancy's collection in response to the question they were asked to answer, have reemerged with such urgency a quarter of a century later suggests that even if Nancy's question cannot be answered because the answer would only be the perpetuation of the question, it must be examined and explained.

I use the term "uneasiness" to describe the reactions to a question without an answer (and the corresponding emergence in both Nancy's collection and this issue of Cultural Critique of answers without questions, answers whose questions have yet to be posed), in part to recall that it was Nancy himself who attempted to theorize "uneasiness," an uneasiness related to, if not identical with, that of the essays gathered here as a concept and not simply a word in Hegel: L'inquiétude du négatif (Nancy 2002). For Nancy, "inquiétude" (a translation of Hegel's Unruhe) reveals a Hegel who is above all a thinker of "restlessness," as Jason Smith and Steven Miller translated Nancy/Hegel, or of unrest (as I will render Unruhe), that is, the irreducible absence of rest, and therefore the absence of any destiny or telos, which serves as the motor of the famous labor of the negative. According to Nancy, Hegel's Phenomenology is itself the site of unrest, unable at any point to dwell or remain with itself and thus propelled at every step to deviate from itself: the unrest that emerges as constitutive of substance understood as a subject acting with an end in view, as if unrest were the means to the end of a final rest (Hegel according to the Preface of the Phenomenology), proves finally to be the end of every end, an impossibility proper to the subject and the perpetual fission of substance that can never close upon itself.

It is this uneasiness or unrest, that of a concept pursuing itself without possibility of closure, a concept, to borrow another phrase from Nancy, originally abandoned to the Heimatlosigkeit, which may be the condition of Unheimlichkeit. The uneasiness or unrest that circulates through the essays collected here concerns, as I noted above, the theory of the subject. But more fundamentally there is a shared...