The Subject as Threshold

We tend to think subjectivity, and the subject, as somehow discrete and distinguishable, self-defining, even self-sufficient. The subject as owner of his own essence, capable of charting his own course, willful, and at least in potential free. An unethical self-deception according to Levinas (1935/2003). A dangerous delusion according to Adorno (1966/1973). Because the subject of self-awareness and freedom is also the subject of sovereignty, given to, and molded by, what Foucault (1975/1977) called power/knowledge matrices. A socially constructed and yet somehow self-experiencing existent. An abstract, and yet deeply felt location of being. This paper is an attempt to journey closer to the heart of this paradoxical, conflictual condition. It does so by putting certain ideas developed in social theory in discourse with Psychoanalysis. First, I follow Michel Foucault in his use of the notion of homo economicus as a means for theorizing the condition of the subject of neo liberalism and his preoccupation with life as enterprise and parenting as investment. I trace a parallel psychoanalytic trajectory seeming to address a similar kind of subject, a trajectory that, I suggest, finds its expression in attachment theory and relational Psychoanalysis. I follow Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities to suggest that the subject of nationalism, homo nationalis, reflects nationalism in his own particular sense of self and preoccupations, most of all with an unstable experience of inside and outside, unclear boundaries and interminable conflict, maintained in an always fragile balance. I trace a parallel collective-subjective construction in the original conceptions of Psychoanalysis, with its models of territorial conflicts, both within and between subjects. In both cases, I argue, even as it continues to make claims of discovery, Psychoanalysis reflects and serves the dominant zeitgeist of its time. I follow Giorgio Agamben in his attention to the ancient Roman concept of homo Sacer in an attempt to imagine subjectivity otherwise than as a hapless reflection of the social power constellations of its place and time. I suggest that we think of subjectivity as a border concept, and of the subject as a threshold, something defined in-between, as an in-between, in relation to, rather than in itself - a frontier, an endless interaction, an imagined, fleeting location through which things continue to pass but never quite reside.