Argument
French philosophy – in its post-Heideggerian, structuralist and poststructuralist iterations – has undertaken a critique of the subject. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault contends, against Sartre’s anthropology, that if ‘the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date’, it is just as possible that for historically contingent circumstances the figure of man – as a epistemological and practical agent and target of analysis – could someday disappear ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1966b, 387). In an interview published the same year as The Order of Things, Foucault states that the ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason is the magnificent and pathetic effort of a man of the 19th century to think the 20th century’ (1966a, 569–70). Decades later, Jean-Luc Nancy introduces the anthology Who Comes After the Subject? by noting that, ‘since the close of the Sartrean enterprise’, the ‘critique or deconstruction of subjectivity’ is one of the ‘great motifs of contemporary philosophical work in France’ (1991, 3–4). And yet several recent philosophers working from within the framework of contemporary French philosophy – such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek – argue that political subjectivation is central to conceptualizing radical political practice. In Part I, I propose that Rancière’s account of egalitarian political subjectivation gives us good reason to reconsider the legacy of Cartesian and existentialist theories of the subject.