Loosely, a body of knowledge or a topic of inquiry larger or smaller than disciplinary or FIELD-level formations (see DISCIPLINE). In reference to broad areas of study, “subject” often occurs within the context of secondary school education and applies to a non-professionalized discursive register. Collectively, English, math, science, and social studies represent a popular distribution of various academic disciplines into subject areas in the United States. A subject may also refer to an object of scholarly study, however expansive (in the sense of a field) or delimited (in the sense of a specific issue or theme). In the latter regard, the subject occupies a local academic setting as a subject of discussion or debate. There is no lack of definitions for the subject in the sense of the human individual. Synonyms, metonyms abound—and complicate the resulting endeavor to extricate, if not redeem, the individual from the tempest of critical responses to metaphysical systems (see METAPHYSICS). A shortlist of the overdetermined possibilities (the rational subject, the Cartesian subject, the transcendental subject, the autonomous subject, the speaking subject; additionally: the self, ego, I, not-you, actor, agent, author, speaker) embroils him/her (pronominal subjects) in a lockstep of critiques—of Enlightenment, rationalism, transcendentalism, ahistoricism, ideology, hegemony, agency, autonomy, individualism, and humanism itself (see CRITIQUE). Claim after counterclaim, however, the subject remains; each metaphysical permutation attests to its persistence. Subject. Is the subject the nucleus of the HUMANITIES, the locus of humanistic inquiry, the embodiment of “what it means to be human”? The singularity of the subject undermines the synecdochic arrangement whereby the part identifies the whole, the one stands in for the many, and the human individual incarnates the human community. The scholar does not exist in isolation from the group of peers who receive and evaluate his/her work. Scholarship presupposes audience: it culminates in an address, delivered by the subject as supplicant, to those with whom he/she presumes to identify. Yet even the academic plurality of subjecthood—the ostensible inclusivity (but recursivity?) of “we”—threatens the humility of humanistic inquiry. “And how should I presume?” Certain disciplines transfer objecthood onto the depersonalized “human subject” of research (generally scientific). Humanistic scholarship, in turn, encounters the human subject as object—perhaps inadvertently, and crossways, but persistently.