Subjective affects
surveying with Husserl, Shakespeare, and Derrida into the twenty-first century
pp. 1-82
in: , Transversal subjects, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
The history of Western critical theory has been preoccupied with questions regarding subjectivities and subjects, about what constitutes and accounts for them: whether individual or collective consciousness, presence, embodiment, perspective, authority, simulacra, and so on; whether they are singularities within multiplicities, or vice versa, or some multidimensional combination: events, amalgams, or articulations. Concepts of subjectivity typically pertain to individuals, respectively, even if generally applied to all people, and are linked to theories of inwardness, selfhood, personal agency, and identity formation and maintenance; yet they often suggest or extend to something collective or indicative of a group. Accordingly, inquiries into subjectivity correspond with specific areas of investigation and experience; in other words, with subjects of critical inquiry and philosophy as well as of societies and cultures. These include the subject matters of psychology, sociology, phenomenology, metaphysics, neuroscience, and consciousness studies, but also of literary, cultural, theater, and performance studies. Perspectives on subjectivity within and among these areas are commonly divided, generally speaking, between humanist/essentialist and post-humanist/constructivist idea-fields. While defining and explaining subjectivity have been primary to the objectives of various, often competing, discourses on the human condition, it is an argument of this book that subjectivity persists fugitively, enabling the condition to remain unfettered and subjective affects to be generative.