Zima, Peter v. - Subjectivity and Identity. Between Modernity and Identity (2015)

Subjectivity and Identity
i
By the same author
Deconstruction and Critical Theory

Modern/Postmodern: Society, Philosophy, Literature
What is Theory?
The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory
ii
Subjectivity and Identity
Between Modernity and Postmodernity
Peter V. Zima
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
iii
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First published 2015
© Peter V. Zima, 2015
Peter V. Zima has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as Author of this work.
This book is an augmented and updated translation by the author of ‘Theorie des Subjekts.
Subjektivität und Identität zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne’, Tübingen, Francke-UTB,
2010 (3rd ed.)
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iv
To Veronica – once more
v
vi
Contents
Preface x
I Theories of the Subject: Definitions of the Term and the State of the
Debate 1
1 The concept of subject and the subject of theory 3
(a) Individual and collective subjects in society and language 3
(b) Subject and actant: Infra-individual, individual, artificial
and supra-individual actants as subjects 6
(c) Individual and collective subjects as discursive instances:
Subjectivity, individuality, identity 10
(d) The subject of theory 17
2 The state of the debate 20
(a) From existentialism to postmodernity: Philosophy 21
(b) From the lonely crowd to the social movement: Sociology 28
(c) From psychoanalysis and the theory of personality to social
psychology: The discontent in culture and society 33
(d) Individual subjectivity in linguistics and the theory of
literature 42
3 Aporias of the individual subject in modernity and postmodernity 50
II Subjectivity Between Metaphysics and Modernism: The Subject as a

Fundamental, Subjugated and Disintegrating Instance 65
1 Subjectivity from Descartes and Kant to Fichte: ‘Monsieur Teste’ 67
2 From Hegel to Marxism: Omnipotence and impotence of
the subject 73
3 Vischer, Stirner and Kierkegaard as critics of Hegel:
Particularity, contingency, chance and dream 80
4 Nietzsche’s criticism of the metaphysical concept of subject:
Ambivalence, particularization and nature 86
5 From Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to Sartre: Sartre’s critique of
surrealism and psychoanalysis 92
6 From Nietzsche to Critical Theory: Subjectivity, mimesis, alterity 98
vii
viii Contents
7 Adorno, Freud and Broch: The ‘weakness of the I’, the ‘discontent
in civilization’ and the ‘theory of mass hysteria’ 102
8 The crisis of the subject in the literature of modernism: Nature
and contingency as menace and liberation 108
9 From modernism to postmodernism: A Clockwork Orange 115
III Disintegration and Submission of the Individual Subject in

Postmodernity: Philosophy and Psychology 133
1 From Adorno to Lyotard: The ambivalence of the sublime
between modernity and postmodernity 135
2 The linguistic subversion of subjects: Between iterability and
iterativity 141
3 From Laing to Vattimo: ‘Divided self ’ and soggetto scisso 147
4 From Laing to Goffman and Foucault: Stigmatization and
organized experience 152
5 Ideological reification and ‘normalization’ of the subject: From
Foucault and Althusser to ‘normalism’ 158
6 From Althusser to Lacan: The ‘decentred subject’ as a subjugated
and disintegrating instance 167
7 Psychosociology of narcissism: The individual subject in
postmodern indifference 174
8 Feminist concepts of subjectivity between modernity and
postmodernity: From Virginia Woolf to dialogical subjectivity 179
IV The Dialectics of Individual Subjectivity from a Sociological

Viewpoint 201
1 The crisis of individual subjectivity in late modern sociology 203
2 The decline of subjectivity in a media world: From Bourdieu to
Baudrillard 209
3 The liquidation of the subject by its omnipresence:
Niklas Luhmann 217
4 Alain Touraine’s alternative: Subject and movement 229
V Theory of the Subject: Towards a Dialogical Subjectivity 249

1 Subjectivity as dialogue 251
(a) Ambivalence and negation 252
(b) Dialogue and reflexivity 254
(c) Identity as semantics and narrativity 256
(d) The ambivalence of chance 260
Contents ix
2 The subject of Dialogical Theory 262

(a) Particularism vs. universalism: Lyotard and Habermas 263
(b) From the particular to the universal: Critical testing 267
(c) Interdiscursive theorems: Consensus and dissent 270
(d) The practice of dialogue: Psyche, language, politics
(metacommentaries to a discussion) 274
3 ‘The dialogue or Europe’ 278
(a) Language and subjectivity 279
(b) Movement and historicity 281
(c) Towards European politics 284
Bibliography 293
Index 305
Preface
What Jacques Derrida writes about translation, namely that it is both ‘necessary and
impossible’,1 could be repeated in conjunction with an interdisciplinary analysis of
subjectivity and identity. The question concerning the fate of the subject has been dealt
with for centuries by theologians, philosophers, psychologists and sociologists. Their
accumulated knowledge is daunting and makes the attempt to present an encompassing
or interdisciplinary overview appear bold and risky. Who can claim to be knowledgeable
in theology, philosophy, sociology and psychology? Although an interdisciplinary
generalization may appear impossible in view of an increasing specialization in
philosophy and science, it does seem necessary at the same time. Considering the fact
that, due to specialization, the concept of subject is defined in many different ways in
various disciplines, only an interdisciplinary approach, which relates these diverging
definitions to one another, can deal with it adequately.
In view of this aporia that links impossibility and necessity, one could adopt
Wittgenstein’s point of view and argue that, if we cannot meaningfully talk about
something, we can only fall silent. It is not surprising that this ascetic advice is hardly
ever heeded by scholars in the humanities whose disciplines often thrive on rhetoric.
Their innumerable commentaries and interpretations have crucially contributed to the
growing ambiguity of the concept of subject.
In this situation, marked by verbal excesses, the author cannot possibly decide to
propose a definition acceptable to all parties and thus clarify the issue once and for all.
Apart from the fact that such an attempt is bound to fail, it would not be in agreement
with his Dialogical Theory (cf. Chapter V, 2), in which knowledge appears as an open-
ended dialogical process. The concept cannot and should not be conclusively defined
(delimited) so as to give other (dissenting) theoreticians the option to define ‘subject’,
‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity’ differently – without necessarily rejecting the approach
mapped out here.
Although all-encompassing knowledge, which would synthesize all existing
perspectives in a Hegelian fashion, is not envisaged in this book, the attempt will be
made to avoid arbitrariness by structuration. The Czech structuralist Jan Mukařovský
takes the view that ‘structure’ should not be defined by completeness because
openness is one of its key features. Unlike a composition or a context (e.g. a sonnet
or a sentence), which have to be complete in order to be perceived as such, a structure
can be a meaningful unit without being complete: ‘The fact that we are dealing with
a totality is [. . .] not in doubt; however, this totality does not appear to us as closure
or completeness [. . .], but as an interrelation of elements.’2 The fragment of a poem
or a novel can be understood as a system of phonetic-semantic or semantic-narrative
relations. For in such cases, ‘we can complete a structural analysis, e.g. of a specific
relationship between intonation and meaning, between syntax and intonation’.3
x
Preface xi
In short, even an incomplete, fragmentary work of art can be perceived and analysed
as a multi-layered structure.
If these arguments are applied to the problematic of subjectivity, the following
scenario emerges: even an incomplete, open-ended description of individual
subjectivity in its interaction with other forms of subjectivity can reveal a structure of
this particular phenomenon. Hence it does not seem necessary to involve all relevant
disciplines – such as law, psychiatry and medicine – in order to obtain a concrete
definition. What matters is that the analysed theory compounds – philosophy,
semiotics, psychology, sociology and literary theory – be related to one another in such
a way that the structure of individual and collective subjectivity is recognizable. Though
consisting of similarities and differences, this structure stretches across the borders of
disciplines and its contours become clearer at the border crossings: between Freud and
Broch, Laing and Vattimo, Althusser and Lacan. But what are the components of this
structure?
It is both historical and systematic in character. While the first chapter deals with
the ambivalence of the concept of subject, an ambivalence inherent in both the Greek
word hypokeimenon and the Latin word subiectum, and presents the concept in an
interdisciplinary context, the second and third chapters analyse this basic ambivalence
in a historical perspective. The subject or subiectum appears both as the foundation (of
thoughts and actions) and as a subjugated, manipulated instance. Chapters II and III in
particular focus on the oscillation of subjectivity between these two extremes. While
the subject as foundation of human thought becomes the basis of modern idealism and
rationalism from Descartes to Sartre, it is seen by postmodern thinkers as a subjugated
(Foucault) or disintegrating (Vattimo) instance. The fourth (sociological) chapter is
meant to put the transition from the modern apotheosis of the subject to its postmodern
deconstructions into perspective. This sociological perspective coincides with the late
modern (modernist) self-criticism of modernity and subjectivity in the works of
sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel. The last chapter
is a return to the first and an attempt to turn the late modern and postmodern crisis of
the subject into an asset. It is meant to show that an ambivalent conception of the
subject as foundation and as subjected or disintegrating instance can yield a dialogical
concept of subjectivity which resists postmodern criticisms by virtue of its flexibility –
more so than idealist conceptions rooted in modernity (e.g. Habermas’s notion of
intersubjectivity).
This development of individual subjectivity from modern self-assertion to
postmodern self-abnegation was described and explained – especially in philosophy
– independently of other kinds of subjectivity. However, Marxist, sociological and
semiotic theories reveal the importance of abstract, mythical and above all collective
subjects (subject-actants, Greimas: cf. Chapter I, 1, b) for the formation of individual
subjectivity. The relationship between individual subjects and the supra-individual
instances mentioned here is ambivalent, and this ambivalence is inherent in the
individual subjects themselves. Thus Hegel’s World Spirit (Weltgeist) as a mythical
instance may force the individual subject in search of identity into (philosophical
and political) submission in the same way as the Marxist-Leninist party acting as
a collective subject. At the same time, however, Alain Touraine’s sociology of action
xii Preface
(cf. Chapter IV, 4) shows how important social movements as collective subjects can
be for the emergence and the consolidation of individual subjectivity. It becomes
clear, especially in a sociological context, that the interdependence of individual
and collective instances or actors may imply both an affirmation and a negation
of individual subjectivity, so that subjectivity, as defined in this book, appears as a
permanent oscillation between self-assertion and self-abnegation.
This is why in the last chapter a concept of subjectivity in the individual sense is
proposed which relates these two extremes dialectically to one another: not in order to
bring about a synthesis, but in order to show that the individual subject is a contingent
construction, a search for identity fraught with difficulties that can succeed or fail. In
this perspective, identity appears as the object of an individual or collective subject
trying to realize itself in thought and action.
This process is dialogical in character because it is geared towards the Other and
otherness in general. For this reason individual subjectivity is constructed in the last
chapter on three different levels as a permanent dialogue with alterity: on the level of
social and linguistic interaction, on the level of theory formation and on the
intercultural level of European integration.
It is by no means certain that this subjectivity can survive in everyday life. It can be
overwhelmed by ideologies and media, split up by social differentiation, crushed by
colliding cultures and languages. However, individual subjects do have the possibility
to take advantage of the availability of information in the electronic age, to confront
cultures, ideologies and television programmes critically and to overcome the
difficulties of differentiation and specialization by technical innovation and by moving
critically between languages and cultures. Their answer to postmodern complexity and
fragmentation can be a dialogical absorption of otherness: of the Other’s language and
culture, of the new discipline or technology, of the Other’s world view that challenges
prejudice and opens up new perspectives.
In a similar way, the subject of Dialogical Theory (cf. Chapter V, 2) listens to the
Other’s voice. To the testing of hypotheses within its own group of scientists it adds
criticism and testing between scientific groups whose members speak different
theoretical languages. It exposes itself to ‘outside’ criticism in order to be able to
reconsider its own theory and its group of origin with critical detachment. This
approach need not lead to relativism and disorientation – as little as the dialogue with
otherness in everyday life. On the contrary, in many cases, a subject open to dialogue is
able to qualify and consolidate its position by taking in the word of the Other.
The possibility that dialogical subjectivity might prove to be more flexible than the
idealist and monological constructions of the metaphysicians from Descartes to Hegel
is examined in the last section of the fifth chapter, where subjectivity is reconsidered in
conjunction with the collective subjectivities of the new social movements (workers,
unemployed, women and ‘greens’) and within the framework of European integration.
The movements are not the sole factors (as Touraine seems to suggest)4 that can be
expected to strengthen individual subjectivity; their impact on social life can be
considerably increased by the developing European institutions, some of which can
contribute to the rise of a polyphonic subjectivity beyond the nationalist monologues
of existing nation states.
Preface xiii
The fact that individual subjectivity cannot be viewed independently of collective

factors and institutions was revealed by Michael Nerlich in his analyses of the
adventure ideology. The rise of commercial adventure in early modernity would have
been inconceivable without the support of the princes and the Church: ‘The impetus
instilled into experimental thought and action in Europe (and later the whole world)
by the ecclesiastical justification of adventure trade found its way into all spheres
of social action from artistic creation to natural science and changed the world.’5
Is it conceivable that contemporary European institutions and future European
governments espouse some of the ideas of the social movements and contribute to the
realization of a social Europe and a multilingual subjectivity by creating a multilingual
education system based partly on European schools and universities? Can they
contribute to the renaissance of the early modern ‘adventure spirit’?
It is conceivable but by no means certain; and this is the reason why the last chapter
should only be read in relation to Chapters III and IV, in which the precarious situation
of the individual subject in a world dominated by trusts, media and ideologies is
analysed. A lot depends on the question of whether the European project will be turned
into an alternative to the North American model or be absorbed by the latter.
The book as a whole can be read as a continuation of the author’s book Modern /
Postmodern (2010/12),6 in which late modernity is constructed as a problematic
geared towards ambivalence, whereas postmodernity is seen as dominated by
indifference. In both problematics, the dualistic discourse of ideology appears as the
opponent of market-mediated ambivalence and indifference: as a negation of openness,
indeterminacy and tolerance. Indifference as interchangeability of all social values
appears as the other extreme: as a negation of cultural value judgements, of engagement
and critique.
In this context, the individual subject in search of autonomy can only escape the
submission to an ideology and to the market-oriented, value-negating indifference by
an orientation towards a late modern (modernist) ambivalence which makes an open
dialogue possible and furthers social criticism at the same time.
Notes
1 J. Derrida, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in: idem, Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, Paris, Galilée,
1987, p. 208.
2 J. Mukařovský, ‘Pojem celku v teorii umění’, in: idem, Cestami poetiky a estetiky, Prague,
Československý Spisovatel, 1971, p. 90.
3 Ibid., p. 89.
4 Cf. A. Touraine, Le retour de l’acteur, Paris, Fayard, 1984, p. 135.
5 M. Nerlich, Abenteuer oder das verlorene Selbstverständnis der Moderne. Von der
Unaufhebbarkeit experimentalen Handelns, Munich, Gerling Akademie Verlag, 1997,
p. 308.
6 Cf. P. V. Zima, Modern / Postmodern. Society, Philosophy, Literature, London-New York,
Continuum (2010), 2012.
xiv
I
Theories of the Subject: Definitions of the Term

and the State of the Debate
The greater the number of commentators who express their opinion on a given term,
the greater the danger that the term will ultimately defy all attempts at definition.
Subject is one such term whose vague, shifting character stems primarily from the
academic division of labour, which endows this ambiguous signifier with a different
meaning in each discipline: grammatical subject, legal subject, literary protagonist, or
even the subject of history. It is immediately apparent that there are a number of
different levels at play here (language, law, literature, history as world affairs) which are
far from homogeneous.
The aim of this book is not so much to establish a unity which closer inspection
would reveal to be illusory, but to investigate the interdisciplinary links between the
philosophical, sociological, semiotic and psychoanalytic uses of the term. One of the
problems which has bedevilled discussions of the subject as a concept is a focus restricted
to a single discipline. In philosophical discourse in particular, the focus of attention has
mainly been on the abstract, transcendental subject characteristic of Cartesian, Kantian
and Hegelian idealism: Descartes’s ego cogitans, Kant’s ‘I think’ and Hegel’s ‘spirit’.
What has been overlooked here is the fact that this subject did not only arise, think
and act in concrete material circumstances described in the critiques of the Young
Hegelians and Marxists, but became established through a constant interplay with
collective, abstract or mythical subjects: with nation, state and class, Spirit, World Spirit
and History. Above all, the interaction between the abstract, individual subject of
philosophy and the collective subjects (groups, organizations, movements) of society
was ignored entirely. In such circumstances, Marx’s idea that materialist philosophy is
the ‘mind of the proletariat’ was more mystifying than illuminating.
In the first section of this chapter, an attempt will be made in relation to a specific,
semiotic definition of the term ‘subject’ (1) to describe the interaction between
individual and collective subjects in a social and linguistic context; (2) to have a closer
look at the relationship between infra-individual, individual, artificial and supra-
individual actors; and (3) to consider individual and collective subjects as instances of
discourse responsible for narrative programmes. At the end of the first section and in
sections 2 and 3, the proposed definitions will give rise to questions concerning the
subject of theory and the decline or disappearance of the individual subject – as
diagnosed by various postmodern philosophies.
1
2 Subjectivity and Identity
In contemporary debates, the ‘disappearance of the subject’1 is about to become a

stereotype which merely diverts attention from the fact that nobody is actually able to
define what exactly is about to disappear or has already disappeared. Hans Michael
Baumgartner deserves praise for his courageous but risky attempt to distinguish
notions of subject we can do without from concepts that will remain indispensable.
What has disappeared, according to Baumgartner, is the ‘subject as anticipation of
reconciliation’ or ‘the universal subject of the intellectual which has caused difficulties
in other respects’.2 Apart from the fact that one need not discard everything that causes
difficulties, it certainly makes sense to insist with Baumgartner on the inevitability of
such grammatical subjects as the personal pronouns ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he / she’, etc.3 A lot more
problematical appears to be his enumeration of some philosophical concepts of
subjectivity which he considers to be unavoidable:
What has not disappeared because it continues to be a pre-condition of any

meaningful speech, even of a speech on disappearance, is: 1. the self-reference of
the ‘I’, 2. the subject as individual consciousness of cognition, 3. the subject as a
responsible person in the legal and moral sense and 4. the communicative ‘I’ as a
point of reference of any shared discourse about the world and the life of humans
in it: even about the absolute.4
It will become clear later on, especially in Chapters IV and V, that not all of these
concepts of subjectivity meet with consensus and that especially ‘the subject as
individual consciousness of cognition’ and as ‘responsible person’ is queried by
sociologists and social psychologists. However, contrary to what Baumgartner thinks,
the ‘subject as anticipation of reconciliation’ may appear as a meaningful concept,
especially if considered in the light of Critical Theory (cf. Chapter II, 6).
Reacting to a certain philosophical discourse exemplified by Baumgartner’s train of
thought, this book is geared to the argument that the problem of the subject can only be
dealt with within the interdisciplinary context in which philosophy, sociology, semiotics,
psychology and theory of literature interact. Naturally, not all approaches related to this
problem can be considered here; but it seems crucial to take into account constructions
or definitions of the subject originating in different disciplines and to relate contradictory
views to each other in a dialogical way. This is why in this chapter the theoretical debates
follow the definitions and why in the other chapters the problematic of subjectivity is
viewed in the light of philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis (psychology) and sociology –
all of which are considered as interacting and complementary disciplines.
Within the methodological framework mapped out above, a second, more concrete
argument can now be put forward. It has an etymological as well as a philosophical
aspect. Etymologically speaking, ‘subject’ is an ambiguous word which, both in ancient
Greek and in Latin, means what is fundamental or underlying (hypokeimenon, subiectum)
and what is subjugated (subiectus = subject in the sense of the king’s or emperor’s subject
or subjects). It is important to know that in philosophy these two aspects coexist,
sometimes in one and the same discourse – e.g. Hegel’s. Exaggerating slightly, one might
argue that the entire philosophical discourse on subjectivity revolves around this
ambiguity, which, time and again, leads to the old question of human freedom.
Theories of the Subject 3
Descartes and the main representatives of German idealism – Kant, Fichte, Hegel –
share ‘the idea that human subjectivity is the source of all reality or truth and the firm
belief that human subjectivity is anchored in thought’.5 This dogma of idealism was
called into question after the radical critique of Hegel’s philosophical system by the
Young Hegelians, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Their critique was intensified and became
more radical in literary modernism (Dostoevsky, Musil, Valéry) and in Adorno’s and
Horkheimer’s Critical Theory. It probably reached its climax in the writings of
postmodern philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Vattimo – all of whom
were inspired by Nietzsche’s polemics against the complementary concepts of truth and
subjectivity.
They reveal the reverse of the idealist medal by pointing out that the subject is not
a fundamental or underlying entity but rather a subjugated or disintegrating instance:
a product of power constellations (Foucault) and ideologies (Althusser) or an unstable
epiphenomenon of the unconscious and its impulses (Lacan). In the latter case, it is
marked by discontinuity and contingency. In the second and third chapters, it will
appear that there is a contradiction between the subject as a subjugated and the subject
as a disintegrating instance. For a subject held together by ideology can be quite
homogeneous and its definition excludes a disintegration in language, contingency or
the unconscious.
In this situation, the authors of Critical Theory (Adorno, Horkheimer), who in many
respects saw themselves as sceptical heirs to Kant, Hegel and Marx, gauged the scope
and the limits of an individual autonomy located well beyond all idealist dreams of
subjective omnipotence, but also beyond all forms of structural subjugation and psychic
fragmentation. The questions they raised will be reformulated here in conjunction with
a Critical Theory geared towards the dialogical principle in the sense of Bakhtin – and
not (as Adorno would have it) towards the negativity of modernist art.
1 The concept of subject and the subject of theory
The proposed definition of the subject is linked here to a theoretical project, which will
be worked out in the following chapters: for it seems difficult to submit a new definition
without embedding it in an appropriate theoretical context. The theoretical project sets
out from Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory and is marked by Greimas’s
semiotics of discourse, Touraine’s sociology, Ricœur’s hermeneutics and – above all –
Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to literature. The main topic of this section is the
interaction of individual and collective subjects and the possibilities offered to them in
different social and linguistic situations.
(a) Individual and collective subjects in society and language

The individual as an autonomous subject, capable of defending opinions, assuming
responsibilities and adopting a critical stance, has not always existed. In archaic and
ancient societies, the individual appears as subjected by collective myths or by what
Emile Durkheim calls ‘mechanical solidarity’: a solidarity based on the similarity of all
members belonging to a particular tribe. Even in European feudalism the individual

subject speaks and acts within the collective context of a vast religious community, the
guild or the extended family. The process of ‘disembedding’,6 as Anthony Giddens calls
the release or liberation of the individual from feudal tutelage, begins in the Renaissance,
when Montaigne, in his Essais, sets out to explore the apparently boundless realm of
secular thought located beyond the collectively accepted doctrines of medieval
scholasticism. Klaus-Jürgen Bruder aptly points out that ‘the notion of the individual is
itself of modern origin’.7
Bruder relies on the sociologist Norbert Elias who doubts that the idea of
individuality was actually known to antiquity:
Norbert Elias insists on the fact that, in ancient languages, an equivalent of the
notion of ‘individual’ did not exist, a notion we use ‘in order to refer to the
uniqueness of each human being, to the particularity of his existence compared
with the existence of others’ and ‘at the same time to express our esteem for this
kind of uniqueness’. Elias explains this idea arguing that [in antiquity] ‘there was
apparently no need for a concept referring to the modern identity of the “I” ’. “The
collective identity of the individual human being was far too important in the
social practice of the ancient world”.8
This concise description of the individual subject’s ‘embeddedness’ in traditional

collectives confirms in many respects the analyses of ‘classical’ sociology in the sense of
Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel. All of these
authors have described the release of individual subjects from the links and bonds of
the Christian feudal community and their ensuing atomization in market society
which turned them into free but exploited labourers or profit-seeking entrepreneurs.
The young Marx anticipates these sociological analyses when he relates the emerging
market economy to competition, possessive individualism and egoism: ‘The motive of
those who engage in exchange is not humanity but egoism.’9
The idea that the mechanisms of the market might eventually threaten the individual’s
uniqueness and freedom, which they themselves brought about, was put forward by
Georg Simmel, a sociologist of modernism and modernist crises. Commenting on the
function of money for the members of a society, he points out: ‘For money only refers to
what is common to all of them, to the exchange value, which reduces all quality and
particularity to the question “how much”.’10 Like the archaic or feudal community, but by
quite different means, the market value as exchange value deprives the individual subject
of his singularity by making him comparable to all others.
The ‘dependence of the autonomous subject on economic autonomy’11 mentioned
by Rudolf zur Lippe entails a drastic limitation of individual freedom (autonomy)
insofar as individuals are freed by the market from feudal bonds, but at the same time
are reduced to their quantifiable components as producers or consumers. They are thus
negated as social and cultural subjects.
Isaiah Berlin might say that in this situation the individual subject enjoys liberty in
the negative sense, i.e. liberty from constraints and collective tutelage, but is unable to
take advantage of positive liberty, defined by Berlin as the ability of the subject to acquire
certain objects and to realize particular projects which are part and parcel of his
subjectivity. Berlin, who defines negative liberty as ‘freedom from’ and positive liberty
as ‘freedom to’ links the latter to the very substance of subjectivity:
The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the
individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself,
not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not
of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object.12
Marxists and other critics of capitalism point out, quite rightly, that in a society
dominated by large international trusts, some of which carry more weight than small
states, it becomes increasingly difficult to be ‘one’s own master’, as Berlin puts it.
This is one of the reasons why the self-realization of the individual in the sense of
‘positive freedom’ is frequently linked to the fate of the class which is meant to overcome
capitalist class society: to the proletariat. According to the Marxist point of view, only
the collective subject ‘proletariat’ is able to bring about freedom and autonomy in this
particular sense. However, the consciousness of the proletariat is soon superseded,
within the Marxist doctrine, by a second, superior collective subject whose leadership is
justified by George Lukács: ‘The form taken by the class consciousness of the proletariat
is the Party’,13 he argues in an orthodox fashion in History and Class Consciousness
(1923).
This well-organized and genuinely existing collective subject eventually usurps the
subjectivity or consciousness of the proletariat and that of the individual worker. In
communist Eastern Europe ‘freedom’ was only conceivable as a kind of sacrificium
intellectus: as a voluntary identification of the individual citizen or party member with
the omnipresent and almighty collective subject and its rhetoric. Although the
communist regimes had succeeded, in some respects, in overcoming the heteronomy of
the market, whose laws tend to negate the qualities of the individual whenever they are
not ‘needed’, they had to accept a substantial sacrifice: the sacrifice of positive and
negative freedom. In some cases, ‘Western’ conditions were reversed: people had enough
money but could not buy anything because there were hardly any interesting goods on
offer – thanks to the miscalculations of central planning agencies such as Gosplan in the
USSR.
It goes without saying that the collapse of East European communism did not
eliminate the alienations and contradictions of a globally functioning market economy:
on the contrary, globalization exacerbated them. This is why some sociologists –
Touraine in France, Beck in Germany – investigate the relationships between individual
and collective actors and the possibility of extending the scope of the individual’s
‘positive freedom’ by linking it to collective action. According to Touraine, for example,
the social movement provides the kind of collective action which ‘defends the subject
against the power of commerce, big business and the state’ (cf. Chapter IV, 4).14
This kind of argument is both plausible and attractive. But who guarantees that
contemporary social movements are immune to totalitarian tendencies characteristic
of Leninist parties and of some postmodern sects whose members are frequently
brainwashed into different kinds of Orwellian Newspeak – and thus eliminated as
autonomous subjects? It seems worth having a closer look at the multifarious links
between individual and collective subjects in order to obtain a more concrete notion of
subjectivity.
(b) Subject and actant: Infra-individual, individual, artificial and

supra-individual actants as subjects
Thus far, ‘the individual’ has been treated as a synonym of ‘individual subject’, an
instance Franz Grubauer also refers to when he defines individuality:
Individuality [. . .] means, considered from outside, certain physical features, a

particular system of relations and the particularity of behaviour patterns,
orientations and utterances; considered from within, it is the natural experience of
the self, the understanding of one’s own position within a social network and
finally, the experience of individuality by the ‘I’ as a unique individual.15
Although this kind of definition is perfectly acceptable, as long as one agrees with the
theoretical context presupposed by Grubauer,16 it makes sense to distinguish ‘the
individual’ from ‘the individual subject’ in order to take into account the biological
nature and the biological foundations of subjectivity.
The individual who appears to us in the street or in the countryside is immediately
recognized by us as an ‘individual’ (man, woman or child) – not as a ‘subject’. Only when
an individual begins to speak or to act do we recognize a subject – albeit vaguely. Some
of us have experienced the ineffable feeling that overcomes a healthy person who is
confronted by a critically ill patient who no longer recognizes the visitor, even if the
latter is a close relative. In this case, illness as a natural process has destroyed subjectivity
as a social, cultural and linguistic phenomenon. This kind of situation illustrates to what
extent subjectivity as a social fact presupposes the biological basis of individuality, which
includes such factors as the genetic code, certain physical features and propensities.
This seemingly banal insight is not unimportant if one tries to understand why
several modernist authors such as Kafka or Sartre consider – in some of their works –
nature as a threat to the individual subject: at any moment the latter can be reduced, by
illness, psychic regression or political terror, to its biological basis, to a speechless
individual. (In the second chapter, the importance of this distinction between ‘individual’
and ‘subject’, which coincides with the distinction between nature and culture, will be
commented on in detail within the context of philosophical and literary discussions
after the disintegration of Hegel’s system.)
Manfred Frank seems to oversimplify the matter when he argues ‘that individuals
are subjects (although not all subjects are individuals), that they are immediately
conscious of themselves in the sense that they construct their world in the light of
interpretations which would remain incomprehensible without consciousness’.17 Like
Grubauer, he overlooks the fact that, first of all, individuals are nature and that this
transitory nature constitutes a contingent and highly precarious basis of culturally and
linguistically formed subjectivity. In this respect, collective subjects, hinted at by Frank
in the parentheses, differ substantially from individual ones: as groups, institutions or
organizations they do not know biological death – but they are permanently threatened
by social and political disintegration.
In the context mapped out so far, the individual subject can be defined as an acting
and speaking instance or subject-actant (actant-sujet) in the sense of Greimas, which
communicates and interacts with other individual, infra-individual, artificial and
supra-individual actants. This attempt to conceive of the individual subject as actant
has nothing to do with ‘scientism’ or ‘scientific jargon’, but stems from the idea that the
relationship between individual, collective and other subject-instances can best be
described on the level of actants, especially since the description of the discursive
structure presupposes this level which can be linked to the main patterns of
argumentation in psychology and sociology. (In the next section, it will be shown how
subjects come about in discourse and how they assume an identity as speaking and
acting instances.)
Within Greimas’s structural semiotics, two kinds of actants can be distinguished: on
the one hand, actants of enunciation or communication (e.g. narrators), on the other
hand, actants of narrative (e.g. characters in a novel). In the first case, we are dealing
with speaking instances, in the second case, with acting instances among whom subject
actants and object actants can be distinguished. Simplifying slightly, one could argue
that Greimas starts from an elementary structure of enunciation and action within
which a subject of enunciation or communication narrates how an acting subject
attempts to wrestle an object from an anti-subject – or to defend its possession of the
object.
At this stage, it is important to bear in mind that structural semiotics does not
primarily deal with literature, but is more concerned with religious, political, legal,
journalistic and scientific texts. In this context, ‘subjects’ are not simply heroes in the
sense of ‘protagonists’ or ‘characters’; they can also be mythical, collective or abstract
actants: for example, the sun or the moon in a fairy tale, the party in the discourse of a
Marxist like Lukács (cf. supra) or science in the discourse of a philosopher or scientist.
The triadic, dialogical and polemical model subject-object-anti-subject, which points
beyond the dualist scheme of subject-object, gains complexity if we assume that subject
and anti-subject are called upon or summoned by addressers (destinateurs, Greimas)
and ordered to realize a narrative programme. They are aided by helpers (adjuvants: on
the subject’s side) and by opponents (opposants: on the anti-subject’s side). In Greimas’s
later work, the following instances confront each other: addresser (destinateur), anti-
addresser (anti-destinateur), subject (sujet), anti-subject (anti-sujet) and object (objet).18
In Sémantique structurale (1966), he included the two complementary functions of
helper and opponent (mentioned above), but dropped them later on – in spite of the fact
that they seem quite useful.19
All individual, collective and abstract actants are endowed with characteristic
features or qualities which Greimas calls modalities. They empower the hero of the
novel, the scientist or the political subject (e.g. the party) to intervene as a competent
actant (of a discourse or a narrative), to change situations according to certain needs
and to realize the narrative programme in question. Greimas distinguishes the following
modalities: virtualizing modalities (‘having to do something’,‘wanting to do something’),
actualizing (‘knowing’, ‘being able to do’) and realizing (‘to do’, ‘to be’). In other words:
speaking and acting instances can only begin to act if they wish or have to do something
and if they have a certain knowledge and certain skills.20
This particular semiotic approach was frequently misunderstood as a kind of pseudo-
scientific jargon, and some critics argued that Greimas could easily have used ‘ordinary’
words like ‘character’ or ‘protagonist’ instead of actant. They overlooked the fact that the
Franco-Lithuanian semiotician reintroduced Lucien Tesnière’s concept of actant21 and
Vladimir Propp’s corresponding concept of function22 not only in order to analyse fairy
tales and other literary texts, but in order to clarify the concept of subjectivity. For this
concept designates a complex unit, which is not given at any moment of time, but evolves
in a social and linguistic context on a discursive level. The individual or collective subject
comes about in a narrative programme consisting of words and actions.
The question how it develops on an actantial and narrative level can be described –
albeit in a slightly simplified form – with the help of Greimas’s semiotic terminology.
To begin with, it ought to be realized that an individual subject can only be understood
in a communicative context, in which it confronts other subjects in a permanent
consensual or polemical dialogue. It can come about by following another individual, a
collective, an abstract or a mythical subject recognized as addresser (destinateur) who
partly or entirely usurps its freedom. A political leader, a party, a sect, a trade union or
religion, science and art as idealized entities can all fulfil the function of addressers and
to a certain extent determine the fate (destin) of the individual subject.
While George Lukács’s subjectivity was temporarily determined by the Hungarian
Communist Party, Proust decided to act and narrate in the name of literature or art. It
is a well-known fact that the members of a sect are very often over-determined by the
dogmatic tenets (a kind of Newspeak) of a creed. Hartmut Zinser confirms sociological
and psychological findings when he points out: ‘The orientation towards occultism can
be considered as a valid symptom of the subject’s difficulties.’23 It becomes clear at this
stage that an individual, collective or abstract actant (as addresser) can both give birth
to subjectivity as religious, artistic or scientific vocation and cause the subject’s
elimination by forcing it into an unconditional submission (sub-iectum) to authority.
The freedom of the individual subject – child, man or woman – seems to consist in
permanent criticism: of the chosen addresser or authority and of its own attitude
towards the latter.
On the infra-individual level, which corresponds to the level of personality in the
sociological sense,24 the individual subject can also be understood – albeit in a different
perspective – as a communication or interaction of actants or acting instances. In
George H. Mead’s interactionist approach, the Self results from an interplay between
the I and the Me triggered off by the multiple social reactions to the I – or the attitudes
people adopt towards ‘me’: ‘The “I” reacts to the self which arises through the taking of
the attitudes of others. Through taking those attitudes we have introduced the “me” and
we react to it as an “I”.’25
Although he starts from very different premises, Sigmund Freud also adopts an
infra-individual perspective when he divides the individual subject into his well-
known instances – superego, ego and id – whose interaction is meant to explain the
dynamics and woes of the psyche. Like Mead, he endows these instances with specific
modalities (Greimas) such as ‘must-do’, ‘can-do’ and ‘know-how’:
The tension between the strict super-ego and the subordinate ego we call the sense
of guilt; it manifests itself as the need for punishment. Civilization therefore
obtains the mastery over the dangerous love of aggression in individuals by
enfeebling and disarming it and setting up an institution within their minds to
keep watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.26
This is an almost complete presentation of Freud’s mythical and military actantial

model. Culture as addresser orders the superego as infra-individual subject to occupy
and supervise the obstreperous ‘I’ in its double role as anti-subject and object. By
weakening and disarming the ‘I’, the latter’s virtualizing and actualizing modalities are
reduced to a bare minimum: its freedom of will and its scope of action are drastically
limited as long as it submits to the superego as ‘conscience’. Freud’s model is a
particularly vivid description of subjectivity as ‘subjugation’ in the second sense of the
Latin word subiectum.
The meta-discursive translation of Freud’s model into the language of structural
semiotics is also meant to illustrate the gaps in this model. It includes abstract and
mythical but not collective actants and hence cannot be used to explain the social
process in the course of which subjectivity develops or disappears (e.g. by virtue of
ideological or organizational subjugation). For it is not ‘culture’ in general that achieves
the submission of the ‘I’ but such concrete institutions and organizations as the Church,
the sect or the party. They send out the individual subject on ‘a mission’ (‘mission de
salut’, Greimas): ‘The addresser (a social authority empowered to send out the hero on
a mission) endows the hero with the role of addressee.’27 The addresser can also be an
abstract or mythical actant such as ‘science’, ‘socialism’, ‘History’ or the ‘World Spirit’ in
the sense of Hegel, and the distinction between mythical and abstract actants
(addressers) is hard to draw – as the critique of Luhmann’s sociology in the fourth
chapter will show. One may well ask whether ‘civilization’ in the Freudian sense does not
imperceptibly turn into a mythical addresser – at least in some of Freud’s texts.
At the other end of the spectrum, the computer as artificial intelligence and artificial
subject is very likely to have a long-term impact on both individual and collective
subjectivity. The common denominator linking human and artificial intelligence seems
to be the narrative programme (cf. Chapter I, 1, c). Wolfgang Huber takes note of this
in his essay on ‘The Artificial Subject’:
However, not only computer models of humans as thinking, planning and acting
beings lead to the artificial subject. The discovery of the genetic code has led to the
idea that human hardware is an information processing machine and that the task
of science consists in investigating the programme of this machine.28
The question seems to be: who will programme whom? However, this question does
not merely concern the interaction between individual and artificial subject-actants,
but also that between individual and collective subjects. In both cases, the autonomy of
the individual subject is at stake.
A better understanding of individual subjectivity can reinforce this autonomy; this
is why an attempt has been made here to define the subject as a dynamic and dialogical
unit, as a dynamic, permanently shifting equilibrium resulting from the interaction of

infra-individual, individual, collective, abstract, mythical and artificial actants. It is
hardly necessary to point out that this equilibrium is permanently threatened, since
even collective subjects can only be adequately conceived of as relatively unstable,
changing units. Coalition governments fall apart as soon as the parties involved begin
to oppose each other as independent actors29 and no longer adhere to the common
programme their coalition is based on. It is this (narrative) programme which
guarantees the unity and identity of the collective actant ‘government’. As long as it
stands, such a government is a legal, political and economic subject.
The nation as a collective actant has not always existed (in the Middle Ages, e.g.
during the English ‘War of the Roses’, feudal families appear as the decisive acting
instances), and it may be that the future does not belong to it any more. This possibility
of a decline of the national actant is not even envisaged by the editor of the Nueva
revista (Madrid) who is quite confident that nation states will continue to be the
relevant political and historical units: ‘Nations continue to exist as subjects and agents
of history, and their dissolution by European powers or their destruction by regional
nationalisms is not in sight.’30 It is not so much the ideological prognostic which
matters here, but the author’s description of the historical context of interaction and
communication within which the actant ‘nation’ operates.
Like the collective actant ‘nation’, the individual subject has a historical dimension
to it and is permanently threatened by functional atrophy, decline or disintegration,
especially since it owes its changing identity to geographical, historical, cultural and
linguistic factors which are also relevant to the identity of the ‘nation’. Will it still be
possible to feel ‘British’ if Scotland leaves the United Kingdom at one point? Is there,
was there ever, a ‘British nation’? This example shows to what extent individual and
collective subjectivity and identity are tied up.
So far, these introductory remarks were meant to show that the individual subject is
embedded in a communicative or dialogical context within which it acquires an
identity. Within this context, it interacts as an individual subject – which this analysis
focuses on – with infra-individual, artificial, abstract and mythical instances most of
which can be conceived of as subject-actants – but not as individual or collective
subjects, which always presuppose the existence of biological, psychic and social
factors. (We can thus consider ‘history’ or ‘fate’ as mythical subject-actants, as acting
instances, but not as subjects in the individual or collective sense.) The question is how
the individual subject comes about in a social and linguistic situation, where it moves
between different languages (natural languages, group languages, technical languages)
and appears as both over-determined and autonomous.
(c) Individual and collective subjects as discursive instances:

Subjectivity, individuality, identity
The idea developed here can be summed up in a few words: collective and individual
subjects come about in social and linguistic situations which can be considered as
interactions of group languages and their discourses. A subject is, among other things,
a discursive instance whose development depends on a dialogue with others in the
course of which it reacts imitatively, consensually or polemically to other discourses

and their subjects, thereby opting in favour of or against a certain vocabulary, particular
semantics, relevance criteria, classifications and definitions. Its identity as speaking and
acting subject develops in discourse as narrative programme.
This discourse can only come about in a permanent dialogue with others: with
parents and relatives in the course of primary socialization; with teachers, friends and
colleagues in the course of secondary socialization. The best example in this case is
probably language acquisition: children acquire their mother tongue by interacting daily
with their parents, relatives, brothers, sisters, friends and teachers. They acquire a second
language by communicating with many others whose cultural and linguistic otherness is
decisive: it is only by listening to the stranger who thinks, acts and speaks differently that
they make their subjectivity expand into the new, the unknown – and the future. From
the mother to the teacher of the second language it is the (generalized) Other in the
sense of Mead who contributes decisively to the development of the individual subject
in dialogue: by incessantly introducing alterity, innovation, transformation.
However, this dialogical process of socialization and acculturation is at the same
time a process of social and linguistic over-determination of the subject: of subjection.
For each individual and collective subject (e.g. a peer group) moves in a social and
linguistic situation it has not created and cannot immediately change. The sociolects or
group languages of peer groups, political parties or ideological movements are given in
the same way as technical languages, the languages of advertising and science.
Assuming that the behaviour of the child, the youth and to a certain extent even the
adult is primarily adaptive and imitative, one can argue that, in many respects, the
individual and the group are over-determined by society and language.
More often than not, this means that subjects are conditioned by certain religious,
political or scientific sociolects. At this stage the sociolect can be defined more concretely
as a permanent interaction within a group of real or potential discourses based on a
common vocabulary and common semantics: i.e. relatively homogeneous relevance
criteria,31 classifications and definitions. Considering that individuals can hardly invent
general relevance criteria of their own (e.g. in medicine, ecology or economics), they
tend to rely heavily on the vocabulary and the semantics of the most influential political
or technical sociolects as articulated by the media.32
The discourses they turn to in order to get by in everyday life are produced by these
group languages and have a narrative structure (they tell a ‘story’) based on a schematized
interaction of actants and actors. (Consider a conservative discourse which invariably
presents the ‘loony left’ as a negative collective actant or anti-hero and a complementary
discourse of the left which reserves this role for ‘capitalism’ as a mythical actant.
Everybody is familiar with this anti-hero: but how do you get hold of it?) In other
words: individual and collective subjects cope with social reality by declaring certain
semantic oppositions and differences as relevant (thereby neglecting others) and by
using this relevance for the construction of actantial models and narrative sequences:
stories about social events which make it easier to distinguish subjects and anti-
subjects, helpers and opponents, addressers and anti-addressers.
Unlike Marxists, who start from the opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat
in order to narrate their own personal story and the story of society as a ‘history of class
conflicts’, the ‘green’ politician constructs an antagonism between economy and

environment or civilization and nature, thus trying to involve us in a completely
different ‘story’ in an apparently post-industrial society. The feminist presents an
alternative to both by drawing our attention to the millenary conflict of genders and by
re-narrating history as ‘His-story’. Marxist story, ‘green story’ or ‘Her-story’? Which one
is relevant? How do you choose?
The situation does not change radically if we turn to scientific theory. The fact that
a single semantic distinction can change the actantial scheme, the narrative structure
and the direction of a discourse becomes apparent if one compares Niklas Luhmann’s
distinction between system and environment with Jürgen Habermas’s distinction
between systems and life world (Lebenswelt, Husserl, Schütz, Habermas). While
Luhmann narrates society as a process of system-differentiation, Habermas tells the
story of a intensifying conflict between the systems ‘power’ and ‘money’ on the one
hand, and the ‘life world’ on the other. His expression ‘colonization of the life world’ is
the story in a nutshell.33 Each of these two stories creates a philosophical or sociological
subjectivity as soon as somebody – for example, a young sociologist – adheres to its
relevance criteria and starts propagating it.
Greimas confirms the idea that the decision to espouse a sociolect or a particular
discourse as narrative structure is an existential act, when he explains in an interview
‘that one may consider the narrative scheme as an ideological model in which man
confronts life and with the help of which he acquires qualifications and competences
allowing him to realize meaning and a particular project’.34 The existentialist
connotations of the word ‘project’, which evoke Sartre’s projet, are not due to chance but
are meant to remind us of the fact that the partly over-determined decision to adopt a
discourse as a narrative programme has an existential character and involves a certain
amount of autonomy and freedom. Within this context, all attempts to programme
computers and to use them as helpers of planning humans could be viewed as efforts
to extend and optimize the life programmes of individual and collective subjects.
Susanne zur Nieden, who has explored diaries of German women under National
Socialism, shows that the individual subject’s autonomy is often limited or even
suppressed by overwhelming collective subjects who impose their language on society as
a whole. She quotes from the diary of the fourteen-year-old Edelgard B., who notes on 25
August 1944: ‘Now Dr. Goebbels has coined the slogan “total war”. We, that is our school,
will also have to fulfil various tasks. That would be perfectly all right, for we have to win!!!
It’s better to give everything now than end up in Siberia.’35 This is almost a caricature of
‘over-determination’, that is of the subject as ‘subjected instance’, as subiectum. At the same
time, this example illustrates Jean-Pierre Faye’s theory of ‘totalitarian languages’,36 most of
which usurp the subject’s linguistic autonomy by suppressing or curtailing its critical
faculties. It also illustrates Louis Althusser’s thesis, according to which ideology turns
individuals into subjects: ‘Ideology interpellates Individuals as Subjects.’37
Althusser explains: ‘I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology,
but at the same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only
constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of
“constituting” concrete individuals as subjects.’38 Althusser’s central idea is expressed
more concretely by Michel Pêcheux, who adds: ‘In reality, the thesis according to which
“ideology calls upon individuals as subjects” means that a “non-subject” is called upon
by ideology and turned into a subject.’39
In spite of its merits, this approach to ‘ideological subjectivity’ is problematical for
three reasons. To begin with, it neglects the fact that theories, very much like ideologies,
from which they cannot be entirely dissociated, turn individuals and groups into
subjects (as Althusser’s own theory shows). This idea will be developed in some detail
in the next section. Moreover, it completely neglects the well-known fact that ideologies
can also shape the subjectivity of groups, organizations (e.g. political parties) and even
masses, especially in totalitarian states. Finally, it neglects the potential of ‘positive
freedom’ in the sense of Isaiah Berlin. It seems worth dwelling on the third point.
On the one hand, the discourse of fourteen-year-old Edelgard B. seems to confirm
Althusser’s thesis in all respects, for this discourse appears to be entirely over-
determined by the National Socialist sociolect; on the other hand, anyone familiar with
the development of totalitarian systems can imagine that the individual subject is not
permanently reduced to a puppet of propaganda. As a dialogical and developing unit,
it relies on reflection, difference and dissent. It thrives on difference and divergence
because competing viewpoints and ideologies even exist in totalitarian systems (one
may think of the semi-official Catholic dissent in fascist Italy and National Socialist
Germany) and because an ideological interregnum followed the collapse of the
totalitarian systems in Germany and Italy after 1945. This interregnum revealed the
ambivalence and relativity of the old values, thereby calling into question all ideological
subjectivities (collective and individual) of the past and at the same time releasing the
critical potential of reflecting and dissenting individual subjects: a critical potential
which contributed to the movements and revolts of the 1960s – and especially of 1968.
Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory thrived on the collapse of the totalitarian
ideologies and on the intense process of (self-) reflection it brought about.
After the collapse of National Socialism and fascism, it was no longer possible
to maintain the subjective modalities of ‘being’, ‘knowing’ or ‘willing’ within the
disintegrating official language or sociolect. This fact is amply illustrated by
the disillusioned hero of Alberto Moravia’s post-war novel Il conformista (1951). At
the end, Marcello Clerici, an agent of fascism, is confronted with the transformation
of the entire value system and the ambivalence of values: ‘In other words, there must
be brought about, thanks to forces which did not depend on him, a complete
transformation of values: injustice must become justice; treachery, heroism; death, life.’40
In this kind of social and linguistic situation, which is marked by the transformation
and ambivalence of all ideological values, the individual subject undergoes a crisis
because its discursive and ideological identity is at stake:
At this point he felt the need to express his own position in crude, sarcastic words,
and said to himself coldly: ‘If, in fact, Fascism is a failure, if all the blackguards and
incompetents and imbeciles in Rome bring the Italian nation to ruin, then I’m
nothing but a wretched murderer’.41
However, the ambivalence of social values does not only cause a crisis, but at the same
time provokes radical criticism of the ideological sociolect which for years or decades
formed individual subjectivity. The subject gradually dissociates itself from its own
subjectivity and begins to envisage a general reorientation as a speaking and acting
instance.
A reorientation of the kind experienced by Marcello Clerici is also conceivable in
the case of Edelgard B. Like Clerici’s, her situation in 1945 was marked (if she survived
the war) by crisis and critique. Both factors may have induced her to embrace a new
ideology or to react with active scepticism: as a floating voter, writer, critic or as a
feminist author who considers the competing feminisms with irony and reveals their
contradictions. She may even have read Althusser’s works and noted in her new diary:
‘What is presented here as pure science, as a scientific brand of Marxism-Leninism that
has been purged of all humanist ideologies, is merely a new ideology, which is about to
turn credulous individuals into subjects. This is more or less what we experienced in
the GDR.’
Unfortunately, the last sentence misses Althusser’s and Pêcheux’s main point, for
Althusser’s thesis (quoted above) represents considerable progress within the theory of
ideology. Translated into the language of social semiotics, it shows to what extent
individuals are governed by ideologies and turned by them into speaking and acting
agents. Althusser overlooks, however (a fact pointed out by the fictive Edelgard B.), that
even scientific discourses turn individuals into subjects who unwittingly practise a
‘normal science’ in the sense of Thomas S. Kuhn42 without being able to imagine an
alternative to the paradigm within which they have been formed as scientists by
particular historical and always contingent discourses.
The alternative to their paradigm nevertheless surfaces at a certain point: not only
because scientific development produces anomalies or contradictions, thus calling the
entire paradigm into question (as Kuhn would have it), but also because certain
individual subjects are encouraged by these contradictions to look for alternative
relevance criteria, definitions and explanations. This positive freedom ‘to do something
(different)’ is overlooked by Althusser and his followers who seem to have lost sight of
the dialectic between over-determination and freedom.43
This dialectic, without which innovative and inventive thought would be impossible,
can be described as a relationship between individuality and subjectivity. The biological
individual who, as an infant, is not yet mature because it is unable to articulate
impressions, needs and ideas in a coherent way, grows up gradually in a permanent
interaction with other subjects and objects,44 to become an individual subject conscious
of its own unique individuality (as socialized physis) and subjectivity (as socialized
psyche). At this point, it is capable of realizing itself in the sense of ‘positive freedom’.
This kind of freedom may, for a certain period of time, be usurped by ideologies,
religions and even media, as the fascist, National Socialist and Stalinist episodes have
shown – but not at all levels and not for ever: for in late modern and postmodern
societies the domination of ideologies, scientific ‘paradigms’, religious ‘revivals’ and
media fashions are quite short-lived. Their sporadic disintegration leads to new
ideological and cultural constellations which provide new scopes of action and new kinds
of freedom for individual and collective subjects (e.g. social movements).
Hence Althusser’s highly questionable assertion that ‘ideology is eternal’45 could
be countered by the insight that ideology is a relatively new phenomenon, i.e. a
characteristic feature of secularized bourgeois society,46 and that in contemporary

society ideologies are more ephemeral than ever. It follows from this that one and the
same person can be perfectly capable of reflecting critically and self-critically on
different ideological attitudes and identities, thus turning subject-forming ideology
into an object of scepticism (cf. Chapter III, 5). At this point, it seems helpful to recall
Rüdiger Bubner’s concise and lucid remark on subjectivity: ‘Reflection is always able to
take the sting out of fate.’47
We are dealing here with the dialectical relationship between individuality as social
physis or potential and subjectivity as realization of this potential in thought, speech
and action. Hence the individual subject could be defined – at least for the time being – as
a dynamic, dialogical synthesis of individuality and subjectivity.48 The circular form of
the argument, which is due to the fact that subjectivity presupposes (biological, physical)
individuality, while the latter also presupposes subjectivity (because individuality can
only be defined in the linguistic context of subjectivity), is not a major problem, since
the aim of the argument is not a chronological explanation but a description of the
dynamic, dialectical unit.49
Paul Ricœur comments on this matter in some detail:
First there is being-in-the world, then understanding, then interpreting, then

saying. The circular character of this itinerary must not stop us. It is indeed true
that it is from the heart of language that we say all this; but language is so made that
it is able to designate the ground of existence from which it proceeds and to
recognize itself as a mode of the being of which it speaks.50
The reflexive moment is decisive here because the discourse, which constitutes
subjectivity, reflects at the same time on its own nature in relation to its origin. Manfred
Frank has recognized the importance of this auto-reflexive moment for the structure
of subjectivity: ‘Even the so-called critics of subjectivity – e.g. Heidegger and Derrida –
have never seriously questioned the idea that subjectivity as a fact is correctly described
as auto-reflexivity of thought.’51 In a complementary fashion Vincent Descombes
defines the subject as ‘subject conscious of itself ’ (‘sujet conscient de soi’).52
Against this backdrop, Ricœur’s distinction between ipseity (ipséité) and sameness
(mêmeté) seems relevant, because ipseity corresponds in some respects to individuality,
while sameness corresponds to subjectivity. A crucial aspect of ipseity (translated as
selfhood by the American translator) is physis as corporeity, for ‘to the extent that my
body’s belonging to myself constitutes the most overwhelming testimony in favour of
the irreducibility of selfhood to sameness’,53 the corporeal criterion is linked to the
problem of ipseity (selfhood). Ipseity as origin of statements and actions is a guarantee
of continuity and identity. Ricœur quotes as examples the given promise and the
perpetrated crime which can both be attributed to a certain identifiable (even if not
always identified) ipse. Even the change of sex, one could add, can be attributed to an
ipse who decides to give her or his narrative programme a new orientation and to
present her- or himself as a new actor. Paradoxically, the change itself occurs on the
level of sameness or mêmeté which is linked by the individual’s narrative project to
ipseity.
This is why Ricœur speaks of a ‘narrative identity’ which results from the dialectic
between ipseity (selfhood) and sameness.54 This narrative identity as a narrative project
or ‘emplotment’ (‘mise en intrigue’)55 is a ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’56 in which
continuity and discontinuity are intertwined and in which discontinuity can dominate
to such a degree that subjectivity as sameness is put in jeopardy: for example in Robert
Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities – quoted by Ricœur – where the hero’s
narrative programme is questioned from episode to episode: ‘The story of this novel
boils down to a situation where the story which was meant to be told is not told.’57 What
remains is a hero without ‘qualities’, without a definable subjectivity, or rather: with
different coexisting and competing subjectivities (narrative programmes).
In many cases, ideology covers the ‘lack of qualities’ by turning the individual into a
subject: into a speaking and acting being. In a Hungarian university town, a person
unknown to us greets our colleague, and we ask: ‘Who was that?’ ‘In the past, he was a
fanatical communist whom everybody was afraid of.’ ‘And what is he now?’ ‘A pious
Catholic who, thank goodness, is no longer a threat to anybody.’
In spite of his break with communism, this particular individual has managed to
safeguard a certain amount of continuity as a subject. His addresser (destinateur) may
no longer be the Party but the Church – but his crucial modality, i.e. the will to believe,
to adopt a faith and to consider redemption as the main goal in life (as the object-
actant), has been preserved. His narrative identity may have become more complex,
but it can still be considered as the same, la même.
It may very well be that this whole conception is based on a hermeneutic and
semiotic illusion deconstructionists such as Derrida could easily break up. For
if the new (old) Catholic identity is viewed as a radical negation of the old
communist identity, it seems preferable to speak of a disintegration of the subject
or of his renewed submission to yet another ideology – and not of continuity
within an increasing complexity. The way out of this dilemma may be a dialectical
link between the hermeneutic-rationalist and the deconstructionist extreme: it
may show that the subject is a dynamic unit of individuality and subjectivity
which can neither be understood as a constant, self-identical and homogeneous
instance, nor as a disintegrating or subjugated entity. The idea of subjective
autonomy can best be made plausible within a theory in which the dialectic between
individuality and subjectivity is perceived as an open-ended narrative process geared
towards identity.
Finally, the word ‘identity’ raises questions concerning the definition of this
frequently used and abused concept. Theorists of identity such as Heiner Keupp tend
to use ‘identity’ and ‘subjectivity’ as synonyms. Following Stuart Hall, Keupp queries the
idealist view of a homogeneous and indivisible subjectivity or identity: ‘It is the idea of
an “indivisible subject”, of a unified and indivisible identity.’58 Subjectivity or identity?
Can these two concepts be distinguished – and is a distinction meaningful?
An explicit distinction is not offered by Keupp, but a closer look at his text shows
that he works with an implicit difference. It can be made explicit within the semiotic
model used here. Identity is the object of the feeling, thinking, speaking and acting
subject-actant. ‘Identity work’ or ‘Identitätsarbeit’59 in the sense of Keupp appears in
this context as a complex interaction of narrative programmes, most of which evolve at
an affective, cognitive or pragmatic level, in the sense that every subject constructs an
emotional, rational or rationalized and fact-related life story.
The idea that ‘identity’ functions as the ‘object-actant’ within the narrative programme
or the story crops up at crucial moments in Keupp’s work. In Identitätskonstruktionen,
for example, he speaks of the ‘very creative role subjects perform while working on their
identity’.60 Especially his expression ‘identity materials’ suggests that he conceives of
‘identity’ as an object constructed by the subject within an actantial model in the sense
of Greimas. The infant as individual, as ipse in the sense of Ricœur, does not yet dispose
of a psychic and social identity; it has to appropriate the latter as mêmeté, as Ricœur
would say.
From this perspective, one could consider subjectivity as a dynamic synthesis of
individuality and identity, for only somebody who has acquired a psychic, social and
linguistic identity is recognized by others as a feeling, speaking and acting subject. The
narrative process leading to identity formation is thus reflexive in character, and Keupp
has a point when he refers to ‘processes of subject formation’.61 Here again the circular
relationship between individuality (as ipseity) and subjectivity as (sameness / mêmeté
and identity) makes itself felt. One presupposes the other.
The fact that, as a psychoanalyst, Gianpaolo Lai finds numerous breaks in the
identities of his patients, need not lead to the conclusion that identity is a myth or
simply does not exist. Identity, like textual coherence, like the political cohesion of a
(coalition) government is relative: it need not be absolute or monolithic in order to exist.
The more open or flexible it is, the longer it may survive: the more flexible, the more
open to compromise the political parties of a coalition government are, the longer the
latter is likely to last . . . This does not necessarily mean that such parties – as collective
subjects – lack identity; and what applies to them also applies to individual subjects.
Commenting on his therapies, Lai concludes: ‘It is a non-identical therapy applied
by a non-identical therapist to non-identical patients.’62 This does not mean, however,
that identity is no longer the main objective of the subject’s quest; it means that it has
become more complex and undergoes frequent changes in a postmodern society –
very much like party programmes, political organizations and institutions.
Keupp is right in pointing out, after Beck,63 that the contemporary decline of
traditions and social solidarities (e.g. class solidarities) brings about a never experienced
‘disembedding’ (Giddens) of individual subjects and ‘that social processes of
disembedding entail fundamentally different conditions of identity formation’.64 In the
following chapters, the change of these conditions will be described more concretely in
relation to the transition from modernity to postmodernity.
(d) The subject of theory

A theory of the subject, which fails to reflect upon its own social and linguistic origins
and upon its own subjectivity, would not only be incomplete – it would be ideological.
For one of the salient features of ideological discourse (defined as a semantic and
narrative structure with an underlying actantial model) is its ‘naturalist’ attitude
towards itself. Its subject views its language as naturally given and hence necessary and
does not reflect self-critically upon the context of its social and linguistic origin. This
monologic attitude gives birth to the authoritarian claim to be identical with reality, i.e.
with all the objects the subject refers to: they can only be defined in the sense of the
subject’s ideology. Adorno and Horkheimer chose to call this kind of thought
‘identitarian thought’ or ‘Identitätsdenken’. Another aspect of ideological discourse is
its dualistic structure which, on the actantial level, boils down to a rigid opposition
between heroes and anti-heroes, helpers and opponents (traitors).65
Considering the complexities and difficulties encountered by most people in the
course of their lives, it is not altogether surprising that they have recourse to collective
ideologies and tacitly or unconsciously accept being turned into subjects by their
semantics and their narratives. Niklas Luhmann quite rightly reminds us of the
dangers of ideological manicheism: ‘Today one would be shocked if, among the
campaign staff of a political party, he heard someone say, “All the people want to know
is who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and this is what we are going to
tell them”.’66 This worry may be symptomatic in the case of a sociologist who has
replaced the subject by the system (cf. Chapter IV, 3) and is therefore unaware of the
link between subjectivity and ideology. However, for individual subjects it may be
useful, for practical and emotional reasons, to drastically reduce the complexity
(Luhmann) of everyday life by adopting monologic and dualistic language patterns
offered by a vast number of ideological discourses. This is probably the main reason
why ideological arguments or explanations are more easily understood and accepted
by groups than theoretical ones – which are often hypothetical and leave crucial
questions unanswered.67
In this situation, the subject of theory can afford neither linguistic naiveté nor a
blind political engagement. It will adhere to three basics: (1) It will reflect upon its own
subjective position in a particular historical and socio-linguistic constellation; (2) it
will avoid certain discursive mechanisms of ideologies such as dualism, monologue
and identification with reality and construct a theoretical alternative both on the
semantic and the narrative level; and (3) finally, it will remain open to dialogue with
other sociolects and their discourses in order to overcome the doxa or prejudice
underlying its own language and subjectivity.
In short, the subject of Dialogical Theory (cf. Chapter V), which underlies this book,
will not only reflect upon its socially formed subjectivity but will sporadically call it
into question. It does not aim at a metaphysical foundation of its stance but at a
permanent critique of its theorems in an open dialogue.
Discussions about the role of individuality in theoretical discourses may only have
begun. How does individuality as corporeity and material basis of subjectivity manifest
itself in theory formation? Cartesians, Kantians and Hegelians – unlike materialists
such as Hobbes and Feuerbach68 – may consider this question as meaningless. ‘Science
smiling into its beard’ (‘Das in den Bart Lächeln der Wissenschaft’)69 (Musil) may be a
suitable topic for novels – not for scientific discourse which only admits serious
gestures and faces. These are creatively ignored by Henning Klauß who sets out to
prove in minute analyses ‘that the sensual rapport between the scientific subject and its
object is progressively selective, i.e. limited in a certain sense and not encompassing the
whole’. He goes on to explain: ‘The other aim was to show that, due to methodological
exigencies, the distance between subject and object increases.’70
Both ideas are important, because the first reveals that, due to the individual,
physical bias of the scientist, an ‘objective’ representation is very unlikely to come
about, while the second reminds us of the fact that distance and abstraction mark the
subject-object relationship. The socially accelerated process of abstraction in science is
convincingly related by Klauß to the dominance of sight among humans:
Within this historical process, the sense of sight has acquired a dominant position
vis-à-vis other senses, because it has become more intense for specific reasons and
because it fulfilled the demands of growing abstraction, distance and rationality
more easily and was able to reproduce and develop the latter.71
It can be assumed that, aided by the sense of vision, this process of abstraction was
initiated by homo sapiens, who was forced to think and act strategically in order to
survive in a hostile environment.
It is certainly inherent in rationalist discourses on the domination over nature
dealt with critically by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Not only
the social subject, even the individual as a creature of nature has to accept painful
constraints in order to survive: ‘Odysseus recognizes the archaic superior power of the
song even when, as a technically enlightened man, he has himself bound.’72 Eventually,
technical or instrumental reason yields a mode of thought so abstract that subject and
object are dissolved by it: ‘Subject and object are both rendered ineffectual. The abstract
self, which justifies record-making and systematization, has nothing set over against it
but the abstract material which possesses no other quality than to be a substrate of
such possession.’73
In view of this nexus between domination and thought, it seems crucial to reflect
upon the position of one’s own discourse in a particular social and linguistic situation
in which the subject’s decisions in favour of certain relevance criteria, taxonomies,
definitions and arguments are never free of domination because they are invariably
linked to individual and collective interests. Within each theoretical sociolect (e.g. that
of Critical Theory or of Critical Rationalism), special objects are constructed in relation
to the relevance criteria and taxonomies of the sociolect. They compete with comparable
object constructions in other scientific group languages.
The claim to supremacy of one’s own language can only be controlled and mitigated
by the subject of discourse if it succeeds in avoiding the dualistic, monologic and
identifying mechanisms of ideologies. For unlike the subject of ideology, the subject of
theory calls the dualism of ideological speech into question and reflects upon its own
social and linguistic situation, upon its semantic and narrative techniques and the object
constructions resulting from them. Such constructions are subsequently presented as
hypotheses in a critical and open dialogue with other scientists. This dialogic approach is
meant to overcome – at least partly – the particularity and contingency of the subject of
theory by a self-critical and ironical attitude towards the position it defends.74
The contrast between ideological identification (of thought and reality) and
theoretical construction of objects is analysed by the semiotician Luis J. Prieto: ‘The
knowledge of a material reality is ideological whenever the subject considers the limits
and the identity of an object, in which reality appears to it, as part of reality itself, i.e. if
the subject attributes to reality the idea it constructed from it.’75 Implicitly, Prieto
criticizes not only Hegelianism and various brands of Marxism-Leninism, but also
hermeneutic approaches and even Popper’s Critical Rationalism, whose followers
frequently pretend that their scientific metatheories are universally valid.76
Unlike all of these approaches, the dialogic approach proposed here is marked by
the consciousness of the subject of theory that its concept of subjectivity is merely a
contingent construction which competes with other – comparable and divergent –
constructions in an open scientific dialogue. Such constructions do not simply come
about in the minds of individual subjects but are the products of collectively shared
philosophical traditions and scientific group languages (sociolects) – as the works of
Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault show.
Reflecting upon its particularity and its contingency, Dialogical Theory (cf. Chapter
V, 2) will never lose sight of these competing constructions and will keep an eye on
both consensus and dissent in theoretical debates. It is guided by the idea that a
dialogue between heterogeneous group languages and philosophical traditions is more
likely to expose theories and theorems to critical tests than intersubjective control in
the sense of Popper and Habermas,77 which depends on individual thinkers within a
particular scientific group and more often than not confirms the group’s collective doxa.
In other words: the subject of Dialogical Theory takes the view that it can only
survive as a theoretical subject if it remains open to the otherness of competing
scientific languages and listens to their criticism. It thereby defines itself as a dialogical,
polyphonic subject in the sense of Bakhtin. Far from excluding multiplicity and
plurality, it thrives on the confrontation and combination of dissenting voices and thus
becomes itself a polyphonic narrative in which homogeneity and heterogeneity are not
mutually exclusive.
The fact that identity can only be understood in its relationship to alterity was
pointed out by Mikhail M. Bakhtin, probably the most important theoretician of
dialogue. According to him, both the speaking subject and the spoken word are to be
viewed in a dialogical set-up. Commenting on Dostoevsky’s work, Bakhtin writes:
Every experience, every thought of a character is internally dialogic, adorned with

polemic, filled with struggle, or is on the contrary open to inspiration from outside
itself – but it is not in any case concentrated simply on its own object; it is
accompanied by a continual sideways glance at another person.78
Like Dostoevsky’s (Bakhtin’s) hero, the subject of theory becomes conscious of the fact
that it can only develop in a permanent interaction with others and the ‘generalized
Other’ in the sense of Mead.
2 The state of the debate
‘State of the debate’ may sound slightly pretentious, for no theoretician will ever be able
to comment on all of the crucial discussions regarding the notions of subject,
subjectivity and identity. As a matter of fact, the concept of subject crops up in virtually
all theological, philosophical, psychological, sociological and literary debates so that

any attempt at a general or panoramic view of this particular topic is bound to turn
into a recapitulation of classical, medieval and modern thought. Since the next chapter
will deal with the problem of subjectivity in Descartes, German idealism and late
modernity, it seems reasonable to limit the presentation of the debates to the second
half of the twentieth century.
In what follows, it is not individual authors and their works that will be at the centre
of the discussion but currents of thought such as existentialism, Marxism, Critical
Theory, psychoanalysis, systems theory, etc. A major topic will be the relationship
between individual and collective actants and the problem of disintegrating social
value systems. In a postmodern retrospective, three factors appear to have precipitated
the crisis of the modern subject: (1) the increasingly difficult orientation of individuals
towards collective subjects; (2) the gradual disintegration of collective value systems;
(3) the devaluation of language which accompanies these developments – as a basis of
individual and collective subjectivity it turns out to be less reliable than ever.
Anticipating the third section of this chapter and the chapters that follow, this
section will deal with the opposition between thinkers of a modernity who continue to
adhere to the concept of subject, albeit in a revised version, and postmodern authors
who radically criticize the notions of subject and subjectivity or discard them altogether
as metaphysical relics. Since some of the positions mentioned here will be dealt with in
more detail later on, what follows will be limited to a general outline. At the same time,
however, a dialogue with other theories of the subject will be pursued.
(a) From existentialism to postmodernity: Philosophy

On the one hand, it may seem advisable not to worry too much about philosophical
and literary fashions; on the other hand, one should avoid neglecting them completely
because, more often than not, they function as signs of the times we live in. Why
was existentialism superseded by structuralism and the latter by deconstruction
and postmodernism? The simple formalist idea that yesterday’s theories become
‘automatized’ and that the public demands and rewards innovation overlooks the fact
that Jean-Paul Sartre’s idealist and heroic concept of subjectivity, which in the late 1930s
stood for domination over the object and over nature, was meant to be integrated after
the war – especially in Questions of Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason – into the
supraindividual subjects of Marxism: into the subject-actants ‘History’ and ‘Proletariat’
– independently of all structuralist or semiotic debates. (The collective subjects in
question were not considered as ‘myths’ or ‘illusions’ but as concrete historical forces.)
While the young Sartre, the author of La Nausée (1938), pleads for the freedom of
the individual subject vis-à-vis the world of objects (‘Things have broken free from
their names.’),79 the author of Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) aims at an
incorporation of existential philosophy as a theory of the concrete individual into
Marxist discourse. The Marxist omission of the individual’s role in history is to be
corrected: ‘In view of this default [. . .] existentialism, at the heart of Marxism and
taking the same givens, the same Knowledge, as its point of departure, must attempt in
its turn [. . .] the dialectical interpretation of History.’80
Sweeping statements of this kind expose themselves to contemporary criticism,

especially since they have been superseded by events in the second half of the twentieth
century. Nevertheless, Sartre’s suggestions in The Problem of Method are not only
reasonable, but continue to be relevant because the author attempts to combine
Kierkegaard’s particularistic approach with the generalizing, historical perspective of
Hegelian Marxism within the framework of a ‘progressive-regressive method’, thus
making Marxist theory more concrete.81 He quite rightly points out that it is difficult to
locate Flaubert’s work within history by simply relating it to the situation of the French
petty bourgeoisie, thus omitting the writer’s childhood within a particular family.82
It is not so much this Sartrian methodological project which should be called into
question – it could even prove relevant to sociologists fond of ‘social systems’ – but
Sartre’s notion of the individual subject. It rules over nature in Nausea and Being and
Nothingness and later declares its solidarity with Hegelian Marxism and its concept of
History. Long before postmodern critiques of Sartre’s existentialism appeared, Camus
expressed his distaste for Sartre’s domineering subject and attempted to extricate it
from a historical meta-narrative (Lyotard) which he considered as fatally committed to
the principle of domination. His objections to Christian teleology are also directed at
the Marxists:
From this moment, human nature becomes the subject of history, and significant
history expressed by the idea of human totality is born. From the Annunciation
until the Last Judgement, humanity has no other task but to conform to the strictly
moral ends of a narrative that has already been written.83
In the French original the relevant expression is ‘récit écrit à l’avance’:84 it shows to what
extent Camus anticipated the postmodern critique of the grand meta-narratives within
which individual and collective subjects were supposed to act.
In this context, the harsh criticism of Camus’s L’Homme révolté (1951), published by
Francis Jeanson in Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes, appears – especially in
retrospect – as a modern justification of History in the Hegelian sense. Camus’s reply
to his critic announces in many respects the now prevailing postmodern scepticism
vis-à-vis all meta-narratives: ‘The truth, which is to be reiterated and defended against
your article, is that my book does not in the least negate history (such a negation would
be meaningless); rather, it is content with criticizing an attitude which turns history
into an absolute.’85
Camus, in this respect a follower of Nietzsche,86 enhances the status of nature vis-à-
vis history as (Christian or Marxist) teleology so dramatically ‘that one can hardly
avoid the impression that individuality is dissolved in the unimaginable and ineffable
totality of life or nature’.87 The quarrel between the two philosophers, both of whom
continue to be labelled ‘existentialists’, flared up at two points of dissent: one of them
was the attitude adopted by the individual subject towards nature; the other was its role
within the Hegelian-Marxist narrative.
Both problems are at the centre of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Critical Theory. In
their work Dialectic of Enlightenment, written during the war in American exile, the
authors criticize an instrumental, technical reason, which tends to annihilate both
subject and object. The domination over nature exercised by a rationalist, enlightened
subject leads to the reification of this subject: eventually, it is obliged to control itself in
order to impose its will on nature and in the process becomes itself an instrument of
economic, social and technical progress. This fact is obscured by idealism – from
Descartes to Hegel – which celebrates abstract subjectivity as an expression of human
autonomy and free will. The critique of the abstract ‘I’, so prominent in German
idealism, reappears in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966, orig. version), where the
idealist principle of ‘identity between subject and object’ is called into question:
The ego principle imitates its negation. It is not true that the object is a subject, as
idealism has been drilling into us for thousands of years, but it is true that the
subject is an object. The primacy of subjectivity is a spiritualized continuation of
Darwin’s struggle for existence. The suppression of nature for human ends is a
mere natural relationship.88
Inverting the idealist hierarchy, Adorno pleads in favour of a ‘preponderance of the

object’.
Far from following Camus, who tends to dissolve the human subject by assimilating
it to the natural order, Adorno envisages a thought capable of representing the
particularity or the unique character of the object, thus delivering the subject from its
fatal involvement in the rationalist principle of domination over the objective world.
According to Adorno, philosophy ‘must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the
concept’89 and aim at ‘the nonconceptual in the concept’.90
Adopting a stance similar to that of Robert Musil, Adorno believes that the essay, by
considering the object from different sides without ever defining it or identifying it
with a concept, is best suited to articulate the ‘consciousness of nonidentity’.91 In his
Negative Dialectics he turns to the model in order to grasp the singular, the specific
‘without letting it evaporate in its more general super-concept’.92 This balancing act of
a non-theoretical theory geared towards the mimetic principle of art93 leads eventually
to the paratactic composition of Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory
(1970, orig. version): to a text experiment designed to reconcile subject and object by
defying the idealist principle of subjective supremacy.
It may have become clear that a theory attracted by the particular and its nuances is
likely to consider with scepticism the Marxist idea of linking theory and practice and
any attempt to make the individual subject submit to an ideologically defined party
discipline. In this respect, Adorno is quite close to Camus. Like the French writer-
philosopher he rejects the subordination of the individual subject under the mythical
subject ‘History’ and the collective actant ‘Party’. Against Marx’s and Engels’s apotheosis
of History he pleads for the individual whom Hegel and Marx are prepared to sacrifice
to History as raison d’Etat or as class struggle: ‘The individual survives himself. But in
his residue which history has condemned lies nothing but what will not sacrifice itself
to false identity.’94
Although he continues Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique in some respects,
Habermas departs significantly from the subject-object model by trying to map out an
alternative to what he calls the ‘philosophy of the subject’ and a ‘subject-centred reason’.
His model is based on the two complementary notions of ‘intersubjectivity’ and

‘communication’. His basic aim is to replace Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s subject-object
dialectic by intersubjective communication and to show ‘that the paradigm of the
knowledge of objects has to be replaced by the paradigm of mutual understanding
between subjects capable of speech and action’.95
Since Habermas’s universal pragmatics will be discussed in some detail in the last
chapter, it may be sufficient at this stage to mention some of the critical arguments his
approach has met with. It ought to become clear that, in spite of his plea for the
continuation of an ‘unfinished modernity’, his communication model tends to reduce
subjectivity by placing it within a homogeneous life world (Lebenswelt), in which the
linguistic, cultural and ideological differences between subjects are neutralized by
semantic and pragmatic language rules.
In particular his sociological writings show to what extent he not only follows
American pragmatism (Peirce) but also a sociology of consensus in the sense of Mead
and Parsons, whose consensus ideology was criticized by Alwyn W. Gouldner and
others.96 Habermas imagines a homogeneous life world which forms the basis of a
consensus-oriented communication.97 What is meant, however, is not the real, conflict-
ridden world of everyday life, but a ‘formalized’, ‘idealized’ life world in which the ideal
speech situation (ideale Sprechsituation) is anchored.
In what follows, only two aspects of this concept will be considered, both of which
reveal Habermas’s intention to make consensus prevail and, if necessary, even against
the particularities of the participating subjects. In the ‘ideal speech situation’, he argues,
the dialogue roles involved ought to be interchangeable, and the ‘constraint of the
better argument’ should be recognized as binding.
In this situation, subjectivity is suppressed insofar as the interchangeability of
dialogue roles presupposes a homogeneous language common to all participants, a
kind of ‘universal jargon’ commented on by Otto Neurath in the days of the Vienna
Circle.98 However, this kind of universal or universally spoken language exists neither
in everyday life nor in philosophy and the social sciences, where every speaking subject
is constituted by its sociolects and discourses. All of these are particular and hence
cannot become objects of consensus. This is why Habermas’s thesis concerning the
‘constraint of the better argument’ is questionable. For in each group language a different
argument is recognized as ‘better’ or ‘more convincing’. This is the reason why an
argument that is immediately accepted by subject A (e.g. within a feminist sociolect) is
rejected by subject B as ‘unscientific’, ‘irrational’ or ‘absurd’ (e.g. from the point of view of
systems theory).
The existence of successful communication among heterogeneous groups should
not be denied;99 however, Habermas does not have this problem in mind. His aim is a
unification of language meant to exclude psychic, social and discursive differences
between subjects: ‘Different speakers may not use the same expression with different
meanings.’100 One need not be a fanatical follower of Derrida and his deconstruction in
order to realize that this rule is rooted in a repressive utopia. Did Margaret Masterman
not discover twenty-one different meanings of the word ‘paradigm’ in Thomas S. Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)?101 If one took Habermas’s rule seriously,
one could hardly discuss Kuhn’s book in public . . .
Habermas breaks with the discourse of Critical Theory in the sense of Adorno and
Horkheimer by replacing these authors’ attempt to strengthen the individual subject –
an attempt renewed in this book – with an intersubjectivity marked by the rationalist
principle of domination over nature and human beings. He thus continues the dialectic
of Enlightenment instead of proposing an alternative to it.
In spite of his criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer, the German philosopher Hans
Ebeling is closer to their version of Critical Theory than to Habermas because he
returns to the nexus between domination over nature and self-preservation. Moreover,
he focuses on those factors which prevent humans from becoming subjects: ‘Everything,
all that derives from facts, is disposed in such a way as to prevent the rise of human
subjectivity, to minimize it and to push it back into self-abnegation. Against human
subjectivity the gods conspire with the economy and the computers with nature.’102
Unfortunately, this dramatic and metaphoric discourse contains arguments that can be
inverted: for the artificial subject in the sense of computerized artificial intelligence can
very well be considered as an enhancement or expansion of human subjectivity – as
long as it is used intelligently.
According to Ebeling, the present decline of subjectivity can be halted by a self-
critical ‘return to the subject of modernity’.103 In spite of his proximity to Kant, his
postulate of a collective, ‘technically realizable death-drive’104 moves him closer to
Heidegger’s philosophy of Being and makes him predict that the subject can only be
saved by its ‘rebirth within the resisting synthesis of thought and death’.105 This
reformulation of memento mori leads to the complementary but extremely questionable
assertion that the ecological death of the human race can only be averted by a drastic
limitation of democratic rights: ‘Democratic aspirations cannot be satisfied, once the
human race has disappeared. This is why they have to be limited for a long period of
time on a global scale.’106 This kind of rhetoric, which is reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan, is particularly ominous in times of increasing and electronically reinforced
state controls. The expression ‘for a long period of time’ sounds particularly threatening.
In this respect, the (politically experienced) Romans were more cautious: they elected
their dictator for only one year . . .
The postmodern philosophers, whom Ebeling scorns on several occasions, differ
substantially from him insofar as their analyses of the subject’s subjugation (sub-
iectum) and disintegration do not prevent them from analysing the social mechanisms
responsible for the decline of subjectivity. They would certainly reject any proposal
aiming at the limitation of democratic rights. Michel Foucault, who will play an
important part in the third chapter – along with Goffman and Laing – views individual
subjectivity as a pseudo-entity lacking genuine autonomy: it appears to him as a
product of power constellations most of which take on the form of language or
discourse formations. Thus the power of the human sciences (including medicine)
manifests itself in the realm of language where the scientific division of labour leads to
a repartition of the human being according to the various scientific disciplines marked
by specialized discourses: a repartition every patient who has undergone multiple tests
in a hospital is painfully aware of.
This scientific subjugation of the individual by modern medicine is commented on
by Roddey Reid in conjunction with Foucault: ‘We may already be witnessing the final
death of man as he was constructed by “medical humanism”.’107 What matters here is

the fact, discovered by Merleau-Ponty,108 that humanism as an ideology turns
individuals into subjects. However, this insight remains valid in the realm of
institutionalized science, whose vocabulary, statistics and taxonomies have a lasting
impact on everyday life and on the subjectivity of individuals.
In this context, Jürgen Link starts from the work of Michel Foucault in order to add
a new dimension to it: the concept of normalism. It means neither normality nor
normalization but the institutionalization and ideological use of what is presented as
‘normal’ by databases, statistics and opinion polls. Following Foucault, he asks: ‘What
characterizes normalist subjectivities and how are they produced?’109 One could answer
with Link that they are produced in a society ridden by scientific and pseudo-scientific
quantifications, some of which penetrate into individual and collective consciousness.
This presupposes, of course, that normalities in this particular (quantitative) sense
can only emerge in data-dominated societies110 which ‘continuously, routinely,
comprehensively and institutionally produce their own transparency’.111 This kind of
transparency, Link argues, is a form of domination over the subject: ‘This kind of
statistical transparency, also considered by Foucault, is certainly related to panoptical
transparency, although it is not identical to it: in the extreme case, they differ like the
Stasi [the East German secret service] and opinion research.’112 One might also say that
they differ like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World. For the
process of normalization, possibly located beyond the ideological realm (cf. Chapter
III, 5), is not repressive like National Socialism or Soviet Marxism-Leninism; it
persuades by continuously releasing data: ‘Act like the statistical majority, like everybody
else; then you’ll have less problems and you’ll be accepted.’
Link’s innovative revision of Foucault’s theory of the subject brought about a turn
in the German debates on subjectivity and identity because it foregrounded the French
philosopher’s basic project: the aim to understand the individual subject as a subjugated
instance (a sub-iectum) and to investigate – in conjunction with Foucault’s later work –
the scope of an autonomous subjectivity. For without a comprehensive analysis of
social constraints and of the subject’s over-determination a plea for autonomous
subjectivity is bound to fail.
This is what German Marxists and followers of Critical Theory overlooked in the
1970s when they blamed Foucault and the ‘structuralists’, who in those days were not
yet considered as postmodern, for intending to dissolve subjectivity in the structure.
Thus Alfred Schmidt criticizes the existentialists for stopping at ‘abstract man’ and the
structuralists for opting for the other extreme: ‘They dissolve all subjectivity in supra-
and intersubjective “structures”.’113 It may well be that, at present, this critique fits
Habermas’s intersubjective approach rather than that of the ‘structuralists’. Both
Foucault and Althusser envisaged a critical analysis of those social mechanisms which
turn the individual subject into a pseudo-subject and a marionette.
However, the German critics had a point insofar as Foucault and Althusser tend to
overemphasize the over-determining structures (as was shown above in conjunction
with Althusser) and to underscore the freedom individuals may find between collective
subjects, ideologies and technical jargons. In this respect, Urs Jaeggi is not entirely
wrong when he remarks: ‘In Althusser, structural necessity remains embedded in a kind
of natural necessity, which reflects an inveterate scepticism towards all kinds of political
practice – although this point is hardly ever mentioned. The absence of the subject
entails an absence of class struggle.’114
Althusser himself realizes this in the 1970s115 but still insists that scientific discourse
is a process without a subject. He thereby precludes himself from understanding his
own scientific language as the contingent construct of a subject speaking and acting in
a specific social context.116 His thesis concerning the ideological character of subjectivity
is nevertheless based on a valuable insight that must not be underestimated.
In spite of their one-sidedness, which is reminiscent of Althusser’s, the critiques of
coherence, identity and subjectivity put forward by Deleuze, Derrida and Vattimo are
illuminating. They will be dealt with in more detail in the third chapter. What matters
at this stage is a basic idea common to the two French thinkers. Derrida’s L’Ecriture
et la différence (1967) and Deleuze’s Différence et répétition (1968) are both geared
towards the idea that the repetition of a sign (in the sense of semantic recurrence or
redundancy), far from promoting coherence, entails semantic shifts and contradictions,
thus causing the discourse and its subject to fall apart. It seems impossible to reiterate
words such as ‘paradigm’ (cf. supra), ‘subject’ or ‘science’ in a particular discourse without
producing shifts and divergences all of which cause the discourse to disintegrate.
Thereby, subjectivity as identity of the subject is radically called into question.
Following Nietzsche, who was among the first to doubt the discursive identity of the
sign and the subject, Deleuze points out: ‘The subject of the eternal return is not
the same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the many,
not necessity but chance.’117 This somewhat cryptic sentence can be taken to mean
that, due to the numerous differences it produces, the subject of discourse is never
identical with itself.
Gianni Vattimo continues this train of thought: ‘From the very outset, difference has
the same meaning for Deleuze as for Derrida. It actually means that all apparent
directness is always the duplicate of an original that does not exist.’118 Hence there is no
origin but only simulacra differing from an unknown X.
However, the divergence from an unknown unit, which underlies both Derrida’s
and Deleuze’s argument, is self-contradictory. This fact was pointed out by Manfred
Frank, who seeks to ‘avoid the subversion of the subject’,119 as Rainer Leschke puts it,
and at the same time objects
that Derrida’s attack on the idea of presence [as presence of meaning and of
subjective identity] is not only radical but too radical, i.e. self-contradictory.
Without the reference to a moment of relative self-consistency, differentiation
(shift of meaning, metaphoric renewal of meaning) could not be ascertained for it
would be devoid of criteria and could no longer be distinguished from a state of
pure sameness.120
This argument is certainly correct and could be completed at a semiotic level to the
effect that differentiation not only entails divergences and contradictions but can also
lead to a more concrete definition: for example, of the concept of subject which finally
appears in its multiple semantic aspects. Frank’s hermeneutic-semiotic position could
be described with Leschke ‘as a reconstruction of the subject on a terrain made unsafe
by semiology’.121
Relating all of these arguments to one another, subjectivity could be viewed (as is
the case in this book as a whole) as a dialogical, changing identity and as unity in
multiplicity. It seems important to abandon the idealist notion of subjectivity as static
identity in order to imagine a subject whose individuality as socialized nature and
whose subjectivity as culture can only be understood as processes or dynamic units.
More often than not, the idea of a disintegrating or vanishing subject appears plausible
merely because we observe movement and change where we expected a static,
inalterable identity – which Deleuze, Derrida and their followers rightly reject.
(b) From the lonely crowd to the social movement: Sociology

The move from philosophy to sociology shows that the problem of subjectivity is less
frequently dealt with by sociologists than philosophers and that it is more prominent
in French than in British or German sociology.122 This comes as a surprise because we
have become accustomed to the stereotype according to which critical or fashionable
Paris thinkers have dismissed the concept of subject as an obsolete relic of German
idealism, whereas it continues to be staunchly defended by quixotic proponents of
German hermeneutics such as Manfred Frank. The fact that this stereotype – like all
stereotypes – is only partly true is not only borne out by the last works of Foucault, who
investigates the scope of ancient and contemporary subjectivity, but also by Ricœur’s
hermeneutic theory which maps out a dynamic notion of subjectivity.
The writings of sociologists such as Alain Touraine and Edgar Morin can be read
parallel to Ricœur’s philosophy. They react to the sociological insight that the individual,
who has been freed from traditional constraints, may very well go under in an automated,
networking data society in which the liberties and initiatives of the liberal era are being
curtailed. Both sociologists ask how individual subjectivity can survive in the relatively
unfavourable constellation brought about by ‘postindustrial’ or ‘programmed’ (Touraine)
society. Their inquiries are based on a model that is also invoked – albeit in different
contexts – by sociologists such as David Riesman, Lucien Goldmann, Daniel Bell,
Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck.
Inspired by Durkheim’s and Ferdinand Tönnies’s idea that traditional societies have
been transformed into secular, individualist societies marked by the division of labour,
this model is the starting point of most sociological theories of the subject. After the
Second World War, however, they add a second dimension to the model which remains
implicit in classical sociology: the idea that in a society ruled by trusts, mass
organizations and mass media the individual subject remains helpless.
Sociologists of the late modern and the postmodern era usually begin their
historical narrative with analyses of traditional forms of society followed by comments
on modernity as liberal capitalism and on an ill-defined contemporary society, called
capitalisme d’organisation by Goldmann, late modernity by Giddens and postindustrial
society or société postindustrielle by Bell and Touraine respectively. Baudrillard
considers contemporary society as being divided into two phases: a ‘structural stadium’
entirely dominated by the exchange value and a ‘fractal stadium’ in which use value and
exchange value become indistinguishable, so that reality (as use value) disappears as a
point of reference.123
In spite of all the theoretical and terminological divergences that separate these
authors, their descriptions of the final stadium of capitalism have one trait in common:
the decline of the individual subject. They all seem to converge in one of the central
insights of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, namely that ‘the individual survives himself ’.124
In this respect, the sociologists confirm the diagnoses of philosophers such as Lyotard,
whose subject-negating aesthetics will be discussed in the third chapter.
In this context, David Riesman’s well-known analysis of the transition from the
autonomous, inner-directed individual of the liberal era to the other-directed individual
of the late capitalist era is particularly characteristic. Unlike the society of inner-
directedness, which coincides with the climax of individual autonomy, the late capitalist
order of other-directedness is marked by heteronomy. Claus Daniel views this process
as a weakening of the individual subject: ‘The subjects consider their actions less in
conjunction with their individual conscience and more in relation to signals received
from prestigious personalities. This type of character is what Riesman calls “other-
directed”; society now relies on other-directedness.’125
However, this social heteronomy should not be over-personalized and linked to
‘prestigious personalities’; for it was shown by Leo Löwenthal in his analyses of popular
magazines126 that other-directedness is also brought about by media-produced models
such as TV stars, actors or popular singers whose ‘images’ have an impact on collective
and individual behaviour. Such ‘images’ function as simulacra which, according to
Baudrillard, replace social interaction in the subject’s consciousness with a phantasmatic
model of reality: ‘The transition from signs that cover up something to signs that
dissimulate the fact that nothing exists, constitutes the decisive turning point.’127
Riesman’s model is completed by Daniel Bell’s ethically motivated diagnosis,
according to which productive capitalism of the liberal tycoon, of the inner-directed
subject, has been transformed into consumer-oriented capitalism in which the virtues
of the liberal era (responsibility, ambition, initiative) have been replaced by a consumerist
hedonism. In Bell’s book The Coming of Postindustrial Society, capitalism itself is made
responsible for its decline: ‘Ironically, all this was undermined by capitalism itself.
Through mass production and mass consumption it destroyed the Protestant ethic by
zealously promoting a hedonistic way of life.’128 It is obvious that Bell, who considers
with dismay the decline of what Max Weber calls ‘the Protestant ethic’, can only regret
the postindustrial social turn – as the negative connotations of expressions like
‘hedonistic way of life’ indicate. In his view, the mythical actant ‘capitalism’ is responsible
for the present malaise.
Less mythical is Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist story of capitalism in which the liberal
and the monopolist phases are followed by a capitalism organized by the state and
dominated by market laws and reification. The domination of the exchange value
relegates qualitative values in the ethical, aesthetic and political sense to the periphery
of society, thus undermining the foundations of collective and individual subjectivity.
The monopolist or imperialist phase appears to Goldmann as marked by the
‘disappearance of the individual’,129 the phase of state-organized capitalism (capitalisme
d’organisation) by the spread of reification which turns into an autonomous world,
in which the human, both as individual and as community, is deprived of its

meaning.130
Structured by the contrast between exchange value and use value, this neo-Marxist
discourse is nonetheless related to Bell’s neo-Weberian diagnosis by the belief that the
autonomous subject of the liberal era is a thing of the past and that subjectivity and
individual initiative become increasingly difficult in late capitalism. Moreover, the
passage quoted above reveals a striking affinity between the humanist Marxist131 and
the fashionable postmodernist Baudrillard. For both are inclined to believe that the
rule of the exchange value produces an autonomous world structured by specific laws
and considered by Baudrillard as ‘hyper-real’. Goldmann’s reified world is not
substantially different from Baudrillard’s world of commercialized media – especially
if one takes into account the orientation of his early writings (e.g. Le Système des objets,
1968) towards the nexus between exchange value and reification.
In Britain and Germany, sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck react
to Riesman’s, Bell’s and Goldmann’s diagnoses in a postmodern situation but without
postmodern convictions. In his Risk Society, Beck seems to refer to the problems
sketched by Riesman and Bell, when he argues that the old industrial society marked
by a productivity ethos no longer exists. It is superseded by a ‘risk society’ which reflects
the imponderables and risks of the industrial era. Modernity thus begins to reflect on
itself:
The argument is that, while in classical industrial society the ‘logic’ of wealth
production dominates the ‘logic’ of risk production, in the risk society this
relationship is reversed [. . .]. The productive forces have lost their innocence in
the reflexivity of modernization processes.132
In other words: modernity as industrial society becomes a problem in view of ecological

disasters and other risks threatening society as a whole.
Although Beck does not consider himself a postmodern thinker in the sense of
Lyotard or Baudrillard, he reacts to postmodern and postindustrial phenomena, because,
like Touraine, he seeks to map out a new social ethic as an alternative to the ‘industrial’
Protestant ethic in the sense of Weber. With Bell he may share the view that the Protestant
ethic belongs to the past, but he radically departs from Bell’s diagnosis of decadence and
presents the picture of a risk society which the accumulated risks of industrialization
have constrained to become critical of its own past. Like Touraine in Critique de la
modernité (1992), he replaces Bell’s conservatism with a self-criticism of modernity.
This is the reason why he does not view the loss of individual autonomy as a
symptom of decadence but, rather, as the result of a globally experienced uncertainty
due to the disintegration of a value system geared towards performance, production
and success. In a social situation in which success symbols such as income, career and
status no longer make up individual subjectivity, because the ‘industrial’ ethic of
performance no longer prevails, the question concerning subjectivity is raised in a new
context marked by uncertainty. The consequence is that ‘people are set free from the
certainties and modes of living in the industrial epoch [. . .]. The shocks unleashed by
this constitute the other side of the risk society’.133 Beck adds that all sorts of experts
and agencies are marketing strategies of self-reassurance in order to counter the new
risks. His remarks are of particular interest here, because they show that in times of
crisis the individual subject finds two points of orientation: the market (the exchange
value) and the ideologies of collective subjects.
They are all the more important here because they can be related to Anthony
Giddens’s Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), a study which arrives at different results.
Although the British sociologist observes the fragmentation of society and the
corresponding changes of its value system, which may produce anomie, he does not
conclude that global uncertainty or the disintegration of self-identity is the inevitable
outcome. He rather invokes the nexus – constructed here in a different context –
between individuality as corporeity and subjectivity as discourse or narrative
programme: ‘The potential for the unravelling of self-identity is kept in check because
demeanour sustains a link between “feeling at home in one’s body” and the personalised
narrative.’134
Sceptical thinkers such as Riesman, Bell and Beck may well object to this that
demeanour becomes a magic buzzword destined to hold together ‘corporeity and
subjectivity’ in a ‘personalized narrative’. Are we not dealing here with a hollow word?
Moreover, ‘feeling at home in one’s body’ can no longer be presupposed in most cases.
The increasing number of psychosomatic diseases may be an extreme example, but it
calls into question the validity of Giddens’s thesis.
The weakening of the individual subject diagnosed by late modern and postmodern
sociologists is certainly one reason why, in his theory of social systems, Niklas Luhmann
eliminates the concept of subject: ‘We can thereby abandon the concept of subject’,135 he
argues in Social Systems. This radical step is undoubtedly motivated by the fact that the
subjugation of the subject by collectives, ideologies and bureaucracies, commented on
by Durkheim, Simmel and M. Weber, has dominated modern sociology for decades.
One might add that Luhmann takes the view that the social ought to be grasped in
conjunction with the difference between system and environment, rather than in
relation to the concepts of structure and action (in the sense of Parsons and Merton).
In spite of Luhmann’s critique, the problem of subjectivity will not disappear. For
subjectivity is also a linguistic problem inherent in all texts – even those of Luhmann.
On the one hand, it crops up in speech (énonciation) because it is always an individual
or collective subject who speaks, criticizes, narrates; on the other hand, it appears in the
narrative structure of texts (énoncé) where actants (Greimas, cf. Chapter I, 1) act and
oppose each other. In fairy tales, it can be kings, witches, princesses or dragons; in
novels, ambitious, loving or vicious heroes or anti-heroes; in modern sociology,
individuals, groups, classes or organizations were the relevant agencies. In Luhmann’s
theory, these actors are replaced by systems as abstract subject-actants, some of which
turn into mythical actants (cf. Chapters I, 1 and IV, 3).
This idea cannot be elaborated on here, but will be developed in some detail in the
fourth chapter. It is meant to cast doubt on the widespread belief that Luhmann’s theory
has once and for all relegated all sociologies of subjectivity and action (in the Weberian
sense) to the realm of ‘Old-European thought’. Since the state of contemporary discussions
is at stake here, it makes sense to mention Franz Grubauer’s alternative to Luhmann’s
approach. Grubauer seems to confirm the above criticism when he points out:
This theory of ‘organized social systems’ is undoubtedly relevant within the theory
of subjectivity proposed here (a) because it contains implicit statements about
subjects of organizations, (b) because it reveals in such practical statements the
ambivalence of systems theory vis-à-vis the position of subjects and their
subjectivity and (c) because it can still be shown that the systemic question of
rationality can only be elucidated within the context of different interests of
individual reproduction and systemic reproduction.136
Finally, Grubauer turns against the systemic approach when he emphasizes that
‘in the dialectic between individual and organization [organizations] rediscover
their dependence on subjects’137 because they depend on reflexive subjectivity. This
opinion is confirmed by French sociologists of organizations such as Michel Crozier
(cf. M. Crozier, E. Friedberg, L’Acteur et le système, 1977); however, it is as devoid of
empirical proofs as Luhmann’s assertion that concepts like ‘subject’ and ‘subjective
understanding’ (in the Weberian sense) can be disposed of. In this respect,
sociologists – like philosophers – keep struggling with words – some of which are
hollow. In the fourth chapter it will be shown in text analyses to what extent Luhmann
suppresses the concept of subject – without making it redundant.
At the same time, the – a priori improbable – affinity between Luhmann and
Baudrillard will be revealed. For Baudrillard, too, takes the view that concepts such as
‘subject’, ‘meaning’ and ‘history’ are anachronistic because they are related to the realm
of the use value which, he believes, has disappeared in a society marked by exchange.
This is why he takes the view that ‘the subject’ and related concepts no longer explain
anything because, in postmodern society, all processes are being moved by systemic
operations – behind the backs of the actors as it were.138 It will appear that Luhmann
can hardly justify his rejection of the concept of postmodernism, because he himself
tends to follow the postmodern trend whenever he proclaims – with Baudrillard – that
the subject does not exist.
Unlike these two thinkers, French sociologists such as Alain Touraine and Edgar
Morin try to show to what extent the concept of subject is indispensable not only on an
individual but also on a collective level. Touraine’s response to the crisis of the
individual subject in late modernity and postmodernity (Touraine does not adopt the
concept of postmodernity) is a plea for solidarity between individual and collective
subjects in the sense of social movements. In his book Le Retour de l’acteur (1984), he
sums up his basic intention: ‘make possible and prepare the analysis of the new social
movements: of the actors of our time’.139
From a typological or comparative point of view,140 it is particularly rewarding to
observe similar arguments in German sociology, which by no means appears as
dominated by systems theory, if considered as a whole. Thus Claus Daniel’s book
Theorien der Subjektivität is reminiscent of Touraine’s recent works, especially in the
following passage: ‘Nowadays, when reflexivity as a principle of life is itself threatened,
social movements, e.g. alternative movements, appear in order to struggle for forms of
life threatened by technology and for the – always contradictory – possibility to be
oneself.’141 The link established by Daniel between individual emancipation and social
movement (which he relates to Marcuse’s ‘new sensibility’) is a salient feature of
postmodern society, whose actors defend their interests against state interventionism,
party organizations and the power of multinational trusts.
Especially in his more recent publications, Touraine expects social movements to
counter the quandaries of neo-liberalism by allying themselves with political actants
such as parties and trade unions. He does not believe in a re-birth of revolutionary
parties within movements because the latter are marked by discontinuity and
heterogeneity. Their actions are limited in time and do not pursue clearly defined goals.
Therefore he appeals to the intellectuals ‘to reveal the common orientations’142 of
contemporary movements. He thus provokes the critical question how the marginalized
intellectuals, who are extremely heterogeneous as a group, are supposed to find a common
line.
Sometimes Touraine’s attempts to establish a link between intellectuals and social
movements is reminiscent of Sartre’s failed rapprochement between existentialism and
the French Communist Party (cf. Chapter I, 2, a) and of Lucien Goldmann’s humanist
Marxism, the politics of which no longer rely on the revolutionary proletariat but on a
radically reformist ‘new working class’.143 Like the latter,144 the social movement in the
sense of Touraine could turn out to be a late modern or postmodern chimera:
an ephemeral actant incapable of supporting or strengthening the individual subject.
The multiple links between individual subjectivity and social movements will be
reconsidered in the last chapter.
(c) From psychoanalysis and the theory of personality to social

psychology: The discontent in culture and society
It is a mistake to consider psychoanalysis and the discovery (or rather construction) of
its central object, the unconscious, independently of social change. For both can be
deduced from the crisis of cultural values, so astutely commented on by Nietzsche in
his Genealogy of Morals. Outside of or beyond these values, their prescriptions and
prohibitions, ‘animal man’145 appears: with his appetites, his vulnerability, his mortality.
This discovery of the animal in the human, of nature in culture, gives rise to a
fundamental ambivalence: an ambivalent attitude towards all religious, ethical, political
and aesthetic values. ‘It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of those
good and honoured things resides precisely in their being artfully related, knotted and
crocheted to these wicked, apparently antithetical things, perhaps even in their being
essentially identical with them.’146 As if responding to Nietzsche, Freud shows to what
extent cultural opposites are ‘crocheted’ to one another, when he declares God and
Devil to be one: ‘Not much analytic astuteness is required in order to guess that God
and Devil were originally one.’147
Not much imagination is required to realize that in this social and linguistic situation,
structured by ambivalence, the subject becomes disoriented. When two actors such as
‘God’ and ‘Devil’, defined as irreconcilable opponents in Christian discourse, are fused
until ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ become indistinguishable, then the identity of the individual
subject, which in many respects depends on the Christian and humanist metanarratives
and their notion of subjectivity, is called into question. At the same time, a Freudian
‘discontent in civilization’ makes itself felt which is due to the spreading crisis of the
social value system – a crisis hinted at by Carl Gustav Jung: ‘Whoever has lost the
historical symbols and refuses to put up with an “Ersatz”, finds himself in a difficult
position: he is confronted by a nothingness from which he turns away in horror.’148
The situation of ‘discontent’ and anguish described by Freud and Jung suggests that
the survival of the individual subject is no longer certain in late modernity. In many
cases it has forsaken God as its ultimate addresser (destinateur, Greimas) and scans the
horizons for new – ideological – addressers who guarantee the coherence of new,
existentially comforting metanarratives. It is in this post-metaphysical context that one
may re-read Ernst Mach’s famous dictum: ‘The I is irretrievably lost.’149 For this dictum
is followed by remarks which reveal to what extent philosophers and psychologists at
the turn of the century presuppose the individual subject’s dissociation from the
Christian metanarrative:
At that point, one will no longer attach that much importance to the I, which varies
a lot in the course of an individual’s life and can be altogether absent during sleep,
in moments of intense contemplation or meditation and especially in the happiest
moments. One will gladly renounce individual immortality and will no longer
prefer a minor matter to the main thing.150
This passage is characteristic of Mach’s Die Analyse der Empfindungen (1886) because
it bears witness to two complementary tendencies, both of which made an impact on
European thought at the end of the nineteenth century: the detachment of the
individual subject from Christian discourse and its actantial model along with the
growing scepticism towards the secularized I, which seems to be at the mercy of
emotions and impulses. ‘Not the “I” is the primary instance but the elements (emotions).
The elements form the “I”,’151 argues Mach.
In a polemical reaction to German idealism, the individual subject as foundation or
substratum is negated by Mach and some of his contemporaries. They redefine it as a
disintegrating or subjugated instance. Against this background, psychoanalysis from
Freud to Lacan can be considered as a systematic attempt to analyse the subject’s late
modern woes and to devise therapies that could strengthen it. The question, which will
be raised here on several occasions, is whether the multiple variations of the ‘I’ mentioned
by Mach are actually incompatible with individual subjectivity. Are contradiction,
movement and change not part and parcel of the individual and collective subject’s
development? Does the subject’s developing identity have to be called into question only
because sociology and psychology reveal its dynamic complexity and its contradictory
character?
The problem seems to be that psychoanalysis discovers this complexity at a
moment of cultural crisis, when no clear line can be traced between complexity and
disintegration. The rise of monopoly capitalism threatens society as a whole with a
disintegration process both Freud and Jung seem to be aware of. What Freud has to say
about the hostility of individuals in late modernity is reminiscent of Hobbes, the
philosopher of ‘possessive individualism’:152 ‘Civilized society is perpetually menaced
with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.’153 The
‘disintegration of values’, commented on by Hermann Broch (cf. Chapter II, 7), implies
that ‘evil’ is no longer recognized as such because it can entail joy or pleasure: ‘Evil is
often not at all that which would injure or endanger the ego; on the contrary, it can also
be something that it desires, that would give it pleasure.’154 In this precarious situation,
one has to see to it that ‘the core of the I (the Id, as I called it)’155 does not always prevail
but is controlled by the super-ego as a cultural instance: ‘The super-ego torments the
sinful ego with the same feelings of dread and watches for opportunities whereby the
outer world can be made to punish it.’156 The moralistic metaphors in this sentence are
quite telling: I can agree and identify with the super-ego within me and thereby accept
that ‘I is Another’; I can also mobilize the id (the ‘core of the I’) against this controlling
instance, thereby confirming the division of the subject.
Freudian psychoanalysis can be seen as an offshoot of Romanticism and Nietzsche’s
philosophy,157 insofar as it focuses, in a culture marked by crisis, on the dualism of
nature and culture which threatens to split the subject. Like literary Romanticism with
its doubles and look-alikes,158 like psychiatry around 1900, whose proponents –
Théodule Ribot, Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet – discover the ‘multiple personality’,159
Freudian psychoanalysis focuses on infraindividual actants (ego, id, super-ego), who are
responsible for the dynamics of the individual subject. By basing the subject’s narrative
on this new actantial model, it disavows philosophical idealism which knows the
subject exclusively in its function of ‘foundation’ (hypokeimenon). In psychoanalysis, it
reappears as both a disintegrating and a subjugated instance: as an unstable entity
ruled by external powers.
Henri F. Ellenberger explains in his study The Discovery of the Unconscious to what
extent the idea of a heterogeneous multiple subject pervaded psychiatric research
which finally led to the discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis:
‘Multiple personalities thus dramatically illustrate the fact that unity of personality is
not given to the individual as a matter of course, but must be realized and achieved
through the individual’s persistent, and perhaps life-long efforts.’160
The phenomenon of ‘multiple personality’ not only illustrates the disintegration of
the subject but also bears witness to its ‘other-directed’ nature; for one of the
‘personalities’ inhabiting it is often the socialized persona or mask in the sense of
Jung:161 an instance sporadically rejected by the other actants coexisting within the
subject. This kind of situation is described by Ellenberger when he comments on the
case of Mary Reynolds: ‘In each state she knew of the other and feared to fall back into
it, but for different reasons. In her second state she considered the other one as dull and
stupid.’162 It appears at the same time as a state of estrangement and depression which
excludes all joy of life and the mood to write verse, so strongly felt in the second state.
This idea of estrangement and Freud’s metaphorical description of the ego as a city
occupied by the super-ego are developed by Jacques Lacan in his claim that the
individual subject comes about during the transition from the imaginary to the
symbolic stadium when the presence of the Other asserts itself through language. Lacan
emphasizes that he does not negate subjectivity, but intends to reveal and analyse its
dependence on the symbolic order as language: ‘What is at stake, is the dependence of
the subject (dépendance du sujet), and that is something completely different; the
return to Freud implies the dependence of the subject on something elementary, which
the concept of “signifier” was meant to highlight.’163
Lacan sees the Freudian unconscious as an interaction of signifiers when he describes

it as a ‘chain of signifiers’.164 He suggests that the individual subject depends on unstable
signifiers whose movement does not allow a definable identity, because the repetition of
a signifier entails an endless process of semantic shifts without ever yielding a ‘presence
of meaning’ – as Deleuze and Derrida have shown (cf. Chapter I, 2, a). In the third
chapter, the determination by outside instances and the ‘deconstruction’ of the subject in
Lacan’s ‘chain of signifiers’ will be dealt with in some detail. What matters here, is the
ambivalence of Lacan’s theory: it may not negate subjectivity, but it ‘deconstructs’ it
(Derrida) as it attempts to represent over-determination by the unconscious as an over-
determination by the non-conscious language of the Other. It thus contradicts all
idealist and rationalist notions of ‘subjective autonomy’ (including Sartre’s).
Alfred Lorenzer does not seem to be aware of this deconstructionist ambivalence,
whenever he blames Lacan – in an idealist fashion – for degrading the individual
subject: ‘Not only is the “I” degraded to a secondary, reproducing instance, but
subjectivity is dissolved in objectivity – not by revealing the objective existence of its
constitution, but by assuming that it falls prey to illusions.’165 This critique fails to do
justice to Lacan’s self-assessment. What he has in mind is – as was pointed out above –
the dependence of the subject on the symbolic order: i.e. ‘its objective constitution’ in
the sense of Lorenzer. But Lorenzer’s critique is not so far off the mark when the
subject’s ‘dependence on the chain of signifiers’ is at stake. In this case, it may very well
fall prey to semantic differences and shifts.
At this stage, it seems essential to imagine a dialogical, processual or narrative
subjectivity (cf. Chapter V, 1), whose dynamic aspects are highlighted – albeit one-
sidedly – by Lacan and Derrida. Their arguments are one-sided for the following
reason: although they quite rightly stress the over-determination and instability of
the subject, they tend to gloss over the possibilities of individual coherence and
autonomy – even in the most adverse circumstances. Within the framework of a
dialogical and processual subjectivity, as mapped out in Chapter V, new scopes of
autonomy can be delineated – beyond idealism and rationalism.
If these new possibilities are not to remain abstract projects or illusions, a permanent
dialogue has to be sought with such theoreticians as Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and
Lacan, who focus on the over-determination of the subject or on its instability. Among
these theoreticians is also Ronald D. Laing, whose thought will be related to Foucault’s
and Vattimo’s philosophies in the third chapter.
Laing takes up some of Foucault’s questions (cf. Chapter I, 2, a) in The Politics of
Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967) insofar as he considers primary and
secondary socialization as a process of domination in the course of which a subject is
‘normalized’ and deprived of its openness to experience. The family appears to him as
an ambivalent instance: as a stronghold of love and violence simultaneously. It offers
affective shelter for the sake of more effective normalization: ‘The family as a “protection
racket”.’166 In the third chapter, it will appear that, in his study La Police des familles
(1977), Jacques Donzelot takes a similar view of the family’s function.
Even love itself turns into an ambivalent medium of affective security and social
domination: ‘Love is the path through permissiveness to discipline: and through
discipline, only too often, to betrayal of self.’167 The expression ‘betrayal of self’ reveals the
distance that separates Laing from Foucault’s structural thought which implicitly excludes
the notion of an authentic ‘I’ that might be betrayed. However, Foucault might share
Laing’s view that subjectivity is an illusion: ‘the illusion that we are autonomous egos.’168
Nevertheless, Laing is closer to Marcuse’s Critical Theory, the vocabulary of which
he uses sporadically. Far from being an orthodox follower of Freud, who views
socialization as a process of necessary adaptation to society, Laing claims to recognize
in society an organized pathology no sane individual can accept: ‘Adaptation to what?
To society? To a world gone mad? The Family’s function is to repress Eros: to induce a
false consciousness of security: to deny death by avoiding life: to cut off transcendence:
to believe in God, not to experience the Void: to create, in short, one-dimensional
man.’169 It is not merely the fear of a one-dimensional world that links Laing’s approach
to Critical Theory, but also the concept of experience which is inseparable from
Adorno’s notion of an autonomous subject.
The work of Christopher Lasch could be read as a response to Laing’s social
psychology insofar as it analyses some of the most questionable reactions of the
individual subject to over-determination and the disintegration of the social value
system in narcissism. Klaus-Jürgen Bruder writes about Lasch:
But he is right in not using ‘narcissism’ in order to explain the disintegration of

the public sphere, but in considering it the other way around as a ‘psychic aspect’
of this disintegration, for which he finds a political cause: the ‘expansion of
powers of organized domination’. ‘Social life’ becomes ‘increasingly barbaric and
warlike’.170
The question is why.

What matters most at this stage is not an answer to this question, but the fact that, in
a chapter of his book The Minimal Self (1984), which carries the subtitle The Politics of the
Psyche, Lasch continues Laing’s argument by showing to what extent even contemporary
psychotherapies turn into technologies of a one-dimensional world, most of which
estrange individuals from their environment and make them seek refuge in narcissism.
Like Laing, he queries the scientistic, progress-oriented creed of these technologies which
ultimately integrate subjects into a disintegrating society and an anomic system of values
hollowed out by the indifference of market laws. Their integration attempts usually fail
and the subject retreats into the isolated citadel of the ‘I’.
‘This book, however’, Lasch writes about The Culture of Narcissism (1979),‘describes
a way of life that is dying – the culture of competitive individualism, which in its
decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all
against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of narcissistic preoccupation
with the self.’171
But is the narcissist supposed to become socially motivated in a society where ideologies
and simulacra transmitted by the media occupy one part of his ego, while the other is
subverted by Lacan’s shifting signifiers? One possible answer is offered in Adorno’s
Minima Moralia where the loss of the subject’s substance is at the centre of the scene:
‘Narcissism, deprived of its libidinal object by the decay of the self, is replaced by the
masochistic satisfaction of no longer being a self. ’172
It will be remembered that Lasch’s comments on the decline of liberal individualism
develop some arguments put forward by Riesman, Bell and Goldmann and run parallel
to those of Giddens, Beck and Touraine. On the whole, it becomes clear that, in spite of
their heterogeneity, the philosophical, sociological and psychological theories converge
in the idea that the individual subject finds itself in a precarious situation on all levels
of analysis.
This situation is hardly considered by the behaviourist and positivist personality
theories developed by Skinner, Eysenck, Cattel, Mischel or Rogers. Although these
theorists deal with pathologies of the personality on both the quantitative and
the qualitative level,173 they all tend to neglect the pathologies of society which
Freud and especially Laing focus on. The concept of personality as such seems
questionable, because it aims at ‘totality’174 or ‘wholeness’175 where disintegration is
often the rule.
This is one reason why theories of the personality (most of which were developed
in the United States) will not be dealt with in the third chapter. The other reason is
terminological. Although the concept of ‘personality’ overlaps with the concept of
‘subject’ by virtue of its involvement with ‘autonomy’ and ‘coherence’, it is not directly
related to the concept of ‘object’ nor to that of ‘collective subjectivity’. However, both of
these concepts are crucial to the sociological and critical understanding of subjectivity.
Only when it becomes clear how individual subjects relate to their objects, how they
are turned into objects by powerful groups, organizations or institutions, can
subjectivity be explained in a social, historical and linguistic context. This is why
Greimas and his followers have decided to replace the concept of personnage by that of
actant-sujet.176
In this context, it is hardly surprising that the theoreticians of personality have
some trouble in defining the key concept of their research. ‘Actually, there is no absolute
or generally agreed upon definition as to what personality is’,177 admits Lawrence A.
Pervin and at the same time suggests such a definition: ‘Personality represents those
structural and dynamic properties of an individual or individuals as they reflect
themselves in characteristic responses to situations.’178 Pervin adds: ‘Personality can be
defined in terms of characteristics (traits) of the individual which are directly
observable in his behavior.’179
These definitions are important for two reasons. On the one hand, they locate the
concept of personality between the particular and the general, on the other hand, they
reveal a link established by all theories of personality: the link between traits (Allport,
Eysenck, Mischel)180 and behavioural consistency.181 Ledford J. Bischof even suggests
that psychology should focus on this consistency of behaviour rather than on
personality.182
What matters here is not so much Bischof ’s recommendation, but the word
‘behaviour’, which evokes the behaviourist background (Watson, Skinner) of this
theory complex and an important discussion in this particular field: Walter Mischel’s
radical criticism of the consistency postulate in personality theories. This postulate is
based on the idealist notion (held in high esteem from Descartes to Fichte) of a stable
and consistent personality structure, the consistency of which is maintained in very

different situations.
In his well-known work Personality and Assessment (1968), Mischel challenges this
notion with the behaviourist idea that changes in the social environment of individuals
can jeopardize the consistency of their behavioural patterns. Sarah E. Hampson
comments: ‘Mischel’s attack on personality was aimed at its most vulnerable point –
consistency – and the attack was partially successful.’183
Mischel himself puts forward two crucial arguments, one of which is epistemological,
while the other is empirical in character. To begin with, he argues that patterns of
behaviour and situations are considered as identical or psychologically equivalent by
the scientist although they are heterogeneous.184 This argument has been successful in
philosophy from Heraclitus to Nietzsche and Derrida: The repetition of ‘the same’ is
not the same but something different. This does not only apply to Heraclitus’s river and
Nietzsche’s word but also to Derrida’s signifier which never denotes the same signified –
and apparently also to Mischel’s ‘behaviour’ which always seems to diverge from a
subject’s ‘behaviour’ in the previous situation. Eventually, consistency appears to
Mischel as a scientist’s construct and not as an aspect of somebody’s personality:
‘Analysis of personality ratings tells us more about the rater than about the ratee.’185
Mischel’s empirical argument is as convincing as his epistemological critique. He
thus considers ‘honesty’ not so much as a constant character trait of certain individuals
but as a factor depending on situations. Whoever is honest in situation A need not
remain honest in situation B. (In principle it ought to be possible, of course, to
distinguish honesty as a social attitude from ‘honesty’ as a tactical manoeuvre: in
certain situations, being naively honest can result in cruelty.)
Mischel’s criticism raises the basic question whether traits, which Hans J. Eysenck
and others consider as quantifiable, are a suitable basis for scientific research. Traits,
after all, are essential aspects of character.186 But the trait dimensions listed by Mischel
are marked by the kind of vagueness one finds in many stereotypes: extraversion or
surgency; agreeableness; conscientiousness; emotional stability; culture.187 However,
someone who manages to keeps calm in everyday stress situations (from traffic jams
to public performances), may lose his head in a love affair. Hence the expression
‘emotional stability’ is itself not particularly stable. One of the problems of the – quite
heterogeneous – theories of personality is due to the fact that they contain everyday
stereotypes like talkative – silent; good-natured – irritable; calm – anxious, etc.188
In this situation, Hans J. Eysenck’s and Michael W. Eysenck’s attempts to give the
analysis of traits a biological foundation is not particularly helpful. They explain ‘that
in looking for causal aspects of personality we should take a careful look at physiological,
neurological, and hormonal factors as being most likely to mediate the genetic
determinants of behavior’.189 When Hans J. Eysenck and Sybil B. G. Eysenck eventually
decide to admit only ‘analytic methods capable of being machine programmed’,190 one
might ask whether they are not under the spell of the kind of scientistic ideology
Robert C. Bannister criticizes in early American sociology.191
As far as the link between character traits and social situations is concerned, L. A.
Pervin is not altogether wrong when he concludes that nowadays all research sets out
from the interaction between the individual and his environment – in spite of all the
differences that still subsist between theoretical approaches. Most of them differ in
answering the question what in a person reacts in what way to environmental variables
and changes.192 It seems therefore that the most pressing questions remain unanswered . . .
Nevertheless, theories of personality are of some importance to the dynamic and
dialogical approach of the subject developed here, especially because they emphasize
the processual character of personality as individual subject. Thus Donald H. Ford sees
personality as a process of ‘self-construction’ and ‘self-organization’,193 in which the
determining feedback is not more important than the creative feedforward: ‘As we will
try to demonstrate later in this book, it is the enhancement of feedforward and positive
feedback processes that provide the key to making a human the most complex adaptive
control system that has yet emerged from evolutionary processes.’194 Thus processuality,
coherence and creative anticipation (‘feedforward’) characterize the individual subject.
In this context, M. E. Ford and D. H. Ford speak of ‘self-organizing and self-constructing
[systems] in both a biological and behavioural sense’.195 However, one may doubt that
an ‘adaptive control system’ will ever call its social environment into question. It seems
far too ‘adaptive’ for that kind of critical performance.
Carl R. Rogers’s client-centred theory is ‘adaptive’ in most respects because Rogers
ignores all of the social and linguistic hurdles that stand in the way of the subject’s
aspirations towards autonomy and unity. Without considering ideological over-
determination or the force of market laws, he writes – together with John K. Wood: ‘A
person’s behavior can be counted on to be in the direction of maintaining, enhancing,
and reproducing self – toward autonomy and away from external control by external
forces.’196 In the ‘best of existing worlds’ imagined by Enlightenment rationalists, this
may have been the case, but what is it like in Rogers’s American society, most of which
has been transformed by powerful trusts and trade unions into an ‘adaptive’ system?
Instead of raising this kind of question, Rogers focuses on the ‘tendency towards
wholeness’197 in a biological sense and maps out a ‘client-centred’ theory aiming at the
therapeutic ideal of the ‘total person’.198 This ‘philosophy’ is a symptom of the economy-
dominated society insofar as it seeks success by transforming the patient into a client –
in spite of Laing’s and Lasch’s critical warnings. Instead of analysing – with Laing – the
pathologies of society, it tries to dispose of the very notion of pathology on an individual
level. Instead of curing patients, it tries to serve clients.199
Although the Freudian Erik H. Erikson has a different approach, he also ignores
the woes of late capitalist society. His favourite concept is not ‘personality’ but ‘identity’
(cf. Chapter I, 1, c) which he defines as a relationship between individuality and
collectiveness: ‘The term “identity” expresses such a mutual relation in that it
connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (selfsameness) and a persistent
sharing of some kind of essential character with others.’200 Erikson’s psychoanalysis
differs from the theories of personality in that it links the individual subject to group
and society.
However, his theory takes the North American social order of the 1950s for granted:
to such a degree that it can only be understood as part and parcel of this order. Its main
focus is the middle-class family which offers affective shelter to its children along with
the possibility to develop an identity. Erikson speaks of ‘psychosocial moratoria’ during
which an ‘inner identity’ can come about.201
What links Erikson to the theorists of personality is his unmitigated belief in the
possibility of individual coherence and identity. He differs from Laing by omitting all
analyses of social over-determination, alienation and disintegration of identities. He
does not consider coherence and identity as social problems. At the end of adolescence,
he argues, individual subjects reintegrate and reshape their past identifications with
adults and other social models.202
If one compares this approach to the scepticism of some ‘irreconcilable’ psychoanalysts
like Laing, then Erikson’s optimistic hypothesis that, at the end of adolescence, the average
subject forms a ‘coherent whole’, appears as an ideological by-product of what Adorno
calls ‘the revised psychoanalysis’.203 Like Erich Fromm’s theory of personality,204 it ignores
the damage done to the individual in contemporary society.205
In this respect, one appreciates Heiner Keupp’s emphasis on the social context of
Erikson’s theory. Keupp’s central insight is that the institutional and ideological stability
of post-war American society forms the background against which one should reconsider
Erikson’s work today: ‘As a theorist of subjectivity, Erikson himself was well aware of the
reality of the empirical world of his time and of his social position in the 50s and 60s.’206
It goes without saying, especially within the context of recent debates on
postmodernism, that this reality is a thing of the past. Therefore Keupp is quite justified
in searching for alternatives to Erikson’s concept of identity:
If it is correct that the social processes of disembedding entail new frameworks of

identity formation and if it still seems plausible that Erikson’s classical paradigm
of identity is no longer applicable to these readjustments, then the search for
theoretical alternatives becomes ever more pressing.207
What do Keupp’s alternatives look like?

One of his key concepts, which he borrows from the sociologists Ulrich Beck
and Anthony Giddens, occurs in the sentence quoted above: disembedding
(Freisetzungsprozesse). By ‘disembedding’ Giddens means the breaking up of traditional
formations such as the family, neighbourhood, nation and religion. Their disintegration
entails the disembedding of individuals who are forced to reintegrate themselves into
emerging social contexts (‘networks’, says Keupp)208 in order to find a new identity.
Riskante Chancen (Risky Chances), the title chosen by Keupp for his book, sums up
the new situation: individuals can take advantage of the possibilities offered to them by
breaking out of traditions; they may also succumb to the new complexity. Commenting
on the processes of disembedding, Keupp remarks: ‘They demand of the subject an
original combination of multiple realities.’209 At the same time, they yield a ‘subject with
multiple identities’.210
What do ‘multiple identities’ look like? Although Keupp derides all postmodern
obituary notices regarding the subject,211 he does not really describe ‘multiple identity’
in the sense of a plural unity. Moreover, he neglects the crucial question how subjectivity
can still be deemed possible in spite of social differentiation, reification, ideological
over-determination and commercialization. Although his approach is more critical
and more reflexive than Erikson’s, it is still too acquiescent. In spite of this, it will be
reconsidered in the last chapter because it constructs the process of identity formation
in a more subtle way than most theories of personality: as a reflexive and narrative
process. But in what social and historical circumstances can this process be successful?
So far, this question was left open.
(d) Individual subjectivity in linguistics and the theory of literature

At this stage, it makes sense to return to the first part of this chapter where the subject
appeared in a sociolinguistic situation marked by competing sociolects. The
grammatical subject of linguists is not at stake here but the subject of semiotic discourse
theory which stands at the crossroads between semiotics, sociolinguistics and gender
linguistics.212
The American authors Nikolas Coupland and John F. Nussbaum quite rightly
remind us of the fact that traditional sociolinguistics did not devote much attention to
the subject and tended to assume that individual subjectivity and identity were static
entities: ‘It is ironic that sociolinguistic and communication research should have
endorsed, on the whole, a static conception of identity, when, for many social scientists,
language and interaction are achieved above all as dynamic and processual events in
shifting social contexts.’213 Nevertheless, sociolinguistic theory is indispensable for a
dynamic conception of subjectivity.
Saussure’s parole and Chomsky’s performance as subjective acts depend entirely on
the social competence of individual actors: on their modalities (knowledge, will, ability),
Greimas would say. When, in his well-known analyses,214 Basil Bernstein opposes the
restricted code of the lower classes to the elaborated code of the upper and middle
classes, he – at least implicitly – maps out a linguistic theory of subjectivity. Whoever
disposes of a restricted code based on a deficient vocabulary and a rudimentary syntax
will not be able to articulate his interests and problems as coherently and clearly as a
speaker of the elaborated code. The latter stands a better chance when it comes to
defending subjective autonomy against over-determination by ideologies, advertising
or the media in a dialectics of criticism and self-criticism. The simplifying schemes of
ideologies and the stereotypes of advertising have more of an impact on restricted than
on elaborated codes and tend to overpower speakers of the lower class. This explains
why lower classes are more likely to succumb to authoritarian, dualistic discourses
such as National Socialism, fascism or Marxism-Leninism. They are less likely to cope
with the processes of disembedding described by Giddens, Beck and Keupp than their
middle-class counterparts.
Although she does not use Bernstein’s terminology, Mary M. Talbot shows in
Language and Gender (1998) to what extent the restricted code can turn out to be a
problem for women who have no access to education. She challenges Otto Jespersen’s
ideological thesis according to which women dispose of a smaller vocabulary than
men and do not use it optimally by insisting on the flaws of the education system: ‘As
women were denied the level of education permitted for (some) men, one would
expect them to have fewer words at their disposal.’215
It becomes clear at this stage how subjectivity and social domination are linked at a
linguistic level. Like the subjectivity of lower classes, which cannot be adequately
articulated within the narrow boundaries of the restricted code, female subjectivity
frequently degenerates into small talk because female topics tend to be defined as
trivial within the dominant male sociolects – which do not form a coherent whole.
Talbot’s book also reveals the importance of relevance criteria and classifications for
the subject constitution of the two genders. ‘Dis-mois comment tu classes, je te dirai qui
tu es,’216 remarks Roland Barthes in one of his Essais critiques, and the linguists Kress
and Hodge aptly point out that a homogeneous system of classification does not exist:
‘But classification systems do not exist for a whole society; different groupings have
different systems, though the differences may be slight.’217 They need not be slight, and
even slight differences may bear witness to power relations and conflicts: for example
when shades of colours are at stake which seem irrelevant to some men. Talbot believes
that nuances such as beige, ecru, aquamarine articulate female concerns and comments
on Robin Lakoff ’s research:
Lakoff reports seeing a man ‘helpless with suppressed laughter at a discussion

between two other people as to whether a book jacket was to be described as
“lavender” or “mauve” [. . .]’. She concludes from this that from a man’s point of
view such fine distinctions are trivial and beneath their notice.’218
Nowadays even some women may be too busy to bother with this kind of nuance, but
Talbot’s example shows that classification criteria vary from group to group and that
subjectivity is dependent on gender language. It also reveals to what extent female
subjectivity can be – implicitly – trivialized and marginalized in a situation dominated
by male languages.
However, individual subjectivity does not only come about on a lexical and semantic
level; it also evolves on the level of narrative syntax where linguistics and literary theory
interlock. The sociolinguists Kevin Buchanan and David J. Middleton explore the relevance
of biography research219 for geriatric studies, some of which emphasize ‘reminiscence
work’ in the form of a biographic narrative based on ‘the intimate relation between memory
and self, biography and identity’.220 They tend to overlook, however, that literary theory
often questions this relation by stressing the complexity and the concomitant instability of
biographical identity, both of which may appear in disintegrating (literary) narratives.
Here again it becomes clear why a concrete idea of the individual subject’s stance in
contemporary society can only crystallize on an interdisciplinary level. Although most
literary studies confirm the linguistic, sociological and ethnomethodological221
hypotheses according to which (auto-)biographical writing aspires towards coherence
and identity, they do not support the somewhat naïve assumption that ‘memory,
selfhood, biography and identity’ form a coherent whole. By viewing this coherence in
the light of irony, they tend to subvert it.
This literary perspective marks the work of Philippe Lejeune, who uses different
texts (novels, diaries or autobiographical narratives) in order to show that the narrating
‘I’ is a stylized instance which may differ quite substantially from the ‘I’ of everyday life.
Je est un autre (1980), I is another person is the title of one of his books. It presages what
Lejeune’s analysis of Ségolène Lefébure’s biography Moi, une infirmière finally reveals:
that the nurse’s narration is a successful construction based on the rules of a particular
genre and geared towards the expectations of a public familiar with that genre (the
document vécu). The nurse’s ‘real’ person is eventually usurped by the narrative
stereotypes of commercialized literature. Lejeune speaks of the ‘game she plays while
narrating’222 and adds that, in the eyes of the reader, she remains an unknown person
who, after leaving the hospital, marries somebody without revealing who it is. Although
Lejeune emphasizes that the narrator is not identical with the author (the writing
nurse), he glosses over the fact that the narrator relies on heavily commercialized
constructs (certain forms of dialogue, inner monologues, etc.) which help to produce
the narrator’s subjectivity. This research into paraliterary forms tends to confirm what
Adorno and R. D. Laing have to say about subjective experience: it is eradicated by
ideological and commercial techniques.
Even in Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiographical text Les Mots it becomes clear to what
extent the narrator differs from other Sartrian subjects, some of whom appear in
interviews or in Sartre par lui-même – and are not necessarily ‘more real’. Lejeune
concludes that for him ‘the narrator of Les Mots and the gentleman who, in the film
Sartre par lui-même, tells his life on the screen [. . .] represent two contrasting figures’.223
Like most texts, the biographical narrative – considered as a whole – seems to be prone
to deconstruction. But does this mean that there is no narrative unity and that the
experiencing and the narrating subject are in permanent disharmony?
Ursula Link-Heer seems to answer in the affirmative when, relying on Hans Robert
Jauß’s analysis of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, she adds to Jauß’s dual
structure consisting of a remembering and an experiencing ‘I’ a third instance.224
Within the new triadic structure, the experiencing and the remembering instances are
completed by a narrating instance. As the latter is not identical with the remembering
instance and hence not restricted to telling the past, it is free to interrupt the narrative
flow and indulge in essayistic and philosophical divagations. Like Lejeune in his
comments on Sartre, Link-Heer analyses the disintegration of the – seemingly –
autobiographical Proustian subject and shows how the different experiencing,
remembering and narrating instances eventually contradict each other.225 Her findings
are partly borne out by those of Annelies Schulte Nordholt, who concludes in her
article ‘Proust and Subjectivity’: ‘I believe on the contrary that the Recherche is
questioning the modern subject.’226
Naturally, the object ‘Proust’ can be constructed differently by showing, for example,
that, in spite of all contradictions, Proust’s novel achieves a high degree of coherence by
relying on ‘involuntary memory’. At this level, the narrating ‘I’ of the novel comes so
close to that of the author Proust in Carnets or Contre Sainte-Beuve that coherence and
incoherence, homogeneity and heterogeneity balance each other out in Proust’s
work.227 However, this seems to be the case in most biographical and autobiographical
texts, and Monika Schmitz-Emans quite rightly points out that ‘since its very beginning,
the history of the subject has been a history of texts’.228 ‘The link between the theme of
the subject and the interest in the writing process’,229 which she considers crucial, is of
particular importance for modernist authors such as Proust and Sartre.
In the course of many literary debates it has become clear that the individual subject
of late modernity is permanently threatened by what Hermann Broch calls ‘the
disintegration of values’ and by ideological over-determination. Various collective
volumes published in the last few decades deal with subjectivity and the crisis of the
value system. Without mentioning the concept of ambivalence, which will be central
here, Dieter Borchmeyer deduces the crisis of the individual subject in Nietzsche from
the ambivalence of political, ethical and aesthetic values in the age of decadence: ‘It was
not Wagner’s involvement in décadence that worried Nietzsche most, but his “instinctive
deviousness”: the fact that he simultaneously eyes the “moral of the master race” and the
“gospel of the humble”. This “innocence between the opposites” characterizes modern
man.’230 It will appear that this conflict within the individual subject, caused by
ambivalence as unity of opposites, calls all of subjectivity into question. However,
ambivalence also undermines ideological dualism and thus encourages a critical stance.
Commenting on the ‘multiplicity of the “I” ’ in Paul Bourget’s work, Ulrich Schulz-
Buschhaus shows that late modern subjectivity is threatened by ambivalence in
Bourget’s novels Un crime d’amour (1886), Le Disciple (1889) and Cosmopolis (1893).
He argues that Bourget ‘considered as dangerous the disintegration of the “I” and of
society amid a multiplicity of mental states and lifestyles’,231 especially since he took the
‘form of a unified personality’232 for granted.
Here again one may feel that the idea of a ‘disintegrating’ or ‘vanishing’ subject
comes up in a social and linguistic situation in which subjectivity has come to be
viewed primarily as a timeless constant in the sense of philosophical idealism (cf.
Chapter II, 1) – and not as a dynamic formation and as a social and psychic process.
A collective work in two volumes dealing with the history of modern subjectivity,
edited by Fetz, Hagenbüchle and Schulz (1998), shows how the modern ‘I’ oscillates
between the idealist illusion of omnipotence and its disintegration in society, psyche
and language. In one of the volumes, Gudrun M. Grabher analyses the precarious
situation of the lyrical subject in modernist poetry and reveals a permanent oscillation
between fantasies of omnipotence and a tendency towards disintegration accompanied
by Nietzschean and psychoanalytic connotations. Relying partly on Hiltrud Gnüg’s
study on the birth and crisis of lyrical subjectivity (Entstehung und Krise lyrischer
Subjektivität),233 she concludes: ‘The lyrical “I” of modernism is subject to doubts which
oscillate between subject negation and subject glorification.’234 Similar conclusions are
drawn by the authors of a more recent volume on subjectivity edited by Paul Geyer and
Monika Schmitz-Emans: Proteus im Spiegel. Kritische Theorie des Subjekts im 20.
Jahrhundert (2003). Especially Käte Meyer-Drawes’s article on the ‘duplicity of the
subject’ exposes the nexus between the subject’s autonomy and its heteronomy, its
unity and its multiplicity.235
Exploring the tensions between these extremes, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory can be
read as a legacy of late modern Critical Theory. After Walter Benjamin who, in his
comments on Baudelaire, describes the decline of the subject in mass society and in the
shocks of modern life,236 Adorno declares his solidarity with individual subjectivity
which seems condemned to atrophy in a society dominated by trusts, bureaucracies
and mass organizations. He sides with poets such as Mallarmé and Valéry who refuse
all cults of personality in the sense of Maurice Barrès237 or Stefan George,238 but
nevertheless try to save the autonomous lyrical subject by relying on a poetic language
unspoiled by ideology and commerce.239 What he has to say about Valéry as a
representative of the human subject is also true of Mallarmé whom he mentions
several times in his Aesthetic Theory: ‘The artist who is the bearer of the work of art is
not the individual who produces it; rather, through his work, through passive activity,
he becomes the representative of the total social subject.’240
The confidence emanating from this sentence has nothing to do with the cult of the
subject Adorno condemns in his essay about lyrical discourse.241 However, it is qualified
in Negative Dialectics in a different context in which subjectivity appears as belonging
to the bygone era of liberal individualism: an era closed for good by fascism and
monopoly capitalism. The capitulation of the individual before the social powers of the
twentieth century seems to be a fait accompli when Adorno writes about modernist
novels and their narrators that ‘they are testimonials to a state of affairs in which the
individual liquidates himself ’.242 His theory of the subject oscillates between the refusal
of the lyrical subject to capitulate and the liquidation of the subject in the modernist
novel: it clings to the concept of subject while observing the latter’s inevitable decline
(cf. Chapter I, 2, a, b).
Adorno’s remarks concerning the disintegration of the subject in the modernist
novel are developed in his well-known article about Samuel Beckett’s drama. Beckett’s
Endgame reveals what is left of the heroic subject of German idealism and existentialism:
a residue functioning as a caricature. ‘Existentialism itself is parodied’, remarks Adorno
and adds: ‘Nothing remains of its invariant categories but bare existence.’243 In his view,
the only hope left lies with a subject capable of speaking a language beyond ideology
and commerce. Is such a subject conceivable? Adorno’s manifold attempts to answer
this question certainly did not satisfy all of his interlocutors, as some discussions about
‘subjectivity and the avant-garde’ show.244 Scepticism is also fuelled by his plea in favour
of a ‘paratactic theory’ (in the sense of Hölderlin’s poetry): a theory geared towards
artistic mimesis and permanently threatened by aporias, as Habermas and some of his
followers pointed out.245
The idea that Beckett’s Endgame announces a theatre beyond the modern subject is
taken up by Gabriele Schwab who seeks to understand this drama as a ‘strategic game’246
with subjectivity. About Beckett’s fiction in general she writes: ‘In it, the subject
experiences both the impossibility of assuming the task of being master of the senses
and the joy of drifting in the medium of apparently strange, but subconsciously
possibly familiar senses.’247
In this commentary, the postmodern categories of ‘joy’ and ‘playfulness’ replace
Adorno’s ascetic defence of modern subjectivity. Endgame as a strategic game with
senses and social roles no longer implies Adorno’s autonomous subject, but playfully
quotes subjectivities of the past and thus abandons the critical project. It announces
Eco’s postmodern game with literary forms of the past. Unlike Eco, Adorno adopts a
modernist view and considers the decline of subjectivity as a disaster. His point of view
is close to that of Peter Szondi who observes the decline of subjectivity in modernist
drama and concludes: ‘Everything falls to pieces: the dialogue, the form as totality,
human existence.’248 Is playfulness still conceivable among these ruins? Postmodern
authors seem to think that it is.
It would be precarious to count Michel Foucault among these postmodern thinkers,
especially since he often appears in the company of science theorists249 or ‘structuralists’
such as Barthes and Lévi-Strauss whose common theoretical denominator has never
been defined.250 During a discussion about Foucault’s lecture ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’
at the Collège de France (1969), Lucien Goldmann blamed him and the ‘structuralists’
for eliminating the human subject. This somewhat reductionist critique was countered
ironically by Jean d’Ormesson who pointed out that, although Foucault doubted the
existence of the author as creator of a homogeneous work, he resuscitated him as
‘founder of discursivity’, ‘instaurateur de discursivité’.251 What had happened?
In retrospect, it becomes clear that Foucault’s stance never boiled down to a simple
negation of the subject as Goldmann and German Marxists like Alfred Schmidt would
make us believe (cf. Chapter I, 2, a). Like Lacan, he drew our attention to the ‘dependence
of the subject’252 on institutions, organizations and social structures. According to him,
the subject can no longer be viewed idealistically as a static entity confronting a variable
‘external’ world. Foucault’s arguments are nevertheless blurred by his frequent
oscillation between subjective autonomy and freedom on the one hand, and over-
determination or disintegration on the other.
He puts forward three arguments in order show that it is not realistic to consider a
particular individual as ‘the author of a work’: (1) an individual can never be understood
as a causa sui but only functionally as a position within a discourse formation, which
enables her or him to speak or to write; (2) the work of an author is always heterogeneous
and hence cannot be read as a homogeneous message emanating from a particular
source – it refers to several authors who may contradict each other; (3) the reception of
a work and its use are beyond the control of an author whose intentions cannot be
clearly defined anyway. In this respect, Foucault seems to agree with Derrida (cf.
Chapter III, 2).
In Foucault’s lecture, the first point is commented on as follows:
Doing so means overturning the traditional problem, no longer raising the

questions: How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it
meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise
to the designs which are properly its own? Instead, these questions will be raised:
How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject
appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of
discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short, it is
a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of
analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.253
Far from denying the existence of the subject, Foucault explains its dependence on
social and linguistic structures.
However, it is not clear why Foucault insists on separating the two sets of questions.
It seems that a dialectical link between freedom and over-determination might make
more sense than one-sided polemics against Descartes’ and Sartre’s autonomous
subjects.254 Why does Foucault allow for creative freedom when he refers to Marx and
Freud as ‘founders of discursivity’ (‘instaurateurs de discursivité’)255 and deny this
freedom when dealing with authors of particular works? Did he not himself coin new
terms such as ‘episteme’ and ‘discursive formation’ which would be inconceivable
without the freedom of Sartre’s projet? The idea that a subject can only speak and act
within a social and linguistic situation marked by particular sociolects and discourses
goes almost without saying. It would be more important to observe the subject’s growing
or shrinking freedom in different historical constellations. It is nonetheless Foucault’s and
Lacan’s merit to have revealed the ‘dependence of the subject’, thus dissolving some
Cartesian and existentialist illusions.
The dialectical perspective, in which freedom and over-determination appear as
two sides of a coin, is also an attempt to relate the homogeneity and the heterogeneity,
the openness and the closure of literary or philosophical works to one another. There
may be different narrators in Sartre’s work, as Philippe Lejeune points out. But this
work nevertheless forms a relatively coherent, albeit heterogeneous, whole – and its
coherence explains why Sartre’s attempt to link existentialism and Marxism by the
concept of history makes sense. Foucault’s own work can be read as a contradictory
whole which, at the end of the day, sets subjective freedom against the random
movements of manipulating powers.256
Lastly, even the unintended impact of a literary or philosophical work cannot be
used as an argument for the non-existence of the author. Nietzsche anticipated the
extent to which he would be misunderstood or misused, and Marx is supposed to have
exclaimed in despair that he was ‘not a Marxist’. Nevertheless, the evolution of philosophy
and literature cannot be understood as a history of misunderstandings, because words
such as ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘misreading’ lose their meaning if everything is
misunderstood or misread. Mallarmé, the ‘obscure’, never said that a poet like Valéry
misunderstood or misread him.
Goldmann’s critique of Foucault implies a paradox insofar as Goldmann, in Towards
a Sociology of the Novel, reads the Nouveau Roman as a genre marked by the historical
decline of the subject in ‘organized capitalism’ (cf. Chapter I, 2, b). Although his polemic
against Foucault revolves around the thesis underlying his major work, The Hidden
God,257 according to which philosophical and literary texts ought to be read as products
of ‘transindividual’ or collective subjects (of the noblesse de robe and Jansenism in the
case of Pascal and Racine), he drops the notion of ‘collective subject’ in his analyses of
the novel, because he believes that it has fallen prey to the disintegration of collective
values and to reification in late capitalism.258 Eventually, he and not Foucault appears as
a philosopher of the ‘vanishing subject’.
Paradoxes and contradictions of this kind, along with Ernst Mach’s sporadically
repeated diagnosis concerning the ‘irretrievable “I” ’, may have prompted Peter Bürger
to respond with a counter-project which is a typology of philosophical and literary
positions rather than a history of the subject or of its decline. His book about the
‘disappearance of the subject’ (Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, 1998) is an attempt to
ascertain the subject’s position in modernity and to show ‘not only how closely
Montaigne’s, Descartes’ and Pascal’s concepts of the subject are interrelated by their
very dissent, but also that these three thinkers have determined all subsequent
statements of the French tradition to such a degree that I thought it necessary to map
out a history in arrest’.259 The Cartesian ‘I’ and Pascal’s anxious ‘I’ complete Montaigne’s
conception of the subject. ‘Together with Montaigne’s corporeal “I” they form a
constellation which I define as the field of modern subjectivity’,260 explains Bürger. In
this context, Barthes’s and Foucault’s belated ‘return to the subject’ appears as a re-
emergence of the old constellation, as a kind of déjà vu.
Apart from the fact that the development of Barthes’s thought in the 1970s can
hardly be subsumed under the label ‘return to the subject’, Bürger’s way of dealing with
the topic raises several problems. (1) Bürger focuses on the individual subject and
neglects abstract, mythical and especially collective subjects whose role in philosophical
and sociological discussions can no longer be neglected. (2) His analysis aims at
literature and philosophy and does not take into account semiotic, sociological and
psychological contributions to the discussion about modern subjectivity. Thus Alain
Touraine’s attempt to rescue the faltering subject by forging an alliance with social
movements contradicts Bürger’s ‘static’ model as much as Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis
regarding the disappearance of the subject in the ‘fractal state’ of media society. (3) Since
the scope of Bürger’s argument is limited to the French context, it does not deal with
Luhmann’s elimination of the concept of subject within his theory of social systems and
completely neglects British and American theories (Laing, Goffman, Lasch) whose
authors observe a decline of the subject in societies dominated by trusts, bureaucracies
and commercialized media. Surprisingly, Bürger does not even refer to the historical
nexus between the crisis of the subject and the birth of French and German sociology
around 1900, whose authors – Durkheim, Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Simmel – confront
the decline of individual subjectivity in late modernity. However, this decline can hardly
be dealt with within a scheme described by Bürger as ‘history in arrest’ – for history is
always movement: a movement described by philosophers, sociologists and
psychologists.
However, Bürger is quite right in pointing out that the subject of modernity has so
far been defined as a monological entity: as an isolated actor without a link to the other:
‘But as subject it is an isolated “I”. The other is of no importance to its self-awareness.’261
Dialogical subjectivity, as sketched by Madame de Sévigné, does not materialize
because it is repressed by the censorship of the clergy.
This concept of a dialogical subjectivity will be developed in the following chapters
(in particular in the last chapter) in conjunction with M. M. Bakhtin’s work, the author’s
What is Theory? (Zima, 2007) and Modern / Postmodern (Zima, 2010). Bakhtin shows
convincingly that individual subjectivity in the novel can only be understood
dialogically: as a polyphony arising from the ambivalence of social values and urging
the ‘I’ to seek a response from the Other, the stranger.262 However, ambivalence as a
coincidence of opposites (good / evil, left / right, male / female, etc.) is not only a starting
point of criticism and dialogue (How evil are moralists? Where do left and right politics
coincide?), but also a cause of crisis. The narrating and acting subject, which is
confronted by the ambivalence of values in the novels of Kafka, Musil, D. H. Lawrence
or Virginia Woolf, is threatened by a paralysis leading to the interruption of the
narrative discourse. ‘Paradox: to write the novel that cannot be written’,263 notes Musil
self-ironically in his posthumously published fragments.
It was shown in Modern / Postmodern to what extent postmodern novels – from the
Nouveau Roman to Patrick Süskind’s Perfume – abandon the problem of ambivalence
along with the entire value problematic. In a situation dominated by the indifference of
the exchange value and by a general feeling that all values are relative and interchangeable,
even the question concerning the ‘I’ as an evaluating instance rooted in a value system
becomes indifferent. Traditional questions, which accompany the narrator’s discourse in
a modernist novel like Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno – Who am I? What is truth? What is
good, evil? – are abandoned by postmodernist novelists such as Alain Robbe-Grillet,
Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Patrick Süskind or Thomas Pynchon as metaphysical or
meaningless quests. The main actor of a postmodern novel dominated by indifference is
frequently a pseudo-subject (e.g. Mathias in Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur or Grenouille in
Süskind’s Perfume) devoid of personal autonomy and blindly obeying natural instincts.264
These considerations, which will be developed at the end of the second chapter, give
rise to two questions. (1) To what extent is the argument put forward here in conjunction
with the modernist and postmodernist novel corroborated by other sciences such as
sociology and psychology? (2) Can developments or tendencies be observed which
justify the counter-argument: namely that subjectivity has a future in postmodern
society despite all the setbacks it has experienced so far? Both questions will be briefly
dealt with in the last section which is meant to cast light on the problematic as a whole.
3 Aporias of the individual subject in modernity

and postmodernity
The argument concerning the modernist and postmodernist decline of the individual
subject can only be made plausible or revised265 by a return to the beginning of this
chapter and to the question of which subject is endangered by modernist ambivalence
and negated by postmodernist indifference. It is primarily the individual and
transcendental subject of idealist philosophy (from Descartes and Kant to Fichte and
Hegel), which, in its form as cogito or spirit, pretends to hold sway over reality and its
objects, claiming that nature is identical with thought. It is the subiectum as fundamental
entity, as the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric replica of the divine subject which
repeats the creation of the world within its rationalist or dialectical systems; it is the
secularized god.
As heirs to the Young Hegelian philosophy of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, whose
experimental novel Auch Einer will play an important part in the next chapter, authors
of modernism such as Kafka, Musil, Proust, Camus, Joyce and Svevo reveal to what
extent the individual subject is swayed by its unconscious and its instincts instead of
being led by reason. They reveal its over-determination by chance, Freudian slips,
language and ideology. Time and again Svevo’s and Pirandello’s novels illustrate
Nietzsche’s anti-rationalist and anti-Hegelian idea that chance, not reason, presides
over human actions.266
In spite of their scepticism, most authors of modernism – defined as a late modern
critique of modernity267 – set out to save the individual subject in a context dominated
by ambivalence and the crisis of values. In this respect, they are quite close to the
philosophers of Critical Theory. ‘Individualism is coming to an end. Ulrich does not
care. But its true moments ought to be preserved,’268 writes Musil in his posthumously
published fragments. These paradoxical statements, which may be attributed to Ulrich,
the narrator, or Musil himself, sum up crucial tenets of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s
Critical Theory whose solidarity with ‘metaphysics at the time of its fall’269 is proclaimed
at the end of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. They also express one of the basic aims of
this book: namely to strengthen individual subjectivity by a dynamic and dialogical re-
definition of the concept of subject.
The perspective adopted throughout this book is that of modernism and Critical
Theory insofar as this theory reveals the impossibility and the ideological character of
rationalist and Hegelian concepts of subjectivity, but at the same time refuses to
confront dualistically the subject as basis or foundation with the subject as subjugated
or disintegrating instance. It is geared towards the modernist, ambivalent idea that the
individual subject, as unity of opposites, is both: an autonomous, productive and an
over-determined, possibly even disintegrating instance.
Ambivalence in the modernist sense is itself double-tracked, because it reveals to
the subject its contradictions, but at the same time stimulates its critical impulse. It
shows that crisis and critique270 are interlinked. In Musil’s novel, the socialist Schmeißer,
who imagines subjectivity ideologically as a homogeneous whole (thus confusing it
with Althusser’s notion of subjugation), is confronted by Musil’s hero with a paradox
produced by ambivalence: “‘Then I shall argue”, Ulrich completed his sentence, “that
you will fail for other reasons, for the simple reason, for example, that we are capable of
calling somebody dog even though we love our dog more than our fellow men”.’271 It is
not by chance that Schmeißer reacts with disdainful silence. He feels that an analysis of
this paradox might cast doubts on the ideological coherence of his subjectivity.
Derived from the modernist problematic and Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue, the key
argument of this book can be summed up in a few words: the individual subject is
neither a sovereign (fundamental) nor a subjugated entity, but a permanently changing
dialogical being whose development depends on its interaction with others and with
alterity in general.
The argument is an attempt to correlate dialectically unity and multiplicity and to
show that ambivalence, contradiction and the absorption of otherness, far from
undermining subjectivity, are indispensable to its development. Naturally, individual
and collective subjects cease to exist whenever ambivalence, heterogeneity and
heteronomy gain the upper hand. In this respect, all subjects, even institutions and
organizations, are endangered as actants or agents and have to prove themselves in
crises. A heterogeneous coalition government composed of two or more parties may
fall apart, and the multicultural, multilingual individual subject can become speechless:
incapable of articulating its feelings and opinions clearly and coherently in any one of
its languages. The ironical pendant to the argument put forward here would be the idea
that the modernist and postmodernist subject is a case in point because it illustrates –
in literature and everyday life – this kind of disintegration in aphasia and in various
cases of over-determination imposed on it by advertising, media and ideology.
These negative aspects of subjectivity are revealed in the critiques of modernity
voiced in very different ways by Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard and Vattimo. They often
give the impression that the individual subject is an anachronism whose survival is
more than uncertain. In spite of this one-sidedness, such postmodern critiques of the
subject as a subjugated or disintegrating instance are far from excessive or esoteric. For
they produce a salutary shock in philosophy and the social sciences where more
reflection on the ambivalence and the complexity of individual and collective subjects
is required.
They are not pure inventions, but are based on sociological insights, some of which
announce a decline of the individual subject and will be dealt with in more detail in the
fourth chapter. They are, among other things: the rise of international monopolies and
trusts and the concomitant decline of the individual entrepreneur; a growing
bureaucratization due to state interventions inspired by Keynesian economics; the
resulting systemic constraints, some of which provoke the mobilization of workers and
employees in tightly organized trade unions; the invasion of all spheres of life by market
forces and the exchange value, both of which entail a crisis of values and a weakening
of collective consciousness (in the sense of Durkheim); the over-determination of
individual and collective subjects by ideologies, as described by Althusser; the parallel
over-determination by the media described and denounced in sweeping statements by
Baudrillard; the relatively recent development of a ‘fatherless society’ studied by
Mitscherlich and regularly referred to by sociologists (Giddens, Beck, Touraine) and
social psychologists such as Lasch; finally, the often neglected but growing discrepancy –
discovered by Georg Simmel – between subjective and objective culture, i.e. between
individual culture and the objectively available state of human knowledge.
In view of this daunting predominance of objective social factors, one might be
tempted to conclude that the individual subject cannot but capitulate. Kafka’s hero sums
up this hopeless situation in a few words: ‘The man from the country did not expect
such difficulties . . .’ The social developments enumerated above could also be turned
against the author of this book who might be accused of a euphemistic approach. The ‘I’
might after all turn out to be an illusion in the sense of Nietzsche or Mach . . .
The key argument of this book does not imply that dialogical subjectivity is or will be
the rule in contemporary society. Rather, it is based on the assumption that new, dialogical
perspectives have been opened up recently by European integration and the parallel rise
of ecological, feminist and eco-feminist movements, all of which aim at incorporating
otherness (of nature, of the other sex) into individual and collective identity. The
argument does not gloss over the difficulties of being a subject, but is meant to reveal new
forms of subjectivity made possible by certain developments in contemporary society.
If such possibilities, which will be dealt with in some detail in the last chapter,
actually exist, they will appear in the relationship between individual and collective (i.e.
European) subjectivity which is frequently completed by regional and national
identities. The idea that the individual subject cannot be saved as long as it sees itself as
an isolated atom, is confirmed by Charles Taylor at the end of his remarkable study
Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity:
But our normal understanding of self-realization presupposes that some things are
important beyond the self, that there are some goods or purposes the furthering of
which has significance for us and which hence can provide the significance a
fulfilling life needs. A total and fully consistent subjectivism would tend towards
emptiness: nothing would count as fulfilment in a world in which literally nothing
was important but self-fulfilment.272
The post-feudal identity of the bourgeois individual was mostly national; should, in
the course of European integration, a new subjectivity crystallize, a subjectivity
evolving beyond the bourgeois nation state, then such a multilingual and multicultural
subjectivity might be more flexible – and hence stronger.
Notes
1 Cf. H. Schrödter (ed.), Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, Würzburg, Königshausen und
Neumann, 1994 and P. Bürger, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts. Eine Geschichte der
Subjektivität von Montaigne bis Barthes, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1998.
2 H. M. Baumgartner, ‘Welches Subjekt ist verschwunden? Einige Distinktionen zum
Begriff der Subjkektivität’, in: H. Schrödter (ed.), Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, op.
cit., p. 26.
3 Ibid., p. 27
4 Ibid.
5 H. Schmidinger, in: E. Beck, Identität der Person. Sozialphilosophische Studien zu
Kierkegaard, Adorno und Habermas, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1991,
p. 49.
6 Cf. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age,
Cambridge-Oxford, Polity-Blackwell (1991), 1994, pp. 17–20.
7 K.-J. Bruder, Subjektivität und Postmoderne, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1993, p. 38.
8 Ibid. This diagnosis is confirmed by K. Oehler, Subjektivität und Selbsbewußtsein in der
Antike, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1997, pp. 80–85.
9 K. Marx, Early Writings (ed. T. B. Bottomore), London, C. A. Watts, 1963, p. 185.
10 G. Simmel, Das Individuum und die Freiheit. Essais, Berlin, Wagenbach, 1984, p. 194.
11 R. zur Lippe, Autonomie als Selbstzerstörung, Frankfurt, Syndikat-EVA, 1984, p. 114.
12 I. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty. An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University
of Oxford on 31 October 1958, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1958, p. 16.
13 G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics, London,
Merlin Press, 1971, p. 41.
14 A. Touraine, Critique de la modernité, Paris, Fayard, 1992, p. 331.
15 F. Grubauer, Das zerrissene Bewußtsein der gesellschaftlichen Subjektivität, Münster,
Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1994, p. 31.
16 Grubauer often uses the concept of ‘individual’ and ‘subject’ as synonyms. In the
context mapped out in this book, ‘individual’ refers to the socially-conditioned
biological basis of individual subjectivity.
17 M. Frank, Selbstbewußtsein und Selbsterkenntnis. Essays zur analytischen Philosophie
der Subjektivität, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1991, p. 43.
18 Cf. A. J. Greimas, Maupassant. La sémiotique du texte: exercices pratiques, Paris, Seuil,
1976, p. 63.
19 Cf. A. J. Greimas, Sémantique structurale, Paris, Larousse, 1966, p. 181.
20 The theory of modalities is explained in A. J. Greimas, ‘Pour une théorie des modalités’,
in: idem, Du Sens II. Essais sémiotiques, Paris, Seuil, 1983. For an exemplary application
of this theory consult T. H. Kim, Vom Aktantenmodell zur Semiotik der Leidenschaften.
Eine Studie zur narrativen Semiotik von Algirdas J. Greimas, Tübingen, Francke, 2002.
21 Cf. L. Tesnière, Eléments de syntaxe structurale, Paris, Klincksieck, 1959.
22 Cf. V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928), Austin, Univ. of Texas Press, 1968
(2nd ed.).
23 H. Zinser, ‘Verlust des Subjekts? Christentum und neuere religiöse Bewegungen’, in:
H. Schrödter (ed.), Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, op. cit., p. 236.
24 A definition of ‘personality’ in the sociological sense can be found in: B. Schäfers (ed.),
Grundbegriffe der Soziologie, Opladen, Leske und Budrich, 1986, p. 230.
25 G. H. Mead, ‘The Self ’, in: idem, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social
Behaviorist (ed. Ch. W. Morris), Works of George Herbert Mead, vol. I, Chicago-
London, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967, p. 174.
26 S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Mansfield Centre (CT), Martino Publishing,
2010, p. 105.
27 A. J. Greimas, Du Sens, Paris, Seuil, 1970, p. 234.
28 W. Huber, ‘Das artifizielle Subjekt’, in: R. L. Fetz, R. Hagenbüchle, P. Schulz (eds.),
Geschichte und Vorgeschichte der modernen Subjektivität, vol. II, Berlin-New York, De
Gruyter, 1998, p. 1294.
29 The relationship between actants and actors is discussed in detail by J. Courtés in:
Introduction à la sémiotique narrative et discursive, Paris, Hachette, 1976, p. 95. He
shows that a collective actant, e.g. a trade union, can be represented by individual
actors (its members or lawyers) and that a particular actor may belong to different
actants (party, trade union, family).
30 A. Fontán, ‘La Unión Europea después del Euro’, in: Nueva Revista 61, February 1999,
pp. 6–7.
31 Cf. D. Sperber, D. Wilson, Relevance. Communication and Cognition, Oxford, Blackwell
(1986), 1993, chap. III. 1: ‘Conditions for Relevance’.
32 A redefinition of Greimas’s concept of sociolect can be found in: P. V. Zima, Textsoziologie.
Eine kritische Einführung, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1980, pp. 72–81 and P. V. Zima, Ideologie und
Theorie. Eine Diskurskritik, Tübingen-Basel, Francke, 1989, pp. 248–50.
33 Cf. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II: The Critique of
Functionalist Reason, Cambridge-Oxford, Polity-Blackwell, 1987, pp. 391–6.
34 A. J. Greimas in discussion with P. Stockinger, ‘Interview. Zur aktuellen Lage der
semiotischen Forschung’, in: Zeitschrift für Semiotik 5, 1983.
35 S. zur Nieden, ‘ “Ach, ich möchte (. . .) eine tapfere deutsche Frau werden”. Tagebücher
als Quelle zur Erforschung des Nationalsozialismus’, in: Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt
(ed.), Alltagskultur, Subjektivität, Geschichte. Zur Theorie und Praxis von
Alltagsgeschichte, Münster, Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1994, p. 181.
36 Cf. J.-P. Faye, Théorie du récit. Introduction aux ‘langages totalitaires’, Paris, Hermann,
1972, pp. 36–40.
37 L. Althusser, On Ideology, London-New York (NLB, 1971), Verso, 2008, p. 44.
38 Ibid., p. 45.
39 M. Pêcheux, Les Vérités de La Palice, Paris, Maspero, 1975, p. 139.
40 A. Moravia, The Conformist, London, Prion Books, 1999, p. 324.
41 Ibid.
42 Cf. Th. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago-London, The Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1996 (3rd ed.), chap. IV: ‘Normal Science as Puzzle-solving’.
43 The Russian formalists and the Czech structuralists never suggested that literary
evolution could be conceived of as functioning without subjects. For the
dissatisfaction with established and ‘automatized’ forms, most of which reveal nothing
new, can only be detected on the level of individual and collective subjects (e.g. critics).
44 Cf. C. F. Gethmann, ‘Praktische Subjektivität und Spezies’, in: W. Hogrebe (ed.)
Subjektivität, Munich, Fink, 1998, pp. 126–7. Gethman confirms K.-O. Apel’s and W.
Kuhlmann’s thesis, according to which ‘subjectivity can practically be attributed to
those who are capable of argument’, by pointing out that infants, mentally
handicapped or incapacitated individuals cannot be considered as subjects.
45 L. Althusser, On Ideology, op. cit., p. 49.

46 It is not by chance that the first work on ideology – Eléments d’idéologie – was
published by Destutt de Tracy between 1801 and 1815.
47 R. Bubner, ‘Wie wichtig ist Subjektivität?’, in: W. Hogrebe (ed.), Subjektivität, op. cit., p. 246.
48 Cf. P. V. Zima, Ideologie und Theorie, op. cit., chap. I.
49 The self-reflection of subjects is discussed in: P. Stekeler-Weithofer, ‘Das Subjekt des
Handelns als Objekt der Reflexion’, in: W. Hogrebe (ed.), Subjektivität, op. cit.,
pp. 165–6.
50 P. Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations. Essays in Hermeneutics, London-New York,
Continuum, 1989, p. 259.
51 M. Frank, Selbstbewußtsein und Selbsterkenntnis, op. cit., pp. 23–4.
52 V. Descombes, Les Embarras de l’identité, Paris, Gallimard, 2013, p. 96. Descombes
distinguishes two aspects of subjectivity which seem to be mutually exclusive: the
subject as ‘mental interiority’ and the ‘subject as expressive behaviour’: i.e. a subjectivity
that is only accessible to myself and a communicating subjectivity that is accessible to
others. However, insofar as we are able to express our feelings and thoughts at any
time, these two ‘subjectivities’ are permanently linked . . .
53 P. Ricœur, Oneself as Another, Chicago-London, The Univ. of Chicago Press (1992),
1994, p. 128.
54 Ibid., p. 140.
55 Ibid., p. 141. (P. Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990, p. 168.)
56 Ibid.
57 R. Musil, Gesammelte Werke, vol. V, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1978, p. 1937.
58 H. Keupp et al., Identitätskonstruktionen. Das Patchwork der Identitäten in der
Spätmoderne, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1999, p. 21.
59 H. Keupp, Riskante Chancen. Das Subjekt zwischen Psychokultur und
Selbstorganisation. Sozialpsychologische Studien, Heidelberg, Asanger, 1988, pp. 150–51.
60 H. Keupp et al., Identitätskonstruktionen, op. cit., p. 10.
61 H. Keupp, Riskante Chancen, op. cit., p. 132.
62 G. Lai, Disidentità, Milan, Franco Angeli, 1999, p. 28.
63 H. Keupp, ‘Ambivalenzen postmoderner Identität’, in: U. Beck, E. Beck-Gernsheim
(eds.), Riskante Freiheiten, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1994, p. 342.
65 Cf. P. V. Zima, Ideologie und Theorie, op. cit., chap. VIII.
66 N. Luhmann, Social Systems, Stanford, Univ. Press, 1995, p. 240.
67 Reception and impact of ideological discourses are discussed in detail in: P. V. Zima,
Ideologie und Theorie, op. cit., chap. VIII. 2. g.
68 This topic is dealt with in quite an original way by H. Klauß in his book Zur
Konstitution der Sinnlichkeit in der Wissenschaft. Eine soziologische Analyse der
Wandlungen des Subjekt-Objekt-Verhältnisses, Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Daedalus, 1990.
69 R. Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. I, London, Tan Books-Picador, 1979, p. 358.
70 H. Klauß, Zur Konstitution der Sinnlichkeit in der Wissenschaft, op. cit., p. 240.
71 Ibid.
72 T. W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London-New York, Verso
(1979), 1997, p. 59.
73 Ibid., p. 26.
74 Cf. P. V. Zima, Ideologie und Theorie, op. cit., p. 56.
75 L. J. Prieto, ‘Entwurf einer allgemeinen Semiologie’, in: Zeitschrift für Semiotik 1, 1979,
p. 263.
76 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Framework ist kein Mythos. Zu Karl R. Poppers Thesen über
wissenschaftliche Kommunikation’, in: H. Albert, K, Salamun (eds.), Mensch und
Gesellschaft aus der Sicht des Kritischen Rationalismus, Amsterdam-Atlanta, Rodopi,
1993, pp. 319–22.
77 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Dialogische Theorie’, in: Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 4, 1999 and
chap. V in this book.
78 M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Minneapolis-London, University of
Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 32.
79 J.-P. Sartre, Nausea, London, Penguin, 1965, p. 180.
80 J.-P. Sartre, The Problem of Method, London, Methuen, 1963, p. 175.
81 Ibid., pp. 85–90.
82 Ibid., pp. 63–4.
83 A. Camus, The Rebel, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962, p. 60.
84 A. Camus, L’Homme révolté, Paris, Gallimard (‘idées’), 1951, p. 91.
85 A. Camus, Essais, Paris, Gallimard, Bibl. de la Pléiade, 1965, p. 762.
86 The relationship between Nietzsche and Camus is commented on in detail by B.
Rosenthal in her book Die Idee des Absurden: Friedrich Nietzsche und Albert Camus,
Bonn, Bouvier, 1977.
87 H. R. Schlette, ‘Camus’ Aktualität im Spannungsfeld der Antithese “Natur-Geschichte” ’
in: M. Lauble (ed.), Der unbekannte Camus, Düsseldorf, Patmos, 1979, p. 129.
88 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, London-New York, Routledge (1973), 2000, p. 179.
89 Ibid., p. 15.
90 Ibid., p. 12.
91 T. W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in: idem, Notes to Literature, vol. I, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1991, p. 9.
92 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op. cit., p. 29.
93 Cf. W. M. Lüdke, Anmerkungen zur ‘Logik des Zerfalls’: Adorno – Beckett, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1981, p. 68: ‘For the particular, non-identical is precisely that which resists
concrete definitions, concepts – i.e. identification.’
95 J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures (1987),
Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, pp. 295–6.
96 Cf. A. W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, London, Heinemann,
1971.
97 Cf. J. Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1986 (2nd ed.), p. 591.
98 The problem of a universally valid language in philosophy is discussed by O. Neurath
in: ‘Universaljargon und Terminologie’ (1941), in: R. Haller, H. Rutte (eds.),
Gesammelte philosophische und methodologische Schriften, vol. II, Vienna,
Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1981.
99 Cf. P. V. Zima, Modern / Postmodern. Society, Philosophy, Literature, London-New
York, Continuum (2010), 2012, chap. VI: ‘Dialogical Theory: Between the Universal
and the Particular’.
100 J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge-Oxford,
Polity-Blackwell, 1992, p. 87.
101 Cf. M. Masterman, ‘The Nature of a Paradigm’, in: I. Lakatos, A. Musgrave (eds.),
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge, Univ. Press, 1970, pp. 61–5.
102 H. Ebeling, Das Subjekt in der Moderne. Rekonstruktion der Philosophie im Zeitalter
der Zerstörung, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1993, p. 190.
103 Ibid., p. 195.

104 H. Ebeling, ‘Das neuere Prinzip der Selbsterhaltung und seine Bedeutung für die
Theorie der Subjektivität’, in: H. Ebeling (ed.), Subjektivität und Selbsterhaltung.
Beiträge zur Diagnose der Moderne, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1996, p. 19.
105 H. Ebeling, Das Subjekt in der Moderne, op. cit., pp. 249–50.
106 Ibid., p. 269.
107 R. Reid, ‘Corps clinique, corps génétique’, in: L. Giard (ed.), Michel Foucault. Lire
l’œuvre, Grenoble, Millon, 1992, p. 126.
108 Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, p. 306.
109 J. Link, ‘Von der “Macht der Norm” zum “flexiblen Normalismus”: Überlegungen nach
Foucault’, in: J. Jurt (ed.), Zeitgenössische französische Denker: Eine Bilanz, Freiburg,
Rombach, 1998, p. 260.
110 Cf. C. Bordoni, Società digitali. Mutamento culturale e nuovi media, Naples, Liguori,
2007.
111 J. Link, ‘Von der “Macht der Norm” zum “flexiblen Normalismus” ’, op. cit., p. 255.
112 Ibid.
113 A. Schmidt, ‘Der strukturalistische Angriff auf die Geschichte’, in: A. Schmidt (ed.),
Beiträge zur marxistischen Erkenntnistheorie, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1972 (4th ed.),
p. 197.
114 U. Jaeggi, Theoretische Praxis. Probleme eines strukturalen Marxismus, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1976, p. 109.
115 Cf. L. Althusser, Eléments d’autocritique, Paris, Hachette, 1974, p. 94: ‘Les plus
politiques de mes critiques l’ont bien relevé: il n’est guère question de la lutte de
classes pour elle-même dans Pour Marx et Lire le Capital; il n’en est pas question
lorsque je parle de la fonction pratique et sociale de l’idéologie (. . .).’
116 Not only in Althusser’s but also in Pêcheux’s work, does it become clear how
detrimental the elimination of such hermeneutic and dialectical categories as
reflection and dialogue can be.
117 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London, Athlone, 1994, Continuum, 2008,
p. 153.
118 G. Vattimo, Le avventure della differenza. Che cosa significa pensare dopo Nietzsche e
Heidegger, Milan, Garzanti, 1980, p. 159.
119 R. Leschke, Metamorphosen des Subjekts. Hermeneutische Reaktionen auf die (post-)
strukturalistische Herausforderung, vol. I, Frankfurt-Bern-Paris, Lang, 1987, p. 35.
120 M. Frank, ‘Subjekt, Person, Individuum’, in: M. Frank, G. Raulet, W. van Reijen (eds.),
Die Frage nach dem Subjekt, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1988, pp. 25–6.
121 R. Leschke, Metamorphosen des Subjekts, vol. I, op. cit., p. 35.
122 The concept of subject is not only conspicuous by its absence in the dictionary of
sociology edited by B. Schäfers (Grundbegriffe der Soziologie: cf. supra) but is also
missing in Methodologie der Sozialwissenschaften (eds. N. Wenturis, W. Van Hove and
V. Dreier, Tübingen-Basel, Francke, 1992). In Wörterbuch der Soziologie (ed. G. Hartfiel,
K.-H. Hillmann, Stuttgart, Kröner, 1972), the related concepts of ‘subject’, ‘subjectivism’ and
‘subjectivity’ were still prominent. Both are defined in the Penguin Dictionary of Sociology
edited by N. Abercrombie, S. Hill and B. S. Turner, London, Penguin, 1984, p. 384.
123 Cf. J. Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal. Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes, Paris,
Galilée, 1990, p. 13.
125 C. Daniel, Theorien der Subjektivität. Einführung in die Soziologie des Individuums,
Frankfurt-New York, Campus, 1981, p. 146.
126 Cf. L. Löwenthal, ‘Biographies in Popular Magazines’, in: idem, Literature, Popular
Culture and Society, Englewood Cliffs (N. J.), Prentice Hall, 1961.
127 J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation, Paris, Galilée, 1981, p. 17.
128 D. Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting, New
York, Basic Books, 1973, p. 477.
129 L. Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, London, Tavistock, 1977.
130 Ibid., chap. II, III.
131 As early as 1966, Jacques Leenhardt, a follower of Lucien Goldmann, described
Goldmann’s approach as ‘profoundly anachronistic in relation to our epoch’.
Cf. J. Leenhardt, ‘Psychocritique et sociologie de la littérature’, in: Les chemins actuels
de la critique, Paris, UGE (10/18), 1968, p. 400. However, it can be shown that
Goldmann’s view of the individual subject’s gradual decline coincides in many
respects with the diagnoses of Simmel, Bell, Riesman and even Touraine and Beck.
132 U. Beck, Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity, London, Sage (1992), 2008,
pp. 12–13.
133 Ibid., pp. 14–15.
134 A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age,
Cambridge, Polity, 1991, p. 100.
135 N. Luhmann, Social Systems, op. cit., p. 74.
136 F. Grubauer, Das zerrissene Bewußtsein der gesellschaftlichen Subjektivität, op. cit.,
pp. 161–62.
137 Ibid., p. 154.
138 Cf. J. Baudrillard, ‘Facticité et séduction’, in: J. Baudrillard, M. Guillaume, Figures de
l’altérité, Paris, Ed. Descartes, 1992, p. 109 and chap. IV. 2 in this book.
139 A. Touraine, Le Retour de l’acteur. Essais de sociologie, Paris, Fayard, 1984, p. 245. The
question of individual autonomy is dealt with by E. Morin in Sociologie, Paris, Fayard,
1984, p. 438.
140 The relationship between typological and genetic comparisons is dealt with by
P. V. Zima, Komparatistik. Einführung in die Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft,
Tübingen-Basel, Francke, 2011 (2nd ed.), chaps. III and IV.
141 C. Daniel, Theorien der Subjektivität, op. cit., p. 125.
142 A. Touraine, Comment sortir du libéralisme?, Paris, Fayard, 1999, p. 116.
143 Cf. L. Goldmann, ‘La Dialectique aujourd’hui’, in: idem, La Création culturelle dans la
société moderne, Paris, Denoël-Gonthier, 1971, pp. 167–81.
144 Cf. A. Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, London, Pluto Press (1982), 1997.
145 F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Mineola (N. Y.), Dover Publications, 2003,
p. 117.
146 F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, London,
Penguin, 1990, p. 34.
147 S. Freud, ‘Der Teufel als Vaterersatz’, in: idem, Studienausgabe, vol. VII, Frankfurt,
Fischer, 1982, p. 301.
148 C. G. Jung, Bewußtes und Unbewußtes, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1957, p. 23.
149 E. Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum
Psychischen, Darmstadt, Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1991, p. 20.
150 Ibid.
151 Ibid., p. 19.
152 In the sense of C. B. Macpherson’s study The Political Theory of Possessive
Individualism. Hobbes to Locke, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962.
153 S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, op. cit., p. 86.
154 Ibid., p. 106.

155 S. Freud, ‘Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse’, in: idem, Studienausgabe, vol. IX,
Frankfurt, Fischer, 1982, p. 69. (Note omitted in the English translation.)
156 S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, op. cit., p. 108.
157 The relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis is also dealt with by Marcia
Cavell in her book Becoming a Subject: Reflections in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,
Oxford, Univ. Press, 2008.
158 The figure of the ‘double’ in literature is dealt with in great detail by S. M. Moraldo,
Wandlungen, des Doppelgängers. Shakespeare – E. T. A. Hoffmann – Pirandello,
Frankfurt-Berlin-Bern, Lang, 1996.
159 H. F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of
Dynamic Psychiatry, London, Allen Lane-The Penguin Press, 1970, p. 141.
160 Ibid.
161 Cf. C. G. Jung, Bewußtes und Unbewußtes, op. cit., p. 29.
162 H. F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, op. cit., p. 128.
163 J. Lacan, in: B. Ogilvie, Lacan. La Formation du concept de sujet (1932–1949), Paris,
PUF, 1988 (2nd ed.), p. 43.
164 J. Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 799.
165 A. Lorenzer, Über den Gegenstand der Psychoanalyse oder: Sprache und Interaktion,
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1973, p. 122.
166 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, London, Penguin, 1967,
p. 55.
167 Ibid., p. 60.
168 Ibid., p. 61.
169 Ibid., p. 55.
170 K.-J. Bruder, Subjektivität und Postmoderne, op. cit., p. 145.
171 Ch. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism. American Life in An Age of Diminishing
Expectations, New York-London, Norton (1979), 1991, p. XV.
172 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life, London-New York,
Verso, 2005, p. 65.
173 Cf. S. B. G. Eysenck, ‘Personality in Subnormal Subjects’, in: H. J. Eysenck,
S. B. G. Eysenck, Personality Structure and Measurement, London, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 317–22.
174 Cf. C. R. Rogers, Encounter Groups, London, Penguin, 1969, p. 14: ‘Each member
moves toward greater acceptance of his total being (. . .).’
175 Cf. C. R. Rogers, J. K. Wood, ‘Client-Centered Theory: Carl R. Rogers’, in: A. Burton
(ed.), Operational Theories of Personality, New York, Brunner-Mazel, 1974, p. 215.
176 Cf. A. J. Greimas, J. Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage,
Paris, Hachette, 1979, p. 274 (‘personnage’).
177 L. A. Pervin, Personality: Theory, Assessment, and Research, New York-London-Sydney,
John Wiley and Sons, 1970, p. 1.
178 Ibid., p. 2.
179 Ibid.
180 Cf. H. J. Eysenck, M. W. Eysenck, Personality and Individual Differences. A Natural
Science Approach, New York-London, Plenum Press, 1985, pp. 17–18.
181 Cf. S. E. Hampson, The Construction of Personality. An Introduction, London,
Routledge, 1988 (2nd ed.), chap. IV: ‘Personality and Consistency’.
182 Cf. L. J. Bischof, Interpreting Personality Theories, New York-Evanston-London, Harper
and Row, 1964, pp. 664–70.
183 S. E. Hampson, The Construction of Personality, op. cit., p. 81.

184 Cf. W. Mischel, Introduction to Personality, New York, Holt-Rinehart-Winston, 1971,
CBS College Publishing, 1981, pp. 19–20.
185 S. E. Hampson, The Construction of Personality, op. cit., p. 80.
186 Cf. H. J. Eysenck, M. W. Eysenck, Personality and Individual Differences, op. cit., p. 4
(character and traits).
187 W. Mischel, Introduction to Personality, op. cit., p. 27.
188 Ibid.
189 H. J. Eysenck, M. W. Eysenck, Personality and Individual Differences, op. cit., p. VII.
190 H. J. Eysenck, S. B. G. Eysenck, Personality Structure and Measurement, op. cit., p. 327.
191 Cf. R. C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism. The American Quest for Objectivity,
1880–1940, Chapel Hill-London, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987.
192 Cf. L. A. Pervin, Personality, op. cit., pp. 373–4.
193 D. H. Ford, Humans as Self-Constructing Living Systems. A Developmental Perspective
on Behavior and Personality, Hillsdale (N. J.)-Hove-London, Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1987, p. 73.
194 Ibid., p. 72.
195 M. E. Ford, D. H. Ford (eds.), Humans as Self-Constructing Living Systems. Putting the
Framework to Work. Hillsdale (N. J.)-Hove-London, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1987, p. 10.
196 C. R. Rogers, J. K. Wood, ‘Client-Centred Theory: Carl R. Rogers’, op. cit., p. 215.
197 Ibid.
198 Ibid., p. 214.
199 Cf. C. R. Rogers, Encounter Groups, op. cit., p. 34, where it is said: ‘In Synanon, the
fascinating group so successfully involved in making personas out of drug addicts,
this ripping away of facades is often dramatic.’ Here the psychic and especially social
problems of drug addiction are completely ignored.
200 E. H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, New York-London, Norton (1980), 1994,
p. 109.
201 Ibid., p. 119.
202 Ibid., p. 121.
203 Cf. T. W. Adorno, ‘Die revidierte Psychoanalyse’, in: M. Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno,
Sociologica II. Reden und Aufsätze, Frankfurt, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1973
(3rd ed.), p. 111.
204 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Erich Fromm: Le discours affirmatif ’, in: idem, L’Ecole de Francfort.
Dialectique de la particularité, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005 (revised and augmented ed.).
205 Cf. E. H. Erikson, ‘Growth and Crises of the “Healthy Personality” ’, in: M. J. E. Senn
(ed.), Symposium on the Healthy Personality. Supplement II. Problems of Infancy and
Childhood (Transactions of the Fourth Conference), March 1950, New York, J. Macy Jr.
Foundation, 1950.
207 H. Keupp, Riskante Chancen. Das Subjekt zwischen Psychokultur und
Selbstorganisation. Sozialpsychologische Studien, Heidelberg, Asanger, 1988, p. 142.
208 Ibid., p. 146.
209 H. Keupp, ‘Diskursarena Identität: Lernprozesse in der Identitätsforschung’, in:
H. Keupp, R. Höfer (eds.), Identitätsarbeit heute. Klassische und aktuelle Perspektiven
der Identitätsforschung, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1997, p. 20.
211 Cf. ibid., p. 151.

212 Brigitte Schlieben-Lange shows to what extent sociolinguistics and text linguistics
converge in France as both disciplines are subsumed under semiotics.
Cf. B. Schlieben-Lange, Soziolinguistik. Eine Einführung, Stuttgart-Berlin-Cologne,
Kohlhammer, 1973, p. 51.
213 N. Coupland, J. F. Nussbaum (eds.), Discourse and Lifespan Identity, London, Sage,
1993, p. XXII.
214 Cf. B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, St. Albans, Paladin, 1973.
215 M. M. Talbot, Language and Gender. An Introduction, Cambridge-Oxford, Polity-
Blackwell, 1998, p. 38.
216 R. Barthes, Essais critiques, Paris, Seuil, 1964, p. 179.
217 G. Kress, R. Hodge, Language as Ideology, London-Boston-Henley, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 63.
218 M. M. Talbot, Language and Gender, op. cit., p. 38.
219 This kind of research seems to be particularly popular in Britain. Cf. J. P. De Waele,
R. Harée, ‘Autobiography as a psychological method’, in: G. P. Ginsburg (ed.), Emerging
Strategies in Social Psychological Research, Chichester, Wiley, 1979 and K. Gergen,
M. Gergen, ‘Narrative and Self as Relationship’, in: L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in
Experimental Social Psychology, New York, Academic Press, 1988.
220 K. Buchanan, D. J. Middleton, ‘Discursively Formulating the Significance of
Reminiscence in Later Life’, in: N. Coupland, J. F. Nussbaum, Discourse and Lifespan
Identity, op. cit., p. 65.
221 Cf. H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs (N. J.), Prentice Hall,
1967.
222 P. Lejeune, Je est un autre. L’Autobiographie, de la littérature aux medias, Paris, Seuil,
1980, p. 217.
223 Ibid., p. 175.
224 Cf. H. R. Jauß, Zeit und Erinnerung in Prousts ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’. Ein
Beitrag zur Theorie des Romans, Heidelberg, Winter, 1970, chap. II.
225 Cf. U. Link-Heer, Prousts ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ und die Form der
Autobiographie, Amsterdam, Grüner, 1988, p. 51 and pp. 130–5.
226 A. Schulte Nordholt, ‘Proust and Subjectivity’ in: W. Van Reijen, W. G. Weststeijn
(eds.), Subjectivity, Amsterdam-Atlanta, Rodopi, 2000, p. 83.
227 Cf. P. V. Zima, L’Ambivalence Romanesque. Proust, Kafka, Musil, Paris, L’Harmattan,
2002 (2nd revised and augmented ed.).
228 M. Schmitz-Emans, ‘Das Subjekt als literarisches Projekt: Ich-Sager und Er-Sager’, in:
Komparatistik. Jahrbuch der deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende
Literaturwissenschaft, 1999–2000, p. 79.
229 Ibid., p. 52. Cf. Also M. Schmitz-Emans, ‘Subjekt und Sprache’, in: P. Geyer,
M. Schmitz-Emans (eds.), Proteus im Spiegel. Kritische Theorie des Subjekts im 20.
Jahrhundert, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 2003, p. 303, where the author
links human over-determination by language to the ‘theme of the I’.
230 D. Borchmeyer, ‘Nietzsches Begriff der Décadence’, in: M. Pfister (ed.), Die
Modernisierung des Ich, Passau, Rothe, 1989, p. 94.
231 U. Schulz-Buschhaus, ‘Bourget und die “multiplicité du moi”’, in: M. Pfister (ed.), Die
Modernisierung des Ich, op. cit., 59.
232 Ibid.
233 Cf. H. Gnüg, Entstehung und Krise lyrischer Subjektivität: Vom klassischen lyrischen Ich
zur modernen Erfahrungswirklichkeit, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1983 and D. Rabaté (ed.),
Figures du sujet lyrique, Paris, PUF, 1996, especially the article by D. Combe, ‘La
Référence dédoublée. Le Sujet lyrique entre fiction et autobiographie’, who discusses
the ‘dissolution of the I’ in modernism.
234 G. M. Grabher, ‘Formen des lyrischen Ich im Modernismus: Subjekt-Kult und
Subjekt-Absage durch die Sprachskepsis’ in: R. L. Fetz, R. Hagenbüchle, P. Schulz
(eds.), Geschichte und Vorgeschichte der modernen Subjektivität, vol. II,
Berlin-New York, De Gruyter, 1998, pp. 1099–100.
235 Cf. K. Meyer-Drawe, ‘Zur Doppeldeutigkeit des Subjekts’, in: P. Geyer,
M. Schmitz-Emans (eds.), Proteus im Spiegel, op. cit., pp. 43–9.
236 Cf. W. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge
(Mass.)-London, The Belknap Press, 2006, p. 179.
237 The cult of the subject in Maurice Barrès’s aestheticism is commented on by P. Bürger,
‘Naturalismus-Ästhetizismus und das Problem der Subjektivität’, in: Ch. Bürger,
P. Bürger, J. Schulte-Sasse (eds.), Naturalismus / Ästhetizismus, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,
1979, p. 44.
238 Cf. T. W. Adorno, ‘George’, in: idem, Notes to Literature, vol. II, New York, Columbia
Press, 1992, pp. 178–92.
239 Cf. P. V. Zima, La Négation esthétique. Le sujet, le beau et le sublime de Mallarmé et
Valéry à Adorno et Lyotard, Paris, L’Harmattan, pp. 93–9.
240 T. W. Adorno, ‘The Artist as Deputy’, in: idem, Notes to Literature, vol. I
(ed. R. Tiedemann), New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1991, p. 107.
241 T. W. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, in: idem, Notes to Literature, vol. I, op. cit.,
pp. 51–3.
242 T. W. Adorno, ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’, in: idem,
Notes to Literature, vol. I, op. cit., p. 35.
243 T. W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in: idem, Notes to Literature, vol. I,
op. cit., p. 243.
244 Cf. M. Moroni, ‘Dynamics of Subjectivity in the Historical Avant-Garde’, in:
W. Van Reijen, W. G. Weststeijn (eds.), Subjectivity, op. cit., p. 10.
245 Even Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, editors of the posthumously published
Aesthetic Theory (orig. 1970) mention the aporetic character of Adorno’s project in
their afterword.
246 G. Schwab, Samuel Becketts Endspiel mit der Subjektivität. Entwurf einer
Psychoästhetik des modernen Theaters, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1981, pp. 105–25. Cf. also:
J. Becker, Nicht-Ich-Identität. Ästhetische Subjektivität in Samuel Becketts Arbeiten für
Theater, Radio, Film und Fernsehen, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1998. In this study, Beckett’s
work is read as an attempt to deconstruct subjectivity.
247 G. Schwab, Samuel Becketts Endspiel mit der Subjektivität, op. cit., p. 125.
248 P. Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1969, p. 90.
249 Cf. D. Lecourt, Pour une critique de l’épistémologie. Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault,
Paris, Maspero, 1972, pp. 98–133.
250 The aesthetic heterogeneity of semiotic theories (Barthes, Eco, Greimas) is
commented on in: P. V. Zima., The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory, London,
Athlone-Continuum, 1999, chap. VI.
251 J. d’Ormesson, in: M. Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in: idem, Dits et écrits I
(1954–1969), Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 812 (discussion).
252 J. Lacan, in: M. Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, op. cit., p. 820 (discussion).
253 M. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in: P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York,
Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 118 (in this volume the ‘discussion’ has been omitted).
254 As far as Foucault’s criticism of Sartre is concerned, cf. ‘Foucault répond à Sartre’, in:
M. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, op. cit.
255 M. Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, op. cit., p. 805.
256 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Abwesenheit und Anwesenheit des Werks. Zu Foucaults Subjekt- und
Werkbegriff ’, in: K.-M. Bogdal, A. Geisenhanslüke (eds.), Die Abwesenheit des Werkes.
Nach Foucault, Heidelberg, Synchron, 2006, p. 187.
257 Cf. L. Goldmann, The Hidden God. A Study in the Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal
and the Tragedies of Racine, London-New York, Routledge, 1964.
258 Cf. L. Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, op. cit.
259 P. Bürger, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts. Eine Geschichte der Subjektivität von
Montaigne bis Barthes, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1998, pp. 23–4. Caroline Williams is
more confident as far as the survival of the individual subject is concerned:
Cf. C. Williams, Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the
Subject, London-New York, Continuum, 2005.
260 P. Bürger, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, op. cit., p. 222.
261 Ibid.
262 Cf. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, op. cit. and P. V. Zima, Roman
und Ideologie. Zur Sozialgeschichte des modernen Romans, Munich, Fink (1986), 1999,
chap. III. 3.
263 R. Musil, Gesammelte Werke, vol. VII, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1978, p. 876.
264 The reification of the postmodern hero is discussed in: P. V. Zima, Modern /
Postmodern, op. cit., chap. V. 7.
265 A final refutation is seldom possible in the cultural and social sciences. Cf. P. V. Zima,
What is Theory? Cultural Theory as Discourse and Dialogue, London-New York,
Continuum, 2007, chap. IV. 2.
266 F. Nietzsche, Werke, vol. V, op. cit., p. 323.
267 A definition of modernism as ‘late modern criticism of modernity’ is proposed by
P. V. Zima, in: Modern / Postmodern, op. cit., chap. I.
268 R. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1952, p. 1578
(fragments).
270 The dialectical link between crisis and critique is analysed in detail in: R. Koselleck,
Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1973.
271 R. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Gesammelte Werke, vol. IV, op. cit., p. 1457.
272 Ch. Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge (Mass.),
Harvard Univ. Press, 1996 (8th ed.), p. 507.
64
II
Subjectivity Between Metaphysics and

Modernism: The Subject as a Fundamental,
Subjugated and Disintegrating Instance
This chapter is a return to the beginning of the first in the sense that the nexus between
the subject as a basic given and the subject as a subjugated or disintegrating instance
will now be reconsidered in a diachronic perspective. The word ‘nexus’ evokes the kind
of dialectic relationship inherent in the great metaphysical systems of modernity – in
the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, Fichte and Hegel – in which the idea of the subject
as a fundamental instance is tacitly linked to its subjugation by an external or internal
power. Time and again, the autonomy of the individual subject is bought by concessions
to heteronomy and submission.
It is one of the merits of modernism, defined here as a late modern self-criticism of
modernity, to have recognized and explored this dialectic between autonomy and
submission. Auch Einer (1879), an almost forgotten novel by the Young Hegelian
philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer, initiates this self-criticism by revealing to what
extent Hegel’s subject depends on chance and the contingency of the objective world.
Vischer’s method is a paradoxical, self-reflexive ‘thinking against one’s self ’,1 which he
applies whenever he turns the satire of his novel against his own Hegelian premises.
His Young Hegelian critique is intensified and radicalized by Stirner, Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche, who reveal the other side of the Hegelian coin: the particularity and
contingency of all subjective projects – along with chance and dream, the body and
nature as irreconcilable but indispensable companions of Spirit. Following the Young
Hegelians and some Romantics,2 Nietzsche in particular emphasizes the role of
contingency and casts doubts upon the idea of historical necessity underlying Hegel’s
system. To him, as to Hegel’s rebellious disciples, this system appears as a contingent
construct: as the particular project of a contingent individual.
This late modern rejection of Cartesian, Kantian and Hegelian aspirations towards
universally valid knowledge is inherent in Kierkegaard’s and Sartre’s thought in
which, as Kierkegaard himself points out in conjunction with Hegel’s reading of
Socrates, ‘the person of Socrates is essential’.3 This tendency towards particularization
also characterizes Sartre’s approach which is marked by the refusal of the subjective
alibi underlying the metaphysical systems (Descartes’, Hegel’s) and by the focus on
the individual subject’s political, epistemological and ethical responsibility. To the
existentialist philosopher this subject appears as fundamental and subjugated at the
65
same time: ‘Whenever freedom is at stake, Sartre’s thought is constantly aware of

submission, of a possible or real experience of over-determination, of violence. The
possibility of submission and concrete violence thus appears as the permanent reverse
of Sartrian freedom.’4
In view of this dialectic between freedom and subjugation, Sartre insists on the
autonomy and self-determination of individual subjects. Having rejected Cartesian
and Hegelian systems, all of which tend to suppress individual responsibility, he pleads
in favour of an autonomous individual subject and condemns all experiments with the
unconscious, chance and dream. He believes that such experiments call into question
subjectivity as conscious action. This is why he criticizes André Breton’s surrealism,
whose experiments with the unconscious and ‘automatic writing’ he considers as a
threat to autonomous and rational action. It will become clear that the drawback of
Sartrian autonomy is a repressive attitude towards nature and sexuality which makes
itself felt in Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée (1938). Subjective autonomy is preserved at
the cost of the subject’s nature: a fatal sacrifice anticipated by Descartes and Kant.
In this perspective, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory may be considered
as an attempt to mediate between subjectivity as reason and subjectivity as nature. In
many ways, this theory is a return to the Young Hegelian problematic mapped out by
Vischer in his critique of Hegel, some of which is an attempt to reconcile nature and
mind (Spirit): ‘Man’s domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost
always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken.’5 This maxim is
completed by a more concise remark in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: ‘Ratio without
mimesis is self-negating.’6 However, the attempt to mediate between reason and artistic
mimesis turns out to be as aporetic as Sartre’s attempt to break out of the contradiction
between subjective freedom and over-determination. For Adorno’s conception of a
non-theoretical theory geared towards the mimesis of art contradicts the very idea of
theory and of a theoretical subject who cannot afford to replace theoretical argument
by essayistic or paratactic writing.7
Adorno’s essayistic style, sprinkled with paradoxes, comes close to that of some
modernist writers like Robert Musil, Italo Svevo and Hermann Broch, who reacted to
the ambivalences, aporias and crises of their times with attempts to save the individual
subject. Like Adorno, these writers tried to turn the symptoms of crisis – ambivalence,
doubt, irony – into instruments of criticism and put these at the disposal of a new,
invigorated individual subject. The idea that their attempts could be of some relevance
to the postmodern problematic, because they avoid metaphysical illusions as well as
ideological dogmas, will be made plausible in what follows.
Together with Adorno’s philosophy and Freud’s psychoanalysis, modernist novels
announce a postmodern problematic in which the notion of subject is frequently
considered as an illusion: as a euphemism for subjugation. What Freud has to say about
the subject in mass society sounds like an answer to Adorno’s remark in Minima
Moralia that ‘to think that the individual is being liquidated without trace is over-
optimistic’:8 ‘His emotions become extraordinarily intensified, while his intellectual
ability becomes markedly reduced, both processes being evidently in the direction of
an approximation to the other individuals in the group.’9 Hermann Broch chooses a
similar vocabulary when describing the ‘dozing’ mass individual who follows
Subjectivity Between Metaphysics and Modernism 67
unconscious impulses without reflection: ‘He loses his individual human physiognomy;
whenever doziness [das Dahindämmern] overcomes him, man turns into mass.’10
It is not the empirical basis of such diagnostics that matters here, but their
symptomatic value. They announce a postmodern era in which the position of the
individual subject appears as a blank usurped by illusions, ideologies and determinisms.
In this context, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, a late modern novel on the
threshold of postmodernity, will be commented on at the end of this chapter. It
illustrates some of Freud’s and Foucault’s mechanisms of over-determination which
usurp individual freedom.
1 Subjectivity from Descartes and Kant to Fichte: ‘Monsieur Teste’
The idea that Descartes’s cogito introduced individual subjectivity into philosophy is
both right and wrong. It is right in the sense that Descartes locates the criterion of truth
in the individual subject – and no longer in Plato’s objective world of pure forms. Yet
the idea is wrong because the founder of modern rationalism defines the subject-actant
underlying the cogito as the addressee of a powerful divine addresser (destinateur,
Greimas). He thus enhances and at the same time reduces the role of the subjective
instance.
At a crucial point of A Discourse on the Method, it becomes clear how strong the
subject’s dependence on the addresser is:
For, in the first place, even the rule which I stated above that I held – namely, that
the things that we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true – is only
certain because God is or exists, because He is a perfect being, and because
everything that is in us comes from Him.11
The actantial autonomy of the subiectum cogitans is thus called into question insofar as
it owes all of its modalities (especially those concerning knowing and doing) to its
addresser.
In this respect, Descartes’s subjugated subject hardly differs from that of orthodox
Marxists who speak in the name of Marx or Marxism and seriously believe ‘that only
Marxism can explain . . . etc.’ In Descartes’s case, the submission to the addresser is
relative in the sense that he imagines an internalized God and refrains from appealing
to the Church or to the Bible as mediating authorities.
In his comments on Descartes and Kant, Gert Kimmerle is well aware of the subject’s
role as addressee in Cartesian philosophy: ‘This is what the methodological necessity of
the proof of the existence of God, which is not external to Cartesian thought, but forms
its innermost core, consists of.’12 The proof is at the core of this philosophy, one could
argue with Greimas, because it produces the addresser who guarantees all modalities of
the thinking subject. In other words, the Cartesian actantial scheme is based on a kind
of tautology insofar as the narrating subject produces its own addresser who is meant
to guarantee the truth of its discourse and to protect it against the nihilism of the malin
génie acting as counter-addresser.
However, the semiotic model merely clarifies and illustrates what has been known
to philosophers for a long time: namely that the divine instance of the Discourse is to
be considered as a fiction and a substitute for the lost medieval and Christian unity of
consciousness and world. This is how Christian Link describes this loss:
It is the break-up of this last, temporary unity between I and world, which
radicalizes the crisis beyond its own premises to such a degree that the ‘Subject’ –
and no longer the imponderable world – plays the central role in the philosophical
triad of God, World and Man. Its reason – absolved from all indebtedness to the
world – is now turned into an instrument used to realize the modern dream of
man as ‘maître et possesseur de la nature’.13
On the one hand, this description is correct because it locates the human subject at
the centre of the scene and assumes that the divine addresser is a construction or
fiction; on the other hand, it is misleading because it fails to recognize the extent to
which the individual subject of philosophy submits to its own construction. By
following an addresser who is primarily thought or spirit, it can only define itself as a
thinking subject. It is ‘a rational soul’, an ‘âme raisonnable’,14 as Descartes puts it in his
Discourse, and a ‘thinking thing’, a ‘chose qui pense’,15 as he adds in his Meditations. As
an image of God it stands above matter; as human existence, as a mortal being it is tied
up with it.
This dilemma of Cartesian rationalism is recognized by Kimmerle who points out:
‘Cartesian dualism [. . .] is not, as is often maintained, the simple (and simplistic)
dualism of body and spirit, but a much more complex and multi-layered dualism of an
autonomous, self-contained spiritual being and an indissoluble unity of body and
spirit.’16 However, it is precisely this contradictory dualism, inherent in the submission
to the divine spirit as addresser, which entails the subject’s self-negation as body and
sensual existence: ‘The prerequisite was the abstraction of the thinking I from all kinds
of sensual existence, which the thinking I itself is made of.’17 This is the reason why it
does not make sense to speak of an ‘apparent’ submission of the individual subject to
the fictive addresser. For this submission is real in all respects and could be compared
with the submission of the Freudian ‘I’ to the ‘super-ego’ (which may cause neuroses).
The Cartesian submission is as problematical insofar as it subordinates the subject
as body and nature to pure thought. It entails the latter’s domination over body and
nature and leads to the reification of both. Charles Taylor, who speaks of Descartes’
‘disengaged reason’, because his ratio is detached from nature, describes this process of
detachment as reification: ‘We have to objectify the world, including our own bodies,
and that means to come to see them mechanistically and functionally, in the same way
that an uninvolved external observer would.’18 Domination over nature leads, as
Adorno and Horkheimer observe in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, to domination
over one’s self.
Whatever is not spirit or thought is excluded from the realm of the cogito. In the
Meditations, bodies are considered exclusively as objects of thought, not of sensual
perception, for ‘even bodies are not perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagining,
but are perceived only by the mind.’19 This tendency to subordinate nature to conceptual
thought also asserts itself in the metaphysical systems of Kant, Fichte and Hegel. In
spite of their differences (especially between Kant and Hegel) they seem to agree in
their view that the individual subject is primarily ratio and not physis, i.e. sensual
perception. In this respect Hegel is right when he considers the Cartesian cogito as the
beginning of modern thought: ‘René Descartes is in fact the real founder of modern
philosophy, insofar as the latter turns thought into the basic principle.’20
This also applies to Kant, but within the framework of a radically secularized
actantial model without a divine addresser. The subject of philosophy no longer needs
to rely on a transcendental instance in order to be able to make well-founded statements.
The Copernican turn brought about by Kant – from the empirical world to the subject
of philosophy – and considered by him as the basis of objective knowledge (‘our
knowledge of objects’, Kant) gives birth to a new subjectivity. Reality as such or ‘the
thing in itself ’, argues Kant, cannot be known, and objective knowledge in this sense is
impossible. For the a priori foundations and modi of human experience, the
transcendental categories of space, time and causality are subjective.
Space and time do not exist in themselves, but only in relation to a human subject:
‘Time is therefore merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is
always sensible, that is, so far as we are affected by objects), but in itself, apart from the
subject, it is nothing.’21 The entire cosmic order would collapse if subjectivity as a
foundation and condition of our knowledge disappeared, and Kant explains ‘that, if we
remove our subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general,
then the entire constitution and all relations of objects in space and time, nay space and
time themselves, would vanish’.22
These explanations are ambiguous insofar as they could mean either that we can
only perceive objects and events in space and time (a plausible idea) or that the human
subject is responsible for the world order in the sense of Radical Constructivism. But
does the sun that comes into being and becomes extinct not have its own non-human
time? Does it exist in space and time only because we are aware of it?
Starting from the idea ‘that everything that exists is either subject or object’,23 as
Thomas Nenon puts it, Kant has to deny that the subjective categories of space and
time belong to the objective world and base the world order on the subject. Otfried
Höffe adds: ‘He not only overcomes rationalism, empiricism and scepticism; more
importantly, he defines a new position of the subject towards objectivity. Knowledge is
no longer determined by its object, but the object by our knowledge.’24 At this point, the
ambiguity of all brands of constructivism comes to the fore. The constructivist does
admit that ‘the thing in itself ’ cannot be known, but suggests at the same time that his
(subjective) constructions are the only possible ones.
The ambiguity of Kant’s concept of subject is due to the fact that, although he limits
subjective knowledge in time and space and removes the ‘thing in itself ’ from the
subject’s cognitive sphere, he proclaims human subjectivity to be the basis of the
perceptible world order. Peter Baumann describes the relationship between Descartes
and Kant as follows: ‘Kant’s egologic conception of the time and space order, defined as
“formal perception”, appears from a Cartesian viewpoint as human presumptuousness.’25
In Descartes’ case the almighty addresser guaranteed humanity’s conception of time
and space.
The idea that Kant did not only attempt to limit the scope of human understanding
(a limitation negated later on by Fichte and Hegel), but at the same time envisaged a
new, secular foundation of subjectivity, is to be found at the beginning of Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Representation. According to Schopenhauer, this innovation is
due to the fact that:
the essential, and hence universal, forms of every object, namely space, time, and
causality, can be found and fully known, starting from the subject, even without
the knowledge of the object itself, that is to say, in Kant’s language, they reside a
priori in our consciousness. To have discovered this is one of Kant’s chief merits,
and it is a very great one.26
This merit consists mainly in the fact that, in obeying the laws of reason, the human
subject no longer relies on a transcendental addresser, but exclusively on its own
insights. By introducing, in his Critique of Pure Reason, synthetic judgements a priori,
judgements that are independent of experience27 and of superhuman guarantees, Kant
founds a new autonomy of the subject which he subsequently extends to ethics and
aesthetics.
Towards the end of this work, it becomes clear that this newly found autonomy is
the result of a secularization process initiated by Descartes and continued by Kant,
who deduces the validity of moral actions from the individual subject’s reason: ‘As far
as practical reason is entitled to lead us, we shall not look upon actions as obligatory
because they are the commands of God, but look upon them as divine commands
because we have an inner obligation to follow them.’28 Kant’s decisive step is the
internalization of moral obligation, which is based on the synthetic judgement a priori
according to which every rational being has to acknowledge and obey the categorical
imperative. Kant’s ethics are based on principles ‘which a priori determine and make
necessary our doing and not doing’.29 The actions of the human subject are autonomous
insofar as they conform to the laws of reason inherent in the subject and recognized by
the latter as universally valid. This means that the subject is autonomous inasmuch as
it is rational. Kant opposes all kinds of heteronomy arising from non-rational impulses
such as passion, egoism or inclination.
If (to the dismay of some philosophers) we reconstruct this line of argument as a
discourse based on an actantial scheme, we find that autonomy turns into heteronomy
as soon as it is considered as a submission of the individual will to an abstract and
ascetic reason – a kind of Freudian super-ego.30
The following passage from the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
reveals the ambiguities and interdependencies of Kant’s abstract and infraindividual
actants: ‘But here we are concerned with objective practical laws and, consequently,
with the relation of the will to itself so far as it is determined by reason alone, in which
case whatever has reference to anything empirical is necessarily excluded; since if
reason of itself alone determines the conduct [. . .], it must necessarily do so a priori.’31
On the semiotic or actantial level, the question arises who exactly acts (‘determines the
action’): will or reason? Kant’s answer would have to be: the will as reason, as thought a
priori. If this is correct then it becomes clear that all the other actants, which deal with
the ‘empirical world’, but are nevertheless crucial to the subject’s decision-making, are
ignored. Eventually, Kant’s reason resembles the Freudian super-ego which subjugates,
in the name of culture, an ‘I’ moved by the id.
On the whole, it seems that Kant’s epistemological and ethical attempts to redefine
subjective autonomy and responsibility are ambiguous. On the one hand, the human
subject appears as an actor independent of external authorities and capable of
reconstructing the world under transcendental conditions a priori in space, time and
causality; on the other hand, it appears as exposed to heteronomous control by an
abstract reason which reduces it to pure thought by separating it from its empirical and
natural components. It is not by chance that the question concerning the a priori
conditions of thought is crucial to Kant. For his aim is to abstract from the subjects’
experience in order to make them submit to general principles.
In this respect, Kant agrees with Descartes. Both of them could have adopted the
maxim of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, according to which the mind does not deal with
individuals: ‘L’ esprit ne doit pas s’ occuper des personnes. De personas non curandum.’32
What Valéry says about Monsieur Teste is also true of the Cartesian and Kantian
subject: ‘un témoin tout intelligence’.33 This reduction to spirit and intellect is a kind of
subjugation: not only because it neglects the natural components of the mind (i.e.
physis and psyche), but also because it dissolves the particularity of the individual mind
in abstractions.
The tendency to negate body and nature links Kant to Fichte. Hartmut and Gernot
Böhme, who attempt to ‘read Fichte with Freud’,34 emphasize the intellectual asceticism
of both philosophers: ‘The body as the Other of the object and the subject is negated by
both Kant and Fichte.’35 The early Fichte sounds like a precursor of Monsieur Teste
when, in his efforts to bring about a ‘unity between subject and object’,36 he maps out a
‘Theory of science’ (Wissenschaftslehre) and defines it as a closed system to which
nothing can be added and which does not tolerate anything outside itself: ‘Science is a
system, or it is complete, when not a single sentence can be added, and this is a positive
proof that not a single sentence is missing in the system.’37 This ‘Theory of science’ was
meant to become the basis of all existing sciences.
It is not surprising that a discourse, which brings about this kind of closure, turns
out to be both monologic and monistic. It is monologic because it identifies ideologically
with reality (cf. Chapter I, 1, d.) and does not tolerate any competing discourses; it is
monistic because it only recognizes the ‘I’ as individual subject of a particular (idealist)
philosophy and does not admit anything located outside this subject. What Fichte has
to say about the self-created subject could be regarded as a prime example of the
idealist subject as a basic given, as fundamentum mundi:
The ‘I’ posits itself and it exists, thanks to this positing, by virtue of itself; and
conversely, the ‘I’ is and posits its being by virtue of its mere being. – It is
simultaneously the actor and the product of its action, the acting instance and
that which is produced by its action; action and deed are one and the same
thing; and therefore the: ‘I am’ is the expression of an action as deed [Thathandlung];
but also the only possible one, as follows from the entire Theory of science
[Wissenschaftslehre].38
This passage not only contains the idealist credo concerning the subject as a
fundamental instance; it is at the same time a negation of the object as alterity. This
negation is confirmed several pages later: ‘Everything that is only exists insofar as it is
contained in the “I”, and outside the “I” there is nothing.’39 It follows from all this that
even the empirical ‘I’ is eventually dissolved in the absolute ‘I’: ‘The “I” is meant to be
identical with itself and nevertheless be opposed to itself. But it is identical with respect
to consciousness, consciousness is a unit; but within this consciousness the absolute “I”
is posited as indivisible.’40 In other words: the idealistically sublimated empirical ‘I’
suffers the same fate as empirical reality as a whole in the sense ‘that the entire system
of objects exists for the “I” only by virtue of the “I” ’.41 This also applies to the empirical
‘I’ and it now becomes clear ‘why the unity of thought and being is called [by Fichte]
pure knowledge’,42 as Hans Rademacher puts it.
In view of this self-empowerment of the ‘I’, it is hardly surprising that, among
Fichte-scholars, it is regarded as an ambiguous instance: as both divine and human.
However, there seems to be a consensus that Fichte ‘projects the image of God into
man, thus turning the world into raw material whose only task consists in helping man
to become an image of God’.43 With respect to Descartes and Kant, the pretensions of
the philosophical subject are thus projected into dizzying heights. On the actantial
level it now parades as its own addresser and creator of the real world.
This excessiveness of the Fichtean subject, which is only surpassed by Nietzsche’s
superman (cf. Chapter II, 4), is plausibly explained by Hartmut and Gernot Böhme in
relation to psychoanalytic theories of narcissism. In this context, the apparent opposites
‘megalomania’ and ‘anxiety’ are dialectically connected:
This is where anxiety appears, which makes Fichte’s philosophy tick: namely
that strangeness, otherness exists, a factual block. The fear of strangeness and
otherness, of that which we are not, but which we depend on nonetheless, has to be
driven out – in the same way as the infant drives out the frightening experience
that the mother’s breast or its own excrements are not itself by recomposing the
narcissistic ‘Almighty I’.44
Isolated as it is, this psychoanalytic explanation is insufficient because it glosses over

the political and economic context: the nationalist, petty bourgeois ideology that
makes Fichte (who thus anticipates National Socialism and Stalinism)45 prohibit all
individual contacts with foreigners: ‘All contacts with foreigners have to be prohibited
and made impossible to the subjects.’46 Once more, the dialectic between the
‘fundamental’ and the ‘subjugated’ subject comes to the fore. The definition of the
abstract, thinking subject as a dominant instance unwilling to tolerate anything outside
itself, can only produce ‘subjugated subjects’ in empirical reality. It will appear that the
closure of Fichte’s nation state is a replica of his closed philosophical system.
In a complementary fashion, otherness is sacrificed to homogeneity and oneness in
Fichte’s Speeches to the German Nation. Fichte, who did not have to worry about the
empirical and scientific status of linguistics and semantic classifications, surprises the
contemporary reader by declaring in his fourth speech that ‘the Scandinavians can
undoubtedly be defined as Germans and are therefore, for all means and purposes,
included in our considerations’.47 Having ignored the Finns and subsumed the
Scandinavians under the collective actant ‘Germans’ (which is analogous to the
‘absolute I’), Fichte continues the semiotic annexation process to the point where
the French, the Italians and the Spanish can also be incorporated into the collective
actant ‘Germans’: ‘One should not attribute too much importance to the fact that, in the
conquered countries, those of German origin mixed with the aboriginal population;
for the victors, rulers and makers of the nation resulting from this mixture were in any
case the people of Germanic origin.’48 According to this ideological construction, the
French turn into Franks, the Spanish into Visigoths.
What matters here, is the train of thought that follows from this construction.
Spaniards, Italians and Frenchmen may be of Germanic origin (in Fichte’s discourse),
but they have given up their original Germanic language and are currently using an
artificial Latin idiom which – according to Fichte – is not their own, is highly abstract
and therefore prevents them from expressing their true emotions. This accounts for the
crucial cultural difference between the Germans and ‘the other nations of Germanic
origins’, i.e. the French, the Italians and the Spanish: ‘This difference appeared
immediately after the first break-up of the original tribe and is due to the fact that the
German speaks a living language driven by the force of nature, whereas the other
Germanic tribes speak a language that is superficially alive, but dead at the root.’49
As in the Wissenschaftslehre, the basic idea here is the narcissistic reconstruction of
unity on a Germanic basis: of an apparently European unity from which all kinds of
alterity – especially the Romance, but also the Slav, the Celtic and the Finno-Ugrian
elements – have been monologically excluded. Here, more than anywhere else, the
domination of the idealist subject asserts itself, and it becomes clear to what extent
Fichte’s political writings are part and parcel of his philosophical monologue. For none
of the other idealist systems sheds so much light on the dialectical nexus between the
subject’s monological domination and its subjugation as a political subject in Fichte’s
‘closed state’ from which the Other is banned.
2 From Hegel to Marxism: Omnipotence and impotence

of the subject
In spite of the complexity underlying the transition from Hegelianism to Marxism and
to Marxism-Leninism, the basic arguments of this section can be summed up in a few
words: the cancelling of the Kantian opposition between subject and object, made
possible by Hegel’s category of totality, leads to an unconditional submission of the
individual subject under state authority – both in Hegelianism and in Marxism-
Leninism. Like the idealists, Marxist materialists try to convince the subdued subjects
that their insight into the political necessity sanctioned by the state is their real freedom:
the freedom of the rational citizen or that of the true socialist.
The fact that Hegel considers his own systematic philosophy as an overcoming of
Cartesian, Kantian or Fichtean dualism is a well-known aspect of his idealism. He sees
reason as the kind of thought that cannot acknowledge dualism because it does not
recognize anything outside itself. This is why he speaks, in conjunction with Fichte’s
‘Theory of science’ (Wissenschaftslehre), of a ‘completely insufficient externality’ and

explains: ‘The “I” is related to an Other, then again an Other, etc. into infinity.’50
To Hegel this seems irrational and hence unsatisfactory, and he blames Fichte for
‘not arriving at reason as the fulfilled, real unity of subject and object or of the “I” and
the “Non-I”; as in the case of Kant, it is an Ought, a goal, a belief that the two are one,
but a goal the attainment of which contains a contradiction, as with Kant, and has no
present reality’.51 He blames both Fichte and Kant for merely postulating the unity of
subject and object without actually bringing it about: ‘Fichte stops at an Ought; however,
like Kant, who presents the idea of unification as a belief, Fichte also ends with a
belief.’52 It is Hegel’s basic project to correct this flaw by relying on a totalizing thought
which cancels Kant’s ‘thing in itself ’ (already criticized by Fichte) as well as Fichte’s
mere aspiration towards unity.53
What is missing in Hegel is not only Kant’s noetic restraint, but also Fichte’s noetic
aggressiveness, which characterizes the narcissistic subject of an idealism committed
to unity. In Hegel’s system, this ideal unity is realized thanks to the intervention of a
supra-individual actant who helps the individual subject (especially on the level of
modalities) to appropriate all of reality and to bring about the unity between the ‘I’ and
the world: the World Spirit (Weltgeist).
As a successor to Plato’s soul and Ariostotle’s nous,54 Hegel’s World Spirit appears as
the mythical subject-actant who guarantees the coherence of universal history and of
Hegel’s narrative (as métarécit in the sense of Lyotard). For Hegel, it is of greatest
importance to prove that the history of humanity ‘has been a rational process; that the
history in question has constituted the rational necessary course of the World-Spirit –
that Spirit whose nature is always one and the same, but which unfolds this its one
nature in the phenomena of the World’s existence’.55 Synonymous or almost synonymous
with ‘God’,56 Hegel’s World Spirit becomes the new addresser of those collective and
individual subjects who act in his name in world history as a narrative. Descartes’
transcendental addresser is thus turned into a world-immanent principle which
overcomes the French philosopher’s rationalist dualism – in a somewhat Spinozistic
manner, as Hegel himself points out.57
It belongs to the spirit’s essence to be self-contained and to acknowledge nothing
outside itself:
Matter has its essence out of itself; Spirit is self-contained existence (Bei-sich-selbst-
seyn). Now this is Freedom exactly. For if I am dependent, my being is referred to
something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external.
I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself.58
It becomes clear at this stage that, in spite of all the differences between the two
philosophers, differences over-emphasized by Hegel in his critique, Fichte and Hegel
have a lot in common: especially their monomaniac rejection of the Other, of an
alterity that resists annexation and demands dialogue.
One is reminded of Plotinus, the neo-Platonic philosopher, when Hegel writes
about the divine spirit: ‘Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity: its activity is
the transcending of immediate, simple, unreflected existence – the negation of that
existence, and the returning into itself.’59 This spirit, functioning as general addresser
in Hegel’s historical narrative, inspires the spirits of nations as collective actants
and those of ordinary citizens as individual actants alike: ‘The principles of the
successive phases of Spirit that animate the Nations in a necessitated gradation, are
themselves only steps in the development of the one universal Spirit, which through
them elevates and completes itself to a self-comprehending totality.’60 ‘Totality’ is here
the key concept.
Reason as totalizing thought and as a fundamental modality of spirit (in the sense
of Greimas’s savoir faire) offers to the subject in all its manifestations the possibility of
becoming one with the World Spirit and dwelling ‘within itself ’. This is why, in his
Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel speaks of ‘reason as self-conscious spirit’.61 For
Hegel’s individual subject it is therefore crucial to attain a degree of self-awareness that
enables it to feel identical with the World Spirit and world history.
In this context, it is easier to understand Hegel’s critique of German Romanticism
and of romantic irony, so thoroughly commented on by Otto Pöggeler. The romantics,
especially the Schlegel brothers, are heirs to Fichte in the sense that they also ‘fail to
solve the problem of the relationship between the pure and the empirical “I” ’,62 as
Pöggeler puts it. The romantic attempt to bring about a unity between subject and
object does not go beyond longing and yearning and remains a dream. It finds its
expression in fragment and irony, but never attains a dialectical totality and is therefore
unable, according to Hegel, to unite subject and object, thought and being.
While romantic irony expresses ‘the negative power of subjectivity as individuality
and as artistic genius of the empirical “I” ’,63 thus presenting the irreconcilable individual
subject as its central figure, Hegel sees this irony in a different light: as a symptom of
individual limitation and incomprehension in view of the World Spirit’s historical
grand design. Pöggeler sums up Hegel’s position when he explains: ‘To the subjectivist
dialectic of irony, Hegel opposes the dialectic of the World Spirit, which negates and
absorbs all individuals.’64 The romantic subject, who persists in its Fichtean nostalgia,
thus negating reality in an abstract manner, is exposed to a different kind of irony in
Hegel’s system where its triviality is revealed and ironically commented on in the
perspective of the World Spirit (Hegel’s addresser).
Considering this Hegelian negation of the individual subject by the mythical actant
World Spirit, once again the question arises concerning the actantial model of Hegel’s
discourse, a model that only a thorough and lengthy analysis could reproduce in all its
details.65 In the present context, a schematic description focusing on the divergences
from Descartes, Kant and Fichte might be sufficient.
The World Spirit as a historically immanent, secularized divinity becomes the
addresser of such collective subjects as the spirits of nations (cf. supra) which, as agents
of the World Spirit, turn into addressers of individual subjects. The object in this model
is the realization of the Idea against all obstacles inherent in unformed Matter as anti-
addresser and in non-rational Nature as anti-subject or compound of anti-subjects such
as passion, dream and chance.
Right at the beginning of his Philosophy of History, Hegel opposes the freedom of
spirit to the gravity of matter: ‘As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand,
we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom.’66 The final victory
of the addresser and his actants is teleologically predetermined in Hegel’s discourse

insofar as the spirit penetrates nature and matter by conceptualizing their laws and
thereby acquires the power to form them:
This formal conception finds actual existence in Spirit; which has the History of
the World for its theatre, its possession, and the sphere of its realization. It is not of
such nature as to be tossed to and fro amid the superficial play of accidents, but is
rather the absolute arbiter of things; entirely unmoved by contingencies, which,
indeed, it applies and manages for its own purposes.67
This means that the spirit as logos is the incarnation of a necessity that finds its
expression in the Idea.
The key modality enabling the World Spirit to penetrate reality, and to empower
other collective and individual subjects to participate in its essence, is reason, which
Hegel often uses as a synonym for the general addresser: ‘For reason is the
comprehension of the Divine work.’68 He writes about this rational insight in his
Outlines of the Philosophy of Right that it ‘reconciles us to actuality – the reconciliation
which philosophy affords to those in whom there has once arisen an inner voice
bidding them to comprehend.’69
The nexus of subjectivity, objectivity and their reconciliation as subjective
appropriation appears in another passage of this Hegelian work:
Thus subjectivity sometimes means something wholly particular, and at other

times something with the highest justification, since everything which I am to
recognize has also the task of becoming mine and attaining its validity in me.
Subjectivity is insatiably greedy to concentrate and drown everything in this
simple spring of the pure I.70
However, this subjective appropriation of reality as reconciliation with the objective

world is fiction. In reality – and this is amply demonstrated by Hegel’s philosophy of
history – the individual subject is subordinated to the national spirit (Volksgeist) as
collective actant and together with the latter incorporated into the mythical actant
called World Spirit. This is how Hegel assesses the position of the individual subject:
‘For he finds the being of the people to which he belongs an already established, firm
world – objectively present to him – with which he has to incorporate himself.’71 As in
the philosophies of Descartes, Kant and Fichte, the ambivalence of the subject in
Hegel’s thought consists in the fact that its knowledge, self-knowledge and self-
realization all boil down to self-renunciation and subordination.
The self-renunciation of the individual subject is due in Hegel’s system – as in other
idealist philosophies – to the exclusion of nature from the idealist discourse and to its
suppression within the subject. The fact that, in spite of his aspirations to total knowledge,
the idealist thinker fails to include nature by reconciling it with conceptual thought,
was observed early on by the Young Hegelian Friedrich Theodor Vischer. He blames
Hegel for not having succeeded in deducing nature as alterity ‘from the Idea’.72 In the
following section, the consequences of this critique will be examined.
In her analysis of Hegel’s notion of subjectivity, Petra Braitling comments on the

role of irreconcilable nature within the philosopher’s system. She confirms Vischer’s
objection that the Idea (as self-realization of the World Spirit) has ‘created an alterity
that escapes its conceptual comprehension’73 and adds: ‘If that were the case, this
would obviously amount to the complete renunciation of its absolute status.’74 This
is the neuralgic point also aimed at by Vischer’s critique. If the Hegelian system is
obliged to tolerate an alterity that is external to it, Hegel can no longer argue that he has
overcome the subject-object dualism he questions in the philosophies of his
predecessors.
This is how Braitling sees it: ‘The Hegelian concept of nature is thus marked by an
essential dualism between a real outside and an ideal inside. What is more, Hegel sees
in this discrepancy between the two spheres the deficient character of nature, which
subsequently justifies the necessary transition to spirit.’75 However, this discursive
manoeuvre fails to reconcile nature and spirit, and Braitling rightly concludes that
‘nature is thus heteronomously defined by the Idea.’76
Parallel to nature, which is heteronomously over-determined by spirit, the individual
subject is incorporated by the spirit of the nation (cf. supra) and subjected to the
authority of the modern state. The individual subject who, as a moral instance aims at
the abstract Good (in the sense of a particular will), has to agree to the cancellation of
his particularity by the Good or Sittlichkeit of the state:
The objective ethical order, which comes on the scene in place of good in the
abstract, is substance made concrete by subjectivity as infinite form. Hence it posits
within itself distinctions whose specific character is thereby determined by the
concept, and which endow the ethical order with a stable content which is
necessary for itself and whose existence [Bestehen] is exalted above subjective
opinion and caprice. These distinctions are laws and institutions that have being in
and for themselves.77
They alone are real; by contrast, the aspirations of the individual subject are abstract,
lack reality and therefore have to be cancelled and incorporated (aufgehoben) in the
laws of the collective actant ‘state’.
Hegel’s expression ‘faule Existenz’ or ‘worthless existence’,78 which refers to all
that has no function in the project of a ‘History of the World’79 or in the World Spirit’s
(i.e. Hegel’s) narrative programme, also refers to the hopes, fears and aspirations
of the individual subject whom Adorno defends against Hegel.80 This subject is
volatilized in Hegel’s system, as in the philosophies of Descartes, Kant and Fichte,
into a conceptual entity and subordinated to the reason of the State. Michael Rosen
chooses the right expression when he speaks of ‘Hegel’s purified self whose activity
constitutes the self-development of Thought’.81 Once it has been deprived of its
particularity and singularity, this ‘purified I’ can declare its identity with state reason
and indirectly with the World Spirit. ‘In practice’, Hermann Schmitz explains, ‘this
means that the will comes to terms with the existing contents and circumstances and
appropriates them in such a way that they no longer appear to it as constraints imposed
on its aspirations.’82 With the help of totalizing reason – conceivable as a modality of the
‘free’ mind – the seemingly autonomous subject is imperceptibly transformed into a

submitting subiectum.
The question remains how state reason as an expression of the World Spirit and as
the ultima ratio of reason closes Hegel’s system. Can one go beyond this kind of reason?
The Marxists Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Pierre Macherey believe that one can. Art,
religion and philosophy, they argue, announce, as forms of the Absolute Spirit (Hegel),
which reflects upon the evolution of the World Spirit, an overcoming of the state:
‘Philosophy has not only the task to think the state, i.e. to endow it with the status of an
ideal and unsurpassable rationality: it also has to think the End of the state, i.e. the
conditions of its overcoming.’83 However, it is by no means certain that this overcoming
as dépassement (Lefebvre, Macherey) is actually inherent in Hegel’s system, as the
authors believe. But there is no doubt that it was envisaged by Marx, Engels and the
Marxists and discussed even after the collapse of European communism.
Marx’s basic idea is clear and is explained in his early comments on Hegel’s
philosophy. He queries Hegel’s sublimation of the individual subject into pure spirit
and redefines man, for example, in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, as an active material
being, i.e. as thinking nature. It is striking to what extent the young Marx follows
Vischer’s critique by emphasizing the natural and nature-bound character of thought,
when he remarks that in Hegel’s philosophy ‘not real man as such and therefore not
nature is made subject – for man is human nature – but only man’s abstraction, his self-
awareness (Selbstbewußtein)’.84
This critique yields the insight that, in Hegel’s system, alienation between subject and
object is only overcome in and by thought, that is without changing the reified material
conditions that cause human alienation: ‘Since Hegel knows man only as self-
consciousness, the alienated object, man’s alienated essence is only consciousness, only
the idea of alienation, its abstract and hence empty and unreal expression, the negation.’85
It is undoubtedly Marx’s merit to have discovered, together with the Young
Hegelians, the human being as physical, corporeal nature and to have made it the
centre of his critique, thus confronting idealism from Kant to Hegel with its most
serious flaw. Starting from a critique of the idealist concept of subjectivity, Marxism as
philosophy, social science and revolutionary movement tried to overcome the
alienation between subject and object by a radical change of the material conditions.
This change was also meant to include the state and its reason. Both were to wither
away in a classless society. However, the expression ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’
coined by Marx and Engels points to the contradiction between the lofty revolutionary
ideals and the limits of political action. For who else was supposed to bring about this
dictatorship (a kind of historical purgatory) if not the Communist Party founded by
the authors of the Manifesto? As early as in Marx’s and Engels’s writings, this well-
organized collective actant appears as the ‘avant-garde’ of the proletariat, whose
modalities of knowing, willing and enabling (savoir, vouloir, pouvoir, Greimas) it
influences, controls and (finally) usurps. In the last resort, it is not the proletariat that
acts in the name of History as its addresser, but the Party in the name of both.
In an article published later on in History and Class Consciousness under the title
‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation’, Georg Lukács explains what
really matters:
To adapt the tactics of the Communist Party to those facets of the life of the class
where – even though in false form – a genuine class consciousness appears to be
fighting its way to the surface, does not at all imply an unconditional willingness to
implement the momentary desires of the masses. On the contrary, just because the
party aspires to the highest point that is objectively and revolutionarily attainable –
and the momentary desires of the masses are often the most important aspect, the
most vital symptom of this – it is sometimes forced to adopt a stance opposed to
that of the masses; it must show them the way by rejecting their immediate
wishes.86
At the end of the day, Lukács concludes, the masses will understand the Party’s view
and approve it.
What matters in this passage is the distribution of the modalities knowing, willing,
enabling (Greimas: cf. supra). It can be shown that the Party as collective subject or
actant reserves the right to define all of these modalities because it alone can distinguish
right from wrong knowledge, the right from the wrong form of will and is alone able to
fix the moment of historical or revolutionary action (i.e. the ‘enabling’ moment). It thus
usurps the narrative function of the collective actant ‘proletariat’: both on the discursive
level of enunciation (énonciation) and on that of narrative action (énoncé). Lukács’s
expression ‘the highest point that is revolutionarily and objectively attainable’ indicates
that we are dealing here with a Hegelian usurpation. The function of the Hegelian state
as expression of a historical ‘national spirit’ is now fulfilled by the Party as ‘avant-garde
of the proletariat’. Its consciousness is deemed objective because the Party and its
ideologues rely on Hegel’s central category of totality in order to assess the revolutionary
process. As in Hegel’s philosophy, discourse and reality are thus monologically identified.
In this situation, individual and collective subjects have only one option: to define
their freedom within this mechanism of identification. Following Hegel and Lukács,
the Marxists-Leninists consider individual freedom as an insight into objective
necessity – as described by the Party. In its form as materialist Hegelianism, the Soviet
ideology thus adopts a simplified model of Hegel’s identifying thought in which the
revolutionary impulse of Marxian philosophy is smothered.
G. Kunyzin’s interpretation of artistic freedom illustrates the basic tricks of Marxist-
Leninist linguistic manipulation: ‘Politically, the artist may be completely free. However,
if he adopts points of view that are ideologically and aesthetically false or if, for
whatever reason, he falsifies the truths of life in his works (e.g. because he lacks talent
or experience), then he is no longer free as an artist.’87 In other words: only those artists
are free who subscribe to the Party’s definitions of reality. Kunyzin’s final argument
confirms Hegel’s postulate concerning the identity between subject and object: ‘Thus
freedom coincides with the insight into necessity.’88
Here, the repressive intentions and functions of Soviet Marxism, defined by Predrag
Grujić as Marxist Hegelianism,89 come to the fore. When Ernst Bloch remarks that it
was one of the main concerns of reactionary thinkers ‘to make the transition from
Hegel to Marx impossible’,90 he is partly right because right-wing Hegelians did actually
go to great lengths to block it; but he seems to have overlooked the effects of this
transition in Soviet ideology.91
3 Vischer, Stirner and Kierkegaard as critics of Hegel:

Particularity, contingency, chance and dream
Three philosophers will be considered here in whose writings the late modern or
modernist critique of Hegel’s systematic reconciliation of all modern contradictions
takes on different but complementary forms: Vischer, Stirner and Kierkegaard. It goes
without saying that these thinkers adopt very different points of view. However, apart
from their critique of Hegel, their philosophies articulate similar ideas, some of which
presage the late modern self-criticism of modernity: the idea that the individual subject
is unique in its particularity, the idea that it is contingent, that institutions are
contingent, too, and finally the idea that nature and thought have not been reconciled
and that natural forces such as the unconscious, contingency (chance) and dream are
agitating under the cultural crust of society.
Hegel’s name appears as a metonymy of modernity in the sense that his philosophy
is the last large-scale attempt to overcome ‘the divide as the structure of the modern
world and of its consciousness’,92 as Joachim Ritter puts it. The disintegration of Hegel’s
system announces a late modern or modernist era whose thinkers collect and revise
the fragments: the liberation and isolation of the individual who can no longer appeal
to an (all-)mighty divine addresser; the revolt of nature against spirit and conceptual
thought; the non-identity between subject and object; contingency and chance; the
unconscious and the dream; the absence of meaning from history and the negativity of
dialectics.
First comes the Young Hegelian Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who, in his ‘Plan for a
New Structure of Aesthetics’ (1843), discovers ‘the modern as an independent main
form of the aesthetic ideal’,93 thus suggesting that Hegel’s system is no longer part of a
late modernity beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, because it ends with
the Christian-Romantic era.94 Like Stirner and Kierkegaard, Vischer belongs to those
of Hegel’s disciples about whom Karl Löwith writes:
While Goethe and Hegel, in their joint refusal of the ‘transcendent’, still succeeded
in creating a world wherein man could feel secure, their closest followers could no
longer feel at home in it and misjudged the equilibrium created by their masters as
a product of mere harmonization.95
The modernist advocate of Critical Theory might say: recognized instead of ‘misjudged’.
The insights of Hegel’s critics have a considerable impact in postmodernity, where not
only Hegel’s synthesis, but even Marx’s idea of a revolutionary reconciliation of subject
and object appears as a dangerous utopia.
In 1875, Vischer published a detailed review of Johann Volkelt’s study Die
Traumphantasie (‘The Dream Imagination’) and commented on Volkelt’s interpretation
of Hegel’s attitude towards nature and the dream. According to Vischer, Hegel had not
succeeded in reconciling nature with spirit:
He [Hegel] believes that he has succeeded in synthesizing world reason and

nature, but he failed to explain their absolute discrepancy and to deduce nature’s
‘otherness’ from the idea [. . .]. But if nature is not really deduced, then chance as a
natural phenomenon is not deduced either.96
In this passage, the most important issues of late modernity (as self-criticism of
modernity) are compounded: the discrepancy of nature and spirit, of subject and
object; the detachment of contingency (chance, dream) from necessity; the critique of
rationalist and Hegelian historical reason.
All of these topics are to be found in Vischer’s philosophical novel Auch Einer
(1879), whose narrator focuses on the disintegration of the Hegelian unity between
subject and object. It is a novel of negativity which confirms and illustrates what
Ewald Volhard has to say in his insightful study about Vischer: ‘But in the negative,
in the discovery that an objective and absolute truth as the decipherable meaning of
life does not exist – contrary to Hegel’s firm belief – Vischer anticipates the problematic
of a new era.’97
To begin with, the novel bears witness to the indissoluble symbiosis of literature and
philosophy described by Vischer as a historical dialectic. It is a novel about the ‘malice
of the object’98 which tends to evade the subject, thus breaking out of the Hegelian
identity nexus: ‘For example, a red-brown spectacle case hides on a red-brown furniture;
but the greatest malice of the object is to crawl to the edge and fall from a great height,
slip out of your hand – just one moment of inattention and bang.’99
In this context, the narrator parodies Hegel’s system of necessity and advises his
hero to turn to that which seems trivial and contingent, but nevertheless calls our
subjectivity as experience into question: ‘You should heed whatever is considered as
not worth remembering, you should study whatever is not considered as worthy of
thought and turn it into a system!’100 Here and elsewhere, Hegel’s system, which tends
to ignore the contingent, all that does not fit into the scheme of necessities guaranteed
by the World Spirit, is parodied and deconstructed. In the process, the body and the
physical weakness of the individual subject become apparent. Albert Einhart, the hero
of the novel, suffers from a chronic catarrh that can erupt at any moment and thwart
his plans, especially those which require eloquence and a calm, strong voice.
Throughout the novel, the human body is seen as part and parcel of the contingent
world of objects and their ‘malice’. The reasoning subject, the subject as spirit, is quite
unable to control the body and falls prey to its contingencies. However, Einhart’s and
Vischer’s answer to this challenge is not a tighter control of nature and contingency, but
a better understanding of the natural world. ‘Hatred of man because he elevates himself
above nature creating orders full of light, a luminous empire’,101 Einhart notes in one of
his fictive diaries which also contain a latent polemic against Enlightenment thought.
There we also find the complementary remark: ‘The object keeps pestering me. A file
has hidden from me in a dastardly manner.’102
Author of a voluminous Hegelian aesthetic, Vischer appears in his later works not
so much as an anti-Hegelian, but as a sceptic who can no longer take his master’s
doctrines for granted:
Philosophy? Try to construct something? That isn’t enough. And then the
misfortune: philosophy’s fall into disrepute because of the systems. A system is
always the development of an idea, which, originating in a particular brain that

may be inspired by many other brains, nevertheless remains the idea of that
particular individual. Still, it is the greatest thing man can do: the attempt to
recreate the universe using concepts – an ambiguous undertaking.103
The matter is surely ‘ambiguous’ and even contradictory because the system constructed
by a particular subject is meant to encompass everything, i.e. reality as such, but at the
same time is obliged to omit so many unknown, unexplored and incomprehensible
phenomena that it ‘remains the idea of that particular individual’ and thus falls prey to
contingency.
It becomes clear that even Hegel could never hope to achieve a conceptual
reconstruction of the real world, and Vischer, instead of trying to revive Hegelianism,
attempts to shed light on those aspects of the natural and social world Hegel
neglected: the absurd, the grotesque, the trivial, the ephemeral, ambivalence and
chance.104
In particular, his ideas concerning ambivalence and the grotesque were developed
much later by Mikhail M. Bakhtin,105 one of the main theorists of modernism. In this
light, Vischer not only appears as a critic of modernity and of the modern (Hegelian)
concept of subject, but as an early theoretician of literary modernism whose authors
discover the absurd, the grotesque, ambivalence and chance.
In retrospect, Hegel’s system, allegedly guaranteed by the World Spirit, appears as
based on chance: ‘Providence. It would be better to say retrospective insight [Nachsehung
/ Vorsehung = play on words]. It’s all due to chance anyway.’106 From this insight to the
idea of the absurd it is only a step: ‘Occasionally, I must admit, I have a great liking for
the absurd. [. . .] I’d like to write a treatise about it, but I haven’t yet found the key
concept.’107 This concept will take shape in the works of Stirner, Kierkegaard and
especially in those of the modern existentialists.
Unlike Vischer, who distances himself ironically from Hegel’s system, the egoistic
anarchist Max Stirner appears as a militant anti-Hegelian who defends the unique
individual subject against all kinds of systematization and against the entire idealist
tradition. He is a kindred spirit of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche insofar as he prefers the
singular and particular to totalizing universal reason.
With respect to the actantial model, one might argue that Stirner rejects the very
idea of a divine or secular addresser (Greimas). He wants the individual subject to
depend exclusively on itself: ‘Why do they denounce Me if I deny the existence of god?
Because they put the creature above the creator [. . .] and because they need a
dominating object in order to make the subject serve obsequiously. I am supposed to
submit to the absolute, I am supposed to do it.’108 What matters here is not primarily the
critique of religion developed later by Marx, but the inversion of the relationship
between addresser and addressee. It reveals the subject’s subjugation in society and is
the basis of Stirner’s particularizing critique of Hegel’s concept of subject: ‘Hegel
condemns the particular, that which is mine, “my opinion”. “Absolute thought” is
the kind of thought, which forgets that it is my thought, that I think and that thought
only exists through Me.’109 This passage reveals the ambiguity of Young Hegelian
particularization: Stirner not only blames Hegel for ignoring the particularity of the
individual subject, but also for adorning himself with the aura of the absolute instead
of acknowledging his own particularity and contingency.
Stirner not only rejects Hegel’s World Spirit and its divine role as supreme addresser,
but also Hegel’s collective subjects: the nations and the states. He insists on their
contingency and denies their role as historical actors. To him, the nation as sovereign
appears as a ‘sovereign made of chance’110 and as ‘an enemy he has to defeat’.111 His
critique of the state is an unambiguous rejection of all Hegelian attempts to mediate
between the individual subject, civil society and the state: ‘Since the state, as might be
expected, only recognizes its own interests, it does not look after My needs, but is only
interested in killing Me, i.e. in transforming Me into another I, into a good citizen.’112
Stirner’s remark ‘the dressage [is becoming] universal and all-embracing’113 not only
anticipates the ideas of Laing and Foucault, but also reveals the importance of the
Young Hegelians for the postmodern problematic.
His critique of German idealism in general is most concrete in his criticism of
Fichte: ‘When Fichte says “The I is Everything”, then he seems to agree entirely with my
point of view.’ But this is a misunderstanding for the following reason: ‘Fichte speaks of
the “absolute” I, but I speak of myself, of the mortal I.’114 This criticism, which Stirner
extends to Feuerbach, who subsumes the individual I to humankind, not only
anticipates Kierkegaard’s critique of idealism, but also some arguments of German and
French existentialists.
In some respects, Stirner’s main work Der Einzige und sein Eigentum is an inversion
of Hobbes’s Leviathan.115 While Hobbes imagines an absolute sovereign in order to put
an end to the ‘war of everybody against everybody else’, Stirner would like to abolish
the state and pleads in favour of a ‘state of nature’ which C. B. Macpherson defines – in
conjunction with Hobbes – as a mythical image of market society and of bourgeois
‘possessive individualism’.116 Anticipating Macpherson’s approach, Kurt Adolf Mautz
recognizes in Stirner’s philosophy a ‘metaphysics of liberalism’117 and explains:
Stirner’s basic position is marked by the tension between ‘nature’ and ‘convention’.
‘Convention’ means the world of cultural values, petrified as it is in empty formulas
transmitted by tradition. To this ‘second nature’ alienated subjectivity opposes the
mythical image of an initial state of nature and its original powers.118
Unlike Hobbes, Stirner views the state of nature with sympathy and believes that the
individual subject is genuinely free in this phase of human development: ‘Help yourself
and take whatever you need! At this point the war of everybody against everybody else
is declared. I alone decide what I want to have.’119
Standing outside of Hegel’s actantial model, delivered from the yoke ‘of the Spirit as
“general” subject’,120 Stirner’s individual subject is a pre-Nietzschean power-seeker who
is the very opposite of Vischer’s hero Einhart. Instead of aiming at a reconciliation with
nature and the object, it tries to dominate both. Commenting on Stirner’s individualist
theory of social values, Mautz writes: ‘In it the individual only counts as a centre of
power.’121
Long before Nietzsche, Stirner attempted a ‘genealogy of morals’ in which virtues
such as love, humanity and compassion are reinterpreted in a utilitarian perspective
based on market laws. About the love of one’s neighbour he writes: ‘How indifferent
he would appear to Me without this love of mine. I only share my love with him and
thus use him: I enjoy him.’122 Such considerations are reminiscent of Bentham’s
utilitarianism.123
Stirner’s genealogy does not respect the metaphysical concept of truth which
Nietzsche later on deconstructs by recognizing in it an idealistically disguised claim to
power. Anticipating Nietzsche, Stirner considers ‘truth’ as a dangerous addresser who
turns the individual subject into an instrument. He writes about inexperienced young
men who readily embrace truth: ‘To them, truth is “sacred” and whatever is sacred
demands blind veneration, submission and sacrifice. [. . .] You don’t want to lie? Then
fall prey to truth and become – martyrs!’124
Like Nietzsche, an enthusiastic reader of Stirner, who deconstructs truth, defining
it as a ‘mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms’,125 Stirner
decomposes both the concept of truth and the concept of subject at a linguistic level.
He shows that truths are linguistic constructs, most of which come about in power
constellations and subsequently turn individuals into subjects. In this respect, he not
only appears as a precursor of Nietzsche but also of postmodern theories of discourse
and subjectivity. He anticipates Nietzsche’s rhetorical analysis when he remarks: ‘Truths
are phrases, sayings, words [. . .]’.126 However, these words and phrases turn me into a
subject because they name and define me, and ‘as my own creations they become
alienated from me after the act of creation’.127 To break out of this alienated subjectivity
or subjugation: that is Stirner’s programme. Towards the end of his treatise, his
anarchistic rebellion passes the peak when he replaces the divine addresser by his own
“I”: ‘They say about god: “Names cannot name you”. That applies to Myself: not one
concept can define Me, nothing of what they say about my essence exhausts Me, it’s just
names.’128 The fact that this trivializing ‘just’ reveals an underestimation of discursive
constraints becomes clear in the second half of the twentieth century: in the writings
of R. D. Laing, E. Goffman and M. Foucault.
Vischer, Stirner and Kierkegaard are related to one another by their drastic re-
evaluation of the particular and singular at a linguistic, aesthetic and political level.
Henri Arvon is probably right when he writes about Kierkegaard and Stirner: ‘With the
same dialectical force they fight against Hegel’s system; with the same verve they turn
against supra-individual reason.’129 Long before Arvon, Mautz noticed the existential
and ethical affinities between Stirner and Kierkegaard: ‘Stirner thus combats the
transfer of the personal freedom of decision and of personal responsibility for ethical
action into a supra-individual sphere of objective norms [. . .]. By adopting this ethical
attitude he agrees with his theological partner S. Kierkegaard.’130
In what follows, only one central aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought will be commented
on, an aspect of considerable relevance to Sartre’s existentialism (cf. Chapter II, 5): his
critique of the Hegelian system as an enhancement of the individual subject. This critique
has both formal-conceptual and existential-ethical components which will be dealt
with briefly.
On a formal level, one is struck by the contrast between Hegel’s systemic approach
and Kierkegaard’s essayism. Essay, fragment and diary are the forms preferred by
Kierkegaard, not the conceptual system. These forms bear witness to the internalization
of the individual problematic. It is no longer related to collective and other supra-

individual actants (as in Hegel’s case), but transferred into the individual inner self
where infra-individual actants of truth confront actants of hypocrisy or dissimulation.
Adorno simplifies somewhat when, in his analysis of Kierkegaard’s construction of
the aesthetic, he writes about the relationship between Hegel and the Danish
philosopher: ‘Kierkegaard did not “overcome” the Hegelian system of identity; Hegel
was internalized by him, and Kierkegaard renders reality most accurately wherever he
adheres to Hegel’s historical dialectic.’131 The question is whether he actually does this
– or whether, following Vischer and the Young Hegelians, he maintains both the
ambivalence and the contradiction Hegel wanted to overcome by his systematic
syntheses.
The process ‘within’ Kierkegaard’s individual subject is not a process of totalization
and unification, but a permanent struggle with ambivalence, contradiction and
paradox which does not culminate in a synthesis but in a tragic antinomy in the sense
of Either – Or. In this long essay, Kierkegaard writes: ‘Thinking a contradiction, in spite
of all the assurances of modern philosophy and the foolhardy courage of its young
adherents, must always involve great difficulty.’132 The expression ‘new philosophy’
refers to Danish Hegelianism, as the editor Niels Thulstrup points out in the German
edition.133
Unlike Hegel, Kierkegaard stops at the contradiction. This fact is amply illustrated
by his polemics against Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung which he replaces with paradox.
With characteristic irony he comments on the Germanizing use of the Danish word
ophaeve (aufheben = cancel and preserve): ‘I am not aware that the Danish word
“ophaeve” permits of any such ambiguity but I do know that our German-Danish
philosophers use it like the German word.’134 They use it in the Hegelian sense of
aufheben and believe that they can thus do justice to Christianity. Kierkegaard calls
them ‘speculators’: ‘For Christianity as it is understood by the speculator differs from
what plain folk are presented. For them it is a paradox, but the speculator knows how
to suspend the paradox.’135 In Kierkegaard’s perspective, the paradox appears as
insurmountable and leads to the innermost self of the subject, where a decision comes
about: ‘Christianity is on the contrary subjective; the inwardness of faith in the believer
is the truth’s eternal decision.’136 The withdrawal into the inwardness of the subject can
be seen as a consequence of the disintegration of both the Hegelian system and of the
social system of values.
Early on, Karl Jaspers realized that Kierkegaard’s paradox is pre- or post-dialectical
and leads to an act of faith in the sense of Pascal’s pari: ‘One can consider the dictum
credo quia absurdum as the key formula of this religious spirit, which puts the antinomy
and the paradox at the centre of faith. Most recently, Kierkegaard characterized the
essence of this paradox and was possibly the first to do so in depth.’137 Heinrich M.
Schmidinger adds that in Kierkegaard’s thought contradictions ‘are not overcome but,
on the contrary, given prominence’.138 Kierkegaard was also considered in this light by
the young essayist Georg Lukács, who emphasized the Danish philosopher’s refusal
to dissolve contradictions in ‘higher units’ (in the Hegelian sense).139
As Kierkegaard’s kindred spirits, Jaspers and the young Lukács doubt the validity
and truthfulness of the system. It functions as an alibi of the individual subject which
alienates itself in collective and mythical actants: in national spirits, in the World
Spirit and the Absolute Spirit. In his Book on Adler, Kierkegaard illustrates the return
to the individual existential problematic after the disintegration of Hegel’s system
by commenting ironically on the development of a Danish Hegelian. Magister Adler,
who would like to justify his contingent existence,140 discovers the magic formula
of life: ‘You lack everything; study Hegel and you have everything.’141 The approaching
catastrophe is inevitable, and the philosopher-narrator explains ‘that Magister Adler by
a qualitative leap was transported from the medium of philosophy, and specifically the
fantastic medium of Hegelian philosophy (pure thought and pure being), into the sphere
of religious inwardness’.142 In a way, this is a leap backwards into romantic irony which
relies exclusively on the individual subject’s critical potential.
Adler’s itinerary leads to the insight ‘that the subject is existing and that existing is a
becoming, and that the notion of truth as the identity of thought and being is a chimera
of abstraction, and truly only a longing on the part of creation’.143 In this respect,
Kierkegaard’s philosophy is based on the notion of non-identity: with human history,
with society and its institutions. It is at the same time, as Adorno pointed out,144 a
thought beyond society which does not reflect upon its own socio-historical character
and thus falls prey to abstraction – as Sartre’s thought much later on.
‘The subject evolves as a radically particular being’,145 remarks Elke Beck in
conjunction with Kierkegaard, and Schmidinger adds: ‘This is why Kierkegaard
proclaims in view of all this: Only particularity will be able to save this era.’146
However, this particularity is in itself social, not only because it results from the
disintegration of the Hegelian system, but because it is also a product of social crises
which – as Stirner saw – become aggravated in the second half of the nineteenth
century and finally give birth to modern sociology as a global reflection on modernity
(cf. Chapter IV).
The leap of the Kierkegaardian subject into the religious stadium is symptomatic of
late modernity or modernism. In retrospect, this era appears as a protracted search for
the lost addresser who, in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, can only be found individually
because, to the Danish philosopher, God is subject and therefore only accessible to
subjectivity as inwardness. However, Kierkegaard’s, Vischer’s and Stirner’s rejection of
Hegel’s supra-individual subject does not help philosophy to overcome the social crisis
but exacerbates it by critique and negativity.147
Anticipated by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and the Young Hegelians, the new era of
negativity and criticism is also a period of ideological affirmation, of mighty addressers
who make the individual subject submit to states, party organizations and other
collectives. It is against this backdrop that one should try to understand Nietzsche’s
ambivalent attempt to save the individual subject in crisis.
4 Nietzsche’s criticism of the metaphysical concept of subject:

Ambivalence, particularization and nature
Concrete understanding is only possible in context. In what follows it is therefore
necessary to consider Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysical subject in conjunction
with his critique of Hegel’s system and in relation to Young Hegelian thought. It will be
shown that, on the one hand, Nietzsche radicalizes Young Hegelian criticism of the
Hegelian concept of subjectivity and that, on the other hand, he reacts to the crisis of
subjectivity with a bold project: the Superman.
Following Vischer and Stirner, he considers the individual subject – defined by
Descartes, Kant and Fichte as the substratum of all meaning and by Hegel as an element
of the World Spirit – as a disintegrating and subjugated being. It appears to him as a
heterogeneous instance torn by contradictions and struggling against annihilation:
‘ “Subject” is the fiction inducing us to believe that many identical states within us
emerge from one substratum: however, we have brought about the “identity” of these
states; their identification and adaptation is the factual basis, not the identity (– the
latter ought to be denied –).’148 In an analogous manner, Nietzsche explains the origin
of concepts without which the modern notion of subjectivity would be inconceivable:
‘Every concept is due to the identification of what is different. [. . .] Our overlooking of
the individual and real yields the concept.’149 In other words, our notions of subjectivity
and conceptuality are due to our blindness and our domineering, identifying intellect.
Long before Lacan, Nietzsche recognizes in subjectivity a construction anchored in the
imaginary.
It is not by chance that he inserts the word ‘subject’ aphoristically between the key
words ‘reality’ and ‘modernity’ and deduces ‘reality’ from ‘our degree of life and power
sensation’.150 Finally, he presents Superman as an answer to the constraints of late
modernity: to its conformism, its mass instincts, its breaking in of individuals.151
It is within the context of a bourgeois, utilitarian and democratic Christianity that
Nietzsche’s vision of the individual subject as a subjugated, manipulated and
incapacitated instance ought to be understood. Starting from Stirner’s diagnosis,
according to which the manipulation of individuals is becoming more intense,
Nietzsche remarks: ‘Man, with the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-
waistcoats, [was] made genuinely calculable.’152 He thus inverts Hegel’s discourse.
Unlike the systematic thinker, who defined state morality as a state of freedom in which
all individual subjects could realize themselves, Nietzsche defines it as a state of
submission and constraint. He thus anticipates the theories of some postmodern
thinkers such as Foucault who consider primary and secondary socialization as a
corporeal and mental training designed to make the subject conform.
This inversion of Hegel’s argument, which resembles that of Marx in some respects,
has far-reaching consequences. (1) As in Stirner’s and Kierkegaard’s case, Hegel’s
historical system is considered as the construction of a particular thinker. (2) This
critical assessment is then extended to include Hegel’s positive, synthesizing dialectic
which Nietzsche transforms into a negative dialectic geared to ambivalence and
contradiction. (3) Finally, Nietzsche brings about a drastic particularization and factual
dissolution of general concepts such as reason, truth and morality. His reaction to the
decline of metaphysics as universal thought and to what he defines as ‘decadence’
culminates in his myths of ‘Superman’ and ‘Eternal Return’.
Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche discovers the particular origin and the contingent
character of Hegel’s system. Hegel’s World Spirit as a world-immanent god does not
make history, but is one of its products:
[T]he God was first created by the history. He, at any rate, became transparent
and intelligible inside Hegelian skulls, and has risen through all the dialectically
possible steps in his being up to the manifestation of the Self: so that for Hegel the
highest and final stage of the world-process came together in his own Berlin
existence.153
In his essay on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (1933), Löwith aptly speaks of the
‘humanization of philosophy and its truth’,154 and this expression does not only apply
to these two thinkers of the nineteenth century, but also to Sartre and his criticism of
Hegel.
The implausibility of Hegel’s synthesizing system in an era of social tensions,
revolutions and revolts is denounced in Nietzsche’s well-known aphorism: ‘I distrust all
systematisers, and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of honesty.’155 This will
seeks to unite subject and object, but becomes obsolete in late modernity when the gap
between consciousness and reality is widening.
Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche replaces the system with alternative forms such as
maxims, aphorisms and essays, all of which bear witness to the decline of systematic
thought. Which factors are responsible for this decline? In Nietzsche’s case, as in
modernist literature, it is the crisis of social values and the resulting ambivalence that
unites opposites without synthesizing them: it stops at the antinomy or the paradox.
Whenever Nietzsche links opposites such as logic and irrationality, pleasure and
displeasure, he does not aim at a higher form of knowledge, at a synthesis, but brings
about a paradox: ‘How did logic come into existence in man’s head? Certainly out of
illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense.’156 Similarly, he refuses to
reconcile pleasure and displeasure: ‘But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied
together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as
much as possible of the other?’157
Like modernist writers such as Musil, Kafka or Camus, all of whom he influenced,
Nietzsche stops at ambivalence and the concomitant paradox: ‘General insight: the
ambiguous character of our modern world – the same symptoms can point to decline
and to strength.’158 This kind of ambivalence cannot possibly yield a systematically
organized historical discourse, for rise and fall, construction and disintegration run
parallel and tend to deconstruct each other instead of forming Hegelian syntheses: ‘As
a matter of fact, every kind of growth involves an enormous decline and deterioration:
the suffering, the symptoms of degeneration belong to the phases of immense forward
movement.’159 It is striking how Nietzsche emphasizes the simultaneity of opposites
using words such as ‘belong’. The opposite terms are inextricably but aporetically joined
together.
In view of this negativity, which excludes any kind of systematic construction,
concepts such as reason and truth appear as particular and lose their universal validity.
Mihailo Djurić explains: ‘In Nietzsche’s perspective, it becomes clear that logic does
not help, even if it is dialectical logic.’160 It does not help because it is linked to the
illogical and hence remains contingent. According to Nietzsche, this also applies to the
metaphysical concept of reason. In a context governed by ambivalence and paradox,
reason becomes unreasonable: ‘That the world is not the abstract essence of an eternal
reasonableness is sufficiently proved by the fact that that bit of the world which we
know – I mean our human reason – is none too reasonable.’161 Thus reason and folly
belong together like good and evil, pleasure and displeasure, expansion and decline.
Along with reason, the concept of truth falls prey to contingency and
particularization. Nietzsche, the critic of language, links the emergence of truth(s) to
questionable linguistic conventions which cannot possibly claim universal status.
‘What then is truth?’ – he asks and answers: ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,
anthropomorphisms.’162 These rhetorical figures, he adds, become customary and are
institutionalized to such a degree that they come to be considered as natural or true in
a particular culture. However, they are illusions. Such considerations amount to a
radical particularization of the concept of truth. At first, it is projected onto a rhetorical
level, where truth appears as a contingent constellation of rhetorical figures,
subsequently it is made dependent on social conventions and presented as the product
of a particular culture. In this light, it appears as particular or fortuitous and loses the
universal character attributed to it by Descartes, Kant and Hegel.
Ethics are treated by Nietzsche in a similar way. They are interpreted as a perverted
‘will to power’, as a kind of ideology developed by the resentful and the weak in order
to challenge the historical position of the strongest and best. In this context, Kant’s
categorical imperative is seen as the product of Jewish-Christian moral resentment
and considered as dangerous and hostile to life. Its abstract character is interpreted as
a threat to the individual’s will to live: ‘Nothing is more profoundly, more thoroughly
pernicious, than every impersonal feeling of duty, than every sacrifice to the Moloch of
abstraction.’163
It was not considered as dangerous because it was seen – along with Descartes’s
cogito and Hegel’s Sittlichkeit – as a realization of the individual subject’s freedom.
Individual freedom was only conceivable as progressive generalization. Anticipating
postmodern trends, Nietzsche inverts this development by revealing the particularity
and contingency of key modern concepts such as truth, reason and moral obligation,
and by insisting on their repressive function. For whoever demands that individuals
should recognize a contingent truth or reason, subjects them to an outside will – and
not to a universal principle within them.
Time and again, Nietzsche shows that the distance separating the subject as a
fundamental instance and the subject as a subjugated being is minimal. Only if I
recognize in Kant’s categorical imperative and in Hegel’s moral law universally valid
principles, do they appear to me as principles of freedom; if I refuse to do this, because
I consider them – with Nietzsche – as culturally contingent, they turn into instruments
of repression. While Descartes starts from the assumption that the ‘I’ as cogito is the
basis of thought, Nietzsche inverts this relationship by showing – long before Althusser
and Foucault – that the ‘basis’ is elsewhere and that the ‘I’ is conditioned by outside
instances. Günter Abel explains: ‘ “Thought” is the condition, the “I” is conditioned. The
“I” is not the thinking instance, it is being thought.’164 Here, Stirner’s and Nietzsche’s
idea of a ‘social straitjacket’165 is reformulated. It is Stirner’s and Nietzsche’s merit to
have shown to what extent idealism’s ‘basic instance’ is conditioned by outside factors.
What is Nietzsche’s final answer to the question of subjectivity? It is – in short – the
idea that the subject ought to be redefined in relation to nature. Habermas
adds: ‘Subject-centred reason is confronted with reason’s absolute other.’166 Like Stirner,
Nietzsche starts from a human will transposed into a fictive ‘state of nature’ imagined
by Nietzsche in relation to his aristocratic vision of medieval and renaissance cultures
and his (pre-existentialist) idea that the individual subject can only justify itself. There
is no supra-individual instance entitled to insert the individual into a narrative
programme such as history or eschatology. This is the reason: ‘Most human beings
enter the world by chance: no higher necessity inhabits them.’167 Since there is no
collective grand design in the Christian or Hegelian sense, meaning can only come
about through individual acts of will. However, considering the heterogeneity of the
subject revealed by Nietzsche himself, the idea of a meaningful subjective act of will
may contradict his philosophy.
‘Not “humanity”, but the Superman is the goal!’168 This sentence contains in a
nutshell the actantial model of Nietzsche’s discourse which is marked by extreme
reductionism: by the elimination of all addressers (God, World Spirit, History) and by
the coincidence of the subject- and the object-actant. For Superman is not only the
subject or the driving force of the social change envisaged by Nietzsche, but at the same
time his own object: the goal of his actions. The anti-subject enters the scene at the very
end of Ecce Homo: ‘Have you understood me? Dionysus versus Christ.’169 However, it is
by no means certain and a matter of interpretation (a Nietzschean principle) that
Dionysus and Superman are one.
Ursula Schneider seems to think so: ‘For this reason Superman is just another side
of Dionysus, he is the Dionysian principle par excellence.’170 The entire actantial model
is based on the idea of ‘self-empowerment’ or ‘Selbstermächtigung’:171 an expression
introduced by Peter Köster. Nietzsche imagines a self-sufficient subject acting beyond
the constraints of the social ‘straitjacket’. Like Stirner’s ‘the Unique’, his Dionysian
Superman is a myth inspired by nature and an attempt to defy the mediocrity of
nineteenth-century bourgeois society.
This myth is completed by Nietzsche’s myth of the ‘eternal return’. In the context
mapped out here, the latter appears as an attempt to break out of history as a linear
narrative with addresser and anti-addresser and to negate all kinds of Christian or
Hegelian teleology that would limit Superman’s freedom. Superman is his own
addresser and his own telos.
Volker Gerhardt is probably right when he points out that Nietzsche does not
negate historical thought (e.g. in the sense of ‘monumental history’): ‘Therefore a
farewell to history is not being considered. Rather, the question is how to make
historical knowledge “benefit life”.’172 But at the same time Günther K. Lehmann’s
observation is valid: ‘However, one has to bear in mind that, although Nietzsche takes
historical developments into account, he thinks outside of historicity.’173 His drastically
simplified actantial model explains why this is the case. A subject which rejects all
addressers and views itself narcissistically as its own object can no longer be integrated
into a linear narrative; it can only function in a circular structure.
The latter is analogous to a mythical state of nature insofar as it negates social time
along with historicity. In conjunction with the archaic myth, Lévi-Strauss speaks of its
‘double structure, altogether historical and ahistorical’.174 He locates the time and the
succession of events in mythical narratives outside the (modern) historical continuum:
‘A myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago’:175 ‘before the
creation of the world’, ‘from time immemorial’, etc. Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ is a
Dionysian myth of late modernity, an attempt to break out of historical continuity and
to revive the a-historical consciousness of antiquity.
This mythical space beyond history is inhabited by a Superman imbued with
the will to power and well aware of history which he despises as he resists the
downward trend of decadence. Reinhard Knodt links Superman and the will to
power to the myth of the ‘eternal return’ and implicitly deals with Nietzsche’s reduction
of the actantial model, when he points out: ‘The link between the eternal return [. . .]
and the experimental activity of the will to power is necessary because nothing
can claim fundamental authority after the idea of the eternal return – apart from
the experiment inherent in this idea.’176 In other words, addresser and object are
both absorbed by a self-sufficient subject acting ‘outside of historicity’ (Lehmann).
At the same time, the will to power appears as an essential modality, as a crucial
will to do (vouloir faire, Greimas) that makes the self-empowerment of the
Superman possible.
Following various interpretations of Nietzsche, one could decide that destiny or
fatality is the secret addresser of the Nietzschean subject.177 As a matter of fact,
Nietzsche’s discourse does oscillate in an ambivalent way between self-empowerment
and a fatalism marked by a narcissistic identification with fate. The last section of Ecce
Homo (‘Why I am a Destiny’) suggests that the speaking subject identifies with destiny
in the same way as Christ identified with his divine father. However, this relationship is
difficult to define, especially since Nietzsche adds with his idiosyncratic humour:
‘Maybe I am a clown.’178
The idea that Nietzsche’s fatalistic and super-human subject is domineering and
violent is not new,179 and in spite of his one-sided critique, which ignores the
‘deconstructionist Nietzsche’,180 Martin Heidegger is probably right when he reads
Nietzsche’s work as the completion of the dominant metaphysical tradition. He
considers Superman ‘as the supreme subject of accomplished subjectivity’.181 This
assessment sounds plausible, because Nietzsche’s subject not only usurps the authority
of the addresser, but also negates the otherness of masculinity: the female principle. (In
this respect, Nietzsche is quite similar to Fichte, whose idealistic ‘I’ systematically
excludes alterity.)
Not only Nietzsche’s misogynous remarks are an eloquent testimony to his bias,
but also the fact that he often presents masculinity as the positive principle tout
court. To Christianity he prefers Islam because the latter appears to him as a stauncher
defender of male domination than the Christian churches: ‘If Islam despises
Christianity, it is justified a thousand times over; for Islam presupposes men.’182 Such
apodictic statements, hardly the highlights of Nietzsche’s thought, were commented on
by many psychoanalysts and criticized by feminists. Thus Günter Schulte would like to
understand ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy of repressed feminity by starting from his own
efforts of repression and by discovering behind his philosophy of ostentatious virility a
kind of “anxious erection”.’183 Compared with this somewhat one-sided approach, Kelly
Oliver’s feminist merit consists in linking Nietzsche’s ‘masculine metaphors of potency
and hardness’184 to his deconstructionist openness to alterity.
Both of these interpretations reveal the dilemma of modern subjectivity, a dilemma

exacerbated in late modernity and located at the centre of the modernist scene by
Sartre’s existentialism, Critical Theory and many modernist novels. The individual
subject seems unable to evolve without suppressing the Other – nature, feminity, the
other culture – within itself. It not only defines itself monologically by opposing the
Other, thus initiating a potentially meaningful dialogue, but by negating the Other who
appears as a threat or a danger. In what follows, this dilemma will be considered in
some detail in conjunction with Sartre and surrealism.
5 From Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to Sartre: Sartre’s critique

of surrealism and psychoanalysis
The question concerning Sartre’s link to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard can be summed up
in a few words. It is the particularizing argumentatio ad personam. In existentialist
terminology this would mean that the individual existence has to be granted priority
over the essence (in an Aristotelian-Hegelian sense). Not a supra-individual, unfolding
essence is made responsible for the process of knowledge, but an individual
consciousness capable of negation.
In his critique of Hegel, Sartre keeps referring to Kierkegaard’s philosophical
writings in which the author comments favourably on Hegel’s presentation of Socrates,
because Hegel focuses on the person of the Greek philosopher and not on the historical
context (as is his wont): ‘This discussion by Hegel is remarkable in that it ends as it
begins – with the person of Socrates.’185 The personality of Socrates, says Kierkegaard,
appears as the instance representing the good life so ‘that the good as such has no
absolute binding power’.186 And this is what matters: the Good and the True should not
be discovered by individual subjects as pre-existing universal principles, but should be
created by them – individually.
This postulate, according to which the True and the Good are created by individual
philosophers and not discovered as universal or historical principles, is also the starting
point of Sartre’s critique of Hegel. In an article entitled ‘L’Universel singulier’, he
challenges Hegel’s system as a pseudo-objectivity that glosses over its subjective
contingency. To the philosopher, who pretends to have grasped history as a meaningful
totality, he objects:
But history has not come to an end, and this timeless reappraisal of temporality as
unity of logic and tragedy is itself turned into an object of knowledge. From this
point of view, not Being appears as the beginning of the Hegelian system, but the
personality of Hegel, as it was shaped by others, as it shaped itself. This is an
ambiguous discovery which, considered from an epistemological stance, can only
lead to scepticism.187
At this point, Sartre’s arguments coincide with those of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
His scepticism not only aims at Hegel, who pretended to speak in the name of
History as his addresser, but also at Descartes, who invoked God as his epistemological
guarantor. In a well-known essay about Cartesian freedom (‘La Liberté cartésienne’),

he sets out from Nietzsche’s dictum about the ‘death of God’ and tries to deliver the
individual subject from an almighty addresser whose presence limits human freedom
to the discovery of divine laws. Descartes, says Sartre, was the first thinker to consider
human thought as a process of negation. Unlike Spinoza, who – according to Sartre –
sacrificed ‘human subjectivity’188 to a cognitive process without a subject (an idea
revived later by Althusser: cf. Chapter III, 5), Descartes sees true knowledge as produced
by the human subject. Truth as a result of the cogitatio, i.e. as human truth, only exists
because we perceive it. We are free to negate it and thus revolt against the divine subject
as addresser. He recognizes in this possibility of revolt and negation a freedom of
decision and action in the existentialist sense. ‘Since the order of truths exists outside
of me, that which will define me as an autonomy is not creative invention but refusal’,189
writes Sartre.
He himself does not believe that Cartesian negation or refusal is sufficient and opts
for a solution involving creativity. He blames Descartes for remaining within the spell
of a divine addresser and for stopping at pure negativity: ‘In short, he failed to conceive
negativity as productive.’190 Continuing this train of thought, Sartre tries, in the 1930s
and 40s, to give negation as néantisation a creative turn.
His main philosophical concern of this period is aptly summed up by Mary
Warnock as ‘the possibility of projecting what is not the case’.191 In his early
phenomenological writings, Sartre tries to show, among other things, that, far from
depicting reality, human thought negates and transcends it creatively. The creative
negation, which goes beyond reality, is theoretically conceivable, Sartre says, if we start
from Husserl’s concept of epoché that implies the systematic bracketing out of all
opinions concerning an object. Epoché cancels all those factors subsumed by the author
of L’Imagination (1936) under the expression ‘l’attitude naturelle’.192
In this book, Sartre distinguishes ‘perception’ from ‘fiction’: ‘Thus every fiction is an
active synthesis, a product of our free spontaneity; by contrast, every kind of perception
is a purely passive synthesis.’193 The flute-playing centaur, argues Sartre, following
Husserl, is fiction insofar as it radically negates conventional reality by recomposing it
in a novel and fantastic fashion. A few years later, in L’Imaginaire (1940), he confirms
the nexus between negativity and creativity when he explains: ‘The imaginary act is
thus simultaneously constituting, isolating and negating’ (‘Ainsi l’acte imaginatif est à la
fois constituant, isolant et anéantissant’).194 This argument develops the essential aspects
of Sartre’s critique of Descartes. The emancipation from the divine addresser frees the
individual subject and endows it with creative powers.
It goes without saying that Sartre’s monumental work Being and Nothingness
(L’Etre et le Néant, 1943) cannot be commented on in detail here. For the understanding
of the present context, two critical remarks concerning freedom and the subject may
be sufficient. As a Cartesian phenomenologist, Sartre – like Husserl – neglects the
psychic and social factors of subjectivity, focuses exclusively on what Ricœur calls
ipseity or selfhood (ipséité) and glosses over sameness (mêmeté, Ricœur) as a psycho-
social process. He thus constructs an abstract subjectivity which only knows a tragic
‘either / or’ and completely ignores the dialectical ambivalence as an unsurpassable
unity of opposites. This explains why the author of Nausea (La Nausée, 1938) bans the
alterity of nature and femininity from his male definition of subjectivity by suppressing
it in a rationalist manner.
In his perspective, it is not the social factors and the established systems of values
that condition individual subjectivity; it is the other way round, the individual subject
creates ex nihilo, as it were, its own scale of values:
I do not have nor can I have recourse to any value against the fact that it is I who
sustain values in being. Nothing can ensure me against myself, cut off from the
world and from my essence by this nothingness which I am. I have to realize the
meaning of the world and of my essence; I make my decision concerning them –
without justification and without excuse.195
The truth of this argument consists in its radical negation of determinism which
cannot explain why it is that prophets become founders of religions, intellectuals
emerge as founders of ideologies, and scientists change social life with their inventions.
Hence Sartre is right when he maintains that ‘I have to realize the meaning of the
world.’ He nevertheless overlooks the truth of determinism: the banal but correct
insight that even the most original of thinkers is a product of society and has to rely on
the knowledge accumulated by his ancestors. Christ had to set out from the Old
Testament (i.e. could not put forward Buddhist or Taoist arguments), and Marx was
not only a Hegelian, but also a reader of Adam Smith. Thus freedom appears as freedom
in context and within certain limits or determinations which impose constraints and
offer new possibilities at the same time.
This is certainly not Sartre’s point of view. He defends freedom in an idealist and
rationalist manner when he declares: ‘Man cannot be sometimes slave and sometimes
free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all.’196 The opposite is probably the
case. Individual subjects are never entirely free because they always participate in the
collective history of society (they can no longer enjoy the freedom of the year 1000 and
cannot even imagine the freedom of the year 3000) and because they are always bound
by their past decisions that constitute their life narrative – in very much the same way
as the novelists and their narrators. Sartre focuses too much on Ricœur’s abstract
ipseity in the sense of the ‘promise made’ or the ‘crime committed’ and neglects
‘sameness’ as changing identity.
Insofar as he defines freedom as negativity, he can imagine existence as ‘nihilation
of facticity’ (‘néantisation de la facticité’),197 thus overlooking the fact that the subject
owes its identity precisely to the social, psychic and linguistic facticity which it is born
into. Negation and creativity can only be thought of as concrete processes taking place
in particular social and linguistic contexts, in which subjects confront specific social
and linguistic structures in order to negate or to develop them. Sartre himself developed
his brand of existentialism in this kind of context, relying on the discourses of Hegel,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, and thus becoming a creative subject
shaped by others. This is roughly Sartre’s own argument in the case of Hegel when he –
quite rightly – points out that Hegel’s system is inextricably tied up with his person:
‘telle qu’ on l’a faite, telle qu’ elle s’ est faite’ (cf. supra). This expression refers to
both components of individual and collective subjectivity: negative-creative freedom
and over-determination. The latter component is bracketed out in Being and

Nothingness.
This is one of the reasons why Sartre rejects Freudian psychoanalysis since his
Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (1938), which he mentions in L’Etre et le Néant.198
However, psychoanalysis neither negates individual freedom nor is it exclusively
interested in the individual’s past, as Sartre argues when he blames it for blocking the
future by a regression from the present into the past.199 By constructing the triad super-
ego, ego and id, Freud would like to increase the individual’s scope of action. Although
he does occasionally put forward deterministic arguments, his psychoanalysis is by no
means rigidly deterministic. Especially his theory of neuroses is meant to strengthen
the ‘I’. However, this project can only succeed if the determinants of the subject’s actions
are analysed.
The fact that Sartre ignores them instead of taking them into account is amply
illustrated by his discussion in Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions of a case from Janet’s
psychoanalysis. A young female patient intends to discuss with Janet her obsessions,
but instead of opening the discussion, she breaks out into tears. Without considering
the physical and psychic factors, which can block speech (we all know the lump in the
throat that prevents us from informing someone of a sad event), Sartre interprets the
patient’s behaviour as a symptom of ‘bad faith’ permitting her to avoid an embarrassing
discussion.200
Naturally, nobody will ever be able to prove that her behaviour was not tactical. But
Sartre’s argument shows to what extent he is inclined – as a Cartesian and a
phenomenologist – to reduce the individual subject to the cogito and to bracket out all
physical, psychic and social factors. His attitude towards psychoanalysis explains his
rejection of surrealist experiments, many of which are geared towards the unconscious
and often involve a transformation of culture into nature. Sartre, the rationalist
philosopher, cannot accept surrealism because the latter reveals the reverse of the
Cartesian cogito: the unconscious, dream and chance. All of these factors belong to
the sphere of nature – boldly subsumed by Hegel under the dominant historical logos.
Surrealists such as Breton never intended to dissolve the individual subject in the
unconscious; they sought to free imagination and creativity from the fetters of social
convention. They did, however, envisage a liberation of human nature from the
constraints of a petrified culture. Gisela Steinwachs not only describes the almost
imperceptible transition from culture to nature brought about by surrealist experiments,
but also establishes a direct link between Breton’s inconscient and the unconscious of
psychoanalysis: ‘There is a direct path leading from the contestation of the paramount
position of consciousness in automatic writing to scientific psychoanalysis in its most
advanced – i.e. structural – form.’201 Sartre may have agreed with this statement,
especially since he knew Breton’s famous definition of surrealism in the first manifesto:
‘psychic automatism in its pure state’.202 At the same time, Breton exalts the power of
dreams.203
He not only turns Descartes’s but also Sartre’s rationalism upside down. For Sartre’s
comments on Janet’s patient show to what extent he equates subjectivity and identity,
especially in the 1930s and 40s. The human being appears to him as a consciousness
without an unconscious: transparent to itself and devoid of suppressed natural
impulses and instincts. It is hardly surprising therefore that, along with psychoanalysis,
he rejects surrealism as an art of the unconscious. He blames it for dissolving
subjectivity in the unconscious and in nature: ‘The first thing to be done is to eliminate
the conventional distinctions between conscious and unconscious life, between dream
and waking. This means that subjectivity is dissolved.’204 Steven Ungar explains: ‘For
Sartre, automatic writing is a game whose end is the dissolution of subjectivity into
tangles of irony and paradox.’205
Not surprisingly, the surrealists adopt the opposite view, and in the light of Vischer’s
and Nietzsche’s critiques of Hegel, it becomes clear why this is the case. Their basic aim
was to free the individual subject as part of nature and the unconscious – not to dissolve
it. All depends on the definition of subjectivity. They set out to demolish the decrepit
conventions, which appeared to them as obstacles to the subject’s development. What
would creativity be without the unconscious and the dream? – Breton might have
asked Sartre in a discussion about the origins of creativity.
From a surrealist and psychoanalytic point of view, Sartre’s problem seems to
consist in his failure to recognize to what extent the fundamental, apparently free ipse
is in reality a product of institutions, ideologies and conventions, i.e. a subjugated being.
Sartre may have delivered the individual subject from the tutelage of the divine
addresser, however, like his idealist precursors, he made it submit to an abstract cogito,
thus reducing it to one of its components. In view of this reductionism, the surrealists
may celebrate their discovery of the other half of subjectivity, of its natural and oneiric
aspects, as a revolutionary step forward.
Nevertheless, their liberation is only partial in character, for the liberated subject falls
prey to the mechanisms of the unconscious: to the objet trouvé and the contingencies of
‘objective chance’ or what the surrealists call hasard objectif.206 Adorno writes about
surrealism: ‘It must be understood not as a language of immediacy but as witness to
abstract freedom’s reversion to the supremacy of objects and thus to mere nature.’207
This is how Sartre saw surrealism, albeit in a different context. His first novel, La
Nausée (1938), which belongs to the same period as his early phenomenological
writings (L’Imagination, 1936 and L’Imaginaire, 1940), could be read as a fictional
inversion of surrealism. In this novel, the transformation of culture into nature
does not appear as liberation, but as a threat to a subject identifying one-sidedly with
culture:
Good Lord, how natural the town looks in spite of all its geometric patterns, how
crushed by the evening it seems. It’s so . . . obvious from here; is it possible that I
should be the only one to see it? Is there nowhere another Cassandra on top of a
hill, looking down at a town engulfed in the depths of Nature?208
Unlike surrealist painting (e.g. Dalí’s), some of which shows ruins and other
remnants of civilization euphorically overgrown by buoyant vegetation, Sartre’s Nausea
novel suffers from a nature phobia leading to a split of the narrator into nature and
culture. He is in permanent denial of his natural half, and this denial pushes him to the
brink of suicide: ‘My saliva is sugary, my body is warm; I feel insipid. My penknife is on
the table. I open it. Why not?’209
Rimbaud’s dictum ‘Je est un autre’ (‘I is someone else’) is illustrated by La Nausée in
the sense that repression of nature and nature phobia lead to a split of the subject into
mind and body. The nausea caused by nature makes the narrator-hero reject his own
body and adopt a schizophrenic attitude towards himself commented on by Georgiana
M. M. Colville:
In a crisis caused by nausea, he has a schizophrenic vision of his own body as

something separate from himself, and the result is a division of the character into
I and He: ‘. . . I turn left, he turns left, he thinks that he turns left, mad, am I mad?
He says that he is afraid of being mad’.210
The divided subject and the dissolution of syntax in what might be called ‘stream of
consciousness’ are both reminiscent of surrealism. However, in Sartre’s text they are
accompanied by negative connotations: as aspects of nausea, of the subject’s decline
and of its dissolution in nature. Everything that entails euphoric connotations in
surrealism – for example, the unconscious, chance and dream in Breton’s and Soupault’s
Les Champs magnétiques – appears in a negative light in Sartre’s novel.
In this context, it is hardly surprising that even the female body, a crucial component
of the surrealist dream, falls prey to misogynous polemics in Sartre’s novel: ‘The female
body is essentially vegetative in character; Nausea shows why. Roquentin describes
public gardens where all objects are submerged in existence, like those women who let
themselves go, adding with a humid voice: “Laughter is healthy.” . . . Femininity and
sexuality are a rotting garden.’211
These critical remarks by François George are later confirmed by Martin Dornberg
who quite rightly stresses the violent character of Sartre’s subject which explains its
permanent negation of otherness (of nature, femininity and the object): ‘It [this
negation] is the product of a thought and an experience both of which perceive and
define the Other as something antagonistic and hostile.’212
At the same time, this negation is the long-term effect of a repressive metaphysics
whose authors – from Descartes to Fichte and Hegel – exclude otherness from the
realm of pure thought. Within this idealist tradition, the subject as basis or foundation
appears as a self-sufficient being. The fact that this apparently autarchic being is also a
subjugated instance whose other half (nature) is being repressed, is conveniently
glossed over.
Sartre continues the idealist tradition when, in Critique de la raison dialectique
(1960), he tries to integrate the existentialist subject into the Hegelian-Marxist
historical narrative which – as Camus noticed early on213 – negates the alterity of
nature (cf. Chapter I, 2, a). His acceptance of this narrative is due to his purely negative
definition of subjective freedom: as néantisation, as refusal of the existing order. This
negativity stems from his Cartesian and rationalist refusal of the Other. Self-definition
is seen primarily as a negation of the Other and otherness. However, it is difficult to
persist in this attitude, which is finally superseded by Sartre himself when he accepts
the authority of the Hegelian-Marxist discourse and its collective actants.
As critics of rationalism, Hegelianism and Marxism, Adorno and Horkheimer have
mapped out a critical theory of society aimed at alterity. Instead of focusing on the
figures of geometry (like the rationalists and Sartre’s narrator), they saw in the mimetic
language of art a possibility to approach nature mimetically and to reconcile the
subject’s concepts with the objective world. They opened conceptual thought to
the Other.
6 From Nietzsche to Critical Theory: Subjectivity, mimesis, alterity
In the first chapter it was pointed out (I, 2, a) that the subject as foundation and
metaphysical postulate is exposed to a thorough and far-reaching critique in Adorno’s
and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, in particular in their Dialectic of Enlightenment,
originally intended to become an analysis of the origins of subjectivity.214 The
underlying thesis can be summed up in a few words: from Descartes to Hegel, idealism
negates or ignores alterity, especially the alterity of nature. It tends to identify all that is
different with itself by dissolving it in the concept. This fatal tendency to impose the
subject’s conceptual domination on nature and the objective world is countered by
Adorno and Horkheimer with their concept of mimetic thought and their attempt to
deliver conceptuality from the principle of domination by opening it to alterity.
In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno summarizes the project of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment in one sentence: ‘Ratio without mimesis is self-negating.’215 This is
possibly the most concise presentation of European idealism and of its key problem
(dealt with again by Derrida’s deconstruction). In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, this
sentence is announced by more detailed considerations: ‘The ratio which supplants
mimesis is not simply its counterpart. It is itself mimesis: mimesis onto death. The
subjective spirit which cancels the animation of nature can master a despiritualized
nature only by imitating its rigidity and despiritualizing itself in turn.’216 The subject’s
domination over the objective world leads to the self-destruction of the ruler: ‘Man’s
domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction
of the subject in whose service it is undertaken.’217
Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s dialectics of subjectivity originate in the Young Hegelian
context insofar as the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment start from Vischer’s and
Nietzsche’s basic idea that Hegel never succeeded in reconciling subject and object,
spirit and nature. Adorno’s expression ‘negative dialectics’ is meant to signal ‘the
difference from Hegel’.218 In a late modern or modernist context, this difference renews
and confirms the Young Hegelian discovery of a repressed (human) nature and its
various elements – contingency, chance, the unconscious and the dream – all of which
disavow Hegel’s claim that subject and object are one.
Within this Young Hegelian context, it is easier to understand Norbert W. Bolz’s
article about ‘Nietzsche’s Trace in Aesthetic Theory’. In this article, Nietzsche does not
appear as the last metaphysician in the sense of Heidegger, but as the precursor of a
Critical Theory which recognizes in the domination over nature man’s domination
over himself: ‘Early on Nietzsche mentioned the impossibility of imagining a pure
concept of humanity that is separate from nature, and he reminded us of the “frightening
ambivalence” of nature inherent in each of us: the fact that we are both a threat to
existence and a basis of humanness.’219
Long before Adorno, he hoped for a decisive impulse from art (especially from
music) that would lead to the reconciliation of subject and object. This is why Adorno
invokes Nietzsche’s notion of an art which goes beyond metaphysics and at the same
time realizes its utopias: ‘Metaphysics cannot rise again [. . .] but it may originate only
with the realization of what has been thought in its sign. – Art anticipates some of this.
Nietzsche’s work is brimful of anti-metaphysical invective, but no formula describes
metaphysics as faithfully as Zarathustra’s “Pure fool, pure poet”.’220
Although the philosopher, sociologist and dialectician Adorno is closer to Marx
than to Nietzsche, he is a Nietzschean in the sense that his negative dialectic aims at the
mimesis of art and rejects the historical immanence of Hegelian Marxists for whom
the proletariat is the only collective subject capable of putting philosophy into practice.
In spite of his trust in conceptual thought, which should prevent postmodern
commentators from reading him as a postmodern or ‘proto-postmodern’ thinker,221
Adorno joins ratio and mimesis in such a way that – like Nietzsche – he does justice to
the particular and to alterity by aesthetic rather than by theoretical means.
However, by focusing on the particular, which rationalists and Hegelians tend to
dissolve in conceptual abstractions, his own discourse becomes so particular and
idiosyncratic that it is virtually impossible to relate it to the terminology of the
social sciences. In this respect Habermas may be right when he points out that the
Dialectic of Enlightenment does not do justice to modernity and ‘that Horkheimer
and Adorno perceive cultural modernity from a similar experiential horizon, with
the same heightened sensibility, and even with the same cramped optics that render
one insensible to the traces and the existing forms of communicative rationality’.222
It may not be necessary to speak of ‘cramped optics’ (‘eingeengte Optik’), merely
because Adorno and Horkheimer refuse to rely on ‘communicative rationality’ which
may have appeared to them as mediated by the exchange value;223 but Habermas is
right in assuming that the orientation towards artistic mimesis and the negativity of
Adorno’s dialectic are not conducive to a fruitful dialogue with contemporary social
sciences and at the same time render theory insensitive to social processes held in
motion by intercultural communication and dialogue (e.g. the European integration
process).
Nevertheless, the critical value of Adorno’s concept of negativity cannot be
doubted – as will be shown in the last chapter. It is negativity that makes a critical
appraisal of social communication and evolution possible, thus preventing theoreticians
from being blinded by their own political engagement. Negativity enhances the
particular and the individual subject, both of which were underrated by Hegel and
subordinated by the Sartre of Critique de la raison dialectique to the collective actants
of history.
The essay, the model and paratactic writing, commented on in the first chapter (I, 2,
a), are Adorno’s attempts to do justice to the singular and the object which were
sacrificed to systemic abstraction by Hegel. The idea is to find forms of thought and
language allowing the subject to adopt an attitude described by Adorno (following
Hegel) as ‘freedom to the object’.224
Such an attitude is impossible within the system, because the system dissolves
objects in conceptual abstractions. At the same time, the individual subject is sacrificed
to systemic constraints, which are meant to give it insight, but in reality blind it
by making it subservient. This is why the young Adorno follows Walter Benjamin225
by proposing ‘configuration’ as an alternative to the system. Truth, he argues, cannot be
expressed in the language of traditional philosophy. Any attempt to do so is based on
the illusion that form and content can be separated. There is no other solution, he
believes, than ‘to position the words around truth in such a way that their configuration
as such yields the new truth’.226 In the process, linguistic form and conceptual content
coincide. Apart from ‘configuration’, the key word here is ‘yields’ (‘ergibt’): truth is not
postulated, deduced or defined, but is ‘yielded’ in the process of configuration.227
Between the Scylla of speechlessness and the Charybdis of commercially
manipulated language, configuration appears to the young Adorno (in the 1930s) as a
solution, as a possibility to endow philosophical subjectivity with language: ‘Compared
with the traditional words and a speechless subjective intention, configuration is a
third option.’228
Adorno, the essayist, may have revived this early notion of ‘configuration’ when
writing his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. The paratactic order underlying
his last major work is a kind of configuration and is at the same time related to
Hölderlin’s ‘parataxis’ or ‘serial technique’ (‘reihendes Verfahren’),229 as Adorno
describes it. About the paratactic composition of Hölderlin’s poems he writes: ‘Hölderlin
is irresistibly drawn to such constructions. The transformation of language into serial
order whose elements are linked differently than in the judgment is music-like.’230
These remarks are highly relevant to his Aesthetic Theory which is indebted to Hölderlin
by its paratactic, associative structures.231
However, theory is not poetry, and all attempts to bring about a rapprochement
between theory and art, attempts anticipated by the Dialectic of Enlightenment, turn
out to be self-contradictory. They lead to the paradox of a non-theoretical theory. This
danger was clearly recognized by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, the editors of
Aesthetic Theory. In their afterword, they also mention the link between the paratactic
composition and the individuum ineffabile: ‘A theory, however, that is sparked by the
individuum ineffabile, that wants to make amends to the unrepeatable, the non-
conceptual, for what identifying thought inflicts on it, necessarily comes into conflict
with the abstractness to which, as theory, it is compelled.’232
It is certainly one of Adorno’s merits to have developed the Young Hegelian,
romantic and Nietzschean critique of Hegel in the sense of a negative dialectic. He gave
this critique a particularizing bias without, however, renouncing conceptuality. The
crucial role of the concept is confirmed in his Negative Dialectics: ‘Concepts alone can
achieve what concept prevents.’233 This is one good reason for refusing to read Adorno
as a poststructuralist or to count him among those postmodern thinkers who doubt
the necessity of concepts.
He is nevertheless a precursor of postmodern thinking by virtue of rejecting the
system and a mythical History to which Hegelians and Marxists tend to sacrifice
the individual subject. Those who light-heartedly call Adorno a Neo-Marxist seem
to ignore this fact. The questionable character of the Neo-Marxist label is made
clear in Negative Dialectics where Adorno blames Marx and Engels for ‘deifying
history’.234
In this particular respect, Adorno agrees with Camus’s critique of Sartre and the
latter’s adhesion to the Hegelian-Marxist notion of history. This critique is articulated
most clearly in L’Homme révolté (1951): a book severely attacked by Jeanson (in Sartre’s
name) in Les Temps modernes (cf. Chapter I, 2, a). Like Camus, Adorno rejects the
incorporation of the individual subject into an actantial and narrative scheme where it
is made subservient to a powerful mythical or collective addresser and to an historical
teleology.
In contrast to Sartre, who, in the 1960s, considers Marxism as ‘the unsurpassable
philosophy of our time’ (cf. Chapter I, 2, a), Adorno sees the individual subject as
standing outside of all teleologies. To him, it appears as the basis and the last chance of
critical thought. By defending ‘the non-identity of subject and object’235 against Hegel
he lays the foundations for a critical distance and a negative critique, both of which are
only conceivable on an individual level. Only the individual subject, who does not
identify with an historical force such as the World Spirit, the nation or the proletariat,
can maintain a critical distance towards all ideologies and at the same time defend the
autonomy of thought.
The value of Adorno’s theory consists – among other things – in its refusal to
accept the Marxist submission of the individual subject to mythical or collective
instances and in its emphasis on the decisive role of individual criticism: ‘In view of
the collective powers, which in the contemporary world are usurping the world spirit,
the general and rational is better looked after by the isolated individual than by the
stronger battalions which have abandoned the generality of reason in a docile
manner.’236 In contrast to the dominant powers, most of which present their particular
interests as universally valid, the individual subject is still capable of ‘perceiving the
negativity of the administered world (verwaltete Welt)’ and of imagining a more
human one.237
Parallel to this train of thought, Adorno considers a critical artist such as Paul
Valéry as the deputy of ‘the total social subject’.238 By resisting the commercialized
communication of the rapidly developing culture industry, his poetry reveals the
pernicious character of the latter and produces a work of art that demands utmost
concentration from the reader, thus projecting ‘a figure of the subject who is aware and
in control of himself, a figure of the person who does not capitulate’.239
Adorno differs from all Marxists and neo-Marxists by the permanent orientation of
his thought towards the individual subject, whom he sees as the final critical instance,
both in philosophical or aesthetic and in socio-political matters.
Unlike Lucien Goldmann, a disciple of Hegel, Marx and Lukács, who tried to replace
the vanishing revolutionary proletariat with the highly diffuse ‘new working class’, with
whom he identified his humanist brand of Marxism, Adorno refuses to identify with a
particular collective subject. Although he is perfectly conscious of the impact of
collective factors (norms, values) on philosophical discourses and artworks, he
considers the individual subject as the last bastion of critical consciousness.
Even the subject of Dialogical Theory (cf. Chapter I, 1, d), which will be discussed
in some detail in the last chapter in conjunction with dialogical subjectivity, is
individual in character. Its search for new insights and truth is quite independent of the
success or failure of collective actants and of a mythical History. It nevertheless differs
from Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s theoretical subject inasmuch as it goes beyond

a purely negative stance by insisting on the importance of alterity and dialogue
(with the Other in the sense of Bakhtin). The Critical Theory of the two Frankfurt
philosophers lacks the self-reflexive and dialogical insight that pure negativity can
yield a monologue – about ‘late capitalism’, the ‘approaching catastrophe’ and the
‘culture industry’ – that becomes insensitive to the truths of other theories. It may also
become insensitive to the critical potential of political developments such as European
integration, which points beyond ideological and metaphysical monologues (e.g.
Fichte’s or Hegel’s) by virtue of its cultural and linguistic polyphony.
In spite of this affinity with certain political developments (cf. Chapter V, 2), no
identity will be postulated here between Dialogical Theory and particular social
movements or agents. In the past, too many philosophers and scientists have allowed
themselves to be blinded by their own political engagement. A theory cannot survive
without ideological engagement and will always receive the odd impulse from
contemporary politics. However, the prevailing attitude of the theoretical subject will
be critical ‘distance’240 in the sense of Norbert Elias. And this distance can also be
considered in the light of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s negativity (cf. Chapter V, 2).
7 Adorno, Freud and Broch: The ‘weakness of the I’, the ‘discontent
in civilization’ and the ‘theory of mass hysteria’
‘In many people it is already an impertinence to say “I” ’,241 notes Adorno in his Minima
Moralia. Far from being an elitist gesture, this sentence is a critical provocation that can
best be understood in the context of Critical Theory. It relates the latter to the
postmodern French critiques of subjectivity whose authors consider the individual
subject (sometimes rightly) as an epiphenomenon of language (Lacan), as an ideological
effect (Althusser) or as an ephemeral image of power constellations and structural
constraints (Foucault). To them, it appears as a chimera of the nineteenth century
which gradually begins to dissolve after the end of existentialism.
As in the works of the French thinkers, there are multiple reasons in Adorno’s
theory for the disintegration or the submission of the individual subject. Sometimes
Adorno dwells upon the supremacy of organizations (trusts, trade unions) in late
capitalism, sometimes he shows how individuals fall prey to reification and ideology.
He reads Beckett’s Endgame as a parody of existentialist ideologies, most of which
emphasize individual freedom without taking into account the organizational,
communicative and economic constraints to which the individual subject succumbs.
About Beckett’s drama he writes: ‘The grimacing clowns, childish and bloody, into
which Beckett’s subject is decomposed, are that subject’s historical truth.’242 And not
existentialist heroism or that of socialist realism, one might add.
This decomposition of the subject is not only brought about by mighty organizations,
ideologies and commercialized media, but also by certain psychic mechanisms, some
of which subtly suggest that conforming to the powers that be might be the best
solution. In The Authoritarian Personality, which he wrote together with Else Frenkel-
Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, Adorno describes how these
mechanisms prompt the individual subject to submit to individual, collective or

mythical authorities: to leaders, parties or myths.243
Much later, Adorno comments on these studies in an article about ‘Sexual Taboos
and Law Today’:
One of the most palpable results of The Authoritarian Personality was that persons
with a character structure predisposing them to follow totalitarian leaders were
haunted by fantasies of persecution of all that seemed sexually perverse to them
and were generally haunted by wild sexual ideas which they rejected by projecting
them onto out-groups.244
The complementary attitude in such cases is the narcissistic identification with the in-
group and its leaders. They usurp the father-image of liberal capitalism that was
dissociated from the family father in late capitalism:
In fact, the individual psyche is secondary, superstructure, if you like, in view of the
supremacy exercised by the actual social processes. Among the collective powers,
which have replaced paternal authority, the father-image survives, as Freud already
noticed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.245
This image attracts the narcissistic libido of powerless individual subjects who tend to
identify with a mighty leader or father figure in order to increase their self-esteem.
The empirical studies assembled in The Authoritarian Personality show how the
individual subject is dissolved in an ‘authoritarian syndrome’, how it submits to
authorities and charismatic leaders. The nine components of the authoritarian
character mentioned by the authors illustrate what is meant: (a) conventionalism: a
blind acceptance of middle-class values; (b) authoritarian submission: uncritical
submissiveness vis-à-vis idealized authorities; (c) authoritarian aggression: the
tendency to spot people who are likely to ignore conventional values; (d) anti-
intraception: rejection of the subjective imaginary; (e) superstition and stereotypy: a
mythical belief in fate; (f) power and ‘toughness’: thinking in terms of power relations;
(g) destructiveness and cynicism: a generalized hostility towards the human; (h)
projectivity: the disposition to believe in dangerous developments and conspiracies; (i)
sex: an exaggerated interest in sexual matters.246
In conjunction with the ‘authoritarian personality’ the authors speak of a
‘sadomasochistic resolution of the Oedipus complex’.247 It is due to the fact that the
individual submits masochistically to a father figure and sadistically expects an
analogous submission from his subordinates. In this social and psychic constellation,
individual subjectivity is sacrificed. In Escape from Freedom (1941), Erich Fromm
describes how this happens: ‘The different forms which the masochistic strivings
assume have one aim: to get rid of the individual self, to lose oneself; in other words, to
get rid of the burden of freedom.’248 Fromm’s analyses complete the studies published in
The Authoritarian Personality in the sense that they expose the historical and religious
causes of submission and self-abnegation, thereby establishing a link between a remote
past and a totalitarian present.249
Although critics of totalitarian systems such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Fromm

deal primarily with problems of fascism, National Socialism and Stalinism, their
research is by no means irrelevant to postmodern societies emerging after the Second
World War. For the various forms of nationalism that can be observed in different parts
of the world are marked by the identification with the in-group analysed in The
Authoritarian Personality. More than anywhere else, this identification makes itself felt
in the world of sport, and Adorno’s remark concerning football continues to be relevant:
‘At each football match the indigenous population celebrates its own team in blatant
disregard for the right to hospitality.’250 The idea that this criticism will be treated as
naive in contemporary society merely shows to what extent collective narcissism is
taken for granted.
The fascination emanating from narcissistically acting authoritarian leaders in
totalitarian states may have diminished, especially since the personality of contemporary
politicians exhausts itself in the ephemeral images of television. The postmodern
situation is marked by a sustained effort of all participants in public communication –
intellectuals, journalists and politicians – to invest their narcissistic libido in a media-
based image formation. The libidinally invested media image becomes a substitute for
the ‘I’, which is no longer under the spell of a leader, but falls prey to anonymous
mechanisms of commercialized culture.
In the fourth chapter, this pseudo-subject of media culture will be dealt with in
more detail in a sociological context. At this stage, it may be sufficient to point out that
Bourdieu’s comments on contemporary television confirm in many respects Adorno’s
critique of authoritarian behaviour and reified communication: ‘
Television is a universe where you get the impression that social actors – even
when they seem to be important, free, and independent, and even sometimes
possessed of an extraordinary aura [. . .] – are the puppets of a necessity that we
must understand, of a structure that we must unearth and bring to light.251
It is the structure of a narcissistic libido projected onto a commercialized media image.

This basic structure is analysed by Freud and his followers who believe that, in the
course of analysis, patients transfer their ego ideal onto the psychoanalyst.252 Similarly, a
Marxist-Leninist may project his ego ideal onto the party presidium, the fascist onto his
duce and the media-dependent politician, journalist or intellectual onto his image on the
TV screen. In all of these cases, the illusion prevails that the narcissistic libido is being
invested in a grandiose ego. In reality, the ego is systematically alienated from itself.
It is the kind of alienation described by Freud in conjunction with the phenomenon
of mass psychology: ‘A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have
substituted one and the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified
themselves with one another in their ego.’253 (Freud speaks of ‘primäre Masse’, not of
‘group’. The translation is misleading, especially since in sociology ‘group’ and ‘mass’ are
two very different concepts.) What matters in this case is not only the transfer of the
ego ideal onto narcissistically acting leaders, but also the libidinal identification of
mass individuals with each other. In an industrial or postindustrial society marked by
organic or functional solidarity in the sense of the Durkheim School, this identification
brings about mechanical solidarity (Durkheim), a solidarity based not on functional

interdependence but on similarity and affective proximity of the actors. It is an archaic
and mythical solidarity that obliterates the complexity of human relations in late
capitalism and that will always be welcomed by individuals with a penchant for
simplification.
This social context of mass psychology could be considered as a ‘relapse into
primitive and archaic conditions’ and explains why Freud links the emergence of
masses to a weakness of the ego (Ichschwäche). In the case of mass individuals, he
diagnoses a sense of diminished responsibility due to their submission to a leader-
dominated collective and to the eruption of their irrational instincts. In conjunction
with the mass he speaks of a ‘weakness of intellectual ability’ and a ‘lack of emotional
restraint’.254 As a relapse into atavistic conditions, mass formation combines the
individual subject’s submission to a leader and a collective with its dissolution in
affectivity and primitive drives.
It might be possible to read the entire discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis as a
permanent oscillation of the subject between the pole of cultural submission and the
pole of dissolution in sexual drives. In this perspective, the submission and dissolution
of the subject in the mass would appear as a short-circuiting of the two poles in a social
state of emergency which threatens to become permanent.
It goes without saying that Freud had a strong aversion towards this eclipse of
individual subjectivity in mass hysteria and that he saw it as one of the basic tasks of
psychoanalysis to strengthen the position of the ego between the cultural super-ego
and the id. One of his aims was to limit the exaggerated moral demands of culture and
at the same time keep the destructive tendencies of the id at bay. His analyses in
Civilization and its Discontents show how precarious a weakening of the cultural
mechanisms of control can be:
The substitution of the power of a united number for the power of a single man
is the decisive step towards civilization. The essence of it lies in the circumstance
that the members of the community have restricted their possibilities of
gratification, whereas the individual recognized no such restrictions.255
All this sounds familiar, for it reminds the English reader of Hobbes, who feared
nothing more than a relapse of potentially anti-social individuals into the state of
nature and the ensuing bellum omnium contra omnes. His introductory remarks
to the second part of Leviathan (‘Of Commonwealth’) cast light upon the
historical context in which Freud approved of the individual’s submission to cultural
constraints:
The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and
Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in
which we see them live in Common-wealths,) is the foresight of their own
preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting
themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily
consequent [. . .] to the naturall Passions of men.256
Like Freud, several centuries later, Hobbes seeks to avoid a relapse into the state of
nature and its passions.
A relapse of this kind is also perceived as a danger in Freud’s psychoanalysis where
the id appears as an imponderable and threatening force of nature. Early on, Thomas
Mann recognized in the threatened ego an appendage of the id: ‘It is a small, advanced,
enlightened and vigilant part of the “Id” – in more or less the same way as Europe is a
bright province of the vast Asian continent.’ He adds a quotation from Freud: ‘The Ego
is “that part of the Id which was modified by the proximity and the influence of the
outside world”.’257
The actantial model underlying all of these considerations has roughly the following
structure: on an infra-individual level, the ego is instructed by two antagonistic
addressers to realize two incompatible programmes. In contrast to the super-ego,
which uses all of its moral influence in order to make the ego realize the programme
‘culture’, the id mobilizes all the drives at its disposal in order to make the ego realize
the programme ‘nature’. It is difficult for the ego to break out of this aporetic constellation
marked by permanent conflict. Only in a situation imbued with mass hysteria does the
individual subject succeed in reconciling the conflicting demands and in realizing both
programmes simultaneously: by projecting its narcissistic libido onto a charismatic
leader who usurps its ego ideal and its autonomy as a subject.
In this exceptional situation, the subject can conform to the cultural norms of a
particular historical moment by projecting its ego ideal onto a collective led by a
charismatic leader and at the same time release its drives and aggressions. It may thus
temporarily avoid the ‘discontent in civilization’. Eventually, it may fall prey to the kind
of depression experienced, after 1945 and 1989, by many fascists, National Socialists
and communists who were confronted by the collapse of their totalitarian systems and
by the revival of Christian, democratic and liberal values. However, this does not
change the fact that in ‘mass hysteria’ or ‘Massenwahn’ (in the sense of Hermann Broch)
the two enemy addressers super ego and id can make peace at ego’s expense. This peace
usually marks the beginning of a barbarian era.
It is a development Hermann Broch warned against at the same time as Freud and
Adorno. Their writings reveal to what extent modernism, as a self-critical reassessment
of modernity and its rationalist or Hegelian notions of subjectivity, considers the
autonomy of the individual subject with scepticism. The intention of the three thinkers
to defend this autonomy is beyond doubt, but the question remains whether their
liberal and individualist project can be realized, especially since the writer, the
psychoanalyst and the philosopher discover substantial economic, social and psychic
obstacles which block the individual subject’s emancipation. In the postmodern era,
these obstacles seem to have taken on daunting dimensions.
While Adorno and Freud consider the dangers inherent in reification, mass
organization, ideology and mass hysteria, Broch relates the ‘disintegration of values’
(‘Zerfall der Werte’) to the disintegration of the individual subject in mass hysteria.
Starting from the idea of social differentiation, he shows in the third novel of his
trilogy The Sleepwalkers how the division of labour estranges the different systems of
values from each other: ‘Like strangers they exist side by side, an economic value-
system of “good business” next to an aesthetic one of l’art pour l’art, a military code of
values side by side with a technical or an athletic, each autonomous, each “in and for
itself ”.’258 In a similar perspective, and referring to Schiller, Georg Lukács asks in History
and Class Consciousness how ‘man having been socially destroyed, fragmented and
divided between different partial systems is to be made whole again in thought’.259 None
of the modernist thinkers has an answer to this pressing question.
However, all of them seem to agree that the accelerating process of social
differentiation and fragmentation, analysed in detail by the sociologist Georg
Simmel,260 decisively contributes to the decline of the individual subject. This decline
is not only due to specialization and fragmentation, both of which prevent the
subject from considering the whole; it is also due to the ambivalence of values that
prevails between the autonomous social systems. For the central and uncontested
value of one system may lose its function and its prestige in another. On a football
pitch, a poet sadly resembles Baudelaire’s helpless albatross after its forced landing on
a ship’s deck.
This ambivalence of values between systems can turn into an indifference of values
and value judgements as soon as it becomes clear that no encompassing, universally
valid system (religion, ideology) exists that would be beyond relativity and contestation.
About Huguenau, the value-indifferent character of the Sleepwalker trilogy, Broch
writes that his thinking is beyond Good and Evil. In his rationalist world, there are no
sinners, at best harmful individuals.261 In this kind of world, political, ethical or
aesthetic orientations become increasingly problematical because the subject lacks the
relevance criteria (cf. Chapter I, 1, c) which are always based on a particular system of
values.
Lack of orientation due to social differentiation, fragmentation and ambivalence is
one of the causes of ‘sleepwalking’ (Broch) and the disintegration of the subject in mass
hysteria. Broch deals with a factor neglected by Freud when he shows how the
traditional cultural superego is weakened by the social division of labour and
overpowered by nature in mass hysteria. About the ‘sleepwalking’ individual he writes
in his Massenwahntheorie: ‘His vegetative-animal nature has gained the upper hand
within him, and whatever he thinks, plans or undertakes, actively or just in his
imagination, with a friendly or hostile attitude towards his environment, it invariably
descends into the instinctual sphere.’262 In other words, the instinctual nature (Freud’s
id) overpowers the ego within the individual subject and nips any rational impulse
pointing beyond existing conditions in the bud. This subject’s world is marked by a
one-dimensional outlook in the sense of Marcuse.
Elsewhere in Massenwahntheorie, a relationship between mass hysteria and the
crisis of values is postulated: ‘The individual lives under the spell of a multitude of
independent subsystems, each of which pretends to be absolutely valid. The consequence
is a hypertrophy of deductive values and a concomitantly growing mass hysteria.’263
The rift within a subject confronting rival value systems weakens his superego and
makes him fall prey to demagogues or (more recently) to the spell of the media. He
may join a tightly organized group – a party, sect or movement – in order to escape
from freedom (in the sense of Fromm) and from personal responsibility. (It seems odd
that Niklas Luhmann, who mapped out a complex theory of social systems, avoids a
dialogue with Broch and renounces the concept of subject instead of examining the
impact of social or systemic differentiation on individual subjectivity. In the fourth

chapter, this problem will be discussed in detail.)
Like most modernist critics of modernity, such as Freud and Adorno, Broch refuses
to disavow the liberal and individualist concepts of subjectivity and autonomy. In The
Sleepwalkers, his narrator expresses the hope that the ‘sleepwalking’ subject of late
modernity will finally wake up. He speaks of a ‘longing for awaking [or: resurrection]’:
‘Sehnsucht nach Erweckung’.264 This longing also inspires Critical Theory with hope.
8 The crisis of the subject in the literature of modernism:

Nature and contingency as menace and liberation
The following analyses take up some of Adorno’s, Freud’s and Broch’s arguments and at
the same time return to the third part of this chapter: especially to Friedrich Theodor
Vischer’s critique of Hegel. Long before the modernist writers, long before Proust,
Musil, Svevo and Pirandello, the Young Hegelian philosopher-writer discovered the
repressive features of systematic thought and noted – as a disciple of Hegel – that the
master of idealism had not succeeded in reconciling mind and nature, subject and
object.
The fictive notes of his hero Einhart could be read as preliminaries to a philosophy
of contingency that queries subjectivity as an unshakable foundation and pure reason.
The idea that philosophy might one day master nature’s whims and contingencies is
commented on with irony:
In the endless activity of people trying to cope with chance, there are mysterious
laws at work which the philosophy of history has tried to investigate without much
success [. . .]. There is not much we can do; we can only accept what there is; there
is only one consolation: if the blind laws of nature are meant to bring forth
unending life and endless well-being, then, inevitably, they will also have to
demand sacrifice.265
In view of this fundamental ambivalence of nature underlying the problematic of

modernism, individual subjectivity appears as an ambivalent instance oscillating
between nature and culture, and its future seems uncertain.
The hero of Vischer’s novel anticipates a late modern or modernist era when he
notes that the thinkers of antiquity ‘were not really familiar with the spectre of the
“I” ’266 and then expresses doubts concerning the ‘I’: ‘Whenever I think about the “I” at
night, in my bed, before falling asleep, I can very well imagine that it can drive you
crazy.’267 Here, he not only broaches one of Proust’s favourite topics: a person’s multiple
character between day and dream, but anticipates the doubts of many modernist
writers who would like to save the individual subject and at the same time grapple with
Ernst Mach’s dictum that ‘the “I” is irretrievably lost’.
Like Vischer – and much later Adorno – modernist novelists such as Musil continue
the Young Hegelian critique of Hegel whenever they reveal the repressive aspects of
Hegel’s system and look for non-systematic ways of writing. In Musil’s fragmentary
novel The Man without Qualities, an anti-systematic, essayistic and fragmentary text in
the sense of Vischer’s Auch Einer, the reader encounters a critique of systematic thought
that is characteristic of modernism. The attitude of the novel’s hero is ironically
commented on by Musil’s narrator: ‘He was no philosopher, philosophers are violent
and aggressive persons who, having no army at their disposal, bring the world into
subjection to themselves by means of locking it up in a system.’268
Not only the world and nature are conquered by the system, but even the individual
subject itself – although it is responsible for the systematic construction (as Kierkegaard
and Sartre have shown in conjunction with Hegel). This is why Musil – in this respect
similar to Adorno – hopes that essayistic thinking and writing will guarantee a certain
freedom of the subject vis-à-vis its objects:
It was approximately in the way that an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs,
takes a thing from many sides without comprehending it wholly – for a thing
wholly comprehended instantly loses its bulk and melts down into a concept – that
he believed he could best survey and handle the world and his own life.269
This ‘freedom vis-à-vis the object’ thus appears to Musil as an alternative to systematic
domination over objects and nature. His solution is ambivalent insofar as it makes
inner and outer nature appear as a contingent force defying rationality and conceptual
thought.
The extent to which nature breaks through the cultural layer of society becomes
clear in Musil’s work whenever the writer comments on the unconscious, on neurosis
and madness in a context dominated by incest myths and by Ulrich’s and Agathe’s
revolt against the incest taboo.270 The basic difference between culture and nature is
called into question by this revolt, and culture as a structured system becomes
uncertain, as was pointed out by Derrida in conjunction with Lévi-Strauss’s structural
anthropology.271 The difference turns out to be problematical in social and linguistic
situations in which ambivalence as insuperable unity of opposites is the rule. In such
situations, the individual subject appears as an irreconcilable coexistence of nature and
culture, consciousness and unconscious drives, necessity and contingency, moral
attitudes and immoral instincts.
At the same time the ambivalence of values, announced by Nietzsche in Beyond
Good and Evil and analysed on different levels in literary modernism, becomes a
generally recognized fact. It bears witness to the crisis of the entire system of values, but
at the same time opens up critical and ironical perspectives, especially in the works of
Broch, Musil, Svevo and Pirandello.
In Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, the ideologist Esch rejects modernist ambivalence and
nostalgically insists on clarity: ‘Nothing was clear and simple, thought Esch in anger,
nothing was clear and simple, even on a lovely spring day like this.’272 Here it becomes
clear how univocal definitions and dualistic perspectives contribute to the constitution
of ideological subjectivity which excludes ambivalence. The latter is considered as an
acute menace by Esch because he feels that it threatens the cohesion of his ego and his
ability to take decisions and act. He only feels at home in ideological dualism and its
pseudo-subjectivity.
However, ideologies are exposed to erosion in a market society dominated by the

indifference of the exchange value and torn by ideological strife. While the exchange
value suggests that all ideological values are irrelevant in the marketplace, the warring
ideological groups eventually destroy what they are fighting for: the rule of ideology.
This scenario is completed by the indifferent or hostile coexistence of value systems
described by Broch. Together with the ideological conflicts and the exchange value
they contribute to the increase of ambivalence until it turns into indifference.273
The fact that the ambivalence of values can inhibit action is recognized – parallel to
Broch’s hero Esch – by Musil’s Diotima, whose behaviour is commented on ironically
by the narrator: ‘Every time when Diotima had almost decided in favour of one such
idea, she could not help noticing that it would also be a great thing to give reality to the
opposite of it.’274 It is obvious that this kind of reasoning can lead to the conclusion that
all values and value judgements are interchangeable, indifferent.
The writers of modernism do not draw this conclusion because they know that
social values are the basis of a subjectivity they do not wish to renounce. This is one
reason why Italo Svevo’s Zeno Cosini keeps asking himself: ‘Am I good or bad?’275 His
question leads to the critical and ironical insight into the ambivalence of his own
personality, an ambivalence investigated simultaneously by Freud’s psychoanalysis.
This ambivalence produces an ironical and self-ironical discourse for which the
following sentence is particularly characteristic: ‘I can account myself a good observer,
though a rather blind one.’276
In Musil’s case, ambivalence also yields a critical, ironical and self-ironical discourse
geared towards his well-known definition of irony:
Irony is: to describe a clerically minded person in such a way that the description
also fits a Bolshevik, to describe an idiot in such a way that the author suddenly
feels: in some respects, this is also me. This kind of irony – constructive irony – is
virtually unknown in contemporary Germany.277
It is – quite rightly – defined as ‘constructive’ because it does not simply focus on the
weaknesses of the other, but leads to a self-criticism conducive to a dialogical attitude
and a better comprehension of others and their alterity. The last chapter will set out
from this modernist ambivalence underlying a dialogical subjectivity.
As might be expected, this ambivalence is a double-edged weapon combining crisis
and critique and threatening the self-critical subject with disintegration. This kind of
ambivalence is – as was shown earlier on – an aspect of the crisis of values and an
aspect of critical irony. It can be used against our interlocutors, but can also turn against
ourselves – as Musil’s example shows.
Many literary works of modernism illustrate the relationship between ambivalence
and the disintegration of the individual subject: a relationship marked by critical and
self-critical components, most of which were analysed by romantic philosophers and
writers. Sandro M. Moraldo casts light on both the creative and the destructive aspects
of ambivalence when he explores the world of the double who becomes a central
literary figure during the transition278 from romanticism to modernism: ‘The individual
seeks to realize and develop the diverse possibilities inherent in his personality. The
double thus becomes a projection surface for his unrealized wishes and desires.’279
Within the context of ambivalence, possibilities of experiencing life are perceived that
would be inconceivable within an ideological dualism in the sense of ‘either – or’.
However, this freedom, which implies an increasing critical potential, is accompanied
by the danger of disintegration:
The abyss of the unconscious opens. Man, in his individual particularity, turns into
a problem for himself; he loses his psychic equilibrium, as it were. On the one hand,
he appears as a construct of contradictory poles; on the other hand, he recognizes
‘le sue multiple identità [. . .] la sua disidentità’, which shatter his illusion of being
identical with himself.280
This disintegration of the subject, which reaches its climax in Giampaolo Lai’s
Disidentità (1988) (quoted by Moraldo), is most pronounced in modernism where
ambivalence as a coincidence of opposites dominates the entire problematic and makes
the question concerning the identity of the individual subject move to the centre of the
scene. Later on, the transition from ambivalence to indifference and the parallel
development of a postmodern literature relegate this question to the periphery of the
problematic. In this postmodern situation, many come to regard the subject as a proton
pseudos of the liberal era or as an ideological chimera.
In modernism, however, both the possibilities and the dangers of the subject’s
multiplicity are taken into account and analysed in different contexts. Pirandello, for
example, is interested in the alterity within the subject, in the stranger we house within
ourselves: ‘How could I bear this outsider inside me? This outsider that I was for
myself?’281 Such questions are provoked by a repressed or ignored alterity and, from
Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal (orig. 1904) onwards, lead to the assumption that
the ‘I’ is a human invention or construction: ‘I was nothing other than an imaginary
man now.’282 This question is raised again, albeit with greater urgency, by Pirandello’s
narrator in One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (orig. 1926). He concludes that
the subject is a chimera that changes from observer to observer like the image in a
kaleidoscope. In the eyes of each observer I am somebody else.283
In a complementary fashion, the narrator of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (orig.
1927) speaks of ‘the illusion of the unity of the personality’.284 This incredulity towards
the subject’s stable identity anticipates the disintegration of the subject in the ‘Magic
Theatre’ where the multiplicity of the ‘I’ that results from the ambivalent, conflict-
ridden coexistence of wolf and man is seen as a liberation: ‘He held a glass up to me and
again I saw the unity of my personality broken up into many selves whose number
seemed even to have increased.’285
In Steppenwolf, as in the novels of Svevo and Proust, this disintegration of the ‘I’ is
linked to the unconscious, and Hesse’s ‘Magic Theatre’ could be considered as a
metaphor of the unconscious. In this ‘theatre’ the social persona (Jung) is treated as the
‘mask of an actor’286 and cast aside so as to reveal the ‘inner life’ of the subject: its
repressed drives, fantasies and desires. ‘You have no doubt guessed long since that the
conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however it may be that you choose to
describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called
personality’,287 explains Pablo to Harry Haller before the latter’s unconscious opens up
before his eyes and he contemplates the half-forgotten images of his desire.
In some respects, the involuntary memory in Marcel Proust’s Recherche appears as
an analogon to Hesse’s ‘Magic Theatre’, especially in Le Temps retrouvé where the social
world of the intellect and of witty talk is subordinated to the artist’s instinct, the instinct
artistique. Since Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust doubts the authenticity of social intellect
and intellectual conversation and seeks a solution in the unconscious world of an
involuntary memory functioning beyond the intellect’s social control.288
At this level, he encounters Musil who would like to locate literary writing beyond
conventional consciousness. More explicitly than Proust, the Austrian novelist doubts
the validity of established syntax – in spite of his critique of psychoanalysis:
As long as one continues to think in sentences with a full stop, certain things
cannot be said – only vaguely felt. However, it might be possible to learn to express
things in such a way as to open up and understand perspectives which today are
still located at the threshold of the unconscious.289
Musil’s and Proust’s novels open such perspectives which are later on extended
and clarified by the surrealists. In his psychoanalytic study ‘La Rhétorique du rêve.
Swann et la psychanalyse’, Michel Grimaud even seeks to show ‘to what extent all of
Proust functions like a dream’.290 On a structural and narrative level, Gérard Genette
confirms this hypothesis when he insists on the associative (Adorno would say:
‘paratactic’) order of Proust’s novel because it obeys the associative laws of dreams
rather than the deductive principles of narrative syntax. He speaks of the ‘multiplicity
of reminiscing instances’ and the ‘multiplicity of beginnings’.291 This ‘multiplicity of
beginnings’ is also a salient feature of Musil’s novel which begins with the hero’s ‘three
attempts to become a famous man’. Like Proust’s Recherche, it doubts the validity of
narrative syntax and its causality, both of which are a result of conscious construction.
It explores in an essayistic manner the possibilities of associative writing that lie beyond
the consciousness and the intelligence of everyday life.
With their exploratory sorties into the realm of the unconscious and the dream, the
modernist novels of Hesse, Proust and Musil revive Vischer’s meditations about the
‘spirit’s indebtedness to nature’ and at the same time anticipate surrealist writing with
its orientation towards the unconscious, the objet trouvé and the hasard objectif. In the
case of Proust, for example, chance (a kind of hasard objectif avant la lettre) guarantees
the authenticity of involuntary memory and its link to the unconscious: ‘But it was
precisely the fortuitous and inevitable fashion in which this and the other sensations
have been encountered that proved the trueness of the past which they brought back to
life.’292 The revival of the subject’s past is thus linked to the unconscious mechanisms of
involuntary memory.
Similarly, in Hesse’s novel an almost surrealist chance prevails in the scenes of the
‘Magic Theatre’. In an unconscious scene reminiscent of Musil’s ‘allocentric state’, the
conscious ‘I’ abdicates and falls prey to contingency. In the ‘Great Automobile Hunt’,
the kind of ‘arbitrariness’293 mentioned by Breton in Les Pas perdus gains the upper
hand: ‘ “Are you shooting everyone, without distinction?” “Certainly. In many cases it
may no doubt be a pity. I am sorry, for example, about this charming young lady. Your
daughter, I presume”.’294 At this point it becomes clear that no rigid opposition should
be postulated between modernism and the avant-garde (surrealism). For modernists
such as Proust and Hesse develop avant-garde mechanisms whenever they locate the
unconscious and its contingency, both relegated to the periphery by Hegelians,
classicists and realists, at the centre of the problematic. Following Astradur Eysteinsson,
the avant-garde should therefore be considered as an aspect of the modernist
problematic.295
Surrealists such as Breton and Soupault agreed with the modernists on one
crucial point: they also set out to free the individual subject from the constraints
of convention, ideology and a rationalist tradition. They never intended – as Sartre
argues in What is Literature? (cf. supra) – to dissolve subjectivity, but tried to lay
bare the unconscious layers of personality because they believed that these were
the authentic (non-conventional, non-manipulated) substrata of subjectivity. This is
why Gisela Steinwachs is right in speaking, in conjunction with surrealism, of a
‘re-transformation of culture into nature’.296 To Breton, the liberation of the individual
subject appears as an escape from cultural conventions and as a liberation of nature
in man.
The fact that surrealism did not plan a dissolution of the subject becomes clear in
Point du jour where Breton confirms that his movement intended to ‘unify personality’:
‘le surréalisme ne se propose rien moins que d’unifier cette personnalité’.297 With
this project Breton continues the efforts of Lautréamont, Rimbaud and Freudian
psychoanalysis. However, his project is as ambivalent as that of the other writers or that
of Freud who would like to relax the controls of the super-ego, but at the same time
unleashes unconscious forces, which threaten the ‘I’ as a product of culture.
This ambivalence of psychoanalysis (and the avant-garde) was noticed early on by
D. H. Lawrence, who saw in the ‘re-transformation of culture into nature’ an acute
threat to society: ‘Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away
entirely with the moral faculty in man. [. . .] At every step the most innocent and
unsuspecting analyst starts a little landslide. The old world is yielding under us.’298
In Breton’s case, the problem spotted by Adorno and Sartre in different contexts is
an undialectical confrontation of subject and society. The surrealist overlooks the fact
that this subject can only be understood as a socialized instance. The fundamental
contradiction underlying surrealism and other modernist currents seems to be the
aporetic search for purely individual values. Christian Kellerer noticed this when he
discovered in surrealism an antinomy between individual and collective symbols:
Insofar as the individual symbols are often complex images, which have nothing to
do with collective and cultural values and frequently even contradict them, they
separate the individual from the collective consciousness by endowing it with an
individual world of values that is often very different from that of the collective.299
This assessment is confirmed by Michel Carrouges, who speaks of a surrealist

dédoublement that yields a supra-social observer who looks at the world with distance
and irony.300 In their efforts to distance themselves from social and cultural reality,
the surrealists agree with modernists such as Proust, Hesse and Camus301 who tend to
prefer the unconscious, the contingent and the natural to cultural convention.
However, modernist writers differ substantially in their attitudes towards the
conflict between nature and culture. While it may be possible to trace a development
from Proust and Hesse to surrealism that is marked by the literary unconscious, the
‘artist’s instinct’ (Proust), chance and oneiric objects (Proust’s madeleine, his pavés
inégaux and his serviette empesée),302 it is equally possible to observe the opposite
development in the case of authors such as Kafka and Sartre. Unlike Proust, Hesse and
the surrealists, these two modernists consider the sphere of nature not as a world of
freedom but as a menace to subjectivity.
They would have reacted with scepticism or even aversion to Hesse’s Nietzschean
pact with nature that is so prominent in his short novel Kurgast: ‘As long as martens still
existed, the scent of a primeval world, instinct and nature, the world was still possible
for a poet, even beautiful and full of promise.’303 In Kafka’s work, the other side of
modernist nature appears: nature as man’s relapse into animality, as cretinism and a
catastrophe that threatens the cultural order and, along with it, the foundations of
individual subjectivity.
The enlightenment zeal that motivates Joseph K. clashes with the naturalness of a
world inhabited by non-rational, animal-like individuals whose sexuality often assumes
animal connotations. When Joseph K. discovers that Leni, the advocate’s mistress, has
a ‘connecting membrane’ between her fingers (like water-birds on their feet), he
exclaims: ‘What a freak of nature!’ and adds: ‘What a pretty claw!’304 The connotations
of this scene are clearly negative, especially since Leni’s intentions are purely sexual and
devoid of emotions.
In Sartre’s work, as in Kafka’s, nature, contingency and chance are more likely to
cause a depression than a Proustian or surrealist euphoria. In La Nausée, it is the
contingency of nature-bound existence that is responsible for the hero’s attacks of
nausea.305 Like Kafka and Lawrence, Sartre fears nothing more than a surrealist ‘re-
transformation of culture into nature’. This explains his early rejection of psychoanalysis
(cf. Chapter II, 5).
The ambivalence of modernism, illustrated by the contradictory attitudes of its
writers towards nature, is due to the fact that these writers recognize the constraints
inherent in the ‘discontent in civilization’, but at the same time become aware of the fact
that the unconscious, the impulses of instinct and the contingencies of nature, can
threaten individual subjectivity. This danger is not perceived by all of them in the same
way, and authors such as Proust, Hesse or Breton tend to consider natural factors as
stimulants of creativity. In this context, the late modern subject appears as an ambivalent
unit torn between culture and nature.
This inner conflict is mainly due to the numerous modernist attempts to remove the
individual subject from the transcendental actantial model. As long as the presence of
a divine addresser seemed beyond doubt, even nature and its contingencies could be
integrated into the (narrative) programme of this addresser. After the disintegration of
this programme in the course of secularization, human nature and human culture drift
apart because the contingencies and imponderables of the one negate the claim to
absolute validity of the other. The human mind as subject turns out to be mortal
because it cannot survive the body, its material basis. This idealist skandalon, which
Hegel tried to cover up systematically, breaks out as soon as it becomes clear that the
spirit as individual subject no longer communicates with its divine addresser and no
longer participates in his powers.
In this situation, a completely new aspect of contingency becomes visible: its
absurdity. Franz Josef Wetz comments:
At one point the whole world appeared as a contingent fact and was justified as
such because it could rely on God’s choice and approval. At present it no longer
appears as justified because it no longer has a foundation and a goal. The fact that
everything could also be different and that it need not exist as such, proves, all things
considered, that it might be better if it did not exist at all.306
However, the insight that the world could be different need not lead to the negation
of everything or to self-negation. It may also yield the project of a dialogical subjectivity
based on the idea that the One and the Other, ego and alter, are inseparable and that the
opposites of modernism ought to be linked dialectically. If it is true that ego as subject
could not exist without its permanent interaction with alter, then the relations between
culture and nature, consciousness and the unconscious, necessity and contingency
should be considered in analogy to this interaction. This will be attempted – beyond all
rationalist exclusions of nature, beyond Sartre’s ‘nausea’ and Breton’s experiments with
the unconscious – in the last chapter.
9 From modernism to postmodernism: A Clockwork Orange
The following is little more than an epilogue and a way of introducing the main issues
of the next chapter. An attempt will be made to understand Anthony Burgess’s novel A
Clockwork Orange (1962) as a transition phenomenon between the critical and self-
critical subject of modernism and postmodernism’s sceptical view of subjectivity. In its
descriptions of subjectivity as submission, Burgess’s text not only anticipates key
arguments of Michel Foucault’s philosophy, but also heralds a postmodern literature
that has abandoned the modernist question concerning individual autonomy because
of its ‘metaphysical’ character.
Which aspects of subjectivity are at stake in Burgess’s novel? The short answer could
be: it shows how the freedom of the individual subject is defended by a violence-prone
peer group against a conformist post-war society dominated by market laws and
consumerism. But this somewhat simplifying answer overlooks the dialectic of violence
and domination inherent in this alienated and alienating text. For the subjectivity of
the approximately fifteen-year-old narrator Alex, whose rebellious language seems to
revive the picaresque tradition (Moll Flanders, Lazarillo, Buscón), comes about by
virtue of a rigid identification with his peer group. Throughout the novel this violent
group functions as a collective actant that expects from its actors307 obedience,
discipline and submission. (In structural semiotics the actor is defined as an instance
subordinate to the actant.)
Although discipline and submission assume extreme forms in Burgess’s novel

because they are reinforced by the violent character of the group and the hostility of its
environment, they do confirm current sociological research on peer groups as
socializing and unifying instances, ‘which “take over socialization”, create their own
space of experience and thus intensify the general tendency towards the formation of
homogeneous age groups’.308 The conformism of the group, presented as solidarity by
its members, diverges sharply from general social conformism and turns out to be the
crucial phenomenon. As a participating actor, the individual subject has to conform to
the ideology of the group and to sacrifice his identity to the collective actant.
For the following reasons Burgess’s novel is a symptom of the transition from
modernism to postmodernism. (1) It narrates the revolts of a violent group of youths,
some of which can be linked to the revolts of modernism (e.g. Hesse’s) by virtue of
their anti-bourgeois, arbitrary and avant-garde (futurist, surrealist) character. (2) It
presents the peer group as an emerging socializing instance which did not exist in this
form before the Second World War and which intensifies conformism and submission
by introducing new pressures and constraints. (3) It highlights – even more clearly
than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World – the individual
subject’s ideological malleability which Foucault and Althusser locate at the centre of
philosophical debates. (4) It is nevertheless a modernist novel because it narrates the
failure of individual and collective emancipation and because it makes an individual
rebel speak who challenges the establishment.
Alex, the narrator, acts as an individual subject in the sense that he is eventually
betrayed by his comrades-in-arms and handed over to society or its immediate
representatives: the police, the psychiatric clinic, etc. Towards the end of the novel,
he still speaks his group’s jargon that is interspersed with pseudo-Russian
vocabulary, but keeps pondering on his solitude between peer group, family and
society. From a postmodern point of view, the novel appears as a narrative about
the impossibility of individual subjectivity and as a confirmation of the latter’s
ideological character.
In a late modern or modernist perspective, it could be read as the history of a
collective revolt against a society marked increasingly by one-dimensionality and the
decline of subjective freedom. This modernist reading is linked here to the concerns of
Critical Theory and is based on the assumptions that the ‘second dimension of society’
(in the sense of Marcuse) should be made visible, that a critical theory of society will
not renounce the concept of subject and that individual subjectivity is possible in spite
of adverse conditions.
A Clockwork Orange does reveal a ‘second dimension’ of social reality, albeit in an
ironical light that is due to the adolescent character of the revolt. The action is set in an
English town at the end of the 1950s or at the beginning of the 60s. A handful of
youngsters form a gang and revolt against the established social order of the older
generation by organizing protests ranging from a simple punch-up to robberies and
homicides. Their solidarity is expressed in a group jargon sprinkled with Russian
words, most of which have been adapted to English grammar and pronunciation. They
use the language of the Soviet enemy, who is permanently condemned in the official
media and their ideologies, in order to provoke their social environment to the utmost.
The narrator, who, together with his droogs (drug = friend), enjoys considerable public
attention, comments:
All this was gloopy and made me smeck, but it was like nice to go on knowing one
was making the news all the time, O my brothers. Every day there was something
about Modern Youth, but the best veshch they ever had in the old gazetta was
by some starry pop in a doggy collar who said that in his considered opinion
and he was govoreeting as a man of Bog IT WAS THE DEVIL THAT WAS
ABROAD and was like ferreting his way into like young innocent flesh, and it was
the adult world that could take the responsibility for this with their wars and
bombs and nonsense.309
This text can be read as a metonymy or synecdoche of the British social and linguistic
situation of the 1960s. The group language of the rebellious youth is inspired by a
mythically enhanced Soviet Union (time and again referred to as ‘Russia’ by friend and
foe). It is permanently under fire from different institutions of the establishment, all of
which attack it as an instrument of the political enemy. Dr Branom, one of the clinic’s
doctors, explains: ‘But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration.’310
The narrator’s subjectivity is not entirely dissolved in his group’s solidarity although
he remains faithful to its jargon, the nadsat talk. In the course of a robbery, he is betrayed
to the police by his brothers or droogs and transferred to a futuristic clinic whose medical
doctors and psychologists make violent youths undergo a ‘psychotechnical manipulation’
(Adorno) in an attempt to eradicate their anti-social drives. In order to attain this goal,
they apply the notorious Ludovico-infusions and at the same time try to make the patient
or victim associate classical music with unbearable violence. They have discovered the
second dimension, which in Alex’s imagination points beyond the existing order: the
(apparently) irreconcilable and violent music of Beethoven, Handel and Skadelig.
The narrator’s dream in his prison cell shows to what extent he associates his
personal revolt against society with this kind of music:
But it was not really like sleep, it was like passing out to another better world. And
in this other better world, O my brothers, I was in like a big field with all flowers
and trees, and there was a like goat with a man’s litso playing away on a like flute.
And then there rose like the sun Ludwig van himself with thundery litso and
cravat and mixed-up wild and windy voloss, and then I heard the Ninth, last
movement, with the slovos all a bit mixed-up like they knew themselves they had
to be mixed-up, this being a dream:
Boy, thou uproarious shark of heaven,

Slaughter of Elysium,
Hearts on fire, aroused, enraptured,
We will tolchock you on the rot and kick
your grahzny vonny bum.
But the tune was right.311

It is not by chance that the nadsat talk, a language anticipating a utopian community,
is linked to Schiller’s well-known text and to Beethoven’s symphony. Both negate the
repressive social order by linguistic and aesthetic means. A sentence from Adorno’s
Philosophy of Modern Music casts light on the narrator’s attitude towards art: ‘The
inhumanity of art must triumph over the inhumanity of the world for the sake of the
humane.’312 (Using nadsat, Burgess radicalized Schiller’s text substantially because he
was well aware of the conciliatory, humanist tone of the ode – and probably also of
Adrian Leverkühn’s radical criticism of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Thomas Mann’s
novel Doctor Faustus, orig. 1947.)
Eventually, the inhumanity invoked by Adorno turns against the fictive author of A
Clockwork Orange who appears in the novel as a floating figure between the worlds:
Alex and his comrades break into his house, ill-treat him and his wife and destroy his
manuscript.
The manipulating doctors, scientists and politicians in Burgess’s novel seem to be
vaguely aware of this inhumanity whenever they try to nip the revolt of the youth and
of art in the bud by applying new methods of domestication. They force Alex to look at
films about war and torture, in which a technically perfect genocide is accompanied by
Beethoven’s music: ‘Then I noticed, in all my pain and sickness, what music it was that
like crackled and boomed on the sound-track, and it was Ludwig van, the last movement
of the Fifth Symphony, and I creeched like bezoomny at that. “Stop!” I creeched.’313
Alex’s protests against this abuse of classical music are met by Dr Brodsky’s –
somewhat modernist – argument concerning the ambivalence of a culture that is
inseparable from the principle of domination. In some respects his argument anticipates
deconstruction: ‘Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The
sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence – the
act of love, for instance.’314 The entire humanist tradition, to which Beethoven’s
compositions belong, seems to be impregnated with this kind of violence. At any
time, as Merleau-Ponty points out in Humanisme et terreur (1947),315 it may serve as
an instrument of domination.
In A Clockwork Orange, the manipulators succeed at first in transforming a
rebellious subject, who is gradually becoming aware of his linguistic and aesthetic
potential, into a sub-iectum, a subjugated being. In the second half of the novel, the
word ‘subject’ is used exclusively in this negative sense which is reminiscent of
Foucault’s philosophy: ‘At this stage, gentlemen, we introduce the subject himself. He is,
as you will perceive, fit and well nourished.’316 Dr Brodsky’s Mephistophelian arguments
announce postmodern attitudes because they suggest that the subject is a result of
successful manipulations (called socialization): ‘Our subject is, you see, impelled
towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act
violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the
subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude. Any questions?’317 One of
the questions from the auditorium is motivated by ethical considerations and concerns
the subject’s freedom of decision. Characteristically, Dr Brodsky and the minister
of the interior answer that they are not interested in higher ethics because their top
priority is ‘cutting down crime’ and ‘relieving the ghastly congestion of our prisons’.318
The new era knows neither subjectivity nor ethics.
The reader’s initial suspicion that the revolt of the narrator and his peer group is not
directed against a peaceful society but against a social order marked by endemic
violence is confirmed when Alex returns home from the clinic. In the library of his
native town, he is recognized and manhandled by some elderly people whom he had
attacked in the past. He is unable to defend himself because his aggressive drives are
accompanied by ‘strong feelings of physical distress’. In view of the fact that even the
police are presented as a violent organization whose aggressive subculture differs from
that of the gang by virtue of its legality, one may conclude that Alex’s youthful revolt
runs parallel to the negativity of the music he admires. Each of the two negates the
omnipresent violence in its own way.
Even members of the political opposition turn out to be unscrupulous, especially
when they see an opportunity to discredit the minister of the interior and his
government. Alex appears to them as a useful weapon in their war on the government:
‘What a superb device he can be’,319 one of the opposition leaders exclaims in a perfect
imitation of Leninist jargon. However, Alex rejects the kind of submissive subjectivity
the socialists would like to impose on him: ‘Stop treating me like a thing that’s like got
to be just used. I am not an idiot you can impose on [. . .].’320
In the end one of them – his philanthropically acting host – recognizes in him the
ruthless hooligan who in former days had so brutally ill-treated his wife that she died
shortly afterwards. The philanthropist plots revenge, locks Alex up in his room and
puts on a record with Skadelig’s third symphony. In a mixture of pain and despair Alex
jumps out of the window. This act of desperation is meant to appear as a suicide
induced by the government’s policy and used for propaganda purposes by the
opposition.
However, Alex survives, is taken to a hospital, and the government succeeds in
turning the tables on its detractors. The vindictive humanist is arrested, and the
minister of the interior parades at the sickbed of the misguided youth as the latter’s
protector and friend: ‘ “When you leave here”, said the Min, “you will have no worries.
We shall see to everything. A good job and a good salary. Because you are helping us”.’321
He gives him a stereo unit, and the narrator-hero listens to the Ninth Symphony, which
violently announces freedom and happiness:
When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running
on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching
world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the last
singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.322
This convalescence is as ambivalent, however, as the Ninth Symphony, as the

humanist tradition itself in which it came about. Alex, whom the government offers a
well-paid job in the National Gramodisc Archives, turns to romantic music and a
romantic inwardness – very much like the post-revolutionary French and German
bourgeoisie. He turns his back on his former comrades because he is lucid enough to
realize that the peer group is also a power constellation: ‘Power power, everybody like
wants power.’323 He decides to grow up and look for a wife like his former droog Pete.
More than the Ludovico-infusions, which, together with the acoustic infusions
administered by ‘Ludwig van’, make up the modernist ambivalence of the novel,

inwardness, career and marriage contribute to his integration into the existing social
order.
Published in 1962, Burgess’s novel anticipates the fate of the 1968 generation which
demanded the impossible and sought to destroy a social order it considered to be fated.
At the same time, it anticipates a one-dimensional postmodernity whose proponents
believe that they can do without (dangerous) utopias and a notion of subjectivity
inherited from ‘old-European thought’ (Luhmann).
The protagonists of many novels considered as postmodern can no longer imagine
an alternative to the existing social order because, without realizing it, they have also
undergone a psycho-technical treatment and are entirely determined by psychic and
material factors. They are subjects in the sense of over-determination and submission.
In their world, Alex’s sentence ‘Stop treating me like a thing’ is no longer conceivable
because they have been turned into psycho-material mechanisms that can perceive
others only in a mechanistic manner.
One of the first postmodern heroes is probably Mathias in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s
nouveau roman Le Voyeur (1955). Mathias is a traveller whose thinking and acting
revolves exclusively around two activities located in the economic and the sexual
sphere. He visits an island in order to sell its inhabitants as many watches as possible.
At the same time, he is under the spell of a sexual obsession. He imagines raping a girl
named Violette after tying her to the ground with pegs and strings. This idea of a
perfect rape originates in an obsessive association or alliteration (violer Violette) and
corresponds to the equally obsessive idea of a perfect sale: ‘Mathias tried to imagine
this ideal sale that only took four minutes.’324 This analogy between economics and
sexuality is reinforced by the phonetic proximity of the words voyageur – voyeur.
Mathias’s world is one-dimensional in the sense that self-reflection and a reflexive
attitude towards his own thoughts and acts are completely unknown to him.
Similarly, Grenouille in Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume (orig. 1985) is unable to
reflect critically upon himself and his world. Having been born ‘without a scent of his
own’, he is dominated by the obsession of acquiring – if necessary by murder – a scent
that makes him irresistible. It is not by chance that the narrator refers to him as ‘tick’:
‘The tick had scented blood.’325 He behaves like a tick when he murders the first girl:
‘And after he had smelled the last faded scent of her, he crouched beside her for a while,
collecting himself, for he was brimful with her.’326 In the end, he succeeds in getting
hold of the perfect perfume, in becoming irresistible and in subjecting others to the
determinism of scent. They turn into animal-like beings: ‘The air was heavy with the
sweet odour of sweating lust and filled with loud cries, grunts and moans from ten
thousand human beasts.’327
The determining factors need not always be sexuality and smell. A tune can also
become irresistible, as A Clockwork Orange shows. In Daniele Del Giudice’s short story
‘L’ orecchio assoluto’ (‘The Absolute Ear’), published in his volume Mania in 1997, a
melody predestines the hero to murder somebody. He hears the melody in the room of
an Edinburgh hotel and is overcome by ‘an extremely lucid and irresistible urge to kill
somebody’.328 After a relatively short search, he finds his victim. Is it an acte gratuit in
the sense of Gide? By no means, rather an acte déterminé: something very different
from Gide’s attempt to make his hero act independently of all determinants and
conventions.
This search for a world beyond established conventions and determinisms seems to
be lacking in postmodern literature whose authors have renounced modernist utopias
or relegated them to the outskirts of their problematic. However, this problematic is
not co-extensive with the works of Robbe-Grillet, Süskind or Giudice. It also made the
experimental works of Thomas Pynchon and Jürgen Becker possible – or the more
readable novels of authors such as John Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969)
or Umberto Eco. It may even admit some collective utopias in the sense of ecological
(Ernest Callenbach), feminist or eco-feminist (Marge Piercy) movements.329
Nevertheless, its protagonists have abandoned the vision of ‘this other better world’
which is central in Burgess’s novel.
The idea underlying the following chapters can be summed up in a few words:
without the critical notion of a ‘better world’ and the complementary notion of a
‘second dimension’, the subject as a critical instance and source of criticism is bound to
disappear.
Notes
1 W. Schulz, Ich und Welt. Philosophie und Subjektivität, Pfullingen, Neske, 1979, p. 13.
2 The relationship between Nietzsche and German Romanticism is discussed by
Th. Meyer, Nietzsche. Kunstauffassung und Lebensbegriff, Tübingen-Basel, Francke,
1991, pp. 300–2.
3 S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates – together
with Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, Princeton, Univ. Press, 1989, p. 223,
4 M. Dornberg, Gewalt und Subjekt. Eine kritische Untersuchung zum Subjektbegriff in
der Philosophie J.-P. Sartres, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1989, p. 17.
5 T. W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London-New York, Verso,
1997, p. 54.
6 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London, The Athlone Press, 1997, p. 331.
7 Cf. P. V. Zima, Essay / Essayismus. Zum theoretischen Potenzial des Essays: Von Montaigne
bis zur Postmoderne, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 2012, chap. VI.
8 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life, London-New York,
Verso, 2005, p. 135.
9 S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Greensboro, Empire Books,
2012, p. 19.
10 H. Broch, Massenwahntheorie. Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik, Kommentierte
Werkausgabe, vol. XII, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 70.
11 R. Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, Oxford, Univ. Press, 2006, p. 33.
12 G. Kimmerle, Kritik der identitätslogischen Vernunft. Untersuchung zur Dialektik der
Wahrheit bei Descartes und Kant, Königstein/Ts., Forum Academicum, 1982, p. 53.
13 Ch. Link, Subjektivität und Wahrheit. Die Grundlegung der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik
durch Descartes, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1978, p. 47.
14 R. Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, op. cit., p. 48.
15 R. Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, London-New York,
Penguin (1998), 2000, p. 25.
16 G. Kimmerle, Kritik der identitätslogischen Vernunft, op. cit., p. 51.

17 Ibid.
18 Ch. Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge (Mass.),
Harvard Univ. Press, 1996 (8th ed.), p. 145. Cf. also A. J. Cascardi, The Subject of
Modernity, Cambridge, Univ. Press, 1992, p. 33: ‘Descartes establishes the cogito as an
entirely self-contained form of reflection and “founding” of thought.’
19 R. Descartes, Meditations, op. cit., p. 30.
20 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III, Werke, vol. XX,
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1986, p. 123. (The English translation Lectures on the History of
Philosophy [translated by E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson], Lincoln-London, Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1896, does not correspond to the German original used by the
author.)
21 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, London, Penguin, 2007, p. 70.
22 Ibid., p. 75.
23 Th. Nenon, Objektivität und endliche Erkenntnis. Kants transzendentalphilosophische
Korrespondenztheorie der Wahrheit, Freiburg-Munich, Alber, 1986, p. 75.
24 O. Höffe, Immanuel Kant, Munich, Beck, 1983, p. 53.
25 P. Baumann, Kants Philosophie der Erkenntnis. Durchgehender Kommentar zu den
Hauptkapiteln der “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”, Würzburg, Königshausen und
Neumann, 1997, p. 338.
26 A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, New York, Dover
Publications, 1969, pp. 5–6.
27 Cf. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., pp. 330–31.
28 Ibid., p. 644.
29 Ibid., p. 658.
30 Cf. T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, London-New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 275:
‘Necessarily hidden from Kant was the arcanum of his philosophy: that in order to
have the capacity with which he credits it, to constitute objectivities or to objectify
itself in action, the subject on its part must always be objective also.’
31 I. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, Milton Keynes, Merchant
Books, 2009, p. 46.
32 P. Valéry, ‘Monsieur Teste’, in: Œuvres II, Paris, Gallimard, Bibl. de la Pléiade, 1960,
p. 70.
33 Ibid., p. 126.
34 H. Böhme, G. Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft. Zur Entwicklung von
Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1985, p. 130.
35 Ibid., p. 126.
36 I. H. Fichte, ‘Vorrede des Herausgebers’, in: Fichtes Werke, vol. I (Zur theoretischen
Philosophie I), ed. I. H. Fichte, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1971, p. IX.
37 J. G. Fichte, ‘Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten
Philosophie’, in: Fichtes Werke, vol. I, op. cit., p. 59.
38 Ibid, p. 96.
39 Ibid., p. 99.
40 Ibid., p. 110.
41 J. G. Fichte, ‘Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre’, in:
Fichtes Werke, vol. III (Zur Rechts- und Sittenlehre I), Berlin, De Gruyter, 1971, p. 27.
42 H. Rademacher, Fichtes Begriff des Absoluten, Frankfurt, Klostermann, 1970, p. 76.
43 I. Schindler, Reflexion und Bildung in Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre. Versuch einer Ausarbeitung
systematischer Grundstrukturen der Pädagogik, Bonn, Phil. Thesis., 1962, p. 61.
44 H. Böhme, G. Böhme, Das Andere der Vernunft, op. cit., p. 129.

45 Cf. H. Schmitz, Die entfremdete Subjektivität. Von Fichte zu Hegel, Bonn, Bouvier, 1992,
p. 147: ‘Thus Fichte’s mysticism after 1800 is a totalitarian, brutal mysticism (. . .).’
46 J. G. Fichte, ‘Der geschlossene Handelsstaat. Ein philosophischer Entwurf als Anhang
zur Rechtslehre und Probe einer künftig zu liefernden Politik’, in: Fichtes Werke, vol.
III, op. cit., p. 419. Cf. also A. Verzar, Das autonome Subjekt und der Vernunftstaat. Eine
systematisch-historische Untersuchung zu Fichtes ‘Geschlossenem Handelsstaat’ von
1800, Bonn, Bouvier, 1979, p. 16.
47 J. G. Fichte, ‘Vierte Rede’, in: Fichtes Reden an die deutsche Nation, Berlin, Deutsche
Bibliothek, 1912, p. 56.
48 Ibid., p. 58.
49 Ibid., p. 71.
50 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III, op. cit., p. 409.
51 Ibid., p. 408.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., p. 407.
54 Cf. M. Riedel (ed.), Hegel und die antike Dialektik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1990,
especially the following contributions: O. Pöggeler, ‘Die Ausbildung der spekulativen
Dialektik in Hegels Begegnung mit der Antike’; K. Düsing, ‘Formen der Dialektik bei
Plato und Hegel’; P. Aubenque, ‘Hegelsche und Aristotelische Dialektik’ and
R. W. Meyer, ‘Dialektik der sinnlichen Gewißheit und der Anfang der Seinslogik’.
55 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, New York, Dover Publications, 1956, p. 10.
56 Cf. ibid., p. 457: ‘That the History of the World, with all the changing scenes which its
annals present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit – this is the
true Theodicaea, the justification of God in History.’
57 Cf. G. W. F., Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III, op. cit., p. 157.
58 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, op. cit. p. 17.
59 Ibid., p. 78.
60 Ibid. In this respect, Ernst Bloch’s presentation of Hegel’s model is somewhat
inaccurate: ‘Hegel calls the motor and the subject of history, quite idealistically,
“national spirit”.’ (E. Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp [1962], 1985, p. 136.)
61 G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Oxford, Univ. Press (1952), 2008,
p. 15.
62 O. Pöggeler, Hegels Kritik der Romantik, Munich, Fink, 1999, p. 47.
63 Ibid., p. 50.
64 Ibid., p. 61.
65 A detailed presentation of the actantial model from a semiotic and literary point of
view can be found in: A. J. Greimas, Maupassant. La sémiotique du texte: exercices
pratiques, Paris, Seuil, 1976, pp. 62–3 and in idem, Du Sens II. Essais sémiotiques, Paris,
Seuil, 1983, especially the chapter ‘Les Actants, les acteurs et les figures’.
66 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, op. cit., p. 17.
67 Ibid., p. 54.
68 Ibid., p. 36.
69 G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, op. cit., p. 15.
70 Ibid., p. 45.
72 F. T. Vischer, ‘Der Traum. Eine Studie zu der Schrift: Die Traumphantasie von Dr. Johann
Volkelt’, in: idem, Kritische Gänge, vol. IV, Munich, Meyer und Jessen, 1922, p. 482.
73 P. Braitling, Hegels Subjektivitätsbegriff. Eine Analyse mit Berücksichtigung

intersubjektiver Aspekte, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1991, p. 82.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., p. 83.
76 Ibid.
77 G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, op. cit., p. 154.
78 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke, vol. XII,
80 Cf. T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op. cit., p. 8: ‘The matters of true philosophical
interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition,
expressed his disinterest. They are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity (. . .).’
81 M. Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism, Cambridge-London, Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1982, p. 113.
82 H. Schmitz, Die entfremdete Subjektivität, op. cit., p. 279.
83 J.-P. Lefebvre, P. Macherey, Hegel et la société, Paris, PUF, 1987 (2nd ed.), p. 87.
84 K. Marx, ‘Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik und Philosophie überhaupt’, in: K. Marx,
F. Engels, Studienausgabe, vol. I, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1966, p. 69.
85 Ibid., p. 77.
86 G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics, London,
Merlin Press, 1971, pp. 328–9.
87 G. Kunizyn, in: Weimarer Beiträge 2, 1973, p. 36.
88 Ibid.
89 P. Grujić, Hegel und die Sowjetphilosophie der Gegenwart. Zur materialistischen
Dialektik, Berne-Munich, Francke, 1969, p. 18 and pp. 59–70.
90 E. Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt, op. cit., p. 386.
91 This transition is dealt with in some length by: S. Hook, From Hegel to Marx. Studies
in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx, Ann Arbor, Univ. of Michigan Press,
1966 (2nd ed.), pp. 43–7 and J. D’Hondt, De Hegel à Marx, Paris, PUF, 1972, Part IV:
‘L’Histoire et la dialectique’.
92 J. Ritter, Hegel und die französische Revolution, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1965, p. 47.
Hegel’s importance for philosophical modernity is dealt with in detail by M. Gans,
Das Subjekt der Geschichte. Studien zu Vico, Hegel und Foucault, Hildesheim-Zurich-
New York, Olms, 1993, p. 16, where the author argues that Hegel’s dialectic ‘has
assembled the key concepts of modernity in a system’. Gans certainly has a point
when he reads Foucault as an anti-modern thinker and an adversary of Hegel.
93 F. T. Vischer, Kritische Gänge, vol. IV, op. cit., p. 175.
94 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, vol. III, Oxford, The Clarendon
Press, 1975.
95 K. Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des
neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Hamburg, Meiner, 1986 (9th ed.), pp. 42–3.
96 F. T. Vischer, Kritische Gänge, vol. IV, op. cit., p. 482.
97 E. Volhard, Zwischen Hegel und Nietzsche. Der Ästhetiker Friedrich Theodor Vischer,
Frankfurt, Klostermann, 1932, p. 155.
98 F. T. Vischer, Auch Einer. Eine Reisebekanntschaft, Berlin, Deutsche Bibliothek, 1879
(Reprint: Wurmlingen, Schwäbische Verlagsgesellschaft, s.d.), vol. II, p. 418.
99 Ibid., vol. I, p. 38.
100 Ibid., vol. I, p. 49.
101 Ibid., vol. II, p. 379.
102 Ibid., vol. II, p. 378.

103 Ibid., vol. II, p. 450.
104 Cf. ibid., vol. II, p. 330.
105 M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, Cambridge (Mass.)-London, M.I.T. Press,
1968, p. 44.
106 F. T. Vischer, Auch Einer, vol. II, op. cit., p. 461.
107 Ibid., p. 455.
108 M. Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, Stuttgart, Reclam, 1991, p. 380. All
translations by the author. The American translation by Steven T. Byington –
Memphis, General Books, 2012 – is defective and cannot be used.
109 Ibid., pp. 381–82.
110 Ibid., p. 252.
111 Ibid., p. 253.
112 Ibid., p. 350.
113 Ibid., p. 365.
114 Ibid., p. 199.
115 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Von Hobbes zu Stirner: Mensch, Naturzustand und Staat’ in: Der
Einzige (Max Stirner und Individualität), 4/28, 2004.
116 Cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes to
Locke, Oxford, Clarendon Press-Oxford Univ. Press, 1962, pp. 61–8.
117 K. A. Mautz, Die Philosophie Max Stirners im Gegensatz zum Hegelschen Idealismus,
Berlin, Duncker und Dünnhaupt, 1936, p. 23.
118 Ibid.
119 M. Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, op. cit., p. 286.
120 K. A. Mautz, Die Philosophie Max Stirners, op. cit., p. 54.
121 Ibid., p. 94.
123 Cf. J. Bentham, Theory of Legislation, 2 vols., Oxford, Univ. Press, 1914 and J. S. Mill,
Utilitarianism, London, Everyman Library, 1910. In this work Bentham’s theses are
developed.
125 F. Nietzsche, ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn’, in: idem, Werke,
vol. V (ed. K. Schlechta), Munich, Hanser, 1980, p. 314.
127 Ibid., p. 391.
128 Ibid., p. 412.
129 H. Arvon, Aux sources de l’existentialisme: Max Stirner, Paris, PUF, 1954, p. 177.
130 K. A. Mautz, Die Philosophie Max Stirners, op. cit., p. 116.
131 T. W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp
(1962), 1974, p. 60.
132 S. Kierkegaard, Either / Or. A Fragment of Life, London, Penguin (1992), 2004, p. 194.
133 N. Thulstrup, in: S. Kierkegaard, Entweder – Oder (Teil I und II), Munich, DTV, 1998
(5th ed.), p. 966.
134 S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs,
Cambridge, Univ. Press, 2009, pp. 186–87.
135 Ibid., p. 187.
136 Ibid., p. 188.
137 K. Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Berlin-Göttingen-Heidelberg, Springer,
1960 (5th ed.), p. 245.
138 H. M. Schmidinger, Das Problem des Interesses und die Philosophie Sören Kierkegaards,
Freiburg-Munich, Alber, 1983, p. 282.
139 G. Lukács, ‘Das Zerschellen der Form am Leben: Sören Kierkegaard und Regine
Olsen’, in: idem, Die Seele und die Formen, Neuwied-Berlin, Luchterhand, 1971, p. 49.
140 Cf. S. Kierkegaard, The Book on Adler, Princeton, Univ. Press, 1998, p. 91.
141 Ibid., p. 93.
142 Ibid., p. 99.
143 S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, op. cit., p. 165.
144 Cf. T. W. Adorno, Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 73.
145 E. Beck, Identität der Person. Sozialphilosophische Studien zu Kierkegaard, Adorno und
Habermas, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1991, p. 58.
146 H. M. Schmidinger, Das Problem des Interesses und die Philosophie Sören Kierkegaards,
op. cit., p. 295.
147 Cf. E. Volhard, Zwischen Hegel und Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 155.
148 F. Nietzsche, ‘Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigerjahre’, in: idem, Werke, vol. VI, op. cit.,
p. 627.
vol. V, op. cit., p. 313.
150 F. Nietzsche, ‘Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigerjahre’, in: idem, Werke, vol VI, op. cit.,
p. 627.
151 Nietzsche is interpreted as a radical critic of ‘reactive’ – i.e. non-creative – thought
by Gilles Deleuze: Cf. G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, Paris, PUF (1962), 1994
(9th ed.).
152 F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Mineola (N. Y.), Dover Publications, 2003, p. 36.
153 F. Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, London, Maestro Reprints, 2000, p. 35.
154 K. Löwith, ‘Kierkegaard und Nietzsche’, in: idem, Nietzsche. Sämtliche Schriften, vol. VI,
Stuttgart, Metzler, 1987, p. 76.
155 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. With The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, Ware,
Wordsworth Editions, 2007, p. 8.
156 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science. With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs,
New York, Vintage Books, 1974, p. 171.
157 Ibid., p. 85.
p. 624.
159 Ibid., p. 625.
160 M. Djurić, Nietzsche und die Metaphysik, Berlin-New York, De Gruyter, 1985, p. 98.
161 F. Nietzsche, Human, all too Human. Beyond Good and Evil, Ware, Wordsworth
Editions, 2008, p. 389.
vol. V, op. cit., p. 314.
163 F. Nietzsche, ‘The Antichrist’, in: idem, Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and
Ecce Homo, op. cit., p. 101.
164 G. Abel, Nietzsche. Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr,
Berlin-New York, De Gruyter, 1998 (2nd ed.), p. 146.
165 Cf. F. Nietzsche, ‘Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigerjahre’, in: idem, Werke, vol. VI, op. cit.,
p. 434.
166 J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity (1990),
1998, p. 94.
167 F. Nietzsche, ‘Wir Philologen’, in: idem, Werke, vol. V, op. cit., p. 327.
168 F. Nietzsche, ‘Aus dem Nachlass der Achtzigerjahre’, in: ders., Werke, vol. VI, op. cit.,
p. 440.
169 F. Nietzsche, ‘Ecce Homo’, in: idem, Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce
Homo, op. cit., p. 260.
170 U. Schneider, Grundzüge einer Philosophie des Glücks bei Nietzsche, Berlin-New York,
De Gruyter, 1983, p. 37.
171 Cf. P. Köster, Der sterbliche Gott. Nietzsches Entwurf übermenschlicher Größe,
Maisenheim-Glan, Hain, 1972, p. 101.
172 V. Gerhardt, ‘Geschichtlichkeit bei Hegel und Nietzsche’, in: M. Djurić, J. Simon (eds.),
Nietzsche und Hegel, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1992, p. 41.
173 G. K. Lehmann, Der Übermensch. Friedrich Nietzsche und das Scheitern der Utopie,
Berlin-Berne-Frankfurt, Lang, 1993, p. 52.
174 Cl. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, New York, Basic Books, 1963, p. 210.
175 Ibid., p. 209.
176 R. Knodt, Friedrich Nietzsche. Die ewige Wiederkehr des Leidens. Selbstverwirklichung
und Freiheit als Problem seiner Ästhetik und Metaphysik, Bonn, Bouvier, 1987, p. 143.
177 Cf. P. Köster, Der sterbliche Gott, op. cit., p. 101.
178 F. Nietzsche, ‘Ecce Homo’, in: idem, Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce
Homo, op. cit., p. 253.
179 Cf. M. Sautet, Nietzsche et la Commune, Paris, Le Sycomore, 1981. The author tries to
explain Nietzsche’s rejection of the Paris Commune in the context of his aristocratic
attitude and reads his work as an apology of aristocratic domination.
180 A detailed critique of Heidegger’s view of Nietzsche is to be found in: J. Derrida, Of
Grammatology, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974.
181 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche II, Gesamtausgabe, vol. VI. 2, Frankfurt, Klostermann, 1997,
p. 273.
182 F. Nietzsche, ‘The Antichrist’, in: idem, Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and
Ecce Homo, op. cit., p. 160
183 G. Schulte, ‘Ich impfe euch mit dem Wahnsinn’. Nietzsches Philosophie der verdrängten
Weiblichkeit des Mannes, Frankfurt-Paris, Qumran, 1982, pp. 13–14.
184 K. Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche. Philosophy’s Relation to the Feminine, New York-
London, Routledge, 1995, p. 42.
185 S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, Princeton,
Univ. Press, 1989, p. 223.
186 Ibid., p. 224.
187 J.-P. Sartre, ‘L’Universel singulier’, in: Kierkegaard vivant (Colloque organisé par
l’Unesco à Paris du 21 au 23 avril 1964), Paris, Gallimard, 1966, pp. 38–9.
188 J.-P. Sartre, ‘Cartesian Freedom’, in: idem, Literary and Philosophical Essays, London,
Hutchinson, 1968, p. 171.
189 Ibid., p. 178.
190 Ibid., p. 180.
191 M. Warnock, The Philosophy of Sartre, London, Hutchinson, 1966 (2nd ed.), p. 29.
192 J.-P. Sartre, L’Imagination, Paris, PUF, 1969, p. 140.
193 Ibid., p. 157.
194 J.-P. Sartre, l’Imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, Paris,
Gallimard, 1940, p. 348.
195 J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, London-New York, Routledge, 2003, p. 63.
196 Ibid., p. 463.
197 Ibid., p. 466. (L’Etre et le néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 499.)
198 Cf. ibid., p. 84.

199 Ibid., pp. 613–23.
200 J.-P. Sartre, Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, Paris, Hermann (1938), 1965, p. 27.
201 G. Steinwachs, Mythologie des Surrealismus oder Die Rückverwandlung von Kultur in
Natur, Neuwied-Berlin, Luchterhand, 1971, p. X.
202 A. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press,
1972, p. 26.
203 Cf. ibid.
204 J.-P. Sartre, What is Literature?, London-New York, Routledge (1993), 2001, p. 139.
205 S. Ungar, ‘Sartre, Breton and Black Orpheus: Vicissitudes of Poetry and Politics’, in:
L’Esprit créateur 1, 1977, p. 11.
206 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Objet trouvé / Sujet perdu’, in: Les Lettres Nouvelles 4, 1972 and idem,
‘De Marcel Proust au surréalisme’, in: idem, L’Ambivalence romanesque. Proust, Kafka,
Musil, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002 (2nd ed.), pp. 343–4.
207 T. W. Adorno, ‘Looking Back on Surrealism’, in: idem, Notes on Literature, vol. I, New
York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1991, p. 89
208 J.-P. Sartre, Nausea, London, Penguin, 1965, p. 227
209 Ibid., p. 145.
210 G. M. M. Colville, ‘Eléments surréalistes dans La Nausée’: une hypothèse de l’écriture’,
in: L’Esprit créateur 1, 1977, p. 23.
211 F. George, Sur Sartre, Paris, Bourgois, 1976, p. 427.
212 M. Dornberg, Gewalt und Subjekt, op. cit., p. 227. Cf. also G. Zurhorst, Gestörte
Subjektivität. Einzigartigkeit und Gesetzmäßigkeit – Ein kritischer Vergleich von Sartre
und Holzkamp, Frankfurt-New York, Campus, 1982, p. 110. Zurhorst emphasizes –
after Lucien Goldmann – that for Sartre there is no such thing as a collective,
supra-individual subject.
213 Cf. A. Camus, The Rebel, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962, p. 161.
214 Cf. T. W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London-New York,
Verso, 1997, p. 54.
215 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 331.
216 T. W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 57.
217 Ibid., p. 54.
219 N. W. Bolz, ‘Nietzsches Spur in der Ästhetischen Theorie’, in: B. Lindner, W. M. Lüdke
(eds.), Materialien zur ästhetischen Theorie. Th. W. Adornos Konstruktion der Moderne,
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1979), 1980, p. 376.
221 Cf. S. Best, D. Kellner, Postmodern Theory. Critical Interrogations, London, Macmillan,
1991, p. 225 where the authors refer to ‘Adorno’s proto-postmodern theory’.
222 J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 129.
223 Adorno’s radical critique of market-mediated communication in late capitalism is
well known, and it is surprising that, in The Theory of Communicative Action,
Habermas assumes that authentic forms of communication exist outside of power
constellations and market relations – as if these relations had no impact on family life,
education and the health system.
224 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op. cit., p. 48: ‘Hegel’s “freedom to the object”, the net
result of which was the subject’s incapacitation, has yet to be achieved.’
225 Cf. W. Benjamin, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, in: idem, Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. I. 2, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1977, pp. 702–3, where the author uses the word
‘constellation’ in an historical context.
226 T. W. Adorno, ‘Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen’, in: idem, Philosophische
Frühschriften. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1973, p. 369.
227 Adorno’s concepts of configuration and constellation are discussed in relation to his
essayism in: A. Bartonek, Philosophie im Konjunktiv. Nichtidentität als Ort der
Möglichkeit des Utopischen in der negativen Dialektik Theodor W. Adornos, Würzburg,
Königshausen und Neumann, 2011, chap. II. 1 (d).
228 T. W. Adorno, ‘Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen’, in: Philosophische
Frühschriften, op. cit., p. 369.
229 T. W. Adorno, ‘Parataxis. On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry’, in: idem, Notes to Literature,
vol. II, op. cit., p. 134. (‘Parataxis. Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins’, in: idem, Noten zur
Literatur III, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1965, p. 189.)
230 T. W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. II, op. cit., p. 131.
231 Cf. ibid., pp. 131–2.
232 G. Adorno, R. Tiedemann, ‘Editors’ Afterword’, in: T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,
op. cit., p. 364.
234 Ibid., p. 321.
235 T. W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1957), 1966, p. 44.
236 T. W. Adorno, Kritik. Kleine Schriften zur Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1971,
pp. 84–5.
237 Ibid., p. 85.
238 T. W. Adorno, ‘The Artist as Deputy’, in: idem, Notes to Literature, vol. I, op. cit., p. 107.
239 Ibid., p. 106.
240 Cf. N. Elias, ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’, in: The British Journal of
Sociology 1, p. 252.
241 T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, op. cit., p. 50.
243 Cf. T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York, Harper and Brothers,
1950.
244 T. W. Adorno, Eingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1971 (7th ed.),
p. 102.
245 Ibid., p. 103.
246 Cf. T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, op. cit., p. 228.
247 Ibid., p. 759.
248 E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, New York, Avon Books (1941), 1969, p. 173.
249 Cf. ibid., chap. II and III.
250 T. W. Adorno, Eingriffe, op. cit., p. 166.
251 P. Bourdieu, On Television, New York, The New Press, 1998, p. 38.
252 B. Grunberger, Le Narcissisme. Essais de psychanalyse, Paris, Payot, 1975, p. 67.
253 S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, op. cit., p. 44
254 Ibid., p. 45.
255 S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, New York, Jonathan Cape-Harrison Smith,
1930, Mansfield Centre (CT), Martino Publishing, 2010, p. 59.
256 Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, London, Penguin, 1985, p. 223.
257 Th. Mann, ‘Freud und die Zukunft’ (Vortrag gehalten in Wien am 8. Mai 1936
zur Feier von Sigmund Freuds 80. Geburtstag), in: S. Freud, Abriß der Psychoanalyse.
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1953, p. 139.
258 H. Broch, The Sleepwalkers, London-Melbourne-New York, Quartet Books, 1986,
p. 472.
259 G. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 139.
260 Cf. G. Simmel, Über sociale Differenzierung, Leipzig, Duncker und Humblot, 1890.
261 Cf. H. Broch, The Sleepwalkers, op. cit., the Second Novel.
262 H. Broch, Massenwahntheorie. Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der Politik, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 133.
263 Ibid., pp. 82–3.
264 H. Broch, Die Schlafwandler, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1978, p. 723 (from H. Broch’s
comments on his novel).
265 F. T. Vischer, Auch Einer, vol. II, op. cit., p. 462.
266 Ibid., p. 384.
267 Ibid., pp. 384–85.
268 R. Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. I, London, Pan Books-Picador, 1979, p. 300.
269 Ibid., p. 297.
270 Cf. T. Floreancig, L’incesto nel moderno. Una prospettiva d’analisi su Bronnen,
Pirandello, Musil e Nin, Pasian di Prato (Udine), Campanotto, 2004, especially the
chapter on Musil: ‘Incesto e utopia nell’Uomo senza qualità’.
271 Cf. J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, London-New York, Routledge, 1978, p. 358:
‘Obviously there is no scandal except within a system of concepts which accredits the
difference between nature and culture. By commencing his work with the factum of
the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss thus places himself at the point at which this
difference, which has always been assumed to be self-evident, finds itself erased or
questioned.’
272 H. Broch, The Sleepwalkers, op. cit., p. 200.
273 The transition from ambivalence to indifference is discussed in detail in: P. V. Zima,
L’Indifférence Romanesque. Sartre, Moravia, Camus, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005
(2nd ed.), pp. 50–4.
274 R. Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. I, op. cit., p. 271.
275 I. Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1964, p. 291.
276 Ibid., p. 84.
277 R. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, vol. V, op. cit., p. 1939 (fragments).
278 The idea that romanticism anticipates realism, aestheticism and modernism is
developed in: J. Barzun, Classic, Romantic and Modern, Chicago-London, Univ. of
Chicago Press (1943), 1975, p. 99.
279 S. M. Moraldo, Wandlungen des Doppelgängers. Shakespeare – E. T. A. Hoffmann
– Pirandello, Frankfurt-Berlin-Bern, Lang, 1996, p. 26.
280 Ibid.
281 L. Pirandello, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, New York, Marsilio, 1992,
p. 15.
282 L. Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal, London, Dedalus, 1987, p. 97.
283 Cf. M. Rößner, ‘Nietzsche und Pirandello. Parallelen und Differenzen zweier
Denk-Charaktere’, in: J. Thomas (ed.), Pirandello-Studien. Akten des Paderborner
Pirandello-Symposiums, Paderborn-Munich-Vienna, Schöningh, 1984, p. 16 where the
author interprets Pirandello’s critique of subjectivity as a rejection of social roles.
284 H. Hesse, Steppenwolf, London, Penguin, 1965, p. 71.
285 Ibid., p. 223. The problem of subjectivity in Hesse’s novel is analysed in great detail in:
P. Petropoulou, Die Subjektkonstitution im europäischen Roman der Moderne. Zur
Gestaltung des Selbst und zur Wahrnehmung des Anderen bei Hermann Hesse und
Nikos Kazantsakis, Wiesbaden, Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, 1997, p. 87.
286 C. G. Jung, Bewußtes und Unbewußtes, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1957, p. 29.
287 H. Hesse, Steppenwolf, op. cit., p. 206.
288 Cf. P. V. Zima, L’Ambivalence romanesque, op. cit., chap. V.

289 R. Musil, Aus den Tagebüchern, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1971, p. 19.
290 M. Grimaud, ‘La Rhétorique du rêve. Swann et la psychanalyse’, in: Poétique 33, 1978,
p. 98.
291 G. Genette, Figures III, Paris, Seuil, 1972, p. 88.
292 M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. XII (Time Regained, Part Two), London,
Chatto & Windus, 1970, p. 240.
293 A. Breton, Les Pas perdus, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 73.
294 H. Hesse, Steppenwolf, op. cit., p. 215.
295 Cf. A. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, Ithaca-London, Cornell Univ. Press,
1990, pp. 155–6. It might be useful to go back in time and to examine the links
between surrealism and romanticism, as Walter Fähnders does in: “‘Projekt
Avantgarde” – Vorwort’, in: W. Asholt, W. Fähnders (eds.), ‘Die ganze Welt ist eine
Manifestation’: die europäische Avantgarde und ihre Manifeste, Darmstadt, Wiss.
Buchgesellschaft, 1997, pp. 3–8.
296 Cf. G. Steinwachs, Mythologie des Surrealismus, op. cit.
297 A. Breton, Point du jour, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, p. 181.
298 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Psychoanalysis vs. Morality’, in: idem, Fantasia of the Unconscious.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, London, Penguin, 1983, p. 202.
299 Ch. Kellerer, Objet trouvé und Surrealismus. Zur Psychologie der modernen Kunst,
Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1968, p. 43.
300 M. Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme, Paris,
Gallimard, 1950, p. 128.
301 Cf. P. V. Zima, L’Ambivalence romanesque, op. cit., chap. VI. 4: ‘De Marcel Proust au
surréalisme’.
302 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Objets oniriques et structures narratives chez Proust’, in: Revue
d’Esthétique 3/4 (‘Pour l’objet’), 1979, pp. 339–45.
303 H. Hesse, Kurgast, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1972, p. 53.
304 F. Kafka, The Trial, London, Penguin, 1994, p. 87.
305 Cf. J.-P. Sartre, La Nausée – ‘Notices, documents, notes et variantes’, in: idem, Œuvres
Romanesques, Paris, Gallimard, Bibl. de la Pléiade, 1981, p. 1685.
306 F. J. Wetz, ‘Kontingenz der Welt – Ein Anachronismus?’, in: G. v. Graevenitz,
O. Marquard (eds.), Kontingenz, Munich, Fink, 1998, p. 95.
307 The relationship between actors and actants is defined in: J. Courtés, Introduction à la
sémiotique narrative et discursive, Paris, Hachette, 1976, pp. 95–6: ‘Actants et acteurs’.
308 B. Schäfers (ed.), Grundbegriffe der Soziologie, Leverkusen, Leske-Budrich, 1986,
p. 148.
309 A. Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, London, Penguin, 1962, p. 35.
310 Ibid., p. 91.
311 Ibid., p. 59.
312 T. W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, New York, The Seabury Press, 1973, p. 132.
313 A. Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, op. cit., p. 90.
314 Ibid., p. 91.
315 Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur. Essais sur le problème communiste, Paris,
Gallimard (1947), 1980, p. 306: ‘Est-ce notre faute si l’humanisme occidental est faussé
parce qu’il est aussi une machine de guerre?’
317 Ibid., p. 99.
318 Ibid.
319 Ibid., p. 127.

320 Ibid., p. 128.
321 Ibid., p. 139.
322 Ibid.
323 Ibid., p. 143.
324 A. Robbe-Grillet, Le Voyeur, Paris, Minuit, 1955, p. 35.
325 P. Süskind, Perfume. The Story of a Murderer, London, Penguin, 1987, p. 72
326 Ibid., p. 45.
327 Ibid., p. 247–8.
328 D. Del Giudice, ‘L’orecchio assoluto’, in: idem, Mania, Turin, Einaudi, 1997, p. 13.
329 Cf. E. Callenbach, Ecotopia Emerging, Toronto-New York, Bantam, 1982; M. Piercy,
Woman on the Edge of Time, London, Woman’s Press, 1983.
III
Disintegration and Submission of the Individual

Subject in Postmodernity: Philosophy and
Psychology
Burgess’s modernist novel announces the beginning of a new, postmodern era by

describing the decline of the individual subject in a society and a language marked by
state interventionism, ideological conflicts and the psycho-technical manipulation of
citizens. Unlike late modern writers and thinkers, postmodern philosophers such as
Lyotard, Vattimo and Foucault are quite explicit whenever they are asked to comment
on the fate of the individual subject. They believe that it is a metaphysical illusion or
that it has disappeared – if it ever existed. They reveal the social, emotional and
linguistic mechanisms which make the subject into what it is: a result of ideology,
language or the unconscious. To them, it appears as a kind of chimera which hides the
fact that the promising mirage of an oasis is not the longed-for destination but yet
another stretch of sand.
They tend to relegate the concept of subject to that historical period of European
metaphysics whose representatives failed to realize that what they considered as
fundamental is in reality a derivate and an illusion based on the faith of those who
mistake the illusion for the real thing. In reality, they argue, the subject is a proton
pseudos that falls apart on closer examination: either because the social and linguistic
meaning within which it comes about can never be made present or coherent (Deleuze,
Derrida) or because the individual is ideologically, linguistically and institutionally
over-determined so that it is misleading to speak of a subject defined as an autonomously
thinking and acting instance (Althusser, Foucault, Baudrillard).
These two points of view appear to be contradictory in the sense that the first
assumes disintegration and absence of meaning, while the second assumes – in spite of
all the differences between the individual philosophers – a massive, subject-negating
presence of (ideological) meaning. This postmodern contradiction can be structurally
related to the contrast between the indifference of the exchange value and the dualism
of ideology. It fills modernist or late modern critics with hope because they can imagine
that between the extremes of meaningless disintegration and meaningful over-
determination a free space inviting subjective creativity might appear. In the first
chapter, it was shown how, after the collapse of state-sponsored ideologies in 1945 and
1989, the individual subject’s scope of action increased.
133
In what follows, the transition from the modern to the postmodern problematic,1 as
described in conjunction with A Clockwork Orange, will be at the centre of the scene.
In the – always constructed – transitions from Adorno to Lyotard,2 from Laing to
Vattimo or from Laing to Foucault, the basic difference will keep reappearing that
separates late modern critique from postmodern deconstruction. Unlike late modern
or modernist authors who link their critique to a concept of truth and to the idea of a
‘better world’ in the sense of Burgess’s hero, postmodern authors analyse processes of
disintegration or over-determination (by ideologies, power structures) without ever
envisaging alternatives to the existing social order. Although Laing shares Vattimo’s
view that the ‘I’ is divided, he immediately adds that this pathology is due to a false
social order.3 He keeps referring to Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional society and
thus departs radically from Vattimo’s approach which replaces the critical overcoming
(dépassement, Überwindung) of the 1968 generation with Heidegger’s Verwindung in
the sense of ‘getting over something’, forgetting it.
If one considers the gradual transition from philosophical, psychological and
literary modernism to postmodernity in this perspective, it becomes clear that the
discourses aiming at utopia and the overcoming of the bourgeois order were superseded
by one-dimensional languages aiming pragmatically at what is feasible or opportune or
calling for desperate revolts (Lyotard). The differences between Foucault’s escape to a
private sphere modelled on Greek antiquity, Vattimo’s pensiero debole (weak thinking)
or Lyotard’s critique of meta-narratives may be substantial, but they all imply a rejection
of modern and modernist utopias that are considered as dangerous: the rationalist,
revolutionary or aesthetic projects, all of which were meant to give the individual
subject a raison d’être. In the radical aesthetics of Lyotard’s last period, the subject,
whose resistance Adorno hoped to increase by introducing the sublime into art theory,
is sacrificed by being exposed to the destructive effects of the ‘sublime feeling’.
Between the problematics of late modernity and postmodernity, Althusser and
Lacan occupy hybrid positions. Although they still envisage an overcoming of the
existing order in the modernist sense, they suggest that this overcoming might fail
because of economic or ideological reification (Althusser) or because of the subject’s
alienation within language (Lacan). In spite of this ambiguity, Lacan’s work, in which
the concepts of truth (vérité) and full sense (parole pleine) are fundamental, will be
ascribed to a late modernity that is gradually being superseded by a one-dimensional
postmodern problematic.
As was shown in Modern / Postmodern (Zima, 2010), this problematic is structured
by the indifference of market laws and the exchange value:
Hence postmodernity, as analysed in the chapters to come, is the era of indifference:

of exchangeable individuals, relations, values, and ideologies. This should not be
taken to mean that in postmodern market society no religious, moral or aesthetic
values exist; it does mean that those who act in their name do so in the face of the
dominant exchange value whose influence increases from decade to decade.4
This social, cultural and linguistic constellation explains the fact that postmodern
thinkers no longer envisage an overcoming of the present social order and that even a
Distintegration and Submission 135
critical thinker such as Zygmunt Bauman (cf. Chapter II, 4) gives up the search for
alternatives. Political engagement, which is inconceivable without a critical value-
orientation, yields to indifference.
Erving Goffman’s work, commented on in the fourth section of this chapter, shows
to what extent indifference as exchangeability of positions and values (not as a
social or emotional attitude) can undermine individual subjectivity. To Goffman, the
disintegration of individual identity appears as a consequence of market laws. He quotes
the psychologist A. Hartman to prove his point: ‘The average chorus girl changes her
name almost as frequently as her coiffure to accord with current theatrical popularity,
show-business superstitions, or, in some cases, to avoid payment of Equity dues.’5
In many cases, religions (sects) and ideologies come to the rescue of a disoriented
subject who can no longer cope with a situation marked by indifference and the
disintegration of value systems. More often than not, their support turns out to be a
stranglehold and a new heteronomy. Between these two kinds of heteronomy, the
indifference of the market and the over-determination by ideologies, the new,
postmodern problematic takes shape. It oscillates between Lyotard’s and Vattimo’s
pluralism and Althusser’s ideologically formed subjectivity. The question is: How much
scope does the subject have between these extremes?
Some answers to this question are provided by contemporary feminisms, which
cannot be globally defined as ‘postmodern’, but which nonetheless develop within a
postmodern society whose male-dominated and growth-oriented economy begins to
erode its ecological foundations. The dialogue with some feminist theories of the
subject will raise the question concerning the prospects of a subjectivity unhampered
by male conceptualization.
The first part of the chapter focuses on the disintegration of the subject in language,
psyche and a society increasingly dominated by its own market (sections 1–3), whereas
the second part deals with the subject’s submission to ideologies, institutions and
normative systems (sections 4–7).
1 From Adorno to Lyotard: The ambivalence of the sublime

between modernity and postmodernity
The key argument of this section is linked to the sixth section of the previous chapter
where Adorno’s ‘aesthetic turn’ of dialectical philosophy was interpreted as an attempt
to save the individual subject. It can be summed up in a few words: Kant’s sublime,
which Mallarmé, Valéry and Adorno subsumed under the beautiful in a negative sense
in order to strengthen the subject’s autonomy vis-à-vis the culture industry, is turned
by Lyotard against the subject. The latter’s coherence is negated by the disruptive forces
of the sublime.
What is at stake here is a reappraisal of the sublime during the transition from late
modernity to postmodernity. Unlike late modern thinkers, who considered the sublime
in the sense of Kant as a critical tool used by the subject in its struggle against the
culture industry (Mallarmé’s universel reportage), Lyotard defines the sublime as a
subject-negating aesthetic principle. It should be added, however, that Mallarmé’s and
Adorno’s attempt to integrate the sublime into the beautiful is a precarious step that has
threatened the subject’s identity ever since Mallarmé’s poem L’Azur.6 By redefining the
aesthetics of the sublime as a global threat to the subject’s existence, Lyotard destroys a
late modern or modernist equilibrium that was never stable because of the tensions
between the beautiful and the sublime.
These introductory remarks are made more concrete by Joseph Tabbi’s study about
the Postmodern Sublime, in which the negation of the subject by the sublime principle
is illustrated in conjunction with Thomas Pynchon’s work. Tabbi shows how, in
Pynchon’s novels, the subject is torn between paranoia (the belief in coherence) and
relativism in the sense that these two attitudes negate each other:
Pynchon likes to present characters in mental states that fluctuate between the
total theory of a paranoid delusion and the ironical ‘mindless pleasures’ of a total
relativism. The overdetermined and wholly private meanings in the first state of
mind are dissolved in the second by an irony that would undermine the ground on
which any stable meaning might be built.7
It is interesting to observe how Tabbi relates this postmodern irony and its relativism to
the exchange value and the market laws, thereby confirming the postulate of indifference:
‘In a postmodern culture where the only absolute value is determined by world markets,
irony and indeterminacy (in advertising and television, and even in Corn Belt politics)
become powerful legitimations, ways of adjusting to the economic absolute while
upholding the appearance of hip radicalism.’8 It is unfortunately true that in televised
discussions, newspaper commentaries and even scientific publications, an indeterminate
radicalism tends to become a substitute for genuinely critical argument.
In the case of Mallarmé, Valéry and Adorno, this kind of argument (i.e. critique in
the modern and late modern sense) was deemed to be the task of the isolated individual
subject whose position in society was becoming more and more precarious. The insight
into the negativity and inhumanity of the social order and the corresponding negativity
of poetry and philosophy were meant to keep critical thought alive. ‘The Beautiful is
negative’,9 notes Paul Valéry, and adopts a stance similar to that of his friend and teacher
Mallarmé. At the same time, he anticipates Adorno’s negative aesthetics. By radical
innovation, distancing effects in language and a systematic negation of all commercially
exploited stereotypes, the writer or artist should avoid all compromise with ideology,
commerce and the culture industry.
But how long will innovation as permanent negation be possible? Both Jean-Paul
Sartre and the German literary critic Hugo Friedrich point out that Mallarmé’s poetry,
especially in its last phase, is threatened by silence. Friedrich speaks of ‘the proximity of
silence’,10 and Sartre comments ironically: ‘In reality he has nothing to say because he
prohibited everything from the outset.’11 In other words, Mallarmé’s poetry is an
expedition to the outer limits of language where the lyrical subject is confronted with
loss of vocabulary, silence and death.
In this sparsely populated border zone, Mallarmé’s image of the beautiful is based
on the aesthetic ideal of autonomy and harmony and is from time to time overshadowed
by the sublime and its negation of this ideal. Although the poet speaks in conjunction
with his poésie pure of a ‘pact with Beauty’ (‘pacte avec la Beauté’),12 his poem L’Azur is
a first attempt to describe the indescribable and to go beyond beauty’s harmony by
taking on the sublime of the boundless azure above him.
Commenting on the contrast between the beautiful and the sublime in nature, Kant
explains:
The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in [the
object’s] being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object,
insofar as we present unboundedness, either [as] in the object or because the object
prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its
totality.13
Formless and boundless, Mallarmé’s azur seems to correspond in all respects to Kant’s
description of the natural sublime. It drives the lyrical subject to despair: ‘Je suis hanté.
L’Azur! L’Azur! L’Azur! L’Azur!’14 Paul Bénichou quite rightly points out that the
contradiction inherent in the boundless and indescribable phenomenon drives the
lyrical subject mad, leading to a ‘mental anomaly’ (‘anomalie mentale’): ‘Since the Bible,
traditional rhetoric admits the triple repetition as an acceptable figure. But he exclaims
“L’Azur!” four times. Here the number 4 evokes endless repetition, i.e. a mental
anomaly.’15 In spite of these sorties into the realm of the sublime, Mallarmé’s poetry as
a whole remains true to the complementary ideals of aesthetic autonomy and beauty in
the sense of Kant, in the sense of Mallarmé’s own ‘pacte avec la beauté’.
This also applies to Paul Valéry’s work. Although it is based on the Kantian ideals of
autonomy, harmony and beauty, it is a remarkable attempt to renew all of them by
systematic negativity. Valéry’s aesthetics, like Mallarmé’s, is a large-scale attempt at
poetic innovation by means of linguistic negativity. The text carrying the symptomatic
title ‘Le Beau est négatif ’ shows to what extent Valéry’s discourse is inspired by
Mallarmé’s negation of linguistic stereotypes. This is how it begins: ‘The Beautiful
implies effects of inexpressibility, indescribability, ineffability. And this concept does not
express ANYTHING. No definition of it is possible, for the one and true definition is
only possible as a construction.’16 In virtually all phases of his development, Valéry
locates this construction within a theory of the beautiful whose negativity hardly ever
moves beyond the idea of harmony. As in Kant’s case, aesthetic harmony cannot be
defined by conceptual means, but for Valéry there is no doubt that harmony is the goal:
‘The force of the verses results from the indefinable harmony between what they express
and what they are.’17 He refers to a ‘univers poétique’ that does not ever communicate
with reality directly.
In spite of this orientation towards beauty and harmony, one comes across various
remarks in Valéry’s work which seem to point beyond this Kantian world of autonomy
and beauty. In a text written in 1929, he insists on the fact that the ideal of beauty and
the corresponding aesthetic theories are a thing of the past: ‘Beauty is a kind of corpse.
It was superseded by the new, the intense, the strange, in short: all the values of shock
(valeurs de choc).’18
These remarks are inspired by the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and anticipate
Walter Benjamin’s theory of the aura together with his idea of a ‘demolition of the aura’
(‘Zertrümmerung der Aura’)19 – but Benjamin does not mention them.20 However,
it is by no means certain that they mark a clear break between the aesthetics of
beauty and autonomy on the one hand, and avant-garde aesthetics on the other,
as Valéry seems to suggest. For Mallarmé’s negative beauty does include the ‘new’,
the ‘intense’ and the ‘strange’ (in Un coup de dés, for example) – although one might
hesitate to call these phenomena, in conjunction with Mallarmé’s and Valéry’s works,
‘valeurs de choc’.
The idea that there is a transition from Mallarmé to the avant-garde is to be found
in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, whose author points out that ‘in this regard art that has
been spiritualized to the extreme, such as that beginning with Mallarmé’s, and the
dream-chaos of surrealism are more closely related than their disciples realize’.21 (In the
German original, p. 145: ‘als es dem Bewußtsein der Schulen gegenwärtig ist’, meaning:
‘than the institutionalized philologies realize’.) Institutionalized criticism seems to have
also overlooked the basic interest Mallarmé, Valéry and the avant-garde movements
had in common: the idea that aesthetic negativity might increase the individual
subject’s freedom and save it in extremis.
This was also Adorno’s project which he never abandoned in spite of his thorough
analyses of the individual subject’s decline in late modernity. This paradox of despairing
hope is considered as a simple contradiction by Daniel Kipfer in his otherwise lucid
study of individuality after Adorno: ‘The possibility of resisting the global trend towards
atomization, integration and uniformity concerns exclusively the dying individual. In
this theory, the defeated individual is the only instance capable of averting the
individual’s defeat.’22 If one accepts this interpretation, which is actually borne out by
various passages in Adorno’s work,23 then one can only agree with Kipfer that Adorno’s
theory of the subject is contradictory. If, however, one considers Adorno’s discourse as
a whole and takes into account his comments on Valéry’s idea of the artwork as an
analogy ‘of the subject who is aware and in control of himself, a figure of the person
who does not capitulate’,24 one will prefer to speak of a subject in crisis, not of a defeated
individual or subject. This expression does more justice to a paradoxical theory whose
author continues to believe in the subject’s autonomy and his critical abilities.
This is also what Aldo Rescio means when he refers to Adorno’s project in Negative
Dialectics ‘to use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive
subjectivity’25 and adds:‘On the contrary: to accept disintegration and pure discontinuity
would only lead to a reconciliation with domination and death.’26
In this light Adorno not only appears as an early critic of deconstruction (cf. Chapter
III, 2), but also as an immediate heir to Mallarmé’s, Valéry’s and Stefan George’s
aesthetics. He shares their view that literature and the literary subject need innovation
in order to avoid being overpowered by ideologies and commercial communication.
‘The old,’ Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, ‘has refuge only at the vanguard of the
new: in the gaps, not in continuity.’27 Without innovation, the subject’s autonomy in art
and literature becomes inconceivable. However, the impulse of innovation aims at the
‘valeurs de choc’ (Valéry), the aesthetic shock effects that shake the foundations of
individual subjectivity.28
This dialectic of innovation and subject-destruction is already announced in
Mallarmé’s poem L’Azur in which one may discern, following Bénichou, the surrealist
‘dérèglement de tous les sens’. Repeated four times, the exclamation ‘L’Azur!’ announces
a literature in which the beautiful may at any moment turn into the sublime, the
unbearably immense in the natural or mathematical sense, thereby threatening
the subject’s coherence.
Adorno was perfectly aware of this when he traced elements of the sublime in
modernist and avant-garde art. According to him, this art is marked by the absorption
of the sublime that Kant found in nature: ‘The sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively
for nature, later became the constituent of art itself. The sublime draws the demarcation
line between art and what was later called arts and crafts.’29 In various contexts the
sublime is defined by Adorno as a negativity by which art resists its incorporation into
the culture industry: ‘The legacy of the sublime is unassuaged negativity, as stark and
illusionless as was once promised by the semblance of the sublime.’30 If Adorno is right,
then the decisive innovation of modernist art is the absorption of the sublime as
negativity by the individual artwork.
The first part of this section was meant to show that the turn towards the sublime
was announced by the poetry of Mallarmé and Valéry. This turn, however, which is
considered by Adorno as an attempt to increase the subject’s autonomy, is not presented
by him with the kind of destructive radicalism that marks Lyotard’s postmodern
aesthetics of the sublime. In Aesthetic Theory, as in the works of the French poets, the
sublime continues to be integrated into the negatively defined beautiful in which the
autonomy of art and of the individual subject is anchored. What Adorno writes about
the ugly also applies to the sublime: ‘In the absorption of the ugly, beauty is strong
enough to expand itself by its own opposite.’31 In Adorno’s aesthetics, the absorption of
the ugly and the sublime does not challenge the dominance of the beautiful. Naturally,
it is no longer the aesthetically pleasing beauty in the sense of Kant and Hegel, but a
negative beauty in the sense Mallarmé and Valéry.
Hence the German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer is probably correct in criticizing
Wolfgang Welsch’s postmodernist reading of Adorno’s aesthetics as a theory of the
sublime. Wellmer reminds us of Adorno’s modern and modernist roots: ‘Even in
Adorno’s case, the category of the beautiful continues to dominate insofar as even the
realization of the artistic sublime is still associated with the condition of aesthetic
autonomy.’32 Adorno is a modernist thinker insofar as he refuses to define the sublime
as a destructive aporia pointing beyond the beautiful and threatening the very existence
of the subject.
By asserting in L’Inhumain (The Inhuman) – a very Adornian title – that ‘the sublime
is perhaps the only mode of artistic sensibility to characterize the modern’,33 Lyotard
moves away from Adorno by just one step. But this step is crucial. It is crucial not only
because it leads to the dissolution of the hierarchical link between the negative beautiful
and the sublime, but also because it turns the sublime against the beautiful and the
subject.34
Unlike Adorno who maintains – with Mallarmé and Valéry – that the autonomy of art
and the subject is inseparable from artistic form, Lyotard invokes Kant – or rather his
own reconstruction of Kant’s aesthetics, as Gernot Böhme points out35 – in order to
oppose the sublime to the beautiful as a basis of subjectivity. He explains his stance in an
allegory. Understanding (Verstand, Kant) as an ally of the beautiful leaves the scene and is
replaced by reason (Vernunft, Kant) which demands that imagination represent the
absolute in rational terms:
Reason thus enters the ‘scene’ in the place of understanding. It challenges the
thought that imagines: ‘make the absolute that I conceive present with your forms’.
Yet form is limitation. Form divides space and time into an ‘inside’, what it
‘comprehends’, and an ‘outside’, what it puts at a distance. It cannot present the
absolute.36
Ultimately, the antagonism, which makes the subject succumb before the sublime,
can be traced back to the incommensurability (the ‘differend’, Lyotard) between
understanding and imagination on the one hand and reason on the other. Although it
is capable of representing the beautiful by resorting to its form, imagination fails vis-à-
vis the sublime which only reason can think. Lyotard detects this incommensurability
within the sublime: ‘This differend is to be found at the heart of sublime feeling: at the
encounter of the two “absolutes” equally “present” to thought, the absolute whole when
it conceives, the absolutely measured when it presents.’37 This conflict of faculties is
insurmountable, and the individual subject falls prey to it. ‘Taste promised him a
beautiful life; the sublime threatens to make him disappear’,38 explains Lyotard.
What happened? Although Lyotard relies heavily on the negative aesthetics
developed by Mallarmé, Valéry and Adorno, he breaks with these aesthetics by
redefining negativity in the light of the sublime and by turning it against the individual
subject and its autonomy. Far from strengthening the subject, as in Adorno’s case,
negativity thus becomes a mortal threat to it.
In this context Lyotard’s critique of ‘trans-avant-garde’ or ‘consumable’
postmodernism can be reconsidered. Insofar as he continues the avant-garde
aesthetics of late modern negativity, he is obliged to condemn the tradition-oriented
innovations of postmodern artists such as Jencks, Eco, John Barth or Bonito Oliva
which defy Adorno’s dictum ‘the old has refuge only at the vanguard of the new’ (cf.
supra). Lyotard is consistent with his postmodern negativity when he distances
himself from the plea for a consumable art in the sense of Jencks or Bonito Oliva
and when he blames ‘trans-avant-gardism’ for ‘squandering’ the heritage of the
avant-gardes.39 Adorno might agree with this criticism because he also rejects all
attempts to adapt art to the needs of a culture consumer who was socialized by
culture industry.
However, the two postmodern extremes – Lyotard and Oliva, Lyotard and Eco – do
meet if they are considered from the point of view of Critical Theory and in relation to
the problem of subjectivity. For Lyotard and the advocates of a consumer-oriented
postmodern art have abandoned Mallarmé’s, Valéry’s and Adorno’s idea of ‘the subject
who is aware and in control of himself ’. At one end of the postmodern spectrum,
Lyotard maps out an aesthetic theory that negates this subject, while at the other end of
the spectrum, the trans-avant-gardists accelerate the integration of this subject into
commercial culture. They also accelerate the decline of critique in the context of
indifference: because critique is only possible in a situation where autonomous subjects
can set out from clearly defined social and aesthetic values.
2 The linguistic subversion of subjects: Between

iterability and iterativity
The basic assumption of some postmodern thinkers is that the individual subject is
over-determined by outside factors such as nature, language or the unconscious. In
Lyotard’s case, it is negated by nature’s presence in the sublime (in the sense of Kant: cf.
Chapter III, 1) that exceeds the capacity of understanding and imagination. In the case of
Derrida, whose critique of the subject will be at the centre of the discussion, along with
the critiques of Gilles Deleuze and Gianni Vattimo, it falls apart in a language considered
as an endless interaction of signifiers that results in a subversion of subjective meaning.
In view of the fact that linguists may find this assumption somewhat strange or
unusual, it seems to make sense to say a few words about André Martinet’s thesis
concerning the ‘double articulation of language’. The French linguist asks how language
‘confers upon the phonemes, i.e. upon units without signifieds, the constitution of its
signifiers, thereby shielding the latter against the impact of meaning’.40 Later on he
underlines the arbitrary character of phonemes as a crucial aspect of this absence of
meaning: ‘Stemming from the second articulation of language, the phonemes thus
appear as guarantees of the arbitrary character of the sign.’41 It stands to reason that, by
subordinating signifieds to signifiers, a philosophy of language such as Derrida’s
weakens conceptual thought and casts doubts on the complementary ideas of meaning
and subjectivity. For the subject is, among other things, an instance responsible for
conceptual definitions.
In Writing and Difference, it becomes clear to what extent Derrida (following
Bataille) returns to Vischer’s Young Hegelian problematic when he blames Hegel for
excluding from philosophy whatever does not fit logical and conceptual thought:
dream and chance, laughter and ecstasy, poetry and play. Bataille himself comments: ‘In
the “system” poetry, laughter, ecstasy are nothing. Hegel hastily gets rid of them: he
knows no other aim than knowledge.’42 Derrida resumes this train of thought when he
writes about Hegel: ‘In interpreting negativity as labor, in betting for discourse,
meaning, history, etc., Hegel has bet against play, against chance.’43 Vischer was well
aware of this, but unlike some postmodern thinkers he did not get the idea of betting
against meaning, history and the subject.
This is precisely what Derrida does when he maps out a theory of language based
on the assumption that a stable, identifiable meaning cannot exist for two reasons: first,
because each linguistic sign functions in an open context of differences that does not
admit its unambiguous definition; second, because a repetition of such a sign in context
entails differences and semantic shifts which also prevent an unambiguous definition
as presence of meaning (présence du sens).
The first case is circumscribed by Derrida’s neologism différance (from différer = to
differ, to postpone), the second case by his notion of itérabilité (iterability = repetition
with shifts in meaning). It goes almost without saying that, by denying the possibility
of defining and identifying meaning, this conception of semantics enhances the role of
the signifiers as phonetic units without meaning and tends to degrade or weaken the
signifieds as concepts. The definition of concepts as ‘presence of meaning’ becomes
impossible in Derrida’s deconstruction. In a complementary way, the identity of the
individual subject appears as an illusion that dissolves as soon as it is reconsidered in

conjunction with différance and iterability. Like the concept, the subject falls prey to the
unstoppable semantic shifting that occurs as one moves from signifier to signifier.
In order to understand the disintegration of the subject and of subjectivity (also as
a collective phenomenon) in Derrida’s deconstruction, it seems necessary to have a
closer look at différance and iterability because they both prevent the identification
(‘definition’) of subjects in language. It will be shown that both notions imply a
Nietzschean critique of Descartes and Hegel.
Saussure, the rationalist, the Cartesian, believed in the possibility of defining the
function and the meaning of individual words within the language system constructed
by him, and he imagined an identifiable subject capable of using language as parole in
an unambiguous way. His synchronic conception of language is systematic and
functional in character. This means that a particular phonetic or lexical element cannot
be defined in isolation, but only within a context where it interacts with other elements
of language. Saussure himself explains:
Within the same language, all words used to express related ideas limit each other
reciprocally; synonyms like French redouter ‘dread’, craindre ‘fear’, and avoir peur
‘be afraid’ have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its
content would go to its competitors.44
Although Derrida accepts Saussure’s idea that the meaning of a word only comes
about by virtue of its difference from semantically related words, he leaves the rationalist
framework when he argues that even Saussure’s differential approach cannot fix the
meaning of a word. The presence of meaning, he believes, cannot be brought about
because linguistic contexts are open and the process of differentiation never ends. Not
surprisingly, a text appears to him as an open interplay of signifiers whose meaning
cannot be unambiguously determined:
And that the meaning of meaning (in the general sense of meaning and not in the
sense of signalization) is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to
signifier? And that its force is a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives
signified meaning no respite, no rest, but engages it in its own economy so that it
always signifies again and differs?45
Derrida calls this endless deferment of meaning différance (from the French verb
différer = to differ, to defer, to postpone). But what does the expression ‘in its own
economy’ mean? It means that meaning can only exist as a semantic shift or deferment
of meaning, not as a static idea in the sense of Plato or as an always present, unchanging
signified presupposed by Saussure.
As a metonymy of postmodernism, Derrida’s différance contains the problematic of
postmodern particularization46 in the sense that it subordinates the interlingual and
intercultural universality of the signified as concept to the particularity of the signifier –
which is unique in each language. In this context Jochen Hörisch speaks quite rightly of
the ‘supremacy of the signifier over the signified’.47 Whenever Derrida maintains that
fixing the conceptual meaning of a word (as signified in the sense of Saussure) is
impossible, he gives priority to the signifier and turns the signified into a secondary,
derived phenomenon. At the same time, he particularizes meaning by denying the
possibility of defining a generally valid concept. For him, only the ‘indefinite referral of
signifier to signifier’ is conceivable – and not a signified or the stable meaning of a text.
This train of thought has considerable implications for individual and collective
subjectivity. It means that the latter cannot be grounded in a stable meaning or identity
because it dissolves in an unending concatenation of polysemous signifiers. It dissolves
in this context because, since Descartes, it has been linked to the conceptualizing cogito
and the possibility of conceptual definition. Subjectivity loses its cognitive basis in a
situation where conceptuality is jeopardized by the indefinable interplay of signifiers.
This process of disintegration will now be reconsidered in conjunction with
Derrida’s notion of iterability (itérabilité) which is slightly more concrete and better to
grasp than différance. Iterability (Lat. iter = path, iterum = again, reiterare = to reiterate,
repeat) means, on the face of it, repetition. Unlike rationalist semioticians such as
Algirdas J. Greimas, who believe that repetition of a word contributes to the coherence
of a text and makes it easier to define its meaning, Derrida claims that, far from
consolidating the text’s coherence, the repetition of a word calls its meaning into
question. It destabilizes its meaning because a semantic shift occurs as soon as a word
enters a new context (within a particular text or in different texts). This means that the
identity of a word or a text can never be unambiguously defined. What Derrida says in
conjunction with différance also applies to his notion of iterability: The presence of
meaning as conceptual definition is not possible.
As soon as we re-read Nietzsche’s particularizing remarks concerning conceptuality
and subjectivity, quoted in the fourth section of the previous chapter, we realize that
Derrida’s deconstruction is a Nietzschean contestation of Descartes, Kant and Hegel:
‘Each concept comes about by identifying what is not identical.’48 Is this not a theory of
iterability avant la lettre? Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the subject can be considered
parallel to his conceptual scepticism: ‘ “Subject” is the fiction according to which many
identical states form within us a single substratum.’49 Like the concept, subjectivity thus
appears as a fiction, which can only continue to exist because we overlook differences
and semantic shifts.
This is why, in his critique of Austin’s speech act theory, Derrida doubts the
continuing presence of a subject’s intention within a speech act. For him, this presence
is an illusion: ‘For a context to be exhaustively determinable, in the sense demanded by
Austin, it at least would be necessary for the conscious intention to be totally present
and actually transparent for itself and others, since it is a determining focal point of the
context.’50
However, this kind of transparency is impossible, argues Derrida, because différance
and iterability always thwart the repetition of one and the same speech act. In a
changing context the repetition of a speech act invariably produces a new speech act.
In short, what applies to the individual word and its semantic shifts also applies to the
speech act.
This semantic shifting does not allow for an identical and identifiable subjectivity or
consciousness. Rudolf Bernet explains: ‘It follows from this that no simple and direct
presence of consciousness for itself exists and that the stream of consciousness appears
between what it is now, what it is no longer and what it is not yet.’51 In the differences
between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’, the subject disappears as an indefinable, non-
identifiable phenomenon whose conceptual basis dwindles.
Especially in his book Difference and Repetition, which can be read parallel to
Derrida’s Writing and Difference, Gilles Deleuze considers repetition as a permanent
semantic shifting. It prevents us from speaking of a repetition of the same. Following
Nietzsche, he denies the existence of essence and relies exclusively on appearance; he
pleads against the concept of truth and in favour of the simulacrum:
The subject of the eternal return is not the same but the different, not the similar
but the dissimilar, not the one but the many, not necessity but chance. Moreover,
repetition in the eternal return implies the destruction of all forms which hinder
its operation, all the categories of representation incarnated in the primacy of the
Same, the One, the Identical and the Like.52
As in Nietzsche’s case, identities and definitions are fictions or illusions and should be
deconstructed.
Deleuze considers ‘the possibility of differences without a concept’53 and reveals one
of the basic concerns of postmodern thought: the conceptual dismantling of individual
and collective subjectivity. In Lyotard’s theory of the sublime, the subject is deprived of its
understanding, and in Deleuze’s theory of repetition, it is dissolved in reified language:
It (language) repeats because it (the words) is not real, because there is no definition
other than nominal. It (nature) repeats because it (matter) has no interiority,
because it is partes extra partes. It (the unconscious) repeats because it (the Ego)
represses, because it (the Id) has no memory.54
What Deleuze describes here could be defined – in a modernist perspective – as the

alienation of the individual subject in trans-subjective contexts such as language,
nature, matter, the unconscious and the id. The individual subject no longer exists
because it is dissolved in otherness: in all those areas it no longer overlooks and controls
because it has been deprived of its conceptuality. In Deleuze’s work, the modernist
critique of the idealist, domineering subject has reached its last (postmodern) phase in
which this subject succumbs to heteronomy and heterogeneity. In a society, in which all
values appear as exchangeable in relation to the exchange value, the subject itself
becomes indifferent. It can no longer be distinguished from language, nature, matter or
the unconscious. Goffman might say (cf. the introduction) that the dancer dissolves in
her different names, hairstyles and ‘tendencies of popularity’.
Two years after Difference and Repetition, Jürgen Becker gave a vivid description of
the loss of subjectivity in language:
Wolf used to make soft sentences when it was still the era of soft sentences. Do the
masses expect soft sentences? Suddenly Wolf is filled with anxiety because he does
not know what sentences the masses expect. Wolf knows that he has to know it
because in the past, when he did not know what the camera and the microphone
wanted, the camera and the microphone did not even show up.55
Both Wolf and the dancer know that offer and demand are inextricably bound together
and that the aesthetic, moral or political quality of the offer is indifferent.
This is not, of course, what Deleuze and other postmodern thinkers mean – but they
all set out from this fait accompli. Their explicit intention is closely linked to the project
of Critical Theory. It is a radical critique of dominant subjectivity, identity and
conceptuality (in the sense of ‘logocentrism’, Derrida). But insofar as Deleuze imagines
the ‘possibility of differences without a concept’ (instead of trying with Adorno to ‘strive,
by way of the concept, to transcend the concept’),56 he can only confirm Derrida’s idea
that every kind of repetition (of thoughts, events, text elements) can only subvert
identity and subjectivity: ‘It fragments identity itself ’.57 It feels like reading Derrida
when one comes across the following sentence: ‘In other words, every time we encounter
a variant, a difference, a disguise or a displacement, we will say that it is a matter of
repetition.’58 As in Derrida’s case, this sort of repetition subverts subjectivity – or even
prevents it from coming about.
Philosophers of déjà vu might object that all of these arguments can be found in
empiricism and nominalism. Their objection is not banal: not only because it explains
Deleuze’s interest in Hume,59 but also because it encourages a search for affinities
between postmodern deconstruction and the older empiricism. Deleuze himself evokes
these affinities when, in a discussion with Claire Parnet, he remarks in conjunction with
empiricism: ‘A multiplicity is never contained in the components, whatever their
number, not even in their unity or totality. A multiplicity is exclusively in the AND
[. . .].’60 Like Derrida’s deconstruction, Deleuze’s neo-empiricism is a partly implicit,
partly explicit critique of Hegel’s dialectical totality. Commenting on Hume’s scepticism,
Hegel observes that ‘one cannot sink any lower in conceptual thought’.61 He might
consider Deleuze and Derrida in the same light. However, a return to Hegel is not an
option because Hegelianism would ignore the most pressing problems of our time and
overlook the valid arguments of Deleuze and the deconstructionists.
The idea that we are dealing with a problematic consisting of related problems and
questions is borne out by the affinity between Deleuze and Derrida on the one hand and
the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo on the other, especially in relation to the subject
problem. Like the two French philosophers, Vattimo, who will be compared with R. D.
Laing in the next section, starts from the basic assumption that repetition is a process
of differentiation that erodes subjectivity. He speaks of ‘difference as disruption’ (‘la
differenza come sfondamento’)62 and argues, following Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Derrida, that in our time art and philosophy are marked by a ‘radical hermeneutic’
which deconstructs the subject and thus escapes the constraints of technological
domination:
The world of symbolic forms – philosophy, art, culture in general – affirms its
autonomy, insofar as it is the place where the subject, empowered by technology to
rule the world, is decomposed, dislocated and de-structured: as subjugated subject
(soggetto assogettato) and last incarnation of the structures of domination.63
At this point, the affinity between the three postmodern thinkers is as striking as
their estrangement from Critical Theory. Like Lyotard, they sacrifice the individual
subject to an ultra-radical (i.e. conformist) critique of capitalism and technology and
thus overlook the fact that the individual or collective subject is the foundation of
resistance and criticism. Vattimo’s affirmative attitude towards the technocratically
organized culture industry and its indifferent pluralism64 reveals the implications of his
critique of the subject.
Therefore it seems to make sense to conclude this section with a meta-critique
that will focus on the question of repetition in order to avoid losing itself in the vastness
of the postmodern problematic. The argument can be summed up in a few words:
Individual subjectivity presupposes neither a ‘presence of meaning’ nor a rigid identity
(x = x), but should be conceived of (as in the first chapter) as an interaction of permanently
changing narrative programmes and as a dialogical process, i.e. as a permanent dialogue
with the Other.
Individual subjects change and yet maintain their identity, very much like characters
in a novel who are perfectly capable of distancing themselves ironically from their past
or their ‘I’ without ever renouncing their identity or their narrative programmes. In
conjunction with Deleuze, Zourabichvili remarks: ‘Meaning is divergence, dissonance,
disjunction.’65 Meaning may include all of this: in everyday life and in the novel. More
often than characters in novels, we are daily confronted with contradictions, incoherent
contexts and meaningless events some of which may block our narrative programme(s).
The fruitless repetition of an affective, professional or scientific experiment may
sometimes confirm the initial impression of ‘divergence, dissonance and disjunction’.
But this need not be the rule – if we are not deconstructionists. For contradiction and
contingency can have both destructive and constructive effects – as will be shown in
the last chapter.
If we are rationalists, we do not believe in iterability and its unending semantic
shifts, but prefer to rely on iterativity, which the semiotician Greimas defines as follows:
‘Iterativity is the reproduction on the syntagmatic axis of identical or comparable
(identiques ou comparables) units occurring on the same level of analysis.’66 In a
complementary way, the concept of isotopy is defined as ‘repetition of classemes on a
syntagmatic axis which guarantee the homogeneity of a discourse as enunciation’.67
In this case, semantic shifts, dissonance or disintegration of meaning are not taken
into account. But maybe they are implicit? Deleuze and the deconstructionists would
certainly dwell upon the ambiguous expression ‘identical or comparable’ and try to
deconstruct the rationalist definition by opposing ‘identical’ to ‘comparable’. Units that
are comparable are not identical, they might say. With J. Hillis Miller, an American
deconstructionist, they might object: ‘The difference is as important as the repetition.’68
It seems easy, however, to integrate these objections into a dialectical semiotic. For
in real life and in a novel, divergences and contradictions can only occur in relation to
a coherence brought about by speech and action. In other words, divergences have to
diverge from something, contradictions have to contradict something and hence
presuppose a certain amount of coherence. Considered in this context, Greimas’s claim
that, far from leading to incoherence, repetition as iterativity develops discourse by
expansion and innovation, sounds quite plausible.
Semiotic subjectivity is an analogous case. If it is considered as a dialogical and

narrative process, then the ‘presence of meaning’ in a metaphysical sense is not relevant
to it because it is based on a narrative and dynamic meaning marked by semantic shifts
and contradictions (if we wish to develop our identity we have to expect others to
contradict us and cause contradictions in our development). This process of identity
acquisition is ambivalent in the sense that changes and contradictions can both
strengthen and threaten the subject’s coherence.
It is one of the tasks of a theory of the subject to relate dialectically the rationalist
and the deconstructionist theories of repetition to one another. Deconstruction (in a
general sense) is justified in challenging the rationalist and Hegelian postulate of
coherence because texts are not unambiguously definable closed totalities, but dynamic
structures marked by semantic shifts and contradictions. In the same way, individual
and collective subjects owe their scope of action and their creativity to the semantic
indeterminacies, contradictions and contingencies inherent in their narrative
programmes. However, such inconsistencies can only be understood in relation to a
basic coherence all subjects (from students combining courses to political parties
entering coalitions) postulate for themselves. Deconstructionists tend to overlook this
fact whenever they adopt an extreme point of view and disregard the counter-
arguments of their rationalist, Hegelian or Marxist interlocutors.
3 From Laing to Vattimo: ‘Divided self ’ and soggetto scisso
The transition from Laing to Vattimo, from the divided self to the sogetto scisso or split
subject – constructed here as a hypothesis – corresponds to the modern-postmodern
transitions from Adorno’s sublime to the sublime of Lyotard’s negative aesthetics, from
the rationalist-hermeneutic repetition to that of Derrida and the deconstructionists. It
will appear that the division of the subject in Laing’s psychoanalysis differs significantly
from the analogous concept in Vattimo’s postmodern philosophy where the very
notion of subjectivity is contested in the light of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s critiques
of metaphysics. These changes in conceptual meaning will be explained in relation to
the transitions from modernity to postmodernity.
It is not by chance that Ronald D. Laing’s two influential volumes The Divided Self
(1959) and The Politics of Experience (1967) belong to the same period as Anthony
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Both in Britain and in the rest of Europe it was
an era of rebellion against a society considered by many intellectuals as a reified and
alienated world in which genuine experience and subjective creativity were hardly
possible. It was an era of revolt against a looming one-dimensional social order whose
mechanisms of integration were threatening to bar people from imagining alternatives,
from thinking outside dominant ideologies.
The ‘passing out to another better world’,69 one of the central themes of Burgess’s
novel, is also one of the key topics of Laing’s work, some of which was influenced by
Sartre’s existentialism and Marcuse’s Critical Theory. In one of his Edinburgh lectures,
Laing argued, using Sartrian vocabulary, that society socializes and disciplines
individuals because it is afraid of nothingness, of the néant. The creativity, which it
denies the individual subject, is inseparable from the negative principle of néantisation
(Sartre) commented on in the previous chapter. In a perfectly organized and
commercialized society, whose members communicate in stereotypes, this creativity
can hardly survive.
Laing’s key concept of experience makes him a kindred spirit of Adorno’s Critical
Theory which links the continuing decline of individual subjectivity to the gradual
atrophy of social, emotional and physical experience. ‘The marrow of experience has
been sucked out; there is none, not even that apparently set at a remove from commerce,
that has not been gnawed away’,70 Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory. The affinity
between the two theoretical perspectives becomes obvious in the introduction to The
Politics of Experience where the loss of experience in a reality becoming unreal is
commented on: ‘Around us are pseudo-events, to which we adjust with a false
consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the
society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not.’71
This means that the subjects’ interaction with their social environment is invariably
alienating and precludes experience. Every attempt to orient one’s action towards
friendly or less friendly personalities in everyday politics is tantamount to ignoring or
misunderstanding political and economic strategies and their consequences.
The semantic opposition between alienation and truth or authenticity, an opposition
underlying Laing’s discourse, bears witness to the modernist origin of this discourse.
‘Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities’,72 we read in the introduction to
The Politics of Experience, where Laing distances himself from Marcuse’s book One-
Dimensional Man because he thinks that in this book truth and despair tend to
coincide. It is regrettable that Laing – like Foucault73 – was not familiar with all aspects
of Critical Theory and therefore misinterpreted this theory as one-sidedly ‘pessimistic’
instead of focusing on its underlying tension between critique, despair and hope.
He nevertheless sets out from several premises of this theory – without always
being aware of their philosophical origins – whenever he considers the division of the
individual subject as a consequence of the prevailing alienation between ‘experience’
and ‘behaviour’. In this situation, the individual subject may withdraw from the realm
of alienated and reified social communication into an interior world of experience that
is inaccessible to others. They are only aware of the reified patterns of interaction that
correspond to their own behaviour.
At the beginning of The Politics of Experience, Laing starts from the phenomenological
thesis that other people’s experience is hidden from my perception: ‘Your experience of
me is not inside you and my experience of you is not inside me, but your experience of me
is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you.’74 This communication of
‘blind spots’ is at the beginning of an alienation process which, as was pointed out before,
suppresses experience to such a degree that only behaviour as a conscious and perceptible
factor remains, condemning to oblivion experience: the second dimension of social life.
In this case, even Laing’s dictum ‘yet I experience you as experiencing’75 is invalidated. For
in a society, which covers every idea and every action with a stereotype, experience is
banned from consciousness. What remains is norm-oriented, stereotype behaviour.
Institutions such as family, school and the health system seem to conspire in order
to reduce the subject’s experience to a bare minimum. ‘The family as a “protection
racket” ’,76 notes Laing in order to indicate to what extent the family’s function of
protection is perverted into a function of tutelage and normalization that reduces the
child’s experience to an ‘interior world’ located outside or beyond social communication.
This ‘interior world’ is obliterated or blotted out by norm-oriented communication.
The function of normalization fulfilled by the family is further strengthened by other
institutions such as the school or the clinic to the extent that experience gradually
recedes from the entire social world, as people grow older.
One of the consequences of this development is a division of the subject as self that
corresponds to the separation of experience and behaviour. Laing sums up in one
sentence the main arguments of his book The Divided Self: ‘I devoted a book, The
Divided Self, to describing some versions of the split between experience and
behaviour.’77 What does this split look like?
At a closer look it becomes clear that the main purpose of this book is a new
investigation of the social gap described by romantics, modernists and avant-garde
artists between social appearance and subjective ‘interiority’ (Breton’s féerie intérieure).
The subject’s strategy is once more a tactical retreat from an alienated social world into
a fantastic inner world of ‘experience’:
The changes that the ‘inner’ self undergoes have already in part been described.
They may be listed here as follows:
1. It becomes ‘phantasticized’ or ‘volatilized’ and hence loses any firmly anchored

identity.
2. It becomes unreal.
3. It becomes impoverished, empty, dead, and split.
4. It becomes more and more charged with hatred, fear, and envy.
These are four aspects of one process, as looked from different points of view.
James carried this process to the limits of sanity, perhaps indeed beyond it. This
young man of twenty-eight had, as is so often the case, deliberately cultivated the
split between what he regarded as his ‘true self ’ and his false-self system.78
This ‘detachment from everyday routines’,79 as Anthony Giddens calls the split
described by Laing, is a well-known aesthetic phenomenon in modernism and
surrealism. Like Laing’s patient James, Harry Haller, Hesse’s ‘Steppenwolf ’, discovers an
inner self standing aloof from the social world which he hates and condemns. Naturally,
Haller cannot in all respects be compared with James who is a clinical case. But like the
psychoanalyst Laing, Hesse’s narrator and hero sets out to rediscover a world of
experience obliterated by routine and normality: ‘I was living again an hour of the last
years of my boyhood [. . .].’80 The key word here is the verb ‘living’ (‘erleben’ in the
original) which evokes the kind of submerged experience Proust’s narrator revives by
relying on an involuntary memory rooted in a distant past.
Surrealism belongs to the problematic of modernism81 insofar as it also opposes an
authentic world of experience to a social life perverted by ideological and commercial
stereotypes. Breton’s famous dictum ‘existence is elsewhere’ (‘l’existence est ailleurs’)82 is
accompanied in the second surrealist manifesto by a regression towards an inner world

marked by childhood experience. The author hints at an ‘interior fairyland’83 whose
magic appears as an alternative to the norm-oriented consciousness of everyday life
and to what Laing calls ‘behaviour’. The ‘fantastic’, ‘unreal’ and hostile attitude of the
surrealists towards the bourgeois social order is well known.84 In some respects, the
violence practised by the alienated youngsters in A Clockwork Orange is a revival of
this surrealist hostility.
Like the surrealists and modernists, Laing considers the schizophrenic split of the
‘I’ as an anomaly and a symptom of late capitalist alienation: ‘It seems to us that
without exception the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is
a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.’85
Like Adorno and Marcuse, Laing pleads in favour of changing the social conditions
that are responsible for what Adorno calls the ‘damaged life’. He nevertheless believes
that a psychic recovery is also possible under alienated social conditions and is
criticized from time to time as a representative of ‘conformist psychology’.86 This
criticism is gratuitous in the sense that a psychotherapy geared exclusively towards
radical social change would lose sight of its primary object: the patient as individual
subject.
At times Laing describes socially domesticated subjectivity in terms that seem to
anticipate postmodern conditions in which subjective autonomy and unity are
dismissed as vain chimeras. He speaks of ‘the illusion that we are autonomous egos’87
and adds: ‘We have all been processed on Procrustean beds.’88 Such statements are
reminiscent of Goffman, with whom Laing seems to agree that, in the course of a
therapy, the psychiatric patient is reduced to an object and thus loses his subjectivity as
a ‘non-agent’ and a ‘non-responsible object’.89 (In semiotic terms, the patient ceases to
be a subject-actant and is forced into the role of an object-actant. Instead of developing
a narrative programme of his own, he is integrated into the narrative programmes of
others.) Laing’s arguments are also reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s history of the
clinic in the course of which humans cease to be subjects because they are reduced to
their corporeity.
At the same time, they anticipate Gianni Vattimo’s claim that individual subjectivity
is dissolved in postmodern society – albeit in a completely different perspective.
Unlike Laing, who still speaks of alienated conditions (‘our collusive madness is what
we call sanity’)90 that ought to be overcome, Vattimo explicitly renounces overcoming
(Überwindung) as defined in the 1960s and replaces this term by the Heideggerian
term Verwindung: ‘Modernization does not come about as tradition is abandoned, but
as it is interpreted almost ironically, “distorted” [Heidegger, in a not unrelated fashion,
talks of Verwindung] in such a way that it is conserved, but also in part emptied.’91
Vattimo’s discourse of ‘ironic interpretation’ developed in a social and linguistic
situation similar to that of German Romanticism as criticized by Hegel. Like romantic
irony, the irony of the postmodernists rises above history because it is no longer able to
envisage the latter as a process of overcoming the existing social order (cf. Chapter II,
2). After the failure of the 1968 revolt, the last large-scale rebellion of the twentieth
century, a playfully romantic attitude of non-involvement appears to be the only
option. The system seems to have integrated the revolution: ‘Even revolution as
innovation appears as a fact that is automatically contained in the system.’92 The drive
towards radical change may have fizzled out.
Vattimo’s book about Nietzsche, written in the aftermath of the 1968 events, suggests
that the subject’s protest against reification and alienation, a protest espoused by
Adorno, Marcuse and Laing, is an illusion. The reason is that its Nietzschean author
presupposes the dissolution of truth and the subject along with the decline of
(modernist) criticism. The second dimension, defined as authenticity by Laing and
Marcuse, is bracketed out by Vattimo: ‘There is no liberation beyond appearance in a
so-called realm of authentic being.’93
In a situation dominated by Nietzschean appearance, the individual subject cannot
rely on its constant ‘core’ or unchanging deep structure. It is dissolved in an ever-
changing collusion of masks: ‘Liberated, the Dionysian consciously opts for a
multiplicity of masks.’94 In his book on Nietzsche, Vattimo speaks of a ‘disintegration of
the subject, which is the consequence of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, if thought
through radically enough’.95 The counter-argument, namely that the eternal return can
also be considered as the foundation of a new subjectivity, was put forward in the
second chapter (II, 4).
Apart from dissolving the subject in an endless interplay of masks, Vattimo also
deconstructs it on a linguistic level where it appears to him as a rhetorical and
metaphorical figure. Following Nietzsche’s dissolution of the concept of truth in
metaphors and other figures, he speaks of a ‘foundation-dissolution of the subject
resulting from a complex interplay of metaphors’.96 This perspective overlaps with the
deconstructionist view of repetition as dissolution of meaning and subjectivity.
Within the postmodern problematic, the sublime, the metaphor and repetition
appear as subject-negating factors, all of which are related by Vattimo to the static
concept of Verwindung – and no longer to the modern and modernist concepts of
critique and overcoming (Überwindung). However, he contradicts himself in a crucial
passage of The End of Modernity when he speaks of contemporary philosophers who
contemplate an ‘overcoming of the notion of the subject’.97 This means that progress is
still possible: but only as a liquidation of the individual subject by the powers that be.
The division within the subject, considered by Laing as a social pathology, is viewed
by Vattimo as the human condition of all times: as a finally recognized reality that was
until recently covered by metaphysical illusions. Following Nietzsche, he speaks of a
‘fundamentally split character of the subject’ (‘carattere costitutivamente scisso del
soggetto’)98 and adds that this division is to be considered as ‘the “normal” condition of
postmodern man’ (‘condizione “normale” dell’uomo postmoderno’).99 The individual
subject appears to him as ‘multiplicity’: ‘individualità come molteplicità’.100
Of course, one could object that the psychiatric division analysed by Laing is not
comparable to Vattimo’s split as scissione and that ‘split’ and ‘multiplicity’ in the sense of
Vattimo are vague notions which are impossible to test on a sociological or psychological
level (Laing is, after all, commenting on the clinically defined state of schizophrenia). It
seems important to deal with both objections in order to cast new light on the
comparison.
To begin with, it goes without saying that only different phenomena can be compared
provided that they have certain features in common. Division and scissione (split) are
comparable insofar as both authors describe the disintegration of the ‘I’ and analyse the
consequences of this disintegration. They do differ, however, on a structural level in
that Laing analyses a division into two halves (in the sense of schizophrenia), while
Vattimo tends to describe a social and cultural process in the course of which the
individual subject is dissolved into a multitude of masks and metaphors. In his case we
are therefore dealing with a process of disintegration, not with a division in the
psychoanalytic sense.
The main difference is at the centre of this section and concerns the change of
meaning undergone by the concept of subject between modernity and postmodernity.
Unlike Laing, who views schizophrenic behaviour in conjunction with a late capitalist
‘discontent in civilization’ and would like to overcome the system of the ‘false self ’101 in
order to reshape the subject’s unity, Vattimo bids farewell to the ‘pathos of authenticity’102
and indirectly accepts postmodern indifference.
Peter Caravetta simplifies this context somewhat when he remarks in his comments
on Vattimo’s ‘postmodern hermeneutic’: ‘Modern society is witness to the decline and
eventual disappearance of the notion of subject and subjectivity.’103 It is possible that
the individual subject has been moving in dire straits since the end of the nineteenth
century. Some structural reasons for its decline were mentioned in the first and second
chapter; some social factors will be discussed in the fourth. However, the ‘notion of
subject’ is far from obsolete because it is being used in sociology and semiotics to
explain the actions of individual and collective actants or actors and because it is at the
centre of discussions between modernists and postmodernists – along with
complementary concepts such as domination, reification, alienation, overcoming and
critique. Only those who sincerely believe that they can renounce social criticism may
also bid farewell to the concept of subject.
4 From Laing to Goffman and Foucault: Stigmatization

and organized experience
‘Gentlemen, we introduce the subject himself ’,104 we read in A Clockwork Orange,
where the word ‘subject’ evokes the subjugated, manipulated and objectified individual.
Its meaning hardly changes in the writings of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault,
whose analyses differ from Laing’s polemics against the existing social order by virtue
of their soberly descriptive character. In their case studies, they describe the human
‘existential minimum’ or the ‘damaged life’105 in the sense of Adorno rather than the
‘better world’ envisaged by Laing and Burgess’s narrator.
Reading Laing – who keeps referring to Goffman – it becomes clear that Goffman’s
theory contains critical components in spite of its functionalist and behaviourist
terminology because it makes the voice of psychiatric patients heard, thereby revealing
the relative character of psychiatric discourse.106 Something similar can be said of
Foucault, who analyses the administrative mechanisms to which individual subjects are
exposed in a world shaped by scientific progress. Although his philosophical
anthropology is not adequately described by a general concept such as ‘structuralism’ or
‘postmodernity’, it does combine a structural with a postmodern perspective in that it
reveals the structural determinants that prevent individual – and possibly even
collective – subjects from finishing the ‘project of modernity’ (Habermas) as a project
of enlightenment and emancipation.
If one had to explain Goffman’s and Foucault’s originality as succinctly as possible,
one might say that the truth of their theories coincides with the insight that the
Cartesian relationship between mind and matter, subject and object, is reversible. The
subject no longer appears as a sovereign mind, a chose qui pense, but as a subjugated
entity: as a chose pensée.
It becomes clear how far the reification of the subject has progressed during the
transition from modernity to postmodernity if one confronts the Cartesian position as
sketched in the second chapter with Goffman’s sobering analyses. About Descartes’
subject Christian Link – quoted in Chapter II – writes: ‘Its reason – absolved from all
indebtedness to the world – is now turned into an instrument used to realize the
modern dream of man as “maître et possesseur de la nature”.’107 Not much is left of this
lofty dream of early idealism in Goffman’s research. Commenting on the admission of
the ‘patient’ into a psychiatric clinic, he writes:
Admission procedures might better be called ‘trimming’ or ‘programming’ because

in thus being squared away the new arrival allows himself to be shaped and coded
into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of the
establishment, to be worked on smoothly by routine operations.108
The idea that the ‘embodiments of self [are] profaned’109 in the process, as Goffman
points out elsewhere, goes without saying.
From a socio-semiotic point of view, ‘programming’ appears as a key word because
it implies the unity of the narrative programmes which together constitute subjectivity
on a linguistic and a pragmatic (action) level. Several of Goffman’s analyses indicate
that the integration, subjugation and administration of the individual subject are
achieved by the usurpation of its narrative modalities and by its actantial integration
into the narrative programme of the clinic as collective actant. From a methodological
point of view, it is interesting to observe to what extent two heterogeneous theories –
social psychology and semiotics – interlock and shed light on each other.
Once he has been defined as ‘patient’ the newcomer is reduced to passiveness both
as a speaking and an acting subject and absorbed by the narrative programme of the
collective actant ‘clinic’:
In short, mental hospitalization outmaneuvers the patient, tending to rob him

of the common expressions through which people hold off the embrace of
organizations – insolence, silence, sotto voce remarks, un-co-operativeness,
malicious destruction of interior decorations, and so forth; these signs of
disaffiliation are now read as signs of their maker’s proper affiliation.110
Here it becomes clear that the narrative programme of the individual subject is
re-programmed – both on the level of enunciation and on the level of action – until it
fits that of the institution, until it is ‘normalized’.111
The latter’s main goal is the recognition of its programme by the inmates: ‘Inmates
must be caused to self-direct themselves in a manageable way.’112 At this point, a similarity
between the socio-psychological realm of individual subjectivity and the political realm
of collective subjectivity can be discerned. Like the clinics described by Goffman,
occupying powers try to integrate the occupied countries and their populations into
their narrative programmes. On an actantial level, helpers (collaborators) are employed
who are expected to make the narrative of the invaders seem plausible to their own
people. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the occupation of Afghanistan
in 1980, the Soviet government showed considerable inventiveness in constructing new
(Hegelian-Marxist) narratives in which aggression appeared as fraternal aid and the
sporadic resistance to Soviet military occupation as a final proof of the historical
necessity to crush counter-revolutionary movements.
Goffman describes the dialectical relationship between individual and collective
actants when he points out in Asylums: ‘Our sense of being a person can come from being
drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in
which we resist the pull.’113 However, the question remains whether the post-Cartesian,
postmodern individual subject is still able to resist the maelstrom of international trusts,
organizations and media on which it depends as a subject (cf. Chapter V, 1, 3).114
Goffman agrees with Laing and Adorno’s Critical Theory when he shows how the
subject’s resistance is undermined in the realm of experience. Once they are defined as
criminal, homosexual or epileptic, individual subjects no longer experience themselves,
but see themselves with the eyes of others. The social images imposed on them not only
obliterate their self-perception but also their self-experience. Whenever they use the
pronoun ‘I’ they evoke images promulgated by those who have stigmatized them.
Their well-meant interventions only increase the self-alienation of the stigmatized
from their experience of themselves. Goffman comments on the ambiguous fates of the
stigmatized: ‘The stigmatized individual thus finds himself in an arena of detailed
argument and discussion concerning what he ought to think of himself, that is, his ego
identity.’115
This sentence from Goffman’s Stigma is a summary of the most important aspects
of his study and at the same time reformulates some arguments of Laing’s The Politics
of Experience. It shows how, by way of ‘professional representation’, the politics of
identity are imposed on the subjects, thus condemning their experience of themselves
and others to atrophy. Moreover, it reveals the narrative-discursive character of subjective
identity by describing how the latter is usurped whenever it is integrated into narrative
programmes imposed by others. The pseudo-subject speaks and acts within narrative
programmes it has not devised or understood. Its main object, its identity, is thus turned
into an object of the adversary.
As in Laing’s case, the subject falls prey to a ‘politics of experience’ defined by
Goffman as a ‘politics of identity’. Is it sheer chance that in Laing’s and in Goffman’s
discourse, the word ‘politics’ acquires negative connotations whereas words such as
‘experience’ or ‘self-awareness’ tend to meet with approval? The main difference between
the two authors seems to consist in the fact that, unlike Laing, Goffman considers
psychiatric control and stigmatization in a functional context and not as instruments of
domination and symptoms of a sick society:
In conclusion, may I repeat that stigma involves not so much a set of concrete
individuals who can be separated into two piles, the stigmatized and the normal, as
a pervasive two-role social process in which every individual participates in both
roles, at least in some connections and in some phases of life.116
This passage confirms the functionalist outlook of Goffman’s The Presentation of

Self in Everyday Life. Society appears to him as an interplay of roles or an interaction of
‘frames’117 and not so much as systematic domination generating aggression, alienation
and apathy.
Nevertheless, similarities can be observed between his studies and those of Michel
Foucault. Independently of American functionalism, Foucault analyses the nexus
between rationalism, efficiency and the administrative organization of individual
subjectivity as body and psyche. Like Foucault, Goffman describes the links between
the rationalized administration of human life and its atrophy in modernization. Like
Foucault, he shows that modern administration does not recognize a habeas corpus
and does not respect the integrity of the human body: ‘Just as personal possessions may
interfere with the smooth running of an institutional operation and be removed for
this reason, so parts of the body may conflict with efficient management and the
conflict may be resolved in favor of efficiency.’118
It would certainly be trivial to insert Goffman into the steadily growing ancestral
line of postmodern thinkers; nevertheless, his work announces a postmodern era:
(1) because it reveals the social mechanisms which turn the individual subject into a
subjugated instance; (2) because it sheds light – like Foucault’s philosophy – on the
irrational and violent character of rationalist reason. But in Goffman’s case one would
look in vain for a critique of this type of reason.
This critique is articulated – in partial agreement with Adorno and Horkheimer –
by Foucault, whose work belongs to postmodernity in the sense that it presents
Descartes’ universal reason as a particular exercise of power within anonymous
structure constellations and discourses. Foucault’s insightful critique is summed up by
his famous dictum ‘reason is torture’ (‘la torture, c’est la raison’).119 This extreme
diagnosis articulates the postmodern distrust of modern rationality. ‘In a nutshell,
modern times were prominent for the ruthless assault of the profane against the sacred,
reason against passion, norms against spontaneity, structure against counter-structure,
socialization against sociality’,120 declares Zygmunt Bauman in Postmodern Ethics. This
book pleads for the ephemeral and particular that does not conform to universal
reason. It is at the same time a critique of what Bauman, following Foucault, calls
pastoral power: organizing, controlling violence.121
It is certainly one of Foucault’s basic merits to have pointed out – in a way
reminiscent of Laing, Goffman and Critical Theory – the reversibility of the relationship
between subject and object, mind and matter as defined by European idealism. To him,
the individual subject no longer appears as a fundamental given, as part of the divine
spirit, but as a socialized corporeity efficiently manipulated by a reason anchored in
anonymous power constellations.
The reversibility of the idealist relationship is one of the main topics of The Order of
Things (Les Mots et les choses, 1966) where man is presented as ‘enslaved sovereign,
observed spectator’.122 He is not defined as mind but as body: as an object of

administration. Foucault adds to Laing’s and Goffman’s theme of ‘normalization’ and
‘stigmatization’ when, in The Birth of the Clinic, he deduces the normative character of
social science from its orientation towards the older natural sciences (especially
biology and medicine): ‘But the very subjects it devoted itself to (man, his behaviour,
his individual and social realizations) therefore opened up a field that was divided up
according to the principles of the normal and the pathological.’123 Starting from the
normative opposition normal / pathological, the social sciences of the nineteenth
century create a normative language in which individual subjects can be stigmatized
and normalized as deviant cases.
This is clearly a somewhat one-sided view of the social sciences that glosses over
their emancipatory potential. In this respect, Habermas may be right when he remarks
critically in conjunction with Foucault’s approach: ‘From the outset, he is interested in
the human sciences as media that in modernity strengthen and promote the mysterious
process of this socialization, that is, the investment with power of concrete, bodily
mediated interactions.’124 However, Habermas overlooks the truth content of Foucault’s
analyses which appears whenever his discourse overlaps with Laing’s or Goffman’s or
with that of Critical Theory. Habermas, who continues the Enlightenment tradition in
many respects, has a lot of confidence in the emancipatory prowess of the social
sciences and tends to ignore their tendency to smother human experience and
individual insight.
Foucault is interested in precisely these aspects of human subjectivity. He shows –
along with Goffman – how patients in hospitals are turned into objects or ‘cases’ of
their illness. In the following passage, ‘subject’ clearly denotes a subjugated instance: ‘In
the hospital, the patient is the subject of his disease, that is, he is a case; in the clinic,
where one is dealing only with examples, the patient is the accident of his disease, the
transitory object that it happens to have seized upon.’125
At the same time, his research shows to what extent the medical profession of
the eighteenth century tended to underestimate empirical evidence and to subsume
experience under the general concept. He writes about the ‘purity of essence’: ‘In
order to accede to the purity of essence, it was first necessary to possess it, and then
to use it to obliterate the excessively rich content of experience.’126 At this point, he
agrees with the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment who also describe the
suppression of experience by a classifying and calculating ratio. The fact that this
suppression equals identification with death becomes clear in The Birth of the Clinic
where the juxtaposition and interaction of human individuality and death are
revealed: ‘From the integration of death into medical thought is born a medicine that
is given as a science of the individual. And, generally speaking, the experience of
individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death.’127 From the dissector
Bichat to Freud, the theoretician of the death drive, the science of man is closely linked
to the latter’s death.
Roddey Reid continues Foucault’s train of thought concerning the end of the
individual subject when he envisages the end of man in ‘medical humanism’128 in
conjunction with the dizzying speed attained by the progress of genetic engineering.
Individuality as socialized corporeity is deleted as soon as it is genetically decoded and
inserted into the biological continuum. The perfectibility of genetic tests reveals to
what degree it can be controlled.
This nexus of reason, domination and death is seen by Foucault not only as a
subordination of the particular to the universal, of the concrete to the abstract, but also
as a physical exercise of power. In this respect, his approach differs from that of Adorno
and Horkheimer. His sentence ‘reason is torture’ not only means that an abstract logos
subjugates human individuality; it also means that this logos is produced by materially
based power structures: ‘In reality nothing is more material, more corporeal then the
exercise of power . . .’129 This exercise of power produces knowledge: ‘Far from
preventing knowledge, power produces it. Knowledge concerning the human body was
appropriated with the help of a certain number of military and school disciplines.’130
Knowledge appears as a particular phenomenon linked to particular power structures
and is thus opposed to Descartes’s universal reason.
The fact that Foucault considers this kind of knowledge, which presents itself as
reason, as violent is not altogether surprising. It appears to him as a reason cut in half
and separated from its otherness: from madness, sleep and dream. Foucault’s critique
of Descartes, whom he blames for having excluded all of these aspects from the realm
of knowledge, is reminiscent of the Young Hegelian and Adornian critique of Hegel:
‘Descartes puts forward this hypothesis which eliminates all sensual foundations of
knowledge and only recognizes the intellectual foundations of certainty.’131 In Madness
and Civilization, like in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Cartesian reason is considered
as a reason cut in half: ‘But the human truth discovered by madness, is the very opposite
of what constitutes the moral and social truth of man.’132 This particular truth is
imposed and administered by the state and its institutions: family, school and clinic.
While Foucault shows how the bourgeois family of the eighteenth century becomes
an agent and a criterion of reason (‘un des critères essentiels de la raison’),133 Jacques
Donzelot develops and modifies his argument by revealing to what extent the family of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is increasingly subjected to state control. Along
with the rise of social security, psychiatry and family planning ‘the complicity between
state and family is inverted in the sense that the family is transformed into an object of
state intervention and missionary work’.134 Psychiatry and psychoanalysis thus become
instruments of the state by contributing to the ‘medicalization of sexuality’135 and to
‘social normalization’.136
What matters here is not the question whether Donzelot’s study – which is partly
based on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipe (1972/73) – departs from Foucault’s
arguments, but the idea that, although reason is considered by Goffman, Foucault and
Donzelot as a universal phenomenon encompassing society as a whole, it is at the same
time unmasked as particular or even arbitrary because it is linked to particular power
structures and negates the individual subject. This contradiction – inherent in modern
reason itself – is reminiscent of Hobbes’s plea in favour of a universally recognized
sovereign whose will is nevertheless presented as particular in the sense that it varies
from country to country.137
Considered in this context, Foucault’s thought can be defined as critical in the sense
of Critical Theory because it presents the submission and mutilation of individual
subjects as a skandalon within the tradition of European rationality. However, his
critique is one-dimensional like all postmodern critiques because it does not raise the
question concerning alternatives. At this point, it not only differs from Critical Theory,
in which the second dimension is always present, but also from the work of Laing and
from Burgess’s novel.
Foucault was well aware of his proximity to Critical Theory, which began to have an
impact on French intellectual life in the course of the 1970s:138 ‘It is quite certain that I
would have saved myself a lot of work if I had known the Frankfurt School, if I had
become acquainted with it earlier on.’139 This remark not only bears witness to the
philosopher’s modesty, but also to his regret of not having taken notice of a theory so
similar to his own.
However, this similarity ends where late modern and postmodern critiques of
reason and subjectivity part company: at the crucial point where the modernists scan
the horizons for a better world beyond reification and alienation, while postmodern
thinkers stop at a negative diagnostic. They stop at Vattimo’s (Heidegger’s) Verwindung
and Zygmunt Bauman’s conclusion that we have to live without alternatives to late
capitalism: ‘Living without an alternative.’140 Their critique stops in view of Foucault’s
withdrawal into a stylized antiquity, which Christopher Norris aptly describes as
‘private self-fashioning’.141
His description of Foucault’s philosophy as a work torn between social criticism
and a stylized private sphere focuses on the problem of subjectivity: ‘It swings between
the opposite poles of a thoroughgoing determinist creed (the idea that subjectivity is
entirely constructed in and through discourse) and an ethics – or aesthetics – of
autonomous self-creation which somehow escapes that limiting condition.’142 The
word ‘somehow’ hints at Verwindung or the lack of alternatives in postmodernity:
Foucault’s withdrawal into a realm of ‘private self-fashioning’ in The History of Sexuality
is a form of Verwindung and suggests that the idea of ‘overcoming’ is inconceivable
within the postmodern problematic.
This lack of perspectives explains why Foucault – unlike Adorno and Horkheimer,
who plead in favour of a mimetic reason, unlike Habermas, who proposes a
communicative reason – cannot envisage a rationality evolving independently of power
structures. To him, all of reason appears as a fatal collusion of mind and power.
During the transition from Adorno to Lyotard, from Laing to Vattimo and from
Critical Theory to Foucault’s philosophy, the loss of the second dimension, which
Marcuse so insistently warned against, becomes a fait accompli. To counter this trend,
Critical Theory would have to be reformulated in such a way as to make a new
subjectivity emerge in whose perspective an overcoming of the present social order
would again seem possible.
5 Ideological reification and ‘normalization’ of the subject:

From Foucault and Althusser to ‘normalism’
It should have become clear by now why both thinkers, Foucault and Derrida, the
‘structuralist’ and the ‘deconstructionist’, appear as postmodernists from the point of
view of a theory of the subject. In spite of the incompatibility of their approaches,143
they agree in one respect: in their eyes, the autonomous subject of modernity is an
illusion. While Foucault analyses the elimination of subjectivity by structural constraints,
Derrida describes the disintegration of the subject in iterability and différance. In this
light, structuralism and deconstruction do not appear as absolute opposites, but as
extremes that meet and as signs of postmodern times.144
Naturally, it cannot be the aim of contemporary theory to react to Foucault’s
scepticism regarding the subject by insisting on the latter’s central position – as German
hermeneutics did in the 1970s.145 After all, Laing’s and Goffman’s very different but
complementary analyses do confirm the key idea of Foucault’s social philosophy. The
individual subject can appear as a product of power constellations that can be described
as discursive compounds. (A case in point is the discursive incapacitation of the subject
by the clinic.) It seems therefore important to project the problems of individual
subjectivity (as discussed in the previous section) onto the linguistic level in order to
show how discursive formations (Foucault), ideologies (Althusser), interdiscourses
(Pêcheux) and normalizing procedures (Link) turn individuals into subjects.
The argument in favour of subjectivity underlying this book presupposes a thorough
analysis of those mechanisms that hamper the development of the subject in
postmodernity. A rash rejection of Goffman’s, Foucault’s or Althusser’s analyses of
failing subjectivity could only disarm and discredit a theory of the subject. The latter
thrives on a permanent dialogue with theories that contradict it.
Like all postmodern critics of modernity who stand between Hegel and Nietzsche,146
Foucault opts for Nietzsche. Two texts, both of which he published in 1971 – ‘Nietzsche,
la généalogie, l’histoire’ and L’Ordre du discours – reveal three crucial disagreements
with Hegel all of which are of Nietzschean origin. (1) History is not a grand design
based on a subjective intention or teleology, but a movement full of gaps and breaks, a
concatenation of power constellations in which particular discursive formations come
about. (2) The individual subject does not participate in historical subjectivity or
rationality (Hegel’s World Spirit: cf. Chapter II, 2), but functions unconsciously within
discursive power constellations. (3) Truth is neither a trans-historical form in the sense
of Plato nor an historical telos in the sense of Hegel’s ‘absolute idea’, but a contingent,
particular insight linked to the exercise of power. As in Nietzsche’s philosophy (cf.
Chapter II, 4), subject and truth are linked to power and thereby particularized.
Unlike Hegel, who subsumed contingency, chance and particularity to historical
necessity, Foucault reassesses the role of contingency and seeks to rewrite history in its
perspective: ‘The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative
mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts.’147 This Nietzschean chance of power
struggles determines the direction of social evolution. New power constellations can
emerge by chance and along with them new truths and subjectivities.
In his essay The Order of Discourse, Foucault emphasizes the role of chance and
discontinuity in a Young Hegelian vein and looks for means ‘which would enable us to
introduce chance, the discontinuous, and materiality at the very roots of thought’.148 He
envisages a ‘theory of discontinuous systematicities’,149 of linguistic, discursive
formations in which subjects and truths come about in a completely contingent way.
About history he writes in an anti-Hegelian, Nietzschean style that its purpose ‘is
not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does
not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which
metaphysicians promise to return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities
that cross us’.150 Not only history in the idealist sense falls prey to discontinuity, but
along with it the event and the subject. Both can change their meaning from power
constellation to power constellation, from one discursive formation to another. And
Foucault, the Nietzschean critic of metaphysics, is in full agreement with the
Nietzschean thinkers Deleuze and Derrida (cf. Chapter III, 2) in whose eyes the
temporality of event and subject coincides with their dissolution.
Similarly, metaphysical truth falls prey to this dissolution process, for it appears to
Foucault (Deleuze and Derrida) as multiple, contingent and particular. In Foucault’s case,
it is irretrievably linked to time, power and discourse. Each discursive formation has its
truths and makes all subjects recognize these truths whose plurality and particularity are
incompatible with the universal character of Cartesian or Hegelian truth concepts.
In this context, the individual subject can only be considered as the product of a
linguistically articulated power constellation: ‘It is a question of caesurae which break
up the instant and disperse the subject into a plurality of possible positions and
functions.’151 Unfortunately, Foucault does not show how this happens. Since he defines
‘discourse’ primarily on a pragmatic level (as an instrument of power), not in semantic
and narrative terms, it remains unclear why the subject cannot attain coherence in
language. Its absorption by a discursive formation or by one of its discourses does not
exclude this kind of coherence – on the contrary, it imposes it. In order to make the
‘break-up’ of the moment and the subject plausible, Foucault would have had to develop
a deconstructionist theory in the sense of Derrida.
It is not by chance that this kind of theory is nowhere to be found in his work. His
thought is primarily geared towards the notion of subjugation of the individual subject
by supra-individual language structures, and this kind of subjugation implies identity
with the dominant instance, not disintegration. The historical breaks mentioned by
Foucault may well lead to the disintegration of the historical subject in the sense of
Hegel or Marx, but not to the disintegration of the individual or collective subject,
which owes its identity to its submission.
Several of Foucault’s texts show to what degree he sees subjective submission not
only as corporeal control (cf. Chapter III, 4), but also as a linguistic process. Language,
he points out in La Pensée du dehors (1986), is not spoken by anybody: ‘In it each
subject merely marks a fold of grammar (pli grammatical).’152 In another context, he
speaks in conjunction with language and its mechanisms of the ‘effacement of the
speaker’ (‘effacement de celui qui parle’).153 He attempts to answer questions, some of
which keep recurring in virtually all of his writings and are raised once more in one of
his lectures at the Collège de France (‘Subjectivité et vérité’, 1981): ‘How were experience
of one’s self and the knowledge concerning this experience organized within particular
schemes? How were these schemes defined, evaluated, recommended and imposed?’154
Although Foucault’s answers in his later works differ substantially from those of his
early studies, his discourse does revolve around one and the same problem: the
production of subjectivity.
This problem has also been dealt with in depth by Louis Althusser and Michel
Pêcheux. Since Althusser’s theory of the subject was briefly discussed in the first
chapter, it will now be dealt with mainly in relation to Foucault, to the modern-
postmodern debate and as a starting point of Pêcheux’s theory of interdiscourse –
which can be understood as a synthesis of Foucault’s and Althusser’s terminologies.
Althusser’s (and Pêcheux’s) theories are related to Foucault’s philosophy in that they
deduce the individual subject in a ‘Spinozistic’ manner, Annie Guédez would say,155
from interlocking systems and structures. According to Althusser and Macherey,156
Spinoza was the first to map out a philosophy without the subject which they consider
as an alternative to Hegelianism and humanist Marxism. Althusser praises Spinoza for
having envisaged a ‘process without a Subject’ (‘procès sans Sujet’)157 and explains why
this innovation contributed crucially to a demystification of Hegelianism: ‘Thereby
Spinoza discovered for us the secret bond, “mystified” by Hegelian dialectics, between
the Subject and its finality.’158 Hence society and science are to be considered as
processes without collective or individual subjects.
Long before Luhmann who, in his sociology of science, imagines a process of
knowledge accumulation without a subject,159 Althusser tries, from Lire le Capital
(1965) onwards, to ban the concept of subject from scientific discourse. He argues that,
in Capital, Marx distances himself from his early Hegelian and Fichtean philosophy of
the subject and maps out a science of history without a subject.160
This reading of Marx is Spinozistic rather than structuralist, as Althusser himself
points out,161 and overlaps with Foucault’s theory of history and subjectivity in two
respects: Hegel’s historical teleology based on a subjective finality is no longer
presupposed; the individual subject is neither free nor autonomous in the historical
process without a subject, but is over-determined by the dominant ideology and turned
into a subjected subject, a sujet assujetti.
This is why Althusser considers the concept of subject as the ideological concept par
excellence. He observes an affinity between philosophical and legal thought when he
writes about the concept of subject: ‘This category is nothing more than a redefinition
of the ideological notion of “subject” in philosophical terms, and this notion is derived
from the legal category of “subject in law”.’162 In short, the subject is a ‘subject’ in the
sense of His or Her Majesty’s subject. As such, it has forgotten or repressed the origin of
its subjection and unwittingly accepts the ideological illusion that it is free and
autonomous.
Althusser’s basic thesis according to which ‘ideology interpellates individuals as
subjects’163 has a considerable explanatory value because it dissipates the myth of a
sovereign and autonomous individual subject. Thus Fichte’s idealist ‘I’ is the product of
an emerging nationalism, which ‘interpellates’ the individual as subject without him or
her being conscious of this fact. In the first chapter it was shown on a biographical level
to what extent the National Socialist or Marxist-Leninist ideology can turn individuals
into subjects.
Like Foucault, Althusser considers the submission of the individual to a power
structure like ideology as a material process. The individual subject indulges in certain
rituals prescribed by a particular ideology within an ‘ideological state apparatus’: for
example, in religious rituals which Althusser also defines as ideological practices.164
Among the most important ‘ideological state apparatuses’ are, apart from the army and
the police, the school, the university and even the church, since Althusser considers
religion (like Marx) as an ideology.165 All of these ‘ideological state apparatuses’ have
their rituals that turn individuals into ideological subjects: a way of greeting, a prayer
or an academic ceremony.
The identification of religion and ideology (which, unlike religion, is a product
of bourgeois-individualist, secular society) is one of the reasons why Althusser
claims with an almost idealist zeal that ideology is ‘trans-historical’, ‘eternal’: ‘If eternal
means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans-historical
and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I shall adopt
Freud’s expression word for word, and write ideology is eternal, exactly like the
unconscious.’166
It is by no means certain that the unconscious (as discovered by Freud) is eternal, and
ideology as a product of modern, secularized societies has a concrete historical origin.
Its rise coincides with that of bourgeois intellectuals who replace the theologians in some
cases and construct complex systems of ideas such as conservatism, liberalism, fascism
or Marxism-Leninism. Ideology differs from a world religion such as Christianity or
Islam by virtue of its artificial, constructed and relatively ephemeral character. In this
particular respect, it resembles scientific theory more than religion because, unlike
religion, it emerges from society’s scientific progress. It is a pseudo-science.167
By claiming that ideology is eternal, omnipresent and unconscious, Althusser
endows it with mythical powers and turns it into a mythical actant (addresser) whose
status is not altogether different from that of Hegel’s World Spirit. He thereby calls into
question his – potentially revolutionary – thesis concerning the ideological origin of
subjectivity. This thesis is partly confirmed by Adorno who refers to a late capitalist
system ‘in which living people have become bits of ideology’.168
Althusser’s partial mystification of ideology and his rigid separation of ideology
and Marxist science have three far-reaching consequences. (1) Ideology can no longer
be analysed and criticized as an historical phenomenon emerging from a secularized
bourgeois society. (2) The undialectical separation of ideology and science prevents
him from reflecting upon the ideological premises of his own theory and subjectivity.
(3) This separation obliterates the nexus between theory and practice and discredits
the crucial Marxist question concerning the importance of theoretical insights for the
revolutionary process.
Had Althusser not insisted on the eternal character of ideology in a Spinozistic
manner, he could have asked how ideologies come about, how their structures change
and how they might be marginalized or even superseded by other mechanisms of
integration in postmodern capitalism. Is normalism, a phenomenon analysed by Jürgen
Link (cf. infra), not a more refined (quantitative) mechanism of control that turns
individuals into subjects and could one day marginalize political ideologies? Althusser
and his followers cannot even raise this kind of question. They are also compelled by
their mythical premises to bracket out the complementary question concerning the
‘end of ideology’ – raised by Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell and Niklas Luhmann.169
In Althusser’s ears, the objection that his scientific Marxism is based on ideological
premises may have sounded like a sacrilege. But what sounded like a sacrilege in the
1970s is nowadays treated as a commonplace. Althusser’s claim in Lenin and Philosophy
(orig. 1972) that Marx discovered the ‘Continent of History’ in analogy to the ‘Continent
of Mathematics’ explored in ancient Greece and to Galileo’s ‘Continent of Physics’170 is

likely to meet with the kind of postmodern incredulity evoked by Lyotard in
conjunction with the grand ‘meta-narratives’. The credulous individuals, who were
turned into subjects by Althusser’s Marxist science in the 1960s, may have adhered to a
different kind of discourse in the meantime – or replaced all adhesions by postmodern
scepticism.
The gap between scientific theory and revolutionary practice, which cannot be
bridged by Althusser’s distinction of different theoretical levels,171 was criticized in the
1970s and 80s by British, Dutch and German Marxists. Authors such as Ted Banton,
Piet Steenbakkers, André Van de Putte and Urs Jaeggi doubted the relevance of a
Marxist science whose insights yielded no practical results.
Van de Putte aptly points out: ‘The practical and philosophical dimension of
Marxism is not mentioned, what is more, it is even rejected as non-Marxist.’172 The
debunking of this ‘simplifying criticism’ by the last Althusserians173 cannot hide the fact
that Althusser’s rationalist and scientistic brand of Marxism announces the absence of
the subject from postmodern literature by its attempts to ban subjectivity from science
and to relegate it to the world of ideology (cf. Chapter II, 8). Although Althusser cannot
be read as a postmodern philosopher because his thought is inseparable from Marx’s
modernity, he writes within the one-dimensional postmodern problematic insofar as
he eliminates the theoretical concept of collective and individual subject and thus
excludes from Marxsim the only theoretical and critical instance capable of
conceptualizing alternatives to the existing social order.
Another factor prevents the Althusserians from envisaging alternatives and an
‘overcoming’ in the modernist sense: their dominant ideology thesis, which makes them
conceive society as a homogeneous (bourgeois) whole, thus making them overlook its
pluralist fragmentation that could even be observed in communist countries before
1989.174 Naturally, particular ideologies – for example, neo-liberalism – can occupy a
dominant position in certain phases of history. However, this position does not remain
unchallenged and soon comes under attack from the extreme left, the extreme right,
feminists and socialists. In short, the idea of a dominant ideology is incompatible with
the plausible postmodern view of a pluralized and fragmented society.175
Althusser often tried to ignore this heterogeneity, and this is one of the reasons why
he is not appreciated by many intellectuals in a society marked by postmodern plurality
and fragmentation. He writes about the ‘ideological state apparatuses’ that they are
homogeneous ‘insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified,
despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the
ideology of “the ruling class” ’.176 This reduction of theoretical complexity is too drastic.
For it is not very likely that, in contemporary French society, socialists, communists,
Gaullists, liberals, nationalists, feminists and ‘greens’ could find a common ideological
denominator and be subsumed under one ‘dominant ideology’. Even those groupings,
which are willing to form coalitions – socialists, communists, liberals and Gaullists –
do not function jointly as the ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie’. Althusser can
only imagine a subjugation of the individual subject by the ‘dominant ideology’ because
he overlooks the political heterogeneity of contemporary society, the historical nature
of ideologies and the subject’s scope of action that results from these facts.
Althusserians still seem to adhere to the feudal model of Christian hegemony

described by Françoise Gadet and Michel Pêcheux: ‘Feudalism maintains the dominant
order by “translating” it into ideas and images that are specific for the dominated
classes.’177 This may be the case; but feudalism is a caste-based, not a class-based society,
and the increasingly heterogeneous class societies of the nineteenth or the twentieth
century can hardly be compared with the feudal order.
Pêcheux takes over Althusser’s dominant ideology thesis whenever he tries to define
ideology in analogy to Foucault’s discursive formation and to his own interdiscourse.
Unfortunately, the relationship between the ideological and the discursive structure
remains unclear.178 About the discursive formation Pêcheux writes in Les Vérités de La
Palice (1975): ‘From now on we call discursive formation that which decides within a
particular ideological formation and starting from a particular position determined by
the state of the class struggle, “what can be said and should be said”.’179 This definition is
undoubtedly useful because it focuses on what can or cannot be said in a particular
social and linguistic situation that partly determines subjectivity.
However, the complementary definition of the interdiscourse shows that Pêcheux
also ignores the heterogeneity of modern societies and that his basic aim is to redefine
Althusser’s notion of ‘dominant ideology’ on a linguistic (discursive) level: ‘We shall call
this “complex totality with a dominant” of discursive formations interdiscourse [. . .].’180
Whatever the complexity of a discursive formation may be, it is always held together by
a dominant. Oppositional, contradicting discourses inside or outside the formation are
never mentioned. This explains why Pêcheux’s theory of the subject eventually turns
out to be as deterministic as Althusser’s: ‘We can now specify that the interpellation of
the individual as subject of his discourse comes about by virtue of [the subject’s]
identification with the discursive formation that dominates it.’181 But what happens
when this discursive formation – e.g. Marxism-Leninism, considered by Pêcheux as a
‘science without a subject’ – collapses on a worldwide scale? What happens if all
ideologies collapse and the critically reflecting individual subject becomes aware of
new horizons beyond ‘eternal ideologies’? In this case, ideology is simply not eternal
and Althusser’s Marxist science not scientific.
This space beyond ideology, a space inaccessible to Althusserians who have blocked
their access by their own dogmas, is being investigated by Jürgen Link in the light of
Foucault’s philosophy. His thesis sounds plausible: After the Second World War, West
European and North American society was not so much held together by ideologies
but by a quantifying, statistically founded flexible normalism which turned individuals
into subjects by statistical evidence or insinuation rather than by ideological constraints
(cf. Chapter I, 2, a).
Link is quite willing to imagine a decline of the ‘eternal ideology’:
In fact, it seems that all ideologies and utopias, including those of the West,
are weakened. One of the most telling symptoms of this situation may be the rise
of ‘normality’ as an interdiscursive, especially media-political and generally
cultural normative concept [. . .]. ‘Normality’ now seems to occupy that position
within the interdiscourse, which had previously been held by ideologies and
utopias.182
Instead of announcing rashly183 – like Aron and Bell – an ‘end of ideology’, Link sets
out from thorough investigations in order to show that a highly sophisticated market
society disposes of new mechanisms of control,184 enabling it to manipulate individuals
discretely (more discretely than any ideology or propaganda) and thus turn them into
speaking and acting subjects. He shows to what extent words such as ‘normal’ or
‘normality’ occupy key positions in very different – technical, political, commercial –
discourses, thereby producing a normalist interdiscourse (Pêcheux) which finds its
way into most layers of our culture. By specifying Pêcheux’s concept of interdiscourse
both on the semantic and the narrative level in relation to various normalist narratives,
he avoids its original abstractness.185
But what exactly is normalism? The concept differs from the concepts of ‘normativity’
or ‘norm system’ by its negation of a stable or fixed norm. In a society marked by flexible
normalism, normality is produced whenever fundamentally different discourses
spontaneously converge in defining what is normal and what lies outside the norm.
However, the limits of this normality are flexible and can be redefined from one
economic or political situation to the next.
In this respect, flexible normalism differs from (ideological?) protonormalism
attributed by Link to National Socialism, fascism and (neo-)Stalinism. Protonormalism
was founded on narrowly defined norms which could be redefined by the Party from
time to time. On the whole, however, they were stable:
I call the strategy of maximum limitation of the normality zone, which entails its
fixation and stabilization, the protonormalist strategy because it was dominant
mainly in the first phase of normalism. The opposite strategy, which is geared
towards a maximum expansion and mobility of the normality zone, I call the
flexible normalistic strategy.186
Link emphasizes that protonormalism and flexible normalism are ideal types (M.
Weber) which may coexist in one and the same society. Serious economic or
environmental crises may trigger off ‘protonormalist’ (ideological?) reactions and lead
to a limitation of normalist flexibility.
It goes almost without saying that the question concerning the social construction
of normality overlaps with the question of subject formation. This question was initially
raised by Foucault (cf. Chapter I, 2, a) of whom Link says: ‘And he obviously recognized
in the discursive complex “normalization” an essential factor regulating the production
of modern subjects.’187 So how exactly are individual subjects produced within flexible
normalism?
This question can be answered most plausibly in conjunction with Link’s discussion
of the American Kinsey Reports. In spite of their seemingly descriptive, neutral
character, these reports insinuate: ‘Behave like all the others, then you’ll be one of us,
then you’ll be successful.’ Link comments: ‘It seems obvious that these reports are
documents of a dynamic, flexible normalism, because they appeal to subjects by
encouraging them to raise the level of their performance.’188 This sentence evokes
Althusser’s and Pêcheux’s idea of ‘interpellation’. However, in Link’s case the discourse
about normality, which is simultaneously a normative and normalizing discourse,
seems to supersede ideology. The published statistics of psychologists, sociologists,

family consultants and social workers see to it that individuals, who ‘spontaneously’
internalize the statistical average or admire the best performance, become normal
subjects: ‘In this case it is the self-adjustment of subjects in view of a symbolically
marked average which eventually [. . .] brings about a distribution of normality.’189 Like
Althusser’s individuals who seem to identify voluntarily and spontaneously with an
ideology, ‘normalist’ individuals accept an invisible and flexible (statistical) norm
imparted by heterogeneous discourses within the dominant interdiscourse.
The concept of normalism is relevant to postmodernity because it can explain why
a market society marked by indifference (as exchangeability of values: cf. Chapter II, 8,
9) is perfectly capable of developing mechanisms of regulation that are relatively
independent of ideologies. The following passage from Link’s book shows to what
extent normalism is a quantitative phenomenon that can be deduced from the
omnipresent exchange value:
This is how the ‘flexible’ unity of the normalist ‘archipelago’ comes about: It is a
hegemonic social network in which normalist subjects feel spontaneously that an
open day for parents, which reveals an alarmingly disproportional distribution of
marks in the English test, as well as the increase of rates for fully comprehensive
insurance, the introduction of nursing care insurance, and a magazine article
dealing with the relationship between stress and decreasing sexual satisfaction are
all meant to avoid de-normalization and that a new recommendation by economic
‘gurus’ concerning the risk of an abnormal escalation of the planned public debt is
‘somehow related’ to all of this as well as to the widening generation gap.190
Three complementary aspects of this text are particularly important here. (1) The
repetition of semantic units (sememes, Greimas) evoking quantity: distribution,
insurance rates, public debt, etc. (2) ‘Normalization’ and ‘de-normalization’ appear as
quantifiable factors whose boundaries are not marked by fixed norms, but are flexibly
defined by fluctuating statistics, some of which have an impact on public opinion, i.e.
on collective and individual consciousness. (3) In contrast to religious, ideological or
legal norms, the normality described by Link is flexible in the sense that it adapts to the
dynamics of the market. (Thus the rates for fully comprehensive insurance depend on
the rising or falling demand, the number of accidents, etc.)
It may have become clear why the concept of flexible normalism is important for
the analysis of subject constitution in European and North American societies. It shows
that late capitalist societies hold mechanisms of self-regulation capable of producing
subjectivities (like religions and ideologies) by ‘appealing’ to individuals who internalize
them. The question is: Did flexible normalism relegate religions and ideologies to the
periphery of society or accelerate their dissolution?
The answer is that this is probably not the case and that the concept of normalism was
overstretched by its author. Ideology may not be ‘eternal’, as Althusser seems to think, but
it is certainly not dead, as various studies show.191 Without it, postmodern movements
such as feminism, ecology, pacifism or fundamentalism would hardly be possible. These
movements, which are considered by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, but especially
by Alain Touraine, as salient features of contemporary society, rarely observe quantitative

criteria – for example, popular statistics – but construct their collective and individual
subjectivities by relying on ideological dualisms such as patriarchal / feminist, economy /
ecology, faithful / infidel, etc. This also applies to the proliferating religious sects.192 They
cannot be understood within the context of normalism because they react – like the
adversaries of globalization – to the value-indifference of the market and indirectly to
flexible normalism that is supposed to stabilize market society by quantitative means. But
movements and radical groupings are guided and turned into subjects by qualitative –
religious, political – criteria that are not quantifiable.
Therefore it seems to make sense to consider flexible normalism as a ‘buffer zone’
between market-based indifference, which dissolves subjectivity, and ideological
reaction which is meant to form and stabilize it. Viewed in this light, the concept of
normalism describes a new phase of secularization in postmodern market societies in
which subjectivity can come about outside of religions, ideologies and utopias. However,
the ideological and religious reactions to this development do not fail to materialize
because the market-oriented flexibility of normalism cannot – by definition – guarantee
subjective stability.
6 From Althusser to Lacan: The ‘decentred subject’ as a

subjugated and disintegrating instance
‘Man is not master in his own house’,193 says Lacan in one of his seminars and in a way
continues Althusser’s train of thought which makes the subject appear as a hostage of
ideology. But like Althusser, Lacan cannot be read as a postmodern thinker194 because
he revives a psychoanalytic tradition whose principal aim is to strengthen the ‘I’.
Considering that Freud’s theory emerged in a late modern context, in which
philosophers, writers and scientists tried to save the individual subject in extremis, the
expression ‘postmodern psychoanalysis’ sounds absurd. For postmodernity is defined
here – as in Modern / Postmodern (Zima, 2010) – as a problematic whose representatives
tend to renounce or deconstruct the concept of subject.
Although Lacan does not drop the concept of subject, he defines it in such a
way that it appears both as a subjugated and a disintegrating instance: as decentred
subject or sujet décentré.195 In spite of the fact that he cannot be claimed by a
postmodernity that renounces the subject, he stands at the threshold of an era in which
the scepticism towards the notion of subjectivity is steadily growing. Like Althusser
and Foucault, he is a structural thinker who, at the beginning of postmodernity, sets
out to show how the individual subject is turned into a prisoner of interlocking
structures.
Anika Lemaire quite rightly presents Lacan as a structuralist (‘Jacques Lacan est
structuraliste’);196 but in order to complete the picture she could have added that he is
also a deconstructionist avant la lettre to whom Derrida is indebted in language
analysis.197 Lacan differs from both Althusser and Foucault by combining the ideas of
subjugation and disintegration. This is why he is so important for postmodern thought,
which is familiar with both ideas, but keeps them apart. He nonetheless thwarts all
attempts to define him as a postmodern thinker by holding on to Freud’s project of

strengthening the endangered subject and by insisting in the 1960s, in a way reminiscent
of Adorno’s ‘truth content’, on ‘ “true” speech’ (‘la parole vraie’).198 (In the original, the
adjective vrai is not in quotation marks.) In a postmodernity marked by Nietzsche’s
‘destruction of metaphysics’, the concept of truth falls prey to Lyotard’s postmodern
‘incredulity’ – along with the concept of subject.
In what follows, it will be shown, however, that Lacan’s thought does open onto this
kind of incredulity because the ‘language wall’ (‘mur de langage’),199 which he refers to
in the 1950s, turns out to be insurmountable. According to Lacan, the development of
individual subjectivity moves from alienation to alienation, so that one cannot assume
that, at the end of a psychoanalytic therapy, ‘ “true” speech’ or parole vraie,200 will be
heard. The treatment might be endless because the true word is stifled by the subject’s
persisting alienation in language.
In some respects, this was also Althusser’s problem. His discourse revolves around
the question of a scientific language beyond ideology. He believes that this kind of
language can be found, albeit in a rudimentary form, in Marx’s Capital and that it can
be neatly separated by an ‘epistemological break’ in the sense of Gaston Bachelard from
Marx’s early (humanist, ideological) writings which came about under the influence of
Hegel and Fichte.201 Lacan puts forward similar arguments when he locates Freud’s
science of the unconscious beyond Hegel’s anthropocentric humanism: ‘Hegel stands
at the border of anthropology. Freud has left it. His discovery coincides with the insight
that man does not entirely agree with himself (que l’homme n’est tout à fait dans
l’homme). Freud is not a humanist.’202 In the 1960s and 70s, this kind of remark was
read as a compliment in France: as a confirmation of somebody’s scientific seriousness.
‘The very centre of the human being was no longer to be found at the place assigned to
it by a whole humanist tradition’,203 Lacan adds in another context where he compares
the French Revolution with the Copernican.
However, the ‘true’ scientific language Althusser associates with Marx’s Capital and
Lacan with Freud has long since fallen prey to a postmodern incredulity which reveals
ideological influence and interference in a type of discourse that was deemed scientific
in the past. But if we find that the pure, scientific language of Marxism or psychoanalysis
does not exist because all language is permeated by ideology and its value judgements,
then doubts concerning the true word or the parole vraie pronounced at the end of a
therapy, emerge.
In his article on ‘Freud and Lacan’, Althusser would like to show that the subjugation
of the individual by ideology analysed by himself corresponds, in Lacan’s case, to the
integration of the individual into the cultural and linguistic order:
Lacan has shown that this transition from (ultimately purely) biological existence
to human existence (the human child) is achieved within the Law of Order, the law
I shall call the Law of Culture, and that this Law of Order is confounded in its
formal essence with the order of language.204
However, Althusser glosses over an essential difference between his own and Lacan’s
positions: the fact that his concept of ideology is invariably accompanied by negative
connotations and opposed to science, whereas Lacan sees the integration of the
individual into the symbolic and linguistic order as a positive aspect of the subject’s
development: i.e. as a liberation from the confusions of what he calls the imaginary
stage. Is the development of the subject within the cultural and linguistic order – as
described by Lacan – an alienating submission or a liberation? In what follows, it ought
to become clear that this question aims at the basic ambivalence and the crucial flaw in
Lacan’s theory.
This theory sets out from a triadic interaction between the imaginary, the symbolic
and the real. The infant who, by definition, cannot speak, is reflected in the eyes of the
Other (the mother) and thus gains a certain unity without subjectivity. It is only during
the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic order that individual subjectivity
comes about thanks to the child’s submission to the laws of language and culture (the
‘symbolic order’). The ‘real’ might best be compared to Kant’s ‘thing in itself ’ because it
never appears as such. It is important to recall that Lacan views the imaginary in a
negative light and the symbolic order as the prerequisite for subject formation. The
subject’s integration into this order is never considered by him – as by Althusser – as
blind submission, but as a path to adulthood.
The negative connotations of the ‘imaginary’ have even penetrated into Jean-
Baptiste Fages’s Lacanian dictionary where it is defined as ‘a relationship devoid of
distinctive individuality in a situation where a genuine access to language does not
exist.’205 Symmetrically, the ‘symbolic’ is defined as ‘coextensive with the entire order of
language’.206 In this context, the ‘I’ as ‘Moi’ belongs to the sphere of the imaginary. It is
‘the instance of the individual as long as he remains on the level of the imaginary. It
is opposed to the subject [. . .]’.207 In other words: Lacan’s ‘subject’ is a product of the
individual’s integration into the symbolic and linguistic order.
Back to the imaginary: How is it defined by Lacan himself? It is described as ‘mirror
stage’, as a narcissistic identification of Moi with the Other, the mother: i.e. as an unstable
constellation in which the ‘I’ comes about as a mirror image within the mother’s desire
and hopes to oust the father by becoming ‘phallus for the mother’ – thus bypassing the
symbolic order. In this situation, explains Lacan, ‘the desire only exists on the level of the
imaginary relationship of the mirror stage, is projected onto the Other and thereby
alienated’.208 This set-up is described very clearly by Antoine Mooij, who points out that
‘the child identifies in an imaginary way with the object of his mother’s desire’.209 Lacan
himself sums up: ‘Le moi [. . .] est une fonction imaginaire.’210
This means concretely that no stable identity can come about in the imaginary state
that is dominated by the mirror relationship, because the Moi depends on the
‘mediatization through the desire of the other’ (‘médiatisation par le désir de l’autre’),211
thus turning ‘the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a
danger’.212 Anika Lemaire establishes a link between this train of thought and
philosophical metaphysics when she concludes: ‘The “I” (Moi) is that instance which
most stubbornly resists the truth of Being.’213
This statement may carry Heideggerian connotations, but it should be read in a
Hegelian context and related to Hobbes’s critique of the ‘state of nature’. Those who still
remember the second chapter will spontaneously think of the Hobbes-Hegel-Sartre
scenario when Lacan says about the imaginary: ‘From this results the impossibility of
human coexistence.’214 The imaginary thus appears as a kind of ‘state of nature’ that can
only be overcome by the individual’s entry into the symbolic order of language: ‘But
thank God (Dieu merci) the subject lives in the symbolic world, that is in the world of
the others who speak.’215 When a Paris intellectual of the 1950s or 60s says ‘Dieu merci’
and even has this phrase printed, then he expresses a strong feeling.
In this particular case, it refers to the deep structure of Lacan’s discourse: to the
semantic opposition between nature and culture to which correspond the secondary
oppositions between imaginary and symbolic, maternal and paternal. Lacan continues
Hobbes’s, Hegel’s and (in spite of his structuralism) Sartre’s discourse insofar as he fears
(like Sartre) a modernist-surrealist ‘transformation of culture into nature’ and the
concomitant relapse (rechute: cf. infra) into the ‘state of nature’. Naturally, this relapse is
not a return to anarchy and civil war, but a return to the imaginary stage, to the mother-
child relationship.
Lacan’s alternative is a subject constitution within the symbolic order of language. In the
course of a successful socialization, the male child renounces his incestuous desire to
become phallus for the mother, recognizes his own castration (i.e. the fact that he does
not yet possess the phallus), acknowledges the father as possessor of the phallus and
identifies with him in the sense that he hopes to acquire the phallus one day. He adopts
the father’s name and enters the symbolic order thereby becoming a subject. In this process
of socialization, the father’s role consists in detaching sexual desire from the incestuous
and narcissistic complex of the maternal and imaginary world: ‘The true function of the
Father, which is fundamentally to unite (and not to set in opposition) a desire and the
Law, is even more marked than revealed by this.’216 Apart from obvious feminist objections
concerning Lacan’s patriarchal bias,217 there are sociological ones: Lacan tries to
perpetuate in psychoanalysis a social order whose paternal functions and figures are as
historically variable as its language. How are we to imagine socialization by paternal
instances in a contemporary ‘fatherless society’218 in the sense of Alexander Mitscherlich?
It would be far too simple to blame Lacan for ignoring history and social evolution
because he is quite conscious of both. He nevertheless seems to detach the symbolic
order from the social process and to follow Hegel who considered the Prussian state as
the ‘end of history’. In an indirect reference to Hegel, he would like to find a way out of
‘the dialectical impasse of the belle âme’ (‘l’impasse dialectique de la belle âme’),219 but
nevertheless makes the individual subject enter a symbolic order whose alienated and
alienating mechanisms he analyses.220
In this respect, he is more lucid than Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Mind he often
uses as a starting point. At the end of this work, the ‘being of spirit’ (‘Dasein des Geistes’)
is enhanced to such a degree that one is reminded of Lacan’s ‘Dieu merci’: ‘Here again,
then, we see Language to be the form in which spirit finds existence. Language is the
way self-consciousness exists for others; it is self-consciousness which is there
immediately present as such, and in the form of this actual universal self-consciousness.’221
In short, the unity of subject and object comes about in philosophical language as
‘being of the spirit’. Lacan would agree insofar as he also considers the linguistic-
symbolic formation of the subject as an overcoming of nature (of the imaginary). This
is the reason why he regularly quotes Hegel: in order to criticize with him the romantic-
imaginary consciousness of the ‘beautiful soul’.
In spite of this, Lacan is not a Hegelian, but a thinker between late modernity and
postmodernity who defines alienation as division or Spaltung. What does the word
division / fente (German: Spaltung, used by Lacan) mean in Lacan’s discourse? In short,
it refers to the gap that opens between consciousness and the unconscious after the
individual’s entry into the symbolic order of language. The subject is split in language;
it is divided into a conscious and an unconscious instance which interact and interfere
with one another in discourse and can hardly be distinguished in everyday language.
Only in the course of analysis – considered as a process of differentiation – can they be
disentangled.
Divided or split between consciousness and the unconscious, the subject appears as
decentred because it constantly oscillates between consciousness and the unconscious
and therefore does not know from where it speaks: from the conscious or the
unconscious sphere. This ambiguity of the subject is explained by Lacan in conjunction
with the dreamer who is frightened by his own dreams to such a degree that he subjects
them to censorship: ‘In his attitude to his dreamed desires, the dreamer thus appears as
consisting of two persons who are nevertheless held together by an intimate bond.’222 In
the following sentence, this idea is summed up by the expression décentrement du
sujet.223
It is not really a new idea because it can be traced back to the psychological theories
of the multiple personality that were discussed in the first chapter (I, 2, c). Moreover, it
is anticipated by modernist writers such as Proust, Svevo and Hesse who analyse
ambivalence, slips of the tongue224 and dreams in conjunction with the unconscious. It
is also to be found in earlier thinkers such as Nietzsche and Vischer – or even Hegel,
who knew only too well why he banned contingency, chance and dream from his
system. He could not, after all, let a discourse inspired by the World Spirit run into a
division of the subject and a crisis of subjectivity. This crisis broke out later on: in the
critiques of the Young Hegelians and Nietzsche.
Lacan is a Nietzschean and a critic of Hegel in the sense that he analyses the crisis
using the language of structuralism – a structuralism, however, which turned into
deconstruction long before Derrida coined this term. For the submission of the
imaginary to the symbolic order (the paternal law) leads to the emergence of the
unconscious in the course of repression, and the unconscious never speaks from where
the ‘I’ (je) thinks it is.225 It is the voice of the imaginary:
There is an inertia of the imaginary, which we observe as it intervenes in the

subject’s discourse, which confuses this discourse to the effect that I do not realize
that, when I want to do somebody good, I want to hurt him, that when I am in love,
it is myself I love or when I think I love myself it is precisely somebody else I love.
It is precisely the dialectical task of analysis to dissolve this confusion and to give
back to discourse its actual meaning.226
It might have become clear why Lacan can be considered as a structuralist

and a deconstructionist at the same time. The integration of the individual into the
order of language, which brings about subjectivity in a structural sense, also leads to
the split of the subject and the emergence of the unconscious as a type of language
that divides, multiplies and subverts the conscious discourse. As a modernist on the
threshold of postmodernity, Lacan does not go as far as Derrida. Although he is
aware of the ambivalences of the subject and his discourse, he insists on the possibility
and the necessity of finding the actual meaning of this discourse. The modernist
component of his thought is the insight that there is no truth to be found in a false
language.
Uwe Rosenfeld describes the splitting of the subject in discourse as follows:
This second, unconscious discourse, the possibility / necessity to refer to everything

in a verbal message except to what is being expressed, erupts in mistakes, slips of
the tongue, jokes and interruptions of speech. A discourse thus surfaces, which,
‘made unrecognizable by “repression”, doubles the human subject’s chain of
discourse’.227
Lacan shows how this happens when, following Saussure and Jakobson, he describes
how the unconscious emerges on the level of the signifiers as a network of symptoms,
of repressed meanings: ‘The symptom is here the signifier of a signified repressed from
the consciousness of the subject.’228 The signifiers, whose meaning is uncertain in
everyday language, are linked by metaphors and metonymies which Charles Mauron
calls métaphores obsédantes229 and which Lacan considers as motivating forces of
an unconscious rhetoric. This rhetoric is not an ‘expression’ of the unconscious but its
very substance. This is why Lacan points out in his preface to Anika Lemaire’s book:
‘I mean that language is the condition of the unconscious.’230 Here his argument returns
to its starting point. By entering the symbolic order of language, the subject is split into
two competing linguistic spheres: a conscious language and a language of the
unconscious.
Lacan’s well-known ‘Seminar about E. A. Poe’s “The Stolen Letter” ’ (‘Le séminaire
sur la lettre volée’) follows two basic ideas: (1) in Poe’s story, the stolen letter represents
the unconscious and is the main actant: the addresser of all other subject-actants of the
narrative, Greimas would say; (2) la lettre – as message, letter, signifier and feminine
instance – dominates the subject. Commenting on Poe’s story, Lacan speaks of ‘the
supremacy of the signifier within the subject’ (‘la suprématie du signifiant dans le
sujet’).231
In the seminar discussion, which took place in 1955, he explains this interpretation:
‘In other words, if this story is read in an exemplary way, then the letter is for everyone
his unconscious. It is his unconscious with all its consequences, and this means that at
every moment of the symbolic circuit, everybody becomes a different person.’232
Semiotically speaking, each actant fulfils a narrative function in relation to the letter or
to the unconscious whose content he does not know, but whom he obeys at all times.
Here Descartes, who identified the subject with the cogito, defining it as a res
cogitans, is stood on his head. Not the Cartesian cogitatio, but its Cartesian counterpart,
the unconscious, becomes subject – or even addresser of all subjects.233 This inversion
of roles is commented on by Alain Juranville: ‘This subject discovered by Descartes is
now defined by Lacan as subject of the unconscious.’234 Fages generalizes this statement
by adding: ‘Freud’s discovery leads to an inversion of Descartes’ thesis: I think therefore
I am. Freud’s revolution forces us to say: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where
I don’t think”.’235 The last sentence is a quotation from Lacan.
Lacan’s ‘decentred subject’ is also a reversal of Fichte’s well-known formula ‘I’ = ‘I’.
The new formula is: ‘I’ ≠ ‘I’. It also contradicts Hegel’s ‘being as self ’ (mentioned above)
that continues Fichte’s efforts to identify the ‘I’ and the world. At the same time,
it confirms Link’s theory of normalism which suggests that mechanisms of
‘normalization’ have an impact on the unconscious and thus produce a subject who
is nowhere near the consciously speaking ‘I’.
Considering this predominance of the unconscious and the fact that Lacan identifies
everyday language with alienation, it is hardly surprising that an individual who is
turned into a subject by the (alienated) symbolic order is permanently threatened by a
relapse (rechute, Lacan) into the imaginary. This relapse possibly comes about (but
Lacan does not say that), whenever the individual subject is confronted by ‘a language-
barrier opposed to speech’.236 ‘As language becomes more functional’, explains Lacan, ‘it
becomes improper for speech, and as it becomes too particular to us, it loses its function
as language.’237 In this case, argues Philippe Julien, it merely strengthens the narcissism
of the Moi. He adds: ‘In short, there is a contradiction between language (langage) and
the spoken word (parole).’238 Lacan expresses this contradiction by using his own
metaphors: ‘I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object.’239
If this is the case, then a relapse into the imaginary stadium becomes inevitable. For it
appears that the symbolic order of language is as alienated as the imaginary constellation
of the pre-linguistic imaginary stage.
This oscillation of the subject between two alienations is described concisely by Joël
Dor: ‘It is precisely the entry into the symbolic order that makes the subject’s relapse
(rechute) into the imaginary possible, which is sealed by the appearance of the Moi.’240
Lacan uses Freudian vocabulary when he speaks of a regression ‘often pushed right
back to the “mirror stage” ’.241
It is of course true, as Lacan points out, that the neurotic desires ‘the death of the
father’ and (metonymically) of the entire symbolic order: ‘The neurotic’s wished-for
Father is clearly the dead Father.’242 However, the sociological question is: Why is the
number of neurotic and psychotic individuals steadily rising, thus turning neurosis
and psychosis into collective phenomena? One possible answer is: because the symbolic
order as culture and language is being eroded by social differentiation, ideological
conflicts and the omnipresent exchange value of market laws. Lacan often hints at this
process of degradation by various metaphors – but he does not analyse it as a historical
and socio-linguistic process.
How else could he – as a reader of Mallarmé243 – explain the paradox that neither
the patient nor the analyst is likely to find the ‘true word’, the parole pleine, but only the
neurotic poet? About him (and an unwitting critic) Adorno writes: ‘The question is
never once broached whether a physically sound Baudelaire would have been able to
write The Flowers of Evil, not to mention whether the poems turned out worse because
of the neurosis.’244
The true word sought by Lacan is possibly elsewhere. And it is unlikely to be
discovered in a false social order into which Lacan would like to integrate the individual
as subject. Against this background, Anika Lemaire’s definition of the cure sounds
naive: ‘The cure is the transition from a non-symbolized imaginary to a symbolized

imaginary, in other words, it is the access to the personal code of the patient.’245 For a
neurosis is due ‘to the loss of the symbolic reference of the signifier’.246 Could it not be
that ‘the truth of the personal code of the patient’ corresponds to the illness of society
and its language? ‘LANGUAGE: In what a ghastly way does language explain, defend,
destroy itself ’,247 remarks the postmodern Austrian writer Werner Schwab.
Had Lacan considered the symbolic-linguistic order in this light, he might not have
decided to define analysis as a (re-)integration into this order. It is not by chance that,
in his seminars, the question concerning the interminable character of the therapy kept
cropping up. The possibility that a desperate person can be saved when she or he finds
the right interlocutor can never be excluded; but on a collective level psychoanalysis
comes up against the ‘language wall’ mentioned by Lacan – and this wall seems to be
getting thicker. Since his theory stops at the wall, it points to a one-dimensional
postmodernity of Verwindung (Heidegger, Vattimo). As a therapy geared towards the
individual subject it thrives on social alienation and on its own inability to overcome it.
‘We are born into a world where alienation awaits us’,248 writes Laing and implicitly
queries the rational and human character of the ‘symbolic order’. This is not how Lacan
sees the matter. He advocates the individual’s integration into this order and makes
subjectivity depend on the success of this integration. He thus indirectly accepts
Vattimo’s postmodern diagnostic of Verwindung. It is not by chance that he reads
Marx’s Capital as an economic science which ‘need not be used as an instrument of
revolution’.249 His rejection of the 1968 revolt250 confirms this interpretation.
But this revolt was not only an oedipal protest against the paternal order; it was also
an attack on a false society which writers from Mallarmé to Werner Schwab identified
with its false language. It may have started from wrong premises, but it revealed the
weak point in Lacan’s discourse: the one-sided revaluation of the symbolic order vis-à-
vis the imaginary.
The collective regression into the imaginary sphere that marked the 1960s and 70s can
nevertheless be explained within the framework of Lacan’s psychoanalysis: as a relapse
(rechute) into the narcissistic phase in which the infant’s desire is geared towards the
desire of the mother. The dynamics of this desire of a desire are described by Bernard
Ogilvie: ‘To desire does not mean to desire the Other, but to desire the Other’s desire.’251
The following section will show that the postmodern culture of indifference is a
narcissistic culture in the sense of Lacan because in it all value systems have been
eroded to such a degree that the individual subject sees herself or himself as the supreme
value. However, in the eyes of all the others, this subject has no or little value and is only
valued – if at all – as a means. In this situation, all subjects tend to become exchangeable.
7 Psychosociology of narcissism: The individual subject in

postmodern indifference
It is against this background that Christopher Lasch’s narcissism theory will be linked
to Lacan’s psychoanalysis and to the indifference postulate of the first two chapters.
Lasch is important for the critique of Lacan’s approach because he reveals the factors
that discredit the symbolic order as a paternal heritage. He explains with different
arguments, but in a context that completes the critique of the previous section, why the
neurotic regression from the symbolic order to the imaginary stadium appears as a
social and psychic symptom of our time. At the same time, Lacan’s theory of narcissism
sheds new light on his perspective.
In agreement with the sociological theories of Daniel Bell and David Riesman,252
Lasch analyses three complementary developments within contemporary society
(since the Second World War): (1) the decline of the family and its values; (2) the
decline of paternal authority; and (3) the regression of atomized individuals to the
‘imaginary’ world of narcissism.
In the first place he emphasizes that the importance of the family has been in
permanent decline in our society for more than a century and speaks of ‘the supersession
of the family by the state’.253 Parallel to Jacques Donzelot (cf. Chapter III, 4), he observes
how various functions of socialization have been transferred from the family to peer
groups, social workers, mass media and state institutions.
It is hardly necessary to explain why this process entails a decline of paternal
authority in the long run. This decline weakens the symbolic order which differentiates
maternal from paternal roles and perpetuates the generational difference between
parents and children:
The emotional absence of the father has been noted again and again by students of
the modern family; for our own purposes, its significance lies in the removal of an
important obstacle to the child’s illusion of omnipotence. Our culture not only
weakens the obstacles to the maintenance of this illusion, it gives it positive support
in the form of a collective fantasy of generational equality.254
Lasch states clearly what Lacan could not say without undermining his theoretical
construction: the constitution of subjectivity within the symbolic order is only
conceivable as long as it is an order and not a process of disintegration in the course of
which all established norms are jeopardized.
The question Lasch could have asked Lacan is: Could it be that the individual
subject of structural psychoanalysis appears as a subjugated and disintegrating
instance, because it enters a symbolic order torn by conflicts and afflicted by anomie?
The alienation in language, so vividly described by Lacan, turns into a major problem
mainly because the ‘language of the fathers’ sounds hollow and thus exposes itself to
modernist critiques by Baudelaire, Proust and Kafka.255
In late modernity, this critique inaugurates the rebellious regression to the mother-
dominated imaginary stadium. What Lasch has to say about this regression (in the
Freudian sense) does confirm Lacan’s observations; but it also calls them into question
because the American author recognizes the problematic character of the symbolic
order: ‘If the designation of contemporary culture as a culture of narcissism has any
merit, it is because that culture tends to favor regressive solutions instead of
“evolutionary” solutions.’256 Lacan, however, holds on to these ‘evolutionary solutions’
as if he did not see the process of cultural disintegration which makes his approach
appear questionable.
Lasch’s description of the imaginary world is quite similar to Lacan’s except that his
construction of the mother-child dyad differs from that of the Paris psychoanalyst. The
(male) child does not attempt to ‘be phallus for the mother’ (Lacan), but ‘equips [the
mother] with a phallus of her own’ (Lasch).257 In spite of this important difference,
which raises further psychological questions, he arrives at a similar result. The child
takes the view that his mother does not need the father. From this ‘fatherless’
constellation emerges a narcissistic desire which Lacan defines as an absolute desire, as
‘désir de l’autre’258 in the genitive sense: as the Other’s desire, not as a desire for her or
him.
The dynamics of this narcissistic desire is aptly described by Moustafa Safouan, a
follower of Lacan, in relation to the incest taboo and to the inaccessibility of the mother
from the child’s point of view: ‘The greatest good does not exist, the mother is
prohibited.’259 Considering that the realization of the incestuous desire for the mother
is impossible, the desire detaches itself from the object and becomes independent as
désir du désir:
In other words, the desire for the mother is maintained by the desire for her desire.
Since this desire remains hidden from the subject (it is also hidden from the
mother because it is unconscious), the desire of the desire (désir du désir) turns
into a desire to be desirable (désir de demande).260
Hence it is a desire for love, ‘désir d’être aimé’,261 says Safouan, which aims at the
child’s mirror image in the mother’s eyes and can be called ‘narcissistic’.
This image is the ideal ego (moi idéal) in the sense of Lacan (not Freud), i.e. ‘an
essentially narcissistic formation, originating in the mirror phase and belonging to the
order of the Imaginary’.262 Giorgio Sassanelli also emphasizes the ‘maternal, primitive
and narcissistic origin of the Ideal Ego’.263 It is this ideal ego that is turned by the
narcissistic personality into an object of the Other’s desire. This personality’s desire is a
restless search for love, recognition, admiration.
Although an object relation (a relation to the Other) does exist in this particular
situation, it is distorted by the fact that the Other is only a means to an end.264 He is
expected to love without being loved. Heinz Kohut concludes: ‘The antithesis to
narcissism is not the object relation but object love.’265 At this point Lasch’s theory of
narcissism also overlaps with that of the Lacan School. About the narcissistic subject
the American author writes that he expects ‘others to confirm his self-esteem’. He adds:
‘He needs to be admired for his beauty, charm, celebrity, or power – attributes that
usually fade with time.’266 In what follows, it will be shown in conjunction with three
models to what extent this attitude of reflecting oneself in the eyes of others has
survived the transition from late modernity to postmodernity: the dandy, Proust’s
narrator Marcel and Patrick Süskind’s ‘hero’ Grenouille.
‘The dandy is a Narcissus’, writes Philippe Jullian in his biography of Robert de
Montesquiou: ‘He wants to be reflected in admiring eyes and scans the portrait for
compliments of his mirror reflection.’267 The dandy cultivates distance and coldness268
in order to be in permanent demand. He does not love in order to be loved. He thus
recreates the imaginary mother-child situation of the mirror stadium.
Marcel Proust was not only a fashionable dandy, who refused to leave the imaginary
world, but also a novelist of narcissistic desire, who made his hero Marcel pass through
all the stages of the désir du désir. It may be sufficient to recall Marcel’s encounter with
the fisher-girl in whose eyes he seeks esteem and admiration. By uttering the two
‘magic’ words ‘Marquise’ and ‘carriage and pair’ he succeeds in arousing the girl’s
curiosity and in assuaging his desire: ‘But when I had uttered the words “Marquise” and
“carriage and pair”, suddenly I had a great sense of calm. I felt that the fisher-girl would
remember me.’269 The Other as object is needed, but only as a pretext, as a source of
demand, not as an object of love.
This narcissistic structure, which characterizes aestheticism and some brands of
modernism, is parodied in Patrick Süskind’s postmodern novel and assumes fantastic
dimensions. His hero, who suffers from the anomaly of having no body odour, becomes
a murderer of beautiful girls whose scent he appropriates. Finally, he succeeds in
producing an extremely refined perfume that makes him irresistible and guarantees a
permanent demand. His discourse, as reproduced by the narrator, bears witness to a
disproportionate ideal ego:
He was even greater than Prometheus. He had created an aura more radiant and
more effective than any human being had ever possessed before him. And he owed
it to no one – not to a father, nor a mother, and least of all to a gracious God – but
to himself alone. He was in very truth his own God, and a more splendid god than
the God that stank of incense and was quartered in churches.270
If ever an ideal was realized then it was realized in this fantastic episode by Süskind’s
nasty anti-hero Grenouille, who owes his irresistibility to a particular product, not to
his looks or to features of his personality.
Although the dandy, Proust’s Marcel and Süskind’s Grenouille share the narcissistic
desire described above, the model of the dandy differs from the two other models.
Unlike the dandy, who seduces his audience by his habitus (his elegance, his
conversation, his esprit), the heroes of the two novels create demand by appropriating
certain desirable values: the words ‘Marquise’ and ‘carriage and pair’ in the first case, the
miraculous perfume in the second. Naturally, the dandy also appropriates a particular
habitus, but the latter is part and parcel of his personality and inseparable from his
talents.
This difference is of some importance here because it reveals a homology between
Marcel’s word-values and Grenouille’s perfume on the one hand, and money as
exchange value on the other. Unlike the dandy, who offers his admirers physical and
linguistic qualities, Marcel and Grenouille offer only exchange values in order to
stimulate demand: prestigious words and an acquired perfume. Both values correspond
to the exchange function of money as described by the young Marx:
That which exists for me through the medium money, that which I can pay for (i.e.
which money can buy), that I am, the possessor of the money. The properties of
money are my own (the possessor’s) properties and faculties. What I am and can
do is, therefore, not at all determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy
the most beautiful woman for myself. Consequently, I am not ugly, for the effect of
ugliness, its power to repel, is annulled by money.271
If the word ‘money’ is replaced by the word ‘perfume’, then the crucial scene of
Süskind’s novel re-emerges. The effect of the appropriated perfume completely cancels
Grenouille’s ugliness.
At the same time, narcissistic desire appears as a psychic structure mediated by the
exchange mechanisms of market society. Between Narcissus and his admirers an
exchange relationship prevails. Like the dandy, like Proust’s Marcel, Narcissus exchanges
symbolic capital (name, title, language, voice) for demand as individual or collective
admiration.
In postmodern societies, admiration is more and more frequently geared towards
quantitative factors. The indicator for a successful stimulation of demand on the TV
screen is viewing figures, the success of a pop star is measured by the size of the
ecstatically swaying masses. Quality is seldom discussed because it is narcissistically
repressed (also in a psychoanalytic sense) in view of a quantifiable demand, as in the
case of ‘Facebook’ where the number of ‘friends’ is crucial.
In a situation dominated by the quantitative criteria of the exchange or market value,
libidinally invested appearance in the sense of Baudrillard replaces reality (cf. Chapter
IV, 2). The performance of the narcissistic film star must be excellent because it is craved
for by many and because numbers, viewing figures and profits of millions cannot
possibly be lying. After all, nobody is willing to pay for nonsense . . . Lasch comments:
‘In a society based so largely on illusions and appearances, the ultimate illusions, art and
religion, have no future.’272 The decline of these two illusions undermines the stability of
the individual subject. In the indifferent world of the exchange value, it suffers a loss of
substance.273
On the level of subjectivity, this indifference manifests itself as exchangeability. The
dialectic between narcissistic desire and demand, in which the enchanted admirers
identify their ideal ego with that of the admired idol, is marked by emptiness. The
personality of the ‘star’ is as empty as that of the admirer. The admired subject who
appears in the media is a quantifiable factor dependent on public demand, while the
public is a statistically recordable figure. Trying to relate the success of the media star
to a ‘corresponding’ quality would be naive, for the latter is not a prerequisite – although
it may exist. In other words, the correspondence between quality and quantity, use
value and exchange value is contingent and tends to become even more contingent as
the exchange value permeates all layers of society.
To the subjective indifference of being-in-demand as idol or star corresponds the
intersubjective indifference of exchangeability of individuals. Today’s media star will
soon be replaced by a younger successor, but the narcissistic nexus between pure,
objectless desire and pure demand need not change. What matters most is the novelty
and youth of the new idol. ‘But always, old was out and young was in’,274 explains Lasch
and adds: ‘But the dread of age originates not in a “cult of youth” but in a cult of the
self.’275 It is the narcissistic fear of a falling demand; it is the fear of the exiled dandy
Oscar Wilde of a life in the provinces, a life without the admiring eyes of his London
public; it is the fear of Narcissus of losing the mirror.
In this situation, a different kind of decentred subject appears: one that is turned into
an object276 and is ‘other-directed’ by the demand of others. The mythical Other, who is
mediated by the exchange value (as public), becomes his destinateur (addresser) and his
destiny: his addresser who can at any time send him back to nothingness by withholding
demand. The market-oriented ‘existence for others’ excludes a withdrawal to the real ‘I’.
It no longer exists, since it was dissolved in the appearances of the exchange value. This
explains the omnipresent fear of the Other’s indifference – which is, however, inevitable
because it is inherent in the exchange-oriented structure of narcissism.
Narcissistic fear shows how unstable individual subjectivity is in a hyper-
individualist media society. It falls apart because it is pure desire dependent on demand
and without any attachment to religious, political or ethical values. Many contemporary
artists do not criticize and provoke because they imagine a different society like Breton
or Brecht, but in an attempt to attract maximum attention. Some intellectuals adopt a
similar attitude when they try to increase demand by a perpetual presence in the
media.277 However, in a situation in which everyone points to himself or herself in
order to stimulate public demand (the desire of others), all participants tend to become
exchangeable, indifferent.
8 Feminist concepts of subjectivity between modernity and

postmodernity: From Virginia Woolf to dialogical subjectivity
In some respects, feminist theories of the individual subject can be seen as reactions to
a postmodern market society governed by indifference, i.e. by the idea that all cultural
values are interchangeable. In this situation, where value hierarchies tend to be replaced
by functional relations, which are by no means neutral but often based on traditional
(patriarchal) patterns of interaction, some feminist theories reflect upon the nexus
between individual subjectivity and collective agency (social movement). Other
feminist theories cast doubts on the very concept of subjectivity by revealing the
‘phallocentric’ or ‘phallogocentric’ origin of the subject in the light of Derrida’s
deconstruction. The third option for feminist theory today seems to be a modernist
position: not only in the sense of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, but also in
the more contemporary sense of Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva, all of whom explore
the possibilities of an ambivalent, androgynous subjectivity within the context of a
critical theory of discourse.
How is the coexistence of these three ideal types (M. Weber), which are often
intertwined in the texts of an author, to be explained? To begin with, it may be useful
to recall the fact that the feminist movement is not merely a late modern and
postmodern phenomenon which questions traditional notions of subjectivity. It is also
to be seen as a permanent revival of a modern project rooted in the Enlightenment and
designed to foster a new sense of female subjectivity – a female prise de conscience in
the Marxist and existentialist sense.
Those feminist movements, which identify with this project, cannot be interested in
deconstructing, let alone in giving up the concept of subject. On the contrary, they are
likely to attach considerable importance to a re-definition of the concept that might
prepare the individual woman, and the movement as a whole, for social action. This
modality of ‘acting’ or ‘being able to act’ (‘pouvoir faire’, Greimas) is referred to as
agency in English-speaking countries. For feminists, who seek to continue the
Enlightenment tradition in the social sciences, agency in this sense is the primary
focus.
On the other hand, feminists, who adopt a deconstructionist stance by critically
analysing and decomposing the concept of subject, are by no means apolitical, as is
sometimes assumed.278 They are not entirely wrong in reminding their enlightened
companions of the historical fact that subjectivity is a form pre-constructed by male
actors who dominate the historical process and the political stage: a form that women
ought not to adopt unwittingly. ‘Not unwittingly’ means that women should let
themselves be inspired by Foucault’s and Derrida’s analyses of power constellations
which, in the course of human history, constitute subjectivity as a male function, i.e.
within an actantial model (Greimas) geared towards masculine role perceptions. They
emphasize sexual difference and highlight the ideological dangers inherent in every
attempt to define the social position, the role and the future of women unambiguously.
But is political action without univocity and a clear definition of goals possible? Does
deconstruction of subjectivity not lead to undecidability and eventually to the kind of
postmodern indifference which all or most contemporary movements – from the
ecological to the conservative – set out to combat? Such questions are of general
importance and their scope cannot be confined to feminism.
The third feminist position, which was initially circumscribed by the notions of
ambivalence and androgyny, by the unity of opposites without synthesis in the
modernist sense, can be considered as an alternative to ideological univocity and to
deconstructionist différance (unending differentiation). The underlying idea is that it is
possible to open up to otherness without dominating it and without being dominated
by it. The possibility of such an ambivalent and dialogical subjectivity was envisaged
for the first time by Virginia Woolf in Orlando and later on by Simone de Beauvoir,
Elisabeth Badinter and Judith Butler in new contexts. Julia Kristeva revealed its
psychoanalytic aspects by relating it to Lacan’s notion of the symbolic order. It
anticipates the idea of a dialogical subjectivity derived from the approaches of Bakhtin,
Mead and Ricœur.
The three models of feminism outlined here have one common theoretical
denominator: the attempt to analyse the genesis of subjectivity and the concept of
subject on a historical and sociological level. In the course of this brief interdisciplinary
analysis, the idea that late capitalist society is increasingly being dominated by market
laws and the exchange value is situated at the centre of the scene. It becomes clear ‘that
market and exchange, i.e. the basis of capitalism, are made possible by the subject /
object-dichotomy which is part and parcel of the patriarchal set-up’.279
Neither the question whether Marxism explains gender relations in capitalism nor
the complementary question whether feminist theory reveals certain shortcomings of
Marxism is relevant here, but the idea shared by both theory complexes that the
objectification of woman is closely linked to her role as an object of exchange. Luce
Irigaray sums up this idea, introduced into anthropological debate by Marcel Mauss:280
‘Woman thus has value only in that she can be exchanged.’281 The exchanging subjects
continue to be men. Commenting on this key statement underlying the analyses in her
book Speculum. Of the Other Woman, Irigaray concludes: ‘We shall in fact receive only
confirmation of the discourse of the same, through comprehension and extension.
With “woman” coming once more to be embedded in, enclosed in, impaled upon an
architectonic more powerful than ever.’282
If this diagnosis is correct, then the very idea of a feminist movement could turn out
to be aporetical. For how can a collective subject-actant in the sense of Greimas come
about if the actors283 it consists of lack subjectivity? This is one of the reasons why
feminists keep raising the question of the social and linguistic development of
subjectivity. One of them, Judith Butler, tries to provide an answer by relying on
Foucault and Bourdieu: ‘The subject’s production takes place not only through the
regulation of that subject’s speech, but through the regulation of the social domain of
speakable discourse.’284 However, what can or cannot be said in a particular situation is
decided a priori within those linguistic power relations described by Michel Pêcheux.
From a feminist point of view, it is the male rulers who make the rules of language:
from grammar to discourse.285
They decide whether a particular discourse is to be considered as legitimate, that is
whether it should be given social credit and be endowed with social prestige or not:
For Bourdieu, then, the distinction between performatives that work and those
that fail has everything to do with the social power of the one who speaks: the one
who is invested with legitimate power makes language act; the one who is not
invested may recite the same formula, but produces no effects.286
This linguistic situation is amply illustrated by the discourse relations in the traditional
family. When father discussed the economic situation of the family or the purchase of
a new car, children and relatives tended to take every word seriously, while mother’s
objections were often dismissed light-heartedly. (This situation may have changed in
the meantime.)
It is particularly enlightening to read what Diane Elam has to say about the dialectics
of sexuality as a biological and gender as a sociocultural factor. Referring to Butler, she
asks herself whether female or male sexuality, usually treated as a biological fact or
constant, is not in reality a linguistic construction: ‘Instead, gender as a discursive
element actually gives rise to a belief in pre-discursive or inner sex. That is to say, sex is
retrospectively a product of gender so that, in a sense, gender comes before sex.’287 This
may be correct insofar as children are born into specific social and linguistic situations
where roles are pre-constructed; but they are born with a biological sex – like all other
mammals.
Elam is certainly not wrong when she argues against those who claim ‘equal rights
for women’ that their slogans aiming at equality may very well lead to an assimilation of
the female to the male gender: ‘Feminism is destined to lose the entire argument, since
the equal rights to which women aspire turn out to mean the right to be hu-MAN.’288 If
one takes into account Foucault’s and Althusser’s thesis about the over-determination of
subjects by power structures and ideologies, Elam’s arguments appear to be quite
realistic, especially since she adds: ‘Subjects do not define rights for themselves; rather,
rights produce subjects who can hold them.’289 This hypothesis is not only applicable to
feudal estates but also to a bourgeois individualist class society. It is nevertheless too
deterministic because it obliterates the other side of the problem: the fact, for example,
that women fought successfully for certain rights, the right to abortion, thus enlarging
their scope of action (and the whole range of modalities), without having to accept a
male over-determination.
This type of (counter-)argument is adopted by feminists who continue the modern
Enlightenment tradition and distrust all approaches which result in weakening or
abandoning the notion of subjectivity: approaches geared towards aporia, undecidability
or an infinite differentiation in the sense of Derrida’s différance. They seem to fear that,
in a society marked increasingly by the indifference of the exchange value, all brands of
deconstruction will tend to confirm the context of indifference.
Françoise Gaspard in France, Sabina Lovibond in Britain and Honi Fern Haber in
the United States plead with sociological, modernist and neostructuralist arguments
for a strengthening of female subjectivity, both on an individual and a collective level.
These arguments are complementary insofar as Alain Touraine’s sociology of action,
invoked by Gaspard, is inspired by the late modern (not postmodern) hope that
individual subjectivity will be strengthened and restructured by contemporary social
movements.
Gaspard, who can base her arguments on solid empirical research,290 starts from the –
originally structuralist – idea that feminist movements can only be understood within the
framework of the gender relations they are trying to change. Her approach is genetic and
dialectical in character, insofar as it is an attempt to avoid the unilateral conception of
over-determination which confronts women with the unattractive alternative of accepting
the status quo or breaking radically with a male-dominated society.
Without losing sight of the fact that rights, roles and patterns of action over-
determine the individual’s activities, she points out:
In the meantime, however, social relations have changed due to women’s activities.
Consequently, the sociology of action now has to cope with a vast field of research
which not only encompasses women as actors in feminist movements, but also as
actors in a general sense, as subjects of history (sujets de l’histoire).291
Unfortunately, it is not quite clear in this context how women can act individually, i.e.
outside of social movements, as ‘subjects of history’, especially since the Hegelian
notion of ‘historical subject’ has increasingly been exposed to criticism and doubt.
Although Gaspard tends to repeat Ulrich Beck’s diagnosis concerning the fate of
social movements,292 when she confirms ‘that they come and go’ (‘qu’ils vont et
viennent’),293 she shows, in her analysis of the French feminist movements, to what
extent specific social laws are involved that make it difficult to explain such movements
within the encompassing context of socio-historical change: ‘On a collective level,
women are less active in 1789 than in 1791, less in 1968 than after 1970.’294 On a
European level, the social history of female protest still has to be written. Gaspard quite
rightly points out that ‘the feminist protest has been underestimated by official
history’.295
Starting from Habermas’s idea that the ‘project of modernity’ is still to be realized,
Sabina Lovibond joins Gaspard in pleading for a stronger female subjectivity in
postmodern times: ‘The pursuit of a fully integrated subjectivity takes the form of an
attempt to rise above our present mental limitations.’296 The idea of a ‘fully integrated
subjectivity’ may appear naive in a postmodern context marked by deconstructionist
attempts to discard all notions of subjectivity as metaphysical relics. However, it bears
witness to the ideological refusal of feminist, ethnic, regional and religious movements
to be intimidated by postmodern critics of subjectivity and to be relegated to the
archaic enclaves of contemporary society. Such movements react in a rationalist,
conservative, nationalist or socialist way to postmodern deconstructions and
negativisms, all of which are marked by a tendency towards indifference – even if they
pretend to combat the latter.
Although Lovibond emphasizes the critical and militant components of feminism,
she also embraces an enlightened utopia when she writes that feminism aspires to end
the war between men and women and to bring about a situation marked by
‘transparency’ and ‘truthfulness’.297 Adopting the stance of a late modern Enlightenment,
she turns against the postmodern tendency of pluralization and particularization,
arguing – quite rightly – that it weakens the feminist movement and consolidates
existing power structures.
She dissociates her own position from postmodernism, which she misunderstands
as a theory or an ideology, defines her own point of view as ‘Enlightenment
modernism’298 and rejects all attempts to present feminism ‘as one more “exciting”
feature [. . .] in a postmodern social landscape’.299 By adopting this perspective, she
tends to overlook the fact that contemporary feminism is a heterogeneous conglomerate
of groups and organizations within a postmodern problematic300 and that it reacts in
many different ways to the underlying indifference of this problematic: (1) by an
ideological rejection of this market-oriented indifference and by a complementary
affirmation of individual and collective subjectivity; (2) by a postmodern deconstruction
of this subjectivity which tends to confirm postmodern indifference (as exchangeability
of particular positions in pluralism); (3) by constructing a new, ambivalent subjectivity
that revives and develops certain modernist tendencies without simply being
‘modernist’.
In the United States, an ideological response to postmodern indifference and
deconstruction comes from Honi Fern Haber, who blames Lyotard, Rorty and Foucault
for undermining female subjectivity and solidarity by pleading for pluralism, irony
and relativism. She interprets these ‘male’ philosophies as attempts to prevent a female
prise de conscience at a crucial moment of historical development: ‘Postmodern politics
is not a viable option on this description for it repudiates the formation of community
and of coherent subjects, both of which are necessary to the identity formation of
otherness.’301
The last statement is undoubtedly true. Every sociologist, every political scientist
and every politician will confirm that coherence and a collective or individual feeling
of identity are indispensable to political action. But how do deconstructionists react to
emotive words such as coherence, subjectivity and identity? At first, they tend to react
like all other theoreticians: with ideological scepticism. Even Adorno, in some respects
their precursor, dismissed the demand for coherent models by proposing as alternatives
negativity and dissonance.302
Here a fundamental dilemma, emerging from the tension between ideology and
theory, comes to the fore. Ideology turns individuals into subjects of action, but hardly
ever induces them to engage in critical reflection; critical theories encourage this kind
of reflection, but are ‘affected by the anaemia of thought’ (Goethe on Hamlet) and
hence tend to prevent action. Nobody will blame the feminists for not having overcome
this ancient contradiction.303
In any case, it seems to make sense to take Hannelore Möckel-Rieke’s warning
about ideological projections of the feminine in Hélène Cixous’s work seriously.
Möckel-Rieke blames Cixous ‘for identifying the feminine with the libidinal body, with
nature and instinct’.304 She explains: ‘This identification is to be seen as a relapse into an
a-historical, dualistic and idealist differentiation of the sexes which originally we were
hoping to overcome.’305 The problem seems to consist in the fact that ideological
dualisms such as true / false, beautiful / ugly, good / bad can encourage individual and
collective action, while the theoretical deconstruction of these dualisms furthers
knowledge and criticism – but not action.
At this point, the advocates of feminist deconstruction defend the principle in dubio
pro cognitione critica. Naturally, they do not admit that they are ‘affected by the anaemia
of thought’, but try to mobilize deconstructionist techniques for political goals. Barbara
Vinken succinctly summarizes the project of deconstructionist feminism when she
accentuates the negative moments of this theoretical approach and simultaneously
rejects ideological dualism:
The feminine ‘is’ thus a negative potentiality, a figure of differentiation, of

de-facement. The feminine ‘is’ therefore the instance that cuts across identity;
‘woman’ the place where the fixation of sex is dis-placed, where sex, meaning
and identity are both created and undermined.306
She adds the following programmatic remark: ‘Deconstructive feminism aims at a

permanent subversion of gender roles as they undoubtedly function – as illusions,
however, not as real phenomena.’307 Unfortunately, radical deconstructionists come
away empty-handed. To them it is of little value that the metaphysical opposition
between the male and the female is replaced by the Platonic dualism of illusion and
reality. How do we find reality? – they will ask in a radical-constructivist-
deconstructionist fashion . . .
In Speculum, where she embarks on a Lacanian deconstruction avant la lettre, Luce
Irigaray can dismiss such questions forthwith. Instead of perpetuating the opposition
between illusion and reality, she starts from the assumption that all of male metaphysics
(from Plato to Freud) perseveres in a kind of ‘specular state’, in which the male subject
comes about by mirroring himself in a negatively defined female counterpart he
systematically seeks to exclude. ‘We can assume that any theory of the subject has
always been appropriated by the “masculine” ’,308 she observes and points out elsewhere
that male speech is a ‘discourse that denies the specificity of her pleasure by inscribing
it as the hollow, the intaglio, the negative, even as the censured other of its phallic
assertions’.309 This is why she believes that Freud assimilates the sexuality of the little
girl to that of the boy, attributing a ‘penis envy’ to the girl and generally tending to see
woman as an incomplete man, associating her with an opaque nature which the male
spirit is at pains to comprehend. (In fact, Freud’s explanations of ‘penis envy’ are at best
curious, as Juliet Mitchell already pointed out in her lucid critique of traditional
psychoanalysis . . . If a word such as ‘envy’ is to be used at all in science, the psychoanalyst
should at least reflect on the possible existence of a corresponding male ‘vagina’ or
‘uterus envy’.)310
Irigaray’s critique is deconstructionist avant la lettre in the sense that by using the
metaphor of the mirror she re-introduces a systematically repressed female sexuality
which leads to the disintegration of the phallocentric and logocentric system. She
thereby negates the apparent autarky of the male idealist system, of what Derrida
would call the ‘logocentric closure’311 – a closure designed to exclude the feminine
element. Irigaray’s basic intention is to show that the excluded element has always been
‘inside’.
Judith Butler develops this idea by asking ‘through what exclusions has the feminist
subject been constructed, and how do those excluded domains return to haunt the
“integrity” and “unity” of the feminist “we”?’312 The exclusion which produces an
‘outside’ seems to be necessary from a male point of view, because the male subject
could not have constructed himself – ex negativo, as it were – as a philosophical or
psychoanalytic subject without a female mirror fulfilling a contrastive function. It
might be interesting to pursue Irigaray’s and Butler’s idea by asking whether
philosophers such as Descartes, Hegel and Fichte have not constructed their systems
by systematically excluding otherness: the body (Descartes), other cultures and nations
(Fichte) and nature (Hegel).
The feminist critique of male-dominated ‘phallogocentric’ philosophy has induced
authors such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson to break with the entire philosophical
tradition and to envisage a critique of society without philosophy: ‘Social Criticism
without Philosophy’.313 Their project, however, is not only problematical because social
criticism has been linked to philosophy ever since Plato, Hobbes and Marx mapped out
more or less realistic alternatives to the social orders of their time, but also because these
two feminist authors keep referring to the philosophical approaches of Marx, Foucault
and especially Lyotard in order to emphasize the difference between these authors and
their own stance. In contrast to Françoise Gaspard, who would like to strengthen the
feminine subject as an historical actor, they renounce subjectivity: ‘Finally, postmodern-
feminist theory would dispense with the idea of a subject of history. It would replace
unitary notions of “woman” and “feminine gender identity” with plural and complexly
constructed conceptions of social identity’.314 Fraser’s and Nicholson’s wish to drop the
metaphysical notion of ‘historical subject’ is understandable – not, however, their refusal
to admit the complementary concepts of individual and collective subjectivity. All of
their arguments converge in a deconstruction (critical dismemberment) of the
individual subject as a unified whole.
In her work on Feminism and Deconstruction, Diane Elam seems to continue this
train of thought when she criticizes feminists such as Gaspard by insisting on the
metaphysical, repressive aspects of subjectivity:
This achievement of a definitive or calculable subjectivity is, as Derrida points out,

not solely liberatory. Indeed, the constraint of subjectivity, even when subjectivity
seems to offer agency, is clear when we realize that women become subjects only
when they conform to specified and calculable representations of themselves as
subjects.315
This is undoubtedly true, and it becomes clear in a feminist context to what extent the
authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment were correct in stressing the fact that all
aspirations to power imply a large amount of self-denial and self-abnegation in the
cognitive sense.
Diane Elam would like to avoid this cognitive self-abnegation by deconstructionist
means. Parallel to the deconstructionist literary critic Geoffrey H. Hartman,316 she
pleads in favour of a ‘radical indeterminacy’317 in politics, quotes Barbara Johnson,
according to whom ‘the undecidable is the political’318 and arrives at the conclusion that
feminism ought to practise a politics of undecidability: ‘The specificity of feminism is
thus its insistence that the politics of undecidability (among multiple determinations)
must be understood from a standpoint of indeterminacy, of political possibilities.’319
But what does this kind of politics look like? In an attempt to make her position
plausible, Elam refers to abortion: ‘To win the debate on abortion would be to allow the
undecidable in so far as abortion would be neither a decision which could be made in
advance or made once and for all for all women.’320 Apart from the fact that this method
of undecidability cedes the political field to those female and male groupings, which
adhere to dualistic ideologies and clear-cut notions of subjectivity, it is marked – like
many other deconstructionist approaches – by a latent tendency towards indifference.
At the end of the day, all decisions concerning abortion appear as being so individual
and so particular that they become interchangeable. Each of them can be justified and
appears to be as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as any other. Here the kind of postmodern pluralism
predominates that is explicitly rejected by Gaspard and Lovibond.
All attempts to politicize deconstruction or to combine it with Marxism (e.g.
Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of practice’)321 tend to fail because of deconstruction’s negativity
and its insights into the logocentrism of rationalist and Hegelian conceptualization
which induce it to remain in a destructive or playful suspense. This negativity is quite
incompatible with Adorno’s refusal to abandon conceptualization or the autonomy of
the subject, for it eventually confirms the indifference of the exchange value.
It seems possible to overcome this dilemma arising from the controversies between
subject-oriented and deconstructionist feminism by returning to Virginia Woolf ’s
novel Orlando (1928) characterized by Frank Kermode as a ‘fantastic “biography” of a
man-woman’.322 It is a modernist novel structured by extreme ambivalence defined as
coincidence of opposites (male / female, war / peace, real / unreal, etc.): an ambivalence
that results – among other things – from the impossibility of Hegelian synthesis in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The unity of opposites seems to be possible, but
not the dialectical synthesis of these opposites constructed by Hegel.
In Walter Benjamin’s work, it becomes clear that this unity without a synthesis need
not be interpreted as an aporia in the deconstructionist sense, but can be considered as
a moment of truth in the dialectical sense: ‘The presentation of an idea can never be
successful as long as the virtual circle of its extremes has not been traced.’323 Derrida’s
deconstructionist disintegration of meaning is not being envisaged here, but the unity
of the extremes for the sake of truth.
In her stimulating study on Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, Makiko
Minow-Pinkey reads Orlando in a post-Hegelian and modernist context when she
remarks about Woolf ’s androgynous protagonist: ‘The author does not present
androgyny as a Hegelian synthesis of man and woman; Orlando lives alteration not
resolution.’324 This is a good example of ambivalence as a coincidence of opposites, of an
ambivalence leading to dialogue. The idea underlying this critical ambivalence is a
transformation of the self by opening up towards the Other – without assimilating,
without confiscating the Other’s identity. Makiko Minow-Pinkey quite rightly points
out: ‘But intermixture does not mean fusion into homogeneous unity, for the difference
between the sexes remains “one of great profundity”.’325 She also stresses the fact that
‘androgyny is the rejection of sameness’.326 Thus Woolf ’s novel can be read as a text
which challenges both the male exclusion strategies and the male incorporation
strategies without becoming entangled in aporias.
Orlando lives and acts. Standing between the sexes and uniting both of them, he-
she acts in spite of all the ambivalences underlying the actions and events of the novel.
Love, which is the preoccupation of traditional protagonists, is presented by the
narrator as an ambivalent entity, as an unstable coincidence of opposites:
For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black;
two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two nails, two,
indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so
strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them.327
Disintegration is not the result of this contradictory unit, but tension, dialogue.
As in many other modernist novels, as in the novels of Svevo, Musil, Kafka or Hesse,
this tension resulting from ambivalence may become an obstacle to action. Although it
furthers critical distance and self-reflection, it hampers the ability of the androgynous
individual to engage in coherent activities. At the end of the day, Orlando considers
both sexes with scepticism:
And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring
both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being, she
seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the
weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in.
The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied her. She was a feather blown in
the gale.328
These ‘comforts of ignorance’ are denied to all of late modern or modernist literature
which is marked by ambivalence, self-reflection, irony and self-irony.
The self-reflection inherent in Virginia Woolf ’s narrative style eventually leads to
the transformation of androgynous dialogue into polyphony: ‘For she had a great
variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a
biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas
a person may well have as many thousand.’329 This multiplicity of the self does not
prevent Orlando from acting, but it does lead to a sceptical reflection on the traditional
adventures of romances and to the protagonist’s insight that her destiny is neither eros
nor action, but literary writing. In this respect, she reminds us of other modernist
heroes such as Svevo’s Zeno Cosini and Proust’s Marcel. In her case too, writing turns
into a critical reflection on identity and the search for identity.
Her experience also seems to announce the work of Simone de Beauvoir which is
read by Françoise Rétif as a work marked by ambivalence and androgyny.330 As in the
case of Woolf, ambivalence appears in Beauvoir’s texts as the salient feature and the
basic structure of literary modernism. ‘Let us assume our fundamental ambiguity’,331
she writes in Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté and explains: ‘Existentialism has defined
itself from the very outset as a philosophy of ambiguity; by postulating the irreducible
character of ambiguity, Kierkegaard adopted a stance diametrically opposed to
Hegel’s.’332 These remarks concerning Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existence reveal
modernism’s indebtedness to the Young Hegelian critique of Hegel’s system.
In this context, Françoise Rétif relates Beauvoir to Virginia Woolf when she writes
about Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté: ‘Man has to reconcile the opposites by preserving
them; so he can only “find”, i.e. unify himself by moving between the different poles
without ever coinciding with himself. In this case, the concept of ambiguity assumes the
full weight of its etymology.’333 This ambiguity (in the present context: ambivalence in
the modernist and Bakhtinian sense) appears to Rétif as the basic structure of
androgyny underlying Beauvoir’s work: ‘The androgynous is the same and the other,
the identical and the different, the masculine and the feminine, all in one.’334 Androgyny
as an ambivalent figure of modernism thus appears both as an alternative to the
ideology of the subject and to the pathological ‘multiple personality’, as described by
Ursula Link-Heer.335
The androgynous dialogism of Beauvoir and Woolf is viewed in a psychoanalytic
perspective by Julia Kristeva when she adds to Lacan’s symbolic order a ‘semiotic order’
dominated not by the figure of the father, but by that of the mother. This semiotic order
is not made of language, but consists of the non-linguistic signs used by the infant
reacting to movements, shapes and colours. Kristeva calls the transition from the
semiotic to the symbolic order the thetic phase (in the sense of Husserl’s transcendental
ego), a phase in which the subject constructs itself as a linguistic agent.
In Kristeva’s approach, the thetic constitutes (and this is the major difference
compared with Lacan) a permanent link between the symbolic order and the pre-
linguistic phase of development. The irruption of the pre-symbolic into the symbolic
order is no longer considered (as in Lacan’s case) as a pathological relapse, but as the
beginning of a dialogical relationship between two heterogeneous, but equal orders
and as a fundamental aspect of dialogical subjectivity:
However, this semiotic element that we can observe in the significant practices
keeps re-occurring after the symbolic thesis. We are thus dealing with the semiotic
element which appears after the emergence of the symbolic order and which can
be analysed both in psychotic discourse and in the practice referred to as ‘art’.336
Kristeva speaks of an ‘explosion of the semiotic within the symbolic’,337 an ‘explosion’

that can be observed in the pre-linguistic elements of avant-garde art. In fact, she joins
in Virginia Woolf ’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s Young Hegelian and modernist critique
when she emphasizes that this explosion of the semiotic within the symbolic order is
not part of a synthesizing movement in the Hegelian sense, but an open process: the
process of subjectivity.
On the one hand, this process can be considered as a continuous concatenation of
crises, on the other hand, as a ‘subject in process’,338 as Rosalind Coward and John Ellis
put it. This construction process can fail at any time: both on an individual and on a
collective level (e.g. when social movements disintegrate). However, it can also appear
as a creative or productive process in the sense of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando.
This novel and the feminist experience as a whole suggest that subjectivity comes
about in a permanent dialogue with others and that identity is inconceivable without
alterity.
Notes
1 For a more detailed definition of ‘problematic’ cf. P. V. Zima, Modern / Postmodern.
Society, Philosophy, Literature, London-New York, Continuum (2010), 2012, chap. I. 3.
2 Cf. P. V. Zima, La Négation esthétique. Le sujet, le beau et le sublime de Mallarmé et
Valéry à Adorno et Lyotard, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002, chap. V.
3 Cf. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, Harmondsworth,
Penguin (1967), 1973.
4 P. V. Zima, Modern / Postmodern, op. cit., p. 16.
5 A. Hartman, in: E. Goffman, Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,
Englewood Cliffs (N. J.), Prentice Hall, 1963, pp. 58–9.
6 Cf. P. V. Zima, La Négation esthétique, op. cit., p. 69.
7 J. Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime. Technology and American Writing from Mailer to
Cyberpunk, Ithaca-London, Cornell Univ. Press, 1996, p. 77.
8 Ibid., p. 78.
9 P. Valéry, ‘Le Beau est négatif ’, in: idem, Œuvres I, Paris Gallimard, Bibl. de la Pléiade,
1957, p. 374.
10 H. Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik. Von der Mitte des neunzehnten bis zur
Mitte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1970 (3rd ed.), p. 117.
11 J.-P. Sartre, ‘L’Engagement de Mallarmé’, in: Sartre, Obliques (special issue, 18–19),
1979, p. 190.
12 S. Mallarmé, ‘Quant au livre’, in: idem, Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, Bibl. de la
Pléiade, 1945, p. 378.
13 I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, Indianapolis-Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company,
1987, p. 98. – Gernot Böhme points out in his article ‘Lyotards Lektüre des Erhabenen’,
in: Kant-Studien 2, 1998, p. 213: ‘Kant did not consider the sublime as a principle of
artistic representation.’
14 S. Mallarmé, ‘L’Azur’, in: idem, Œuvres complètes, op. cit., p. 38.
15 P. Bénichou, Selon Mallarmé, Paris, Gallimard, 1995, p. 82.
16 P. Valéry, ‘Le Beau est négatif ’, in: idem, Œuvres I, op. cit., p. 374.
17 P. Valéry, ‘Tel Quel’, in: idem, Œuvres II, Paris, Gallimard, Bibl. de la Pléiade, 1960,
p. 637.
18 P. Valéry, ‘Léonard et les philosophes’, in: idem: Œuvres I, op. cit., pp. 1240–41.
19 W. Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge
(Mass.)-London, 2006, p. 210.
20 Cf. W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility and
other Writings on Media, Cambridge (Mass.)-London, The Belknap Press, 2008,
pp. 19–21.
21 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London, Athlone, 1997, p. 94.
22 D. Kipfer, Individualität nach Adorno, Tübingen-Basel, Francke, 1999, p. 82.
23 Cf. T. W. Adorno, ‘Individuum und Organisation’, in: idem, Kritik. Kleine Schriften zur
Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1971, pp. 83–4.
24 T. W. Adorno, ‘The Artist as Deputy’, in: idem, Notes to Literature, vol. I, New York,
Columbia Univ. Press, 1991, p. 106.
25 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, London-New York, Routledge (1973), 2000, p. XX.
26 A. Rescio, ‘Sujet et critique du sujet chez Adorno’, in: A. Verdiglione (ed.), Psychanalyse
et sémiotique (Actes du colloque de Milan, 1974), Paris, UGE (10/18), 1975, p. 199.
28 Cf. M. Moog-Grünewald (ed.), Das Neue. Eine Denkfigur der Moderne, Heidelberg,
Winter, 2002.
29 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., pp. 196–7.
30 Ibid., p. 199.
31 Ibid., p. 273.
32 A. Wellmer, ‘Adorno, die Moderne und das Erhabene’, in: W. Welsch, Ch. Pries (eds.),
Ästhetik im Widerstreit. Interventionen zum Werk von Jean-François Lyotard,
Weinheim, VHC, 1991, p. 47.
33 J.-F. Lyotard, The Inhuman. Reflections on Time, Cambridge-Oxford, Polity-Blackwell,
1991, p. 93.
34 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘The Subject, the Beautiful and the Sublime. Adorno and Lyotard
between Modernism and Postmodernism’, in: A. Eysteinsson, V. Liska (eds.),
Modernism, Amsterdam-Atlanta, J. Benjamins, 2007, p. 150.
35 G. Böhme, ‘Lyotards Lektüre des Erhabenen’, in: Kant-Studien 2, 1998, pp. 206–8.
36 J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Kant’s Critique of Judgment
§§ 23–29, Stanford, Univ. Press, 1994, p. 123.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 144.
39 J.- F. Lyotard, The Inhuman, op. cit., p. 127.
40 A. Martinet, La Linguistique synchronique. Etudes et recherches, Paris, PUF, 1968,
p. 27.
41 Ibid., p. 28.
42 G. Bataille, in: J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, London-New York, Routledge (1978),
2001, p. 324.
43 J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, op. cit., pp. 328–9.
44 F. de Saussure, A Course in General Linguistics, London, Fontana-Collins, 1974, p. 116.
45 J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, op. cit., p. 29.
46 This tendency is discussed in some detail in: P. V. Zima, Modern / Postmodern, op. cit.,
chap. I-II.
47 J. Hörisch, ‘Das Sein der Zeichen und die Zeichen des Seins’, in: J. Derrida, Die Stimme
und das Phänomen, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 43.
vol. V (ed. K. Schlechta), Munich, Hanser, 1980, p. 313.
p. 627.
50 J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, p. 327.
51 R. Bernet, ‘Derrida et la voix de son maître’, in: ‘Derrida’, Revue philosophique 2
(April-June), 1990, p. 161.
52 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London-New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 153.
53 Ibid., p. 339.
54 Ibid., p. 340.
55 J. Becker, Umgebungen, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1970), 1974, p. 72.
57 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, op. cit., p. 340.
58 Ibid., p. 341.
59 Cf. G. Deleuze, Empirisme et subjectivité. Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume, Paris,
PUF, 1993 (5th ed.), chap. V: ‘Empirisme et subjectivité’.
60 G. Deleuze, C. Parnet, Dialogues, Paris, Flammarion, 1977, p. 71.
61 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. III, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1996 (3rd ed.), p. 279.
62 G. Vattimo, Le avventure della differenza. Che cosa significa pensare dopo Nietzsche e
Heidegger, Milan, Garzanti, 1980, p. 9.
63 Ibid., p. 121.
64 Cf. G. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1992, pp. 69–70.
65 F. Zourabichvilli, Deleuze. Une philosophie de l’événement, Paris, PUF, 1994, p. 39.
66 A. J. Greimas, J. Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage,
Paris, Hachette, 1979, p. 199.
67 Ibid., p. 197.
68 J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition. Seven English Novels, Cambridge (Mass.),
Harvard Univ. Press, 1982, p. 128.
69 A. Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, London, Penguin (1962), 1972, p. 59.
71 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, op. cit., p. 11.
72 Ibid.
73 Cf. M. Foucault, ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’, in: idem, Dits et écrits IV, Paris,
Gallimard, 1994, p. 439, where Foucault regrets having encountered Adorno’s and
Horkheimer’s Critical Theory so late.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., p. 55.
77 Ibid., p. 45.
78 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self. An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness,
Harmondsworth, Penguin (1960), 1965, pp. 139–40.
Cambridge-Oxford, Polity-Blackwell, 1991, p. 61.
80 H. Hesse, Steppenwolf, London, Penguin, 1965, p. 230.
81 The transition from Proust and Hesse to surrealism is discussed in: P. V. Zima, Roman
und Ideologie. Zur Sozialgeschichte des modernen Romans, Munich, Fink (1986), 1999,
chap. II.
82 A. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1972, p. 45.
(Manifestes du surréalisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 64.)
83 Ibid., p. 162.
84 Ibid., p. 45: ‘This world, in which I endure what I endure (don’t go to see), this
modern world, I mean, what the devil do you want me to do with it?’
86 Cf. R. Jacoby, ‘The Politics of Subjectivity’, in: idem, Social Amnesia: A Critique of
Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing, Boston (Mass.), Beacon Press, 1975,
pp. 101–18.
88 Ibid., p. 62.
89 Ibid., p. 92.
90 Ibid., p. 62.
91 G. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, op. cit., p. 41.
92 G. Vattimo, Al di là del soggetto. Nietzsche, Heidegger e l’ermeneutica, Milan, Feltrinelli,
1991 (4th ed.), p. 14.
93 Ibid., p. 11.
94 G. Vattimo, Nietzsche. An Introduction, London, Athlone, 2002, p. 196.
95 Ibid., p. 98.
96 G. Vattimo, Al di là del soggetto, op. cit., p. 47.
97 G. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988,
p. 45.
98 G. Vattimo, Al di là del soggetto, op. cit., p. 48.
99 Ibid., p. 49.
100 Ibid.
101 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, op. cit., p. 95.
102 G. Vattimo, The End of Modernity, op. cit., p. 23.
103 P. Caravetta, ‘On Gianni Vattimo’s Postmodern Hermeneutics’, in: Theory, Culture and
Society 2–3, Postmodernism, 1988, p. 395.
105 Cf. T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life, London-New York
(NLB, 1974), Verso, 2005.
106 Cf. E. Goffman, Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and
Other Inmates, Chicago, Aldine Publishing Company, 1962: ‘The World of the
Personal’.
107 Ch. Link, Subjektivität und Wahrheit. Die Grundlegung der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik
durch Descartes, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1978, p. 47.
108 E. Goffman, Asylums, op. cit., p. 16.
109 Ibid., p. 23.
110 Ibid., p. 306.
111 Cf. T. Burns, Erving Goffman, London-New York, Routledge, 1992, chap. VI:
‘Normalisation’.
113 Ibid., p. 320.
114 In sociology, there is increasing interest in the self-adaptation and self-manipulation
of individual subjects, especially in competitive areas of the economy.
Cf. U. Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform,
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2007, chap. IV: ‘Strategien und Programme’.
115 E. Goffman, Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Englewood Cliffs
(N. J.), Prentice Hall, 1963, p. 124.
116 Ibid., pp. 137–8.
117 Cf. E. Goffman, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, London,
Harper and Row, 1974, chap. II: ‘Primary Frameworks’ and idem, The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life, London, Penguin, 1972, chap. IV: ‘Discrepant Roles’.
119 M. Foucault, ‘La Torture, c’est la raison’, in: idem, Dits et écrits III, Paris, Gallimard,
1994, p. 390.
120 Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, p. 135.
121 Ibid., p. 103.
122 M. Foucault, The Order of Things, London-New York, Routledge (1989), 2002, p. 340.
123 M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception, London-
New York, Routledge (1989), 2003, p. 41.
124 J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, Cambridge,
Polity, 1987, pp. 242–3.
125 M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, op. cit., p. 71.
126 Ibid., pp. 124–5.
127 Ibid., p. 243.
128 R. Reid, ‘Corps clinique, corps génétique’, in: L. Giard (ed.), Michel Foucault. Lire
l’œuvre, Grenoble, Millon, p. 126.
129 M. Foucault, ‘Pouvoir et corps’, in: idem, Dits et écrits II, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 756.
130 Ibid., p. 757.
131 M. Foucault, ‘Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu’, in: idem, Dits et écrits II, op. cit., p. 246.
132 M. Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 539. (The
text quoted here is missing in the abridged English translation: Madness and
Civilization, London-New York, Routledge, 1989, where the last section ‘Le Cercle
anthropologique’ has been omitted.)
133 Ibid., p. 104.
134 J. Donzelot, La Police des familles, Paris, Minuit, 1977, p. 86.
135 Ibid., p. 180.
136 Ibid.
137 Cf. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, London, Penguin, 1985, pp. 380–94.
138 Cf. J.-M. Vincent, La Théorie critique de L’Ecole de Francfort, Paris, Galilée, 1976 and
P. V. Zima, L’Ecole de Francfort. Dialectique de la particularité, Paris (1974),
L’Harmattan, 2005 (augmented ed.).
139 M. Foucault, ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme’, in: idem, Dits et écrits IV, op. cit.,
p. 439.
140 Z. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, London-New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 175.
141 C. Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, p. 70.
142 Ibid., p. 47.
143 Cf. M. Foucault, ‘Réponse à Derrida’, in: idem, Dits et écrits II, op. cit., pp. 284–5.
144 It was shown by Kvĕtoslav Chvatík that these arguments do not apply to Czech
structuralism which never discarded the concept of subject as obsolete. Cf. K.
Chvatík, Tschechoslowakischer Strukturalismus. Theorie und Geschichte, Munich, Fink,
1981, pp. 107–10.
145 Cf. U. Jaeggi, Theoretische Praxis. Probleme eines strukturalen Marxismus, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1976.
146 Cf. M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in: P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault
Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 94–7. Foucault’s critique of Hegel is
discussed by M. Gans, Das Subjekt der Geschichte. Studien zu Vico, Hegel und Foucault,
Hildesheim-Zurich-New York, Olms, 1993, Part C.
147 M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, op. cit., p. 88.

148 M. Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in: M. J. Shapiro (ed.), Language and Politics,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1984, p. 129. (In the French original, the key words – hasard,
discontinu, matérialité – are in italics: L’Ordre du discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1971,
p. 61.)
149 Ibid.
150 M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, op. cit., p. 95.
151 M. Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, op. cit., p. 129.
152 M. Foucault, La Pensée du dehors, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1986, p. 56.
153 Ibid.
154 M. Foucault, ‘Subjectivité et vérité’, in: idem, Dits et écrits IV, op. cit., p. 213.
155 Cf. A. Guédez, Foucault, Paris, Ed. Universitaires, 1972, pp. 91–2: ‘Le Spinozisme
retrouvé?’.
156 Cf. P. Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza, Paris, Maspero, 1979, pp. 74–94.
157 L. Althusser, Eléments d’autocritique, Paris, Hachette, 1974, p. 74.
158 Ibid.
159 Cf. N. Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1990,
pp. 346–54.
160 Cf. L. Althusser, E. Balibar, Reading Capital, London, NLB, 1977 (2nd ed.), Part II: ‘The
Object of Capital’.
161 Cf. L. Althusser, Eléments d’autocritique, op. cit., pp. 55–64: ‘Structuralisme?’ (‘Mais
nous n’avons pas été structuralistes’, p. 64.)
162 L. Althusser, Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants (1967), Paris, Maspero,
1974, pp. 93–4.
163 L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, New York, Monthly Review
Press-NLB, 1971, p. 170.
164 Ibid.
165 A distinction between religion and ideology is proposed in: P. V. Zima, Ideologie und
Theorie. Eine Diskurskritik, Tübingen, Francke, 1989, chap. I. 2. b.
166 L. Althusser, On Ideology, London-New York (NLB, 1971), Verso, 2008, p. 35.
167 Cf. P. V. Zima, Ideologie und Theorie, op. cit, chap. IX: ‘Ideologie in der Theorie:
Soziologische Modelle’.
168 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op. cit., pp. 267–8.
169 The question concerning ‘the end of ideology’ was dealt with by: R. Aron, ‘Fin de l’âge
idéologique?’, in: Sociologica I. Aufsätze Max Horkheimer zum 60-Geburtstag
gewidmet, Cologne, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1974; D. Bell, The End of Ideology. On
the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, London, Collier-Macmillan (1960),
1967; N. Luhmann, ‘Wahrheit und Ideologie. Vorschläge zur Wiederaufnahme der
Diskussion’, in: H.-J. Lieber (ed.), Ideologie – Wissenschaft – Gesellschaft, Darmstadt,
Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1976.
170 Cf. L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London, NLB, 1971,
pp. 71–2.
171 Cf. L. Althusser, For Marx, London, Allen Lane, 1969.
172 A. Van de Putte, in: P. Steenbakkers, Over kennis en ideologie bij Louis Althusser,
Groningen, Konstapel, 1982, p. 102. Cf. T. Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural
Marxism. Althusser and his Influence, London, Macmillan, 1984, Part I: ‘Althusser’
and R. Aron, Marxismes imaginaries. D’une sainte famille à l’autre, Paris,
Gallimard, 1970: ‘Althusser ou la lecture pseudo-structuraliste de Marx’
(pp. 193–354).
173 Cf. M. Pêcheux, ‘Ideologie – Festung oder paradoxer Raum?’, in: Das Argument 139,
May-June 1983 and W. F. Haug’s answer: ‘Notiz zu Michel Pêcheux’ Gedanken über
den “ideologischen Bewegungskampf ”’, in: Das Argument 139, op. cit., p. 389.
174 Cf. H. Stehle, Nachbar Polen, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1963, chap. IV: ‘Der “polnische Weg”’.
175 For a description of postmodernity as pluralism cf. W. Welsch, Unsere postmoderne
Moderne, Weinheim, VCH, 1991 (3rd ed.), p. 36.
176 L. Althusser, On Ideology, op. cit., p. 20.
177 F. Gadet, M. Pêcheux, La Langue introuvable, Paris, Maspero, 1981, p. 35.
178 Pêcheux does not define ideology as discourse, i.e. as a semantic and narrative
structure, but as an instance that influences discourse.
179 M. Pêcheux, Les Vérités de La Palice, Paris, Maspero, 1975, p. 144.
180 Ibid., p. 146.
181 Ibid., p. 148.
182 J. Link, Versuch über den Normalismus. Wie Normalität produziert wird, Opladen,
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997, p. 407.
183 Cf. note 162.
184 J. Link defines ‘normalism’ as a constellation of normalities and as a network of
discourses. In some instances, ‘normalism’ seems to usurp the function of religions
and ideologies.
185 Cf. J. Link, Normale Krisen? Normalismus und die Krise der Gegenwart. Mit einem
Blick auf Tilo Sarrazin, Constance, Univ. Press, 2013.
186 J. Link, Versuch über den Normalismus, op. cit., p. 78.
187 J. Link, ‘Von der Macht der Norm zum “flexiblen Normalismus”: Überlegungen nach
Foucault’, in: J. Jurt (ed.), Zeitgenössische französische Denker, Freiburg, Rombach,
1998, p. 260.
188 J. Link, Versuch über den Normalismus, op. cit., p. 95.
189 Ibid., p. 171.
190 Ibid., p. 427.
191 Cf. I. Mészáros, The Power of Ideology, New York-London, Harvester-Wheatsheaf,
1989, pp. 57–8 and Ch. Duncker (ed.), Ideologiekritik Aktuell (Ideologies Today),
London, Turnshare, 2008.
192 The growing attractiveness of religious sects is dealt with in detail by: G. Knörzer,
‘Subjektive versus soziale Identität. Verschwindet das Subjekt in neueren religiösen
Bewegungen? – Pastoraltheologische Vorüberlegungen’, in: H. Schrödter (ed.), Das
Verschwinden des Subjekts, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1994.
193 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre II. Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de
la psychanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1978, p. 354. (In what follows, the French original will be
referred to for linguistic and terminological reasons.)
194 Frequently Lacan is defined as a postmodern thinker: Cf. R. G. Renner, Die
postmoderne Konstellation. Theorie, Text und Kunst im Ausgang der Moderne,
Freiburg, Rombach, 1988, chap. IV: ‘Postmoderne als Poststrukturalismus’: 4. 4.
‘Die Sprache des Unbewußten: Jacques Lacan’.
195 J. Lacan, Ecrits: A selection, London-New York, Routledge, 2001, p. 87. (Ecrits, Paris,
Seuil, 1966, p. 292. Occasionally the original will be quoted along with the translation
for terminological reasons – and because the English version is a selection.)
196 A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, Sprimont, Mardaga, 1977 (8th ed.), p. 26.
197 Cf. J. Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in: idem, Writing and Difference,
op. cit., pp. 246–91.
198 Cf. J. Lacan, Ecrits, op. cit., p. 283. (Ecrits: A selection, op. cit, p. 78.)
199 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre II, op. cit., p. 286.

200 In his book Pour lire Lacan, Paris, EPEL, 1990, P. Julien shows that, in his later
writings, Lacan gives up the notion of a ‘parole vraie’ or ‘parole pleine’: ‘More and
more he doubts the creative power of the word and in 1980 he even claims that it
does not exist.’ Cf. also: J.-P. Cléro, Le Vocabulaire de Jacques Lacan, Paris, Ellipse,
2002: ‘Vérité’.
201 Cf. L. Althusser, For Marx, op. cit., chap. II.
203 J. Lacan, Ecrits: A selection, op. cit., p. 126. (Ecrits, op. cit., p. 401.)
204 L. Althusser, ‘Freud and Lacan’, in: idem, On Ideology, op. cit., p.161.
205 J.-B. Fages, Comprendre Jacques Lacan, Paris, Dunod, 1997, p. 119.
206 Ibid., p. 122.
207 Ibid., p. 120.
208 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre I. Les Ecrits techniques de Freud, Paris, Seuil, 1975, p. 266.
209 A. Mooij, Taal en verlangen. Lacans theorie van de psychoanalyse, Meppel, Boom, 1977
(3rd ed.), p. 156.
212 Ibid.
213 A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 109.
214 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre I, op. cit., p. 267.
215 Ibid.
216 J. Lacan, Ecrits: A selection, op. cit., p. 355.
217 For a feminist critique of Lacan cf. J. Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique.
L’Avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé, Paris,, Seuil, 1974,
pp. 61–7 and D. Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction, London-New York,
Routledge,1994, pp. 53–6.
218 A. Mitscherlich, Society without the Father, London, Tavistock Publications, 1969.
220 Cf. J. Lacan, Ecrits: A selection, op. cit., pp. 316–17.
221 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, London-New York, Swan Sonnenschein
& Co.-The Macmillan Company, 1910, p. 661.
223 Ibid.
224 The role of the Freudian slip in the modernist novel is highlighted by Italo Svevo’s
Confessions of Zeno. In this novel, the marriage between the hero Zeno and Augusta is
brought about by a ‘Freudian slip’.
225 Cf. J. Dor, Introduction à la lecture de Lacan. 1. L’Inconscient structuré comme un
langage, Paris, Denoël, 1985, p. 128.
227 U. Rosenfeld, Der Mangel an Sein. Identität als ideologischer Effekt, Gießen, Focus-
Verlag, 1984, p. 56.
229 Cf. Ch. Mauron, Des Métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel. Introduction à la
psychocritique, Paris, Corti, 1983, chap. I.
230 J. Lacan, ‘Préface’, in: A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 12.
231 J. Lacan, Ecrits, op. cit., p. 20. (‘Le Séminaire sur “La Lettre volée”’ has not been
included in the English translation of Ecrits.)
233 B. Péquignot, Pour une critique de la raison anthropologique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1990:
‘J. Lacan et R. Descartes: la division du sujet’, pp. 41–6. Péquignot shows how Lacan
separates the two parts of Descartes’ maxim ‘je pense, donc je suis’.
234 A. Juranville, Lacan et la philosophie, Paris, PUF (1984), 1996, p. 112.
235 J.-P. Fages, Comprendre Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 50. (Cf. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre II,
op. cit., p. 286: ‘Le sujet ne sait pas ce qu’il dit, et pour les meilleures raisons, parce
qu’il ne sait pas ce qu’il est.’)
237 Ibid., p. 93.
238 P. Julien, Pour lire Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 76.
240 J. Dor, Introduction à la lecture de Lacan, op. cit., p.156.
242 Ibid., p. 355.
243 Cf. ibid., p. 48: where, following Mallarmé, Lacan relates alienation in language to the
exchange value.
245 A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 110.
246 Ibid., p. 276.
247 W. Schwab, Mesalliance – Aber wir ficken uns prächtig, in: idem, Königskomödien,
Graz-Vienna, Dorschl, 1992, p. 123. Hermann Lang discusses this problem in: Die
Sprache und das Unbewußte. Jacques Lacans Grundlegung der Psychoanalyse,
Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1973), 1986, p. 255.
249 J. Lacan, Ecrits, op. cit., p. 869. (This text was not included in the English
translation.)
250 Cf. P. Julien, Pour lire Jacques Lacan, op. cit., p. 86.
251 B. Ogilvie, Lacan. La Formation du concept de sujet (1932–1949), Paris, PUF, 1988
(2nd ed.), p. 105.
252 Cf. D. Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society, Harmondsworth, Penguin (1976),
2000 and D. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd. A Study of the Changing American
Character, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1953 (3rd ed.).
253 C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism. American Life in an Age of Diminishing
Expectations, New York, Norton & Co., 1979, p. 187.
254 C. Lasch, The Minimal Self. Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, New York-London,
Norton & Co., 1984, p. 192.
255 Cf. P. Schärer, Zur psychischen Strategie des schwachen Helden. Italo Svevo im Vergleich
mit Kafka, Broch und Musil, Thesis, University of Zurich, 1978: Schärer also examines
the father-son relationship.
256 C. Lasch, The Minimal Self, op. cit., p. 185.
257 Ibid., p. 184.
258 J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre I, op. cit., p. 341.
259 M. Safouan, ‘De la structure en psychanalyse. Contribution à une théorie du manque’,
in: O. Ducrot et al., Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?, Paris, Seuil, 1968, p. 262.
260 Ibid., p. 265.
261 Ibid.
262 J. Laplanche, J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, London, The Hogarth
Press, 1973, p. 202.
263 G. Sassanelli, Le basi narcisistiche della personalità, Turin, Boringhieri, 1982, p. 53.
264 The monologic character of this kind of narcissism is discussed in detail in:
P. V. Zima, Narzissmus und Ichideal. Psyche – Gesellschaft – Kultur, Tübingen,
Francke, 2009, chap. II.
265 H. Kohut, ‘Forms and Transformations of Narcissism’, in: A. P. Morrison (ed.),
Essential Papers on Narcissism, New York-London, New York Univ. Press, 1986, p. 63.
266 C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, op. cit., p. 210.
267 P. Jullian, Robert de Montesquiou. Un Prince 1900, Paris, Perrin, 1965, p. 64.
268 The emphasis on distance and coldness, which marks the dandy’s demeanour, is
discussed in detail by: H. Gnüg, Kult der Kälte. Der klassische Dandy im Spiegel der
Weltliteratur, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1988, pp. 21–6.
269 M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. IV (Within a Budding Grove II), London,
Chatto and Windus (1924), 1972, p. 19.
270 P. Süskind, Perfume, London, Penguin, 1987, p. 248.
271 K. Marx, Early Writings (ed. T. B. Bottomore), London, C. A. Watts, 1963, p. 191.
272 C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, op. cit., p. 96.
273 Cf. G. Debord, La Société du Spectacle, Paris, (1967, 1971), Gallimard, 1992, p. 9.
274 Ch. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, op. cit., p. 217.
275 Ibid.
276 The subject-object relationship in narcissism is dealt with in detail by: K. R. Eißler,
Todestrieb, Ambivalenz, Narzißmus, Munich, Kindler, 1980, p. 34: ‘Narcissism is not
the energy that flows from the subject to the outer world.’
277 Cf. J. Jurt, Frankreichs engagierte Intellektuelle. Von Zola bis Bourdieu, Göttingen,
Wallstein, 2012 (2nd ed.) p. 245.
278 Cf. D. Cornell, A. Thurshwell, ‘Feminism, Negativity, Intersubjectivity’, in: S. Benhabib,
D. Cornell (eds.), Feminism as Critique. Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-
Capitalist Societies, Cambridge-Oxford, Polity-Blackwell, 1987.
279 H. Möckel-Rieke, Fiktionen von Natur und Weiblichkeit. Zur Begründung femininer
und engagierter Schreibweisen bei Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Susan Griffin,
Kathleen Fraser und Susan Howe, Trier Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1991, p. 28.
280 Cf. M. Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés
archaïques’, in: Année sociologique, 2e série, 1923–1924, t. I.
281 L. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca (N. Y.), Cornell Univ. Press, 1985, p. 176.
282 L. Irigaray, Speculum. Of the Other Woman, Ithaca (N. Y.), Cornell Univ. Press, 1985,
p. 141.
283 The relationship between actors and actants is discussed in detail by J. Courtés in his
book Introduction à la sémiotique narrative et discursive, Paris, Hachette, 1976, p. 95:
‘Actants et acteurs’.
284 J. Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative, New York-London, Routledge,
1997, p. 133.
285 The relationship between gender and speech is analysed by Luise F. Pusch in her book
Das Deutsche als Männersprache, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1984.
286 J. Butler, Excitable Speech, op. cit., p. 146.
287 D. Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction, London-New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 49.
288 Ibid., p. 78.
289 Ibid.
290 Cf. F. Gaspard, Les Femmes dans la prise de décision en France et en Europe, Paris,
L’Harmattan, 1997.
291 F. Gaspard, ‘Le Sujet est-il neutre?’, in: F. Dubet, M. Wieviorka (eds.), Penser le sujet.
Autour d’Alain Touraine (Colloque de Cerisy), Paris, Fayard, 1995, p. 152.
292 Cf. U. Beck, Gegengifte. Die organisierte Unverantwortlichkeit, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,

1988, p. 99.
293 F. Gaspard, ‘Le Sujet est-il neutre?’ in: F. Dubet, M. Wieviorka (eds.), Penser le sujet,
op. cit., p. 150.
294 Ibid., p. 151.
295 Ibid.
296 S. Lovibond, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, in: R. Boyne, A. Rattansi (eds.),
Postmodernism and Society, London, Macmillan, 1990, p. 159.
297 Ibid., p. 167: “(. . .) aspires to end the war between men and women and to replace it
with communicative transparency, or truthfulness”.
298 Ibid., p. 179.
299 Ibid.
300 Postmodernism and Modernism have been defined as problematics in: P. V. Zima,
Modern / Postmodern. Society, Philosophy, Literature, London-New York, Continuum
(2010), 2012 (2nd ed.), chap. I.
301 H. Fern Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics. Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, New York-
London, Routledge, 1994, p. 130.
302 Cf. T. W. Adorno, ‘Ohne Leitbild’, in: idem, Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1967, p. 18.
303 This dilemma resulting from the contradiction between ideology and theory is
discussed in detail by P. V. Zima in Ideologie und Theorie. Eine Diskurskritik, Tübingen,
Francke, 1989, chap. XII.
304 H. Möckel-Rieke, Fiktionen von Natur und Weiblichkeit, op. cit., p. 24.
305 Ibid.
306 B. Vinken, ‘Dekonstruktiver Feminismus – Eine Einleitung’, in: Barbara Vinken (ed.),
Dekonstruktiver Feminismus. Literaturwissenschaft in Amerika, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,
1992, p. 19.
307 Ibid., p. 26.
308 L. Irigaray, Speculum, op. cit., p. 133.
309 Ibid., pp. 140–41.
310 Cf. J. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London, Penguin, 1975.
311 J. Derrida, Positions, Paris, Minuit, 1972, p. 49.
312 J. Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism”’,
in: J. Butler, J. W. Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, London-New York, Routledge,
1992, p. 14.
313 Cf. N. Fraser, L. Nicholson, ‘Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter
between Feminism and Postmodernism’, in: Theory, Culture and Society,
Postmodernism 2–3, 1988, p. 373. Linda Singer shows that Feminism can work
perfectly well with philosophy in: L. Singer, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, in:
J. Butler, J. W. Scott (eds.) Feminists Theorize the Political, op. cit., p. 469: ‘Considered
in this light, it is possible to construct a narrative of common origins or parentage for
feminism and postmodernism in post-Hegelian critical traditions of thought like
Marxism, existentialism and psychoanalysis.’ This is undoubtedly true, although the
author seems to overlook the fact that feminism and postmodernism are not
homogeneous entities.
314 N. Fraser, L. Nicholson, ‘Social Criticism without Philosophy’, op. cit., p. 391.
315 D. Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction, op. cit., p. 29.
316 Cf. G. H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness. The Study of Literature Today, New
Haven-London, Yale Univ. Press, 1980, p. 270.

318 B. Johnson, in: D. Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction, op. cit., p. 82.
320 Ibid.
321 This is what Michael Ryan attempts to do in his book on Marxism and
Deconstruction. A Critical Articulation, Baltimore-London, The Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1982.
322 F. Kermode, ‘Biographical Preface’, in: V. Woolf, Orlando. A Biography, Oxford, Univ.
Press, 1992, p. IX.
323 W. Benjmain, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1963), 1972,
p. 31.
324 M. Minow-Pinkey, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, Brighton, The
Harvester Press, 1987, p. 131.
325 Ibid., p. 130.
326 Ibid., p. 9.
327 V. Woolf, Orlando, op. cit., p. 112–13.
328 Ibid., p. 152.
329 Ibid., p. 295.
330 Cf. F. Rétif, Simone de Beauvoir. L’Autre en miroir, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1998, chap. II:
‘De l’un et l’autre côté du miroir ou l’androgyne réinventé’.
331 S. de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, p. 13.
332 Ibid.
333 F. Rétif, Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 60.
334 Ibid., p. 70.
335 Cf. U. Link-Heer, ‘Doppelgänger und multiple Persönlichkeiten. Eine Faszination der
Jahrhundertwende’, in: Arcadia 1–2, 1996, pp. 294–6.
336 J. Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique. L’Avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle:
Lautréamont et Mallarmé, Paris, Seuil, 1974, pp. 61–7 and Diane Elam, Feminism and
Deconstruction, op. cit., p. 67.
337 Ibid., p. 68.
338 R. Coward, John Ellis, Language and Materialism. Developments in Semiology and the
Theory of the Subject, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 146.
IV
The Dialectics of Individual Subjectivity from a

Sociological Viewpoint
At first, a few words should be said about the position and function of this chapter. It is
meant to shed light on the social conditions of modern and postmodern subjectivity and
at the same time locate the theories and arguments discussed so far in a social and
sociological context. At this stage, the question arises why, in late modern and postmodern
debates, the individual subject is increasingly seen as a subjugated or disintegrating
instance and not as a basis of thought and action in the metaphysical sense.
The answer is a partial return to the end of the first chapter which touched on some
of the social factors responsible for the decline of modern subjectivity: social
differentiation, bureaucratization, concentration of economic power, the preponderance
of the exchange value and reification, individualization as atomization, ideological
submission and the power of the media. Ultimately, all of these phenomena can be
deduced from three basic factors which have always been at the centre of sociological
debates: differentiation, market laws and ideology as a reaction to these laws.
The risk incurred by a sociology of individual subjectivity is due to the danger
that the ambivalence of the factors mentioned here is not taken into account, especially
if they are considered one-sidedly as obstacles or impediments to the subject’s
development. Following Kant, one should bear in mind the antithesis which in the
works of Marx, Durkheim and M. Weber accompanies the thesis about the growing
constraints of modernity: the historically plausible claim that differentiation, the rise of
the market and the ‘power of ideology’ (Mészarós) made modern subjectivity possible. In
order to lend more weight to this claim, one could ask whether modern subjectivity is
conceivable without social differentiation, a market economy, electronic media and
ideological engagement.
As in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, where the question concerning the general
validity of aesthetic judgements leads to a dilemma (confronting thesis and antithesis),
an attempt to link thesis and antithesis can help us to overcome the dilemma arising
from the ambivalence of the factors mentioned above. Social differentiation, which sets
individuals free from the mechanical solidarity (Durkheim) of archaic or feudal
societies, eventually threatens their subjectivity; the market, which favours the
development of possessive individualism and delivers individuals, collectives and
works of art from the shackles of religious dogma, eventually threatens this modern
freedom by subjecting all instances to the heteronomy of the exchange value; finally,
201
the ideologies of secular market society, which initially strengthen individual subjects
in their enlightened struggle against the Church, the absolutist state and the growing
power of capital, destroy their freedom as soon as they are exploited by totalitarian
parties and other mighty organizations under late capitalism.
The expression ‘autonomy as self-destruction’ coined by Rudolf zur Lippe is a fair
and concise description of the dialectics of modern subjectivity as sketched above.1 It
can be considered in conjunction with Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s dialectic of
enlightenment and will be related in the first section of this chapter to the social factors
threatening subjectivity. It will become clear that neither the founders of modern
sociology nor their successors take the view that the individual subject is bound to
perish. Especially Alain Touraine is confident that individual and collective subjectivity
has a future and thus echoes the confidence of philosophers such as Paul Ricœur,
Rüdiger Bubner and Manfred Frank.
In spite of this, fundamental works of Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel
seem to justify a certain amount of scepticism in the sense that they often describe
processes of differentiation, bureaucratization and commercialization as trends
towards ‘self-destruction’ (zur Lippe) or decline. In institutionalized sociology, Hegel’s
idea of a rational synthesis that goes beyond Hobbes’s notion of a civil society based on
the sovereign’s will has been discarded: ‘The egoistic association of interests in Hobbes’s
society was gradually replaced, right up to Hegel, by the self-presentation of the
bourgeoisie as a rationally organized class.’2 Modern sociology as a whole is imbued
with scepticism towards this self-assessment of bourgeois society in spite of its
sympathies with the processes of individualization, secularization and emancipation. It
is no longer clear whether the individual subject is heading for autonomy or self-
destruction, and competing or contradictory hypotheses are possible.
Among the sociologists whose scepticism is particularly strong is Jean Baudrillard,
in whose theory the individual subject is dissolved along with reality in a globally
operating exchange mechanism. Although Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems
differs on virtually all levels from Baudrillard’s approach, it nevertheless seems to
confirm his diagnostic regarding the subject. In Luhmann’s sociology, the concept of
subject is abandoned and replaced by the concept of system. This is why his sociology
is discussed here after that of Baudrillard.
Against this background, Alain Touraine’s sociology of action appears as a response
to Luhmann. It is based on key notions such as subjectivity, action (agency) and
movement and forms a kind of transition to the last chapter of this book in which a
sociological theory of the subject is mapped out.
However, even Touraine’s sociology of action cannot avoid the ambivalence
sketched at the beginning. Even those feminists who plead in favour of agency point
out (cf. Chapter 3, III, 8) that a movement which is meant to strengthen individual
subjectivity may eventually force it into submission. It is not by chance that Touraine
refuses to call fascist groupings ‘movements’. He seems to reserve this euphorically
connotated epithet for ‘good’ movements such as the feminists, the environmentalists,
the pacifists, etc. This tendency towards one-sidedness in classification is of course
an ideological manoeuvre within a theory. His subject-oriented sociology will
nonetheless be integrated into the dialogical model.
The Dialectics of Individual Subjectivity 203
1 The crisis of individual subjectivity in late modern sociology
In Durkheim’s detailed analysis of the functional differentiation of society, in the

course of which mechanical solidarity – based on Ferdinand Tönnies’s community or
Gemeinschaft – is superseded by organic solidarity, the dialectic between autonomy
and ‘self-destruction’ becomes discernible. Within the mechanical solidarity of lower
societies, explains Durkheim, ‘individual personality [. . .] did not exist’.3 It is the process
of social differentiation, of the division of labour, which replaces the face-to-face
relations of mechanical solidarity by functional dependence and increasing anonymity.
It leads to an emancipation of the individual subject from tradition, authority and
community control.
But this process of emancipation, referred to as disembedding by Anthony Giddens,4
is ambiguous and has its price. Shaking off the shackles of tradition does not only
increase individual autonomy in a growing urban environment, but also exposes
individuals and groups to the imponderables of the market. As producers and
consumers, both are at the mercy of market laws which tend to reduce all participants
to their quantitative performance and value. As a specialist exchanging labour or
commodities for money, the individual subject is divided into work and leisure, public
and private activities, i.e. into specific roles among which only the exchange value can
mediate.
This situation is described by Georg Simmel who emphasizes the ‘importance of
monetary economy for individual freedom’5 in his Philosophie des Geldes (1900), but at
the same time points out elsewhere that abstract thought, which tends to ignore
individual differences, is modelled on the abstraction of the exchange value: ‘Purely
intellectual man is indifferent towards everything really individual because the
latter involves relations and reactions that cannot be accounted for by the logic of
reason – in the same way as the monetary principle cannot admit the individuality of
phenomena.’6
Durkheim’s process of differentiation and Simmel’s monetary economy are related
insofar as organic solidarity is not solidarity in the ordinary sense of the word, but a
functional interdependence whose communication system cannot exist without a
financial basis. The latter guarantees punctuality and an orientation towards
performance:
The amassing of so many individuals with so many different interests causes them
to relate to each other and to interact in such a multi-layered organism that the
whole system would dissolve in an inextricable chaos without an extreme reliability
of promises and performances.7
Although functional differentiation may set individual subjects free from traditional
constraints, it subjects them to the performance principle and its time pressure. Even
more clearly than Durkheim, Simmel draws the nexus between the rise of monetary
economy and the process of differentiation.
This process not only jeopardizes individual autonomy by the functional and
market-oriented negation of the subject’s (professional, cultural, emotional)
particularity, but by the division of labour itself. The highly specialized engineer, lawyer
or scientist may have achieved perfection in a particular field, but has no competence
in other professional contexts. This situation is marked by individualization, isolation
and incomprehension rather than by ‘solidarity’ in the usual meaning of the word.
Simmel refers to it in his study of social differentiation: ‘In many respects, human
nature and the human situation are such that the individual is more isolated the
further the context of his social relations expands.’8 However, this is only one
aspect of social differentiation that is also dealt with by Durkheim whenever he
comments on the consequences of the division of labour such as social isolation,
egoism and anomie.9
The other aspect is the widening gap between subjective and objective culture:
between the knowledge individual subjects can acquire in the course of their lives
and the collective knowledge accumulated by a whole society (by humanity) in the
course of centuries. In this context, Simmel speaks of the ‘atrophy of individual culture
caused by the hypertrophy of objective culture’10 and adds: ‘In any case, the individual
is less and less able to cope with the proliferation of objective culture.’11 Elsewhere
he explains: ‘Differentiation drives subjective and objective culture further and further
apart.’ One of the consequences is ‘that the growth of individuals falls far behind the
growth of objects in the functional and intellectual sense’.12 In an era of cultural
globalization and electronically accelerated communication, these remarks are more
relevant than ever.
This development tends to undermine individual subjectivity which emerged from
the disintegration of traditional constraints and the decline of mechanical solidarity.
Subjects are not only threatened by the anonymity of market-mediated indifference,
but are at the same time confronted by new scientific insights, technical innovations
and new types of bureaucracy, some of which are beyond their grasp. Their freedom of
action is thus dramatically restricted on at least two levels: on the level of speech (as
competent commentary) and on the level of competent action. On both levels, the
individual subject as subject-actant (Greimas) is threatened by atrophy.
Simmel’s remarks concerning these problems indicate that he is not merely
concerned with culture as education but with institutionalized culture as a whole
including scientific and technical progress. This is also what Alfred Weber has in mind
when he speaks of the ‘tragedy of the culture process’ and explains ‘that by actively
forming culture we create objectifications which eventually destroy us because they
develop an existence of their own to which we have to submit instead of shaping it’.13
According to Simmel, the feeling of alienation that overcomes us in view of this ‘tragedy
of the culture process’ is due to the fact that our ‘drive towards unity and totality’14 is
opposed to this fragmentation of life and the predominance of our own creations. This
is probably the case, although there is neither sociological nor psychological evidence
that such a ‘drive’ actually exists.
More important than the existence of this drive seems to be the fact that Max
Weber’s view of bureaucracy as ‘legal domination’ can be interpreted as confirming the
theories of differentiation commented on here. Weber points out that ‘bureaucracy is
technically the purest type of legal domination’.15 The expression ‘purest type’ as such
evokes the processes of differentiation which Weber describes elsewhere as legal and
organizational forms of specialization: ‘After the victory of formalist legal rationalism,

the traditional types of domination are joined in the West by the legal type of
domination of which the purest, although not the only form, was and still is bureaucratic
domination.’16
The specializations within this particular form of domination are another example
of the objective culture’s hypertrophy commented on by Simmel. The citizen who is
frequently confronted by the ‘competence’ or ‘non-competence’ of an authority, a
department or a particular civil servant does not define this situation as efficient
division of labour, but as a strange world reminiscent of Kafka’s novel The Trial.
Weber was quite conscious of this ambivalent character of bureaucracy which
appeared to him both as rationalization and hypertrophy, as progress and as a threat to
society. This is why he considered the politician as a counter-force to the bureaucrat:
‘Whenever Weber describes the profession of the politician, he confronts it not
with that of the scientist, but with that of the bureaucrat.’17 This means that, in
Weber’s view, the politician stands for subjective initiative which, at least in politics,
is meant to contain or reduce the hypertrophy of objective culture in the sense of
Simmel. It is meant to protect citizens against the bureaucratic ‘shell of serfdom’18
which Weber keeps warning his readers against. It is most clearly articulated ‘by the
charismatic party leader or the charismatic statesman’ in whom Weber sees ‘the most
efficient counter-force confronting the dangers of state bureaucracy’.19 However, the
rationale of charismatic leaders is not necessarily rational, and Weber’s reliance on
political charisma bears witness to a Nietzschean, late capitalist irrationalism.20 It is
reminiscent of Hobbes’s attempt to replace universal reason by the exercise of particular
power.21
One might add that in most cases charismatic leaders are unable to reverse the
trends towards differentiation and bureaucratization. Claus Offe even believes that
such trends are historical developments without subjects. In conjunction with Weber
he speaks of an ‘historical process independent of will and consciousness’ and of a
‘concatenation of circumstances, an evolutionary process without a subject’.22
One of the consequences of this reification of social evolution is the scepticism
concerning the autonomy of the individual subject. Voiced by Nietzsche towards the
end of the nineteenth century in philosophy, this scepticism soon infiltrates
psychoanalysis, literature and sociology, whose founders associate the crisis of society
with that of individual autonomy. Half a century later, sociologists of postmodernity
such as Jean Baudrillard and Niklas Luhmann eventually decide to renounce the
notion of subject because they tend to agree with Offe’s diagnosis and consider the
notion of subject as a myth of the past, not as a viable concept. Other sociologists such
as Alain Touraine do not completely reject this type of diagnosis but draw different
conclusions. They map out a sociology of the actor and of the (individual and collective)
subject, which is meant to strengthen the latter and thus fulfil an ideological function
in the general sense (as system of values). Nevertheless, both schools of thought share
the belief that subjectivity is becoming increasingly problematical at the beginning of
the twenty-first century.
At the level of the social institution, this belief was anticipated by Arnold Gehlen
between the wars and after the Second World War. Gehlen defended the somewhat
irrational thesis that all attempts by subjects to explain the functioning of society and
the processes of institutionalization are futile. Arguing that it is impossible to reflect
rationally and critically upon existing cultural traditions, he pleads in favour of a
spontaneous acceptance of these traditions. Querying them might entail a relapse into
nature and chaos: ‘Chaos in the sense of the oldest myths can be presupposed and is
natural, cosmos is divine and endangered.’23 Instead of trying to critically grasp the
totality of social and cultural relations, sociologists ought to content themselves with a
partial view and accept other partial views as equally valid. Gehlen does not envisage
the possibility of relating these partial views to one another in a dialogical perspective.
He seems to consider the decline of the subject as a fact and all attempts to revive or
deliver it from institutional constraints as involving the danger of a relapse into natural
chaos.
This decline of the subject is dealt with by the sociology of organizations which
relies heavily on Marx, Durkheim and M. Weber in a more specific context. Marx’s
idea24 that the development of the capitalist system leads to the concentration of
economic power in trusts and cartels is applied in the 1960s by Paul A. Baran and Paul
M. Sweezy to the case of American monopoly capitalism. They tend to confirm the idea
of Ernest Mandel and Herbert Marcuse,25 according to which the individualist era of
liberal capitalism is coming to an end and is followed by the era of monopolies and
oligopolies: ‘The tycoon was interested in self-enrichment: he was an individualist. The
modern manager is dedicated to the advancement of the company: he is a “company
man”.’26 Although this view can be called into question because it does not take into
account the new role of highly specialized firms run by tycoons, who discover particular
needs of individuals and collectives which large companies cannot satisfy, it is
nevertheless borne out by recent developments. For the tendency towards fusions and
the emergence of large conglomerates (e.g. in the steel or car industry) can hardly be
overlooked at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This tendency may increase
the need for improved teamwork and communication but can hardly be expected to
strengthen the stance of the individual entrepreneur.
In large companies, decisions come about in teams; they are not taken by individual
subjects who are used to acting in isolation. This shift from the individual entrepreneur
to the team is analysed – quite independently of Marxist theories – by T. Burns and
G. M. Stalker in their empirical study The Management of Innovation. It is based on the
assumption that functional differentiation is now the dominant principle in large
companies where decisions are no longer taken hierarchically or ‘vertically’, but
‘horizontally’. It is no longer the globally responsible tycoon who has the last say but the
functionally differentiated team communicating with all individuals and groups
concerned.27
In France, where Alain Touraine, Michel Crozier, Philippe Bernoux,28 Vincent de
Gaulejac29 and other sociologists consider bureaucratization of the economy as a
threat to individual subjectivity, this shift from individual to collective responsibility
described by Burns and Stalker is sometimes considered as progress. Crozier sees it
as a form of democratization: ‘But this sovereign independence of the successful man
was acquired at the expense of a far more important submission of all those, whose
action was confined to that of subordinates.’30 Adopting this perspective, he criticizes
the American sociologist William H. Whyte Jr. who views the economic weakening of
the individual subject as a setback inaugurating the decline of the subject in society as
a whole.31
It may very well be that ‘the tolerant and “conformist” director of today is a true
model of efficient action’32 in comparison with the old-fashioned captain of industry, as
Crozier would have it. However, this is not the point Whyte wants to make when he
considers the decline of individual initiative and creativity in the economic realm as a
symptom of the individual subject’s global abdication. What matters in this case is the
idea that, along with the abdicating tycoon, even the politician of a nation state is no
longer able to oppose the global power of multinational trusts and supranational
organizations. If individual political action in the sense of M. Weber is to be meaningful,
it has to be effective at both national and international levels.
The globalized economy has long since rendered obsolete the idea of national
borders and nation states. It negates both by operating along the lines of differentiation
and exchange. Car producers seek fusions in order to rationalize their production: they
leave less specialized sectors to partners in order to save personnel and to expand in
technologically more advanced sectors which are more competitive in the global
market. In such cases, political, social and cultural considerations are at best secondary
(although they are never absent). The decisive criterion is economic success, and this
criterion makes all other factors and values (society, politics, culture) fade into the
background. ‘For money’, writes Simmel, ‘only asks what they all have in common and
aims at the exchange value which reduces all qualities and particularities to the basic
question of “how much”.’33
However, cultural specificity is the basis of individual subjectivity. Therefore
Giuseppe Antonio di Marco is right when he projects Marx’s and Max Weber’s theories
back into the Nietzschean context:
The economy thus follows, both in a reactive sense and in the sense of a positive
counter-movement, the development of nihilism. The completely nihilistic
character of the present is its thoroughly economic character. The economy’s
impact on ‘humans and things’ is becoming ever stronger – both Marx and Weber
would go along with this idea.34
Not only Marx and Weber, but even Nietzsche adopted this view when he predicted
that nihilism would at one point be overcome by ‘superman’ (cf. Chapter II, 4) whose
victory would coincide with that of the individual subject. Is Weber’s charismatic leader
not a kind of ‘superman’ in the sense of Nietzsche?
This irrational, voluntaristic turn, which marks both Weber’s and Nietzsche’s
thought, should not hide the fact that the options open to the individual subject in
postmodern society are very limited indeed. They are limited because the division of
labour and the pervasiveness of the exchange value subvert all kinds of group
solidarity35 which form the basis of individual value orientation and value judgement.
This situation yields, among other things, what David Riesman calls ‘the lonely crowd’
and the flight of the isolated subject into the kind of narcissism analysed by Christopher
Lasch (cf. Chapter III, 7).
Another development which leads both to individual isolation and the ‘narcissistic
turn’ is the emergence of a ‘fatherless society’ in the sense of Alexander Mitscherlich. It
is marked by the decline of paternal authority, the dissolution of the family and the
growing isolation of the individual. It is not by chance that Mitscherlich relates the
weakening of the father figure to two factors commented on here: social differentiation
(division of labour) and the disappearance of the liberal entrepreneur (the independent
producer). In his well-known study, he writes about the ‘erosion of authority’:
The progressive fragmentation of labour, combined with mass production and

complicated administration, the separation of home from place of work, the
transition from independent producer to paid employee who uses consumer
goods, has led to a progressive loss of substance of the father’s authority and a
diminution of his power in the family and over the family.36
Mitscherlich believes that paternal authority as interiorization of values and norms

was replaced by peer groups and organizations. This change in the realm of primary
and secondary socialization leads to a constellation in which the autonomous
individual of the liberal era, the inner-directed type in the sense of Riesman, is replaced
by the other-directed type. This new, one might say postmodern type may be more
flexible in the sense of Richard Sennett’s ‘flexible man’,37 but, as Mitscherlich points out
quoting Riesman, he is more opportunistic and his values and aims are more ephemeral:
‘The other-directed type, on the other hand, “is prepared to cope with fairly rapid social
change, and to exploit it in pursuance of individualistic ends”.’38 His is the life in
postmodern indifference, where all values tend to appear as relative and interchangeable.
The decision to join a certain party and support a particular ideology may be
accompanied by the feeling that doing the very opposite might have been just as good.
This postmodern feeling is described by Alberto Moravia in his novel Il conformista
(1951) where the conformism of the hero is seen as a result of the father’s absence.
Everything was ‘preferable to the capricious, tormenting, unendurable freedom of his
own home’ (‘paternal home’ = ‘casa paterna’ in the Ital. original),39 the narrator explains
the situation and adds that Marcello seeks ‘any kind of order and normality’ (‘una
normalità purchessia’).40 He finds this normality in fascist ideology that eventually
turns the vacillating individual into a subject which, for a certain period of time, finds
his bearings and is able to distinguish Good and Evil. He accepts ideological over-
determination as a solution and a blessing.
Moravia’s modernist novel contains a vivid description of the nexus between
market-based indifference and ideological engagement. The unbearable freedom
resulting from indifference makes the flight into ideology appear as the only existential
solution available at a particular moment. Not only Italian fascism and German
National Socialism, but even post-war ideologies offered a refuge to weak subjectivities.
Such ideologies are all but detached from the social world; they are as socially involved
as the apparently ‘free-floating’ intellectuals invented by Karl Mannheim.41 For they
originate in organizations such as political parties, trade unions and movements, all of
which rely on ‘heteronomous intellectuals’ (Bourdieu) in order to construct or adapt
ideological value systems which they subsequently use for the mobilization of masses.
Robert Michels was among the first to show, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, to what extent these organizations (especially political parties) are prone to
ossification and oligarchic tendencies.42 The ‘iron law of oligarchy’ he postulates in his
book on political parties favours the subjugation of the individual and the collective
subject by ideology which cannot be challenged under oligarchic (e.g. Stalinist)
conditions.
This entanglement of ideology and bureaucracy (as oligarchy) is described in detail
by Helmut Fleischer, who writes about the function of ideology in the former Soviet
Union: ‘However, it was not a power in its own right, but was derived from the politico-
bureaucratic power.’43 Robert Michels would say: from the oligarchic power that is
perpetuated by the drive towards self-preservation.
Here the link between Michels’s theory of oligarchy and Sweezy’s and Baran’s notion
of oligopoly becomes apparent. More than ever, the individual subject of the twenty-
first century seems to be at the mercy of multinational trusts and party or trade union
bureaucracies. In spite of these unfavourable conditions, a sociologist like Alain
Touraine and the author of this book refuse to abandon the idea of subjective autonomy
because they believe that, after the end of the East-West confrontation and the
disintegration of global ideologies such as fascism or Marxism-Leninism, the subject’s
scope of action might widen.
However, those who adopt this or a similar perspective should not overlook the new
threat to the subject’s autonomy which originates in the electronic media and their
penetration into all spheres of social life. In the media world, processes of differentiation,
commercialization and ideological involvement interact so intensely that they threaten
to become a substitute for reality. The fact is that even politicians and their advisors
owe their knowledge of many countries and cultures to the mass media which tend to
monopolize information. Most of them lack time for reading texts longer than a few
pages, and their flying visits to ‘exotic’ places are hardly conducive to deeper insights.
How, in this situation, can a superficially informed, media-trained politician control
highly specialized and well-informed civil servants? This question is a return to the
beginning of this section: to Max Weber’s theory of differentiated administration and
his hope that the political subject might overcome the inertia of bureaucracy. It cannot
be answered here but will be related to the question of the subject’s stance in the media
world and its weakening or disappearance in the approaches of Bourdieu and
Baudrillard.
2 The decline of subjectivity in a media world: From

Bourdieu to Baudrillard
In what follows, the word ‘medium’ has two meanings: it refers both to the media world
(e.g. that of television) and to the mediation by the exchange value (medium of
exchange). Far from being a mere play on words, this ambiguity marks the whole of
social reality with its mediations, its statistics and its normalization strategies in the
sense of Link. Together they produce the effect of what Baudrillard calls the total screen
(l’écran total).44 In Baudrillard’s later work, this ‘screen’ turns into the key metaphor for
a world of information mediated by the exchange value, by its equivalence and

indifference which in postmodern society tend to supplant reality.
The second part of the title also requires some clarification because, at first sight,
there is no obvious link between the theories of Bourdieu and Baudrillard. Unlike
Bourdieu who, as a critical sociologist, polemicizes against the commercialization of
journalism (the ‘journalistic field’) in order to promote an oppositional subjectivity in
the individual and collective sense, Baudrillard avails himself of various anthropological
insights in order to dispose of some ‘old European’ (Luhmann) concepts such as ‘reality’,
‘history’, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘critique’.45 In this respect, he seems closer to Luhmann than
to Bourdieu.
In spite of this divergence, Bourdieu’s and Baudrillard’s heterogeneous discourses
confirm each other in several crucial points,46 especially as far as the question of
subjectivity is concerned. While Bourdieu analyses the linguistic and commercial
constraints to which the producing journalistic subject is exposed, Baudrillard describes
the decline of the receptive subject (as viewer or listener) in a world so thoroughly
permeated by the exchange value that the contrast between use value and exchange
value disappears and the latter can no longer be designated. In a one-dimensional
world, it becomes the value as such. It should be pointed out en passant that Baudrillard
develops some ideas from Günther Anders’s book Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen
(1956) without ever referring to Anders.
In some parts of his work, Bourdieu shows how the dialectic of subjectivity cancels
the emancipatory moments of the past by making the individual subject submit to the
structures of the institution or the field (champ). From Language and Symbolic Power
onwards, he argues that language is not simply a system or repertoire used by the
individual speaker in order to produce a parole (Saussure) or a performance (Chomsky),
but a symbolic power structure that offers far more freedom to those who have acquired
linguistic and symbolic capital.
Unlike the privileged speakers, who dispose of the necessary linguistic capital
enabling them to say the right thing at the right moment in order to be socially
accepted, many others have to fall silent because they cannot express their ideas:
The competence adequate to produce sentences that are likely to be understood

may be quite inadequate to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to, likely
to be recognized as acceptable in all situations in which there is occasion to speak.
Here again, social acceptability is not reducible to mere grammaticality. Speakers
lacking the legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains
in which this competence is required, or are condemned to silence.47
In other words: a subject lacking the habitus and competence in the field of politics, law
or literature is not recognized and accepted as a subject in these particular social
sectors. The peasant, argues Bourdieu, may say very much the same thing as the prefect
(préfet); but he will not be listened to because he does not master the authorized
language (le langage autorisé). One might give a tragic turn to this remark by adding
that the peasant will not even be listened to if he puts forward an argument that is far
superior to that of the prefect.
In the case of individual and collective subjectivity, this means that it is subject to
certain constraints resulting from the power constellations of a field (such as politics,
journalism, science). It goes without saying that the prefect has more linguistic room
for manoeuvring than the peasant, but even he has to observe the political, economic
and linguistic rules of a particular institution (e.g. the chamber of commerce).
Pursuing this train of thought, Bourdieu tries to show, in his analysis of the
journalistic field, to what kind of constraints journalists are subject both in the world of
the print media and in that of television. In his own specific way he thus confirms Max
Weber’s and Arnold Gehlen’s thesis regarding the predominance of social institutions,
some of which develop dynamics of their own that seem to be beyond human control.
‘In some sense, the choices made on television are choices made by no subject,’48 he
points out. Why? Because the journalistic field has turned into a closed or vicious
circle, as he puts it:
To measure the closing-down effect of this vicious informational circle, just try
programming some unscheduled news, events in Algeria or the status of foreigners
in France, for example. Press conferences or releases on these subjects are useless;
they are supposed to bore everyone, and it is impossible to get analysis of
them into a newspaper unless it is written by someone with a big name – that’s
what sells.49
The reason for this hermetic closure is that the journalistic field is also a social and
linguistic situation dominated by particular ideological and (especially) commercial
group languages or sociolects which ‘decide’ what can be said about what kind of topic
at a particular moment. They define the authorized or legitimate language within the
‘field’ or institution.
This is why Bourdieu can speak of choice without a subject (choix sans sujet).
Although critical and self-critical reflection is always possible, journalists instinctively
feel that, in the long run, they risk losing their jobs if they do not heed the linguistic
norms of the dominant sociolect(s). But who exactly authorizes these norms? Bourdieu
seems to have no doubts about the role of market mechanisms:
Wherever you look, people are thinking in terms of market success. Only thirty
years ago, and since the middle of the nineteenth century [. . .] immediate market
success was suspect. [. . .] Today, on the contrary, the market is accepted more and
more as a legitimate means of legitimation.50
This not only means that the bestseller is considered – independently of the mediation
by the exchange value – as a ‘good book’; it also implies that the language of the
‘journalistic field’ is mediated by market laws. Their domination of society is
consolidated by the competition principle that decides which issues, topics and titles
are relevant: ‘In short, stories are pushed on viewers because they are pushed on the
producers; and they are pushed on producers by competition with other producers.’51
This is how the autonomy of subjects is reduced to a minimum. Moreover, fierce
competition for markets and audience ratings turns television programmes into shows.
Political developments are hardly ever analysed (although some analysis may be
reserved for the late night news), but presented as spectacular events: as ‘sequences of
events that, having appeared with no explanation, will disappear with no solution –
Zaire today, Bosnia yesterday, the Congo tomorrow [. . .].’52
This kind of media impressionism not only destroys meaning but condemns both
the producing and the viewing subjects to a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that one
is watching ‘an absurd series of disasters which can be neither understood nor
influenced’.53 In the case of producers, this feeling of helplessness often turns into
professional ‘cynicism’54 which eventually boils down to a hodgepodge of politics,
culture and advertising. In the end, everything is geared towards the technique of
commercials. Bourdieu concludes that television – more than any newspaper –
depoliticizes the public’s thinking thereby ‘dragging down the newspapers in its slide
into demagogy and subordination to commercial values’.55 Unlike Baudrillard, who is
content to comment ironically on the disappearance of reality, history and politics
in media- and market-based indifference, Bourdieu does not conceal his stance
as a critical intellectual.56 More than in his polemical analysis of television, he attacks
the ‘heteronomous’, market- and media-oriented intellectuals in Acts of Resistance,
arguing that they are responsible for the invasion of the cultural field by market
laws. In contrast with all postmodern thinkers, he holds on to the notion of the
critical intellectual57 which is not only dismissed as an anachronism by Baudrillard but
also by Luhmann.
With Bourdieu’s critical intellectual, the critical subject of late modernity once more
reappears on the scene and is expected by the sociologist to join the remaining critical
journalists in their struggle against the domination of market laws in their field. Apart
from that, Bourdieu hopes that intellectuals will support social movements, trade
unions and organizations of the unemployed with their advice and their competence.
His speech before the Federation of German Trade Unions is geared to one basic
question: ‘How are the foundations to be laid for a new internationalism among the
trade unions, the intellectuals and the peoples of Europe?’58 The fact that he considers
this internationalism as a European process, at the end of which there is a European
state,59 seems to indicate that French intellectuals begin to take European integration
seriously.60
This view of a critical subjectivity is entirely missing in Günter Anders’s lucid book
about the ‘antiquated character of man’ (Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen) which
anticipates a number of arguments, topics and theses from Baudrillard’s work. To begin
with, Anders deals with some of the most important issues of sociology (in the sense of
Riesman and Lasch) whenever he focuses on the atomization of individual subjects in
post-war society: ‘The type of the mass hermit emerged; and they now sit in millions of
copies, each cut off from the other, but each similar to the other, like hermits in their
retreats.’61 Television penetrates into this retreat and is paid for by the hermit ‘who sells
himself ’,62 surrendering to this medium.
He sells his independence, his experience and all of his critical abilities: ‘For what
dominates the home via TV is the broadcasted external world, be it real or fictive, and
this world dominates so pervasively that it invalidates the reality of the home, not only
that of its four walls and its furniture, but even that of its communal life, thus turning
it into a phantom.’63 Anders describes in vivid terms how TV replaces the family table
as the centre of family life thus becoming itself a negative family table64 which further
decentres the ‘fatherless’ family. The new ‘interlocutor’ is no longer another member of
the family, but the luminous box which speaks without interruption, thus making us
speechless: ‘By speaking for us, the apparatus makes us speechless.’65
These considerations complete Bourdieu’s approach in the sense that they reveal
to what extent the passiveness of the spectator-listener corresponds to the submission
of the producing subject (the journalist, the newsreader). While the journalist has to
obey language rules dictated by the market, the spectators and listeners lose their
ability to express their ideas and to experience reality. For this reality, in which one had
to move, speak and act, is now delivered to the home as a media construction: as a
world of incomprehensible sequences of events (Bourdieu), associations, highlights
and commercials. Both the producers and the consumers are condemned to aphasia by
commercial television.66 Their subjectivity as linguistic, discursive autonomy is thus
undermined.
It is called into question by the fact that spectators are condemned to one-
dimensionality by the TV-screen. They only experience the substitutes of reality that
are transmitted to them daily: ‘If [the event] only becomes socially important as image,
then the difference between essence and appearance, reality and image is cancelled.’67
This one-dimensionality favours an attitude of the spectator which Anders calls
‘idealism’. One might also speak of ‘abstractionism’. As consumers of media images
spectators tend to ‘forget’ that these images refer to real events, to populations and their
problems. Their experience of reality atrophies, but they are no longer conscious of this
loss. In this respect, they resemble the journalists who tacitly follow certain language
rules and patterns of communication without pondering about their behaviour.
Eventually, even their ability to reflect atrophies because television makes the consumer
of appearances ‘forget what the real actually looks like.’68
At the end of this process of diminishing reflection, experience and autonomy, there
is a weakened, disintegrating ‘I’: ‘For the assumption that we, as beings living on ersatz,
stereotypes and phantoms, are still I’s with a self and may therefore be prevented from
being or becoming “ourselves”, is possibly based on an optimism that is no longer
justifiable in our time.’69
This argument is taken one step further by Jean Baudrillard, who radicalizes it by
adopting an extreme position. For him the disappearance of the subject, of experience,
reality and history is a fait accompli. He is far more radical – and one-sided – than
Anders and Bourdieu because, along with the basic contrast between use value and
exchange value, he deletes complementary opposites such as essence / appearance,
signified / signifier, truth / error and subject / object. Exchange is omnipresent, he argues,
and hence no longer discernible. Essence and truth have long since been dissolved into
appearance, and the subject has been lost to objectivity. Baudrillard’s radicalism is also
due to the fact that he does not consider television as a medium among others, but
speaks metaphorically of a ‘total screen’ (‘écran total’),70 thus making the TV-screen
coincide with society as a whole.
Since his critique of Marxism in Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe
(1972), Baudrillard queries the basic opposition between use value and exchange value
without which key concepts of materialist dialectics such as essence and appearance,
alienation and critique, subject and object lose their meaning. Concepts such as
‘exchange value’, ‘commodity fetishism’ or ‘false consciousness’, he argues, ‘presuppose
the phantom ideal of a non-alienated consciousness, of an objective, “true” status of the
object: of the use value’.71 Baudrillard’s work as a whole could be read as systematic
attempt to dissolve this chimera of the use value and to deconstruct the contrast
between use value and exchange value.
In this context, he distinguishes four stages within the economic and social
evolution: While the ‘natural stage’ is still dominated by the use value in its different
forms, the exchange value gains the upper hand in the ‘mercantile’ and ‘structural’
stages (‘le stade marchand, le stade structural’).72 ‘Within the fourth stage, the fractal or
the viral or even better: the irradiated stage’, explains Baudrillard, ‘there is no point of
reference anymore and the value radiates in all directions, into all niches, without
referring to anything at all, by sheer contiguity.’73
In context, this somewhat enigmatic passage means that it is even impossible to
speak of an ‘exchange value’ because the entire terminology that could be deduced
from the obliterated ‘use value’ is missing. In the ocean, where everything is ‘wet’,
the word ‘wet’ is bound to lose its meaning. This is why, in conjunction with the
‘fractal stage’, Baudrillard speaks of ‘the value’ in general. Whatever lies beyond the
exchange value can no longer be referred to. The one-dimensionality of late capitalist
society becomes a fait accompli. In Le Miroir de la production, Baudrillard describes
this development towards one-dimensionality as a reduction of use value to exchange
value: ‘This total reduction of the process to one of its terms whose opposite functions
as a mere alibi (use value as an alibi of exchange value, reference as an alibi of the
code), is more than a simple development of the capitalist mode of production: it
is a mutation.’74 In most of his publications of the 1980s and 90s, Baudrillard examines
the consequences of this mutation. He abandons the utopia of Symbolic Exchange
and Death, a communitarian utopia based on symbolic exchange without profit,75
and describes a one-dimensional world dominated by equivalence and the indifference
of exchange.
In this context he speaks of indifférenciation and indistinction des valeurs
(indistinguishability of values)76 which efface all differences between the economic, the
political and the aesthetic. Hinting at this loss of difference, he uses terms such as ‘trans-
economics’, ‘trans-aesthetics’ and the ‘trans-sexual’,77 a kind of proliferating sexuality that
can be encountered everywhere and nowhere in particular. The omnipresence of the
exchange value makes differentiation impossible.
This is why words such as ‘indifferent’, ‘indistinguishable’ and ‘indeterminate’ keep
recurring in his discourse.78 However, this indifference as impossibility to distinguish
is – like the exchange value – so pervasive that it can no longer be identified. Like the
exchange value, the indifferent can only be defined in relation to its otherness – i.e.
difference, meaning, ideology – which together form the basis of subjectivity. But
meaning as the opposite of indifference has ceased to exist: ‘We continue to produce
meaning although we know that it does not exist.’79 This is why even indifference can
no longer be named (although Baudrillard himself names it). By effacing all other
values, it eventually effaces itself – like the exchange value: ‘Something else was stolen
from us: indifference.’80 What is meant here is the indifference or impassiveness of the
thinker which is no longer recognized as such in an indifferent world.
In view of this Hegelian ‘fury of disappearance’ (‘Furie des Verschwindens’)81 that
cancels all differences between meaning and nonsense, engagement and indifference, it
is hardly surprising that Baudrillard eventually declares that even exchange is
impossible. In a world where everything is dominated by the exchange value, the Other
that could be exchanged for the One also disappears. Where everything is exchanged
for everything else, eventually nothing can be exchanged because every single exchange
presupposes qualities and differences: ‘Everything that is meant to be exchanged for
something else eventually comes up against the wall of impossible exchange. [. . .] And
it is not after some future catastrophe, but here and now that the entire scale of values
is exchanged for nothingness.’82
Without meaning, difference and alterity, individual subjectivity becomes void.
Alienation was not overcome, but projected into an identity without alterity: ‘This
indivisible individual is the accomplished utopia of the subject; the perfect subject, the
subject without the Other. Without an inner alterity [altérité intérieure] it is condemned
to an identity without end.’83 For Baudrillard there is no doubt that such a subject is an
empty shell. For him, it is the serial, ‘fractal’, exchangeable mass subject: ‘The individual
as such becomes mass – for the mass is reflected hologrammatically in each of its
fragments.’84
Without referring explicitly to the two thinkers, Baudrillard develops Anders’s and
Riesman’s arguments. He differs from both of these authors by eliminating, along with
the use value, all elements which might evoke a world beyond indifference and
exchange. History, ideology and political engagement lose their meaning in a society
marked by a global simulation that has replaced reality.
Anders, who does not speak of simulacra but of phantoms which obliterate reality,
asks: ‘Why should those powers which alienate our world reveal themselves to us?’85
This question is also raised by Baudrillard, whose answer is that in media society
alienation is no longer perceived as such because alternatives like meaning, reality and
the use value cannot be named.
This one-dimensional world of simulacra and simulation is metaphorically and
metonymically summed up by television insofar as it replaces complex interrelations
by images, spots and scenes.86 About the media in general Baudrillard writes that they
are a kind of ‘genetic code which brings about a mutation of the real into the hyper-
real’.87 Once more, he seems to echo Anders who also observes the suppression of
reality by the TV screen, although he uses a clearer language in his analyses. Baudrillard
points out: ‘We take note of everything, but we do not believe it because we have become
ourselves TV-screens, and who can ask a TV-screen to believe in what it registers?’88
Like Anders, he notes that the television image only points to itself (‘image qui ne
renvoie qu’à elle-même’)89 and that the object disappears: ‘The real object is destroyed
by the information – it is not only alienated but abolished.’90 Along with the object, the
subject also disappears, because it can only exist as long as it gathers experience in a
given, objective reality.
This obviously implies the end of historical dialectics (in the sense of Hegel and
Marx), the end of modern revolutionary overcoming and of historical emancipation. It
is not by chance that the postmodern91 Baudrillard speaks of a ‘violent implosion of the
social’ (‘involution violente du social’),92 thus following Heidegger’s and Vattimo’s idea
of Verwindung – but without referring to the Italian philosopher. Commenting on the
events of May 1968, he remarks: ‘May 68 was undoubtedly the first implosive episode.’93
He also speaks of a ‘saturation of the social’ (‘saturation du social’),94 and this expression
not only implies Verwindung as impossibility of overcoming, but also Baudrillard’s
notion of posthistoire (‘notre posthistoire’)95 which is part and parcel of his conception
of postmodernity (modernity being marked by historical processes of overcoming,
postmodernity by stalemate and stagnation).96
On the whole, it becomes clear that, both in classical sociology and in the works of
such different authors as Bourdieu, Anders and Baudrillard, the dialectic of
emancipation and subjection (or disintegration) appears as a decline of collective and
individual subjectivity. It seems that media technologies have joined other technologies
like automation or genetic manipulation in order to arrest the process of emancipation
or to reverse it. Technologies of information, which were meant to make data more
accessible and help subjects to find their bearings in a complex world speedily, are
increasingly turning into mechanisms of manipulation, especially when they are
abused by secret services and other uncanny organizations. In this respect, the three
approaches of Bourdieu, Anders and Baudrillard are complementary in spite of their
divergences. While Bourdieu shows how the journalistic field forces upon its actors a
particular habitus and a particular media- and market-oriented jargon, Anders and
Baudrillard describe – the first in a soberly ironical, the second in an apocalyptic tone
– how object and reality are dissolved by media and how the subject follows suit.
Naturally, one is not obliged to agree with Anders’s pessimistic and Baudrillard’s
apocalyptic diagnostics. It may be sufficient to remember Bourdieu’s appeal to critical
intellectuals in order to realize that the situation is by no mean hopeless, especially if
one takes into account some critiques of Baudrillard’s approach.
One basic objection is raised by Klaus Kraemer:
Goods in general and cultural goods produced by the mass media in particular
possess an indelible symbolic use value that only comes about in their daily
reception and ‘consumption’. While functional use value is useful in the concrete-
practical sense, the symbolic use value serves distinction and the aesthetic self-
expression of the consumer.97
This argument sounds plausible and makes Baudrillard’s reduction of the use value to
the exchange value appear as an apocalyptic radicalization. It goes without saying that
Baudrillard’s work owes part of its media success to this kind of extremism which is
bound to strike a note with many readers in a society confused by the accumulation of
risks and disasters.
One ought to add that Baudrillard’s own discourse keeps disavowing his own
prognostics, because he keeps referring to and relying on certain elements such as use
value, reality, politics, history and subjectivity which, according to his approach, no
longer exist. His deconstruction of the contrast between use value and exchange value,
signified and signifier is as problematical as Derrida’s. How can he attempt to distinguish
the four stages of value development (the ‘natural’, the ‘mercantile’, the ‘structural’ and
the ‘fractal’) if the basic concept of the ‘signified’ no longer exists? In one of his books,
he speaks of the ‘divine Left’, ‘la Gauche divine’.98 Could it be that, as a social philosopher,
he contemplates with divine distance a medially blinded humanity as it wanders about
aimlessly because it has not yet noticed that its reality has disappeared? In Baudrillard’s
discourse, the real – from the signified to ‘Beaubourg’99 – is by no means absent.
Where the disappearance of reality, the use value and the signified turns out to be a
discursive trick, there is still hope that the subject may not have ‘really’ disappeared
either. It might also be possible to consider Baudrillard’s rejection of the concept of
action as premature: ‘Everything has slipped into the operational sphere. All categories
of action are turned into categories of operation.’100 One would like to know how
exactly this happens . . .
The idea is not to discredit Baudrillard or to ban him from the field of science as a
Guru of the Apocalypse, but to read his discourse as the symptom of a society in which
subjectivity and subjective autonomy have become more problematical than ever.
Within this ‘symptomatic’ context, it becomes clear that this discourse is not merely an
eccentric phenomenon, but a sign of postmodern times which ought to be related to
other contemporary signs and discourses.
Thus Baudrillard’s remark that categories of action have been turned into categories
of operation could also be attributed to Niklas Luhmann. Here are the corresponding
statements from Luhmann’s work: ‘From an epistemological point of view, the
assumption of a recursively operating system that produces its own observations
occupies the position where formerly the subject fulfilled the task to reflect upon the a
priori valid conditions of knowledge.’101 The following sentence is even more explicit:
‘Every operation of this system, as we must admit for the subject, too, produces a
difference between system and environment.’102
This typological comparison between a contemporary French and a contemporary
German sociologist is not entirely contingent. It reveals the extent to which postmodern
sociologists have internalized the crisis of late modern subjectivity that gave birth to
modern sociology (cf. Chapter IV, 1). In view of the structural constraints and the
illusion-ridden media, they draw the conclusion that the concept of subject is obsolete
and ought to be relinquished.
It will appear, however, that this concept tends to survive precisely in those theories
where it is globally negated. This is why its rejection seems to be risky. At the same time,
it becomes clear that the interdiscursive consensus between such different authors as
Baudrillard and Luhmann does not exclude alternatives in the realm of subjectivity – in
spite of the great symptomatic value of this consensus. Sociologies of subjective action
do exist outside or even beyond postmodern verdicts about the end of the subject.
3 The liquidation of the subject by its omnipresence:

Niklas Luhmann
The contemporary sociological negation of the subject is not due to purely individual
propensities or preferences, but can be traced back to the implicit or explicit subject
theories of the founders of sociology whose concepts of differentiation (Durkheim,

Simmel), bureaucracy (M. Weber) and institutionalization (A. Gehlen)103 imply a
certain scepticism towards the idea of subjectivity. In this respect, Niklas Luhmann
may be read as a critical heir to late modern sociology whose representatives tend to
consider subjectivity as a process of the subject’s decline. Subjective mechanisms such
as domination (over nature), division of labour and bureaucracy eventually yield
oppressive social structures to which the subject succumbs.
Helga Gripp-Hagelstange quite rightly considers Luhmann’s systems theory as an
‘enhancement of the social and a concomitant devaluation of the individual’.104
However, this sociological attitude is not particularly new and can already be found in
the works of Durkheim, Mauss and Talcott Parsons where the predominance of the fait
social and the structure is one of the salient features.105 In this respect, these concepts
can be read as symptoms of the social decline of subjectivity.
In what follows, it will be shown that the dialectic of subjectivity cannot be limited
to the interrelationship between empowerment and loss of power as sketched above
because there is another side to it which has hitherto been neglected. Luhmann’s
proposal to abandon the concept of subject does not solve the problem because the
simple negation of this concept leads to its mystification on a higher level: on the level
of actants (as acting instances). In other words, in Luhmann’s discourse the subject
disappears as a transcendental or individual instance, but continues to be massively
present as an abstract subject-actant (cf. Chapter I, 1, b): as differentiation, system,
operation or communication. The basic problem consists in the fact that abstract actants
(such as ‘the institution’, ‘the economy’, ‘law’), which cannot be avoided in any theoretical
discourse, are turned into mythical actants because, instead of interacting with concrete
individual and collective subjects, they replace them, thus obliterating their functions.
Armin Nassehi objects that systems ‘are not actants’, but continues to use Luhmann’s
concept of communication, thus ignoring the fact that – from a sociological and a
semiotic point of view – communication without actants, i.e. speaking and acting
instances, is inconceivable.106
It is perfectly possible, of course, to argue that the legal or the economic system
admits certain operations and excludes others. It is a truism that a system is not a
person and hence can neither think nor act. What is meant here is the linguistic
(Saussurian) idea that the elimination of a semantic, syntactic or actantial function
affects the neighbouring functions and changes them. Whoever renounces the
concepts of transcendental, individual and collective subject-actants, has to reckon
that the remaining abstract subject-actants appropriate their narrative functions. This
means in concrete terms that systems and operations ‘cause’, ‘decide’ or ‘prevent’
something or other while the individual or collective subject-actants, who may be
responsible for and interested in these actions, are no longer perceived. In this situation,
the question concerning social interests (cui bono?) can no longer be asked because
the concrete actors and their responsibilities have disappeared from view. What
remains are anonymous processes comparable to those in Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau
roman.107
In the end, the reader realizes that the deletion of individual and collective
subjectivity, which may seem plausible in conjunction with Durkheim’s, Simmel’s and
Gehlen’s theories of objective constraints, leads neither to a dissolution of subjectivity

nor to a solution of the ‘metaphysical’ problem of the subject, but to a mystification of
subjectivity by its projection onto the level of abstract-mythical actants.
These (semiotic) considerations confirm some of the Marxist criticism of Luhmann
insofar as critics such as Sigrist108 already pointed out in the 1980s that Luhmann’s
elimination of the concept of subject means that related concepts such as ‘social
interest’, ‘domination’ and ‘violence’ are also discarded. The consequences are obvious.
The fact that Luhmann’s postmodern break with ‘old European’ humanism (similar
to Foucault’s, Althusser’s and Lacan’s) leads to an idealist or Platonic revolt against the
natural language becomes clear in the following passage from Social Systems:
One of the worst aspects of language (and the entire presentation of systems
theory in this book is inadequate, indeed misleading, because of it) is that
predication is forced on the subjects of sentences; this suggests the idea, and
reinforces the old habit of thinking, that we deal with ‘things’, to which any qualities,
relations, activities, or surprises must be ascribed.109
In the work of a systematic thinker such as Luhmann, whose favourite words are ‘sober’
and ‘rational’, the tone of this passage is quite surprising. His fervour in language
matters, which is more typical of poets such as Mallarmé, Ponge or Robbe-Grillet than
of any sociologist, is due to the problem of subjectivity. Luhmann is obviously at pains
to find a technical language that is not contaminated with the anthropomorphisms of
natural language and at the same time eliminates intentionality and social interest
inherent in words. The following sentence may be read as a sample of this utopian
language: ‘To this extent the fact dimension is universal. At the same time, it forces the
next operation into a choice of direction that – for the moment anyway – sets itself
against opposing directions without annulling their accessibility.’ (The German original
is even more anthropomorphic than the English translation: ‘Insofern ermöglicht die
Sachdimension Anschlußoperationen, die zu entscheiden haben, ob sie noch bei
demselben verweilen oder zu anderem übergehen wollen.’)110
The question raised by such sentences is whether Luhmann’s rejection of the notion
of subject does actually yield new knowledge or, on the contrary, blurs our vision: for
example, of the banal but not unimportant fact that only an individual or collective
subject can ‘decide’ something, ‘remain’ somewhere or ‘move on’ – according to its
interests. Whoever endows ‘connecting operations’ with mythical modalities such as
‘decide’ or ‘wish’ runs into problems which Luhmann himself seems to anticipate when
he considers his own ‘global presentation of the systems theory’ as ‘inadequate, even
misleading’. However, it is inadequate for reasons Luhmann ignores because he
suppresses not only the entire subject problematic by starting from the semantic
difference between system and environment, but also the nexus of language, ideology
and subjectivity.
This nexus was described by Voloshinov: ‘In actuality, we never say or hear words,
we say and hear what is true or false, good or bad, important or unimportant, pleasant
or unpleasant, and so on. Words are always filled with content and meaning drawn from
behavior or ideology.’111 This means concretely that language invariably expresses
subjective intentions and interests. By postulating the fundamental semantic difference

between system and environment, thus ignoring the social character of language, and
by complaining about the ‘subjectivism’ of language instead of recognizing its links
with individual and collective interests, Luhmann drastically limits his horizon.
An attempt to apply Luhmann’s description of the scientific observer to his
own stance might reveal the core of the problem. He asks among other things ‘whether
an observer of the second order could not concentrate on observing what the observer
of the first order cannot observe, and we know: he cannot observe the difference
underlying his observation’.112 Naturally, this also applies to the author of this book
who – in spite of being conscious of the partial character of his own perspective –
would like to know which blind spots are caused in Luhmann’s discourse by the
exclusion of the concept of subject. But first of all another question: How does this
exclusion come about?
It is due in the first place to the orientation of his entire systems theory towards the
Durkheimian concept of social differentiation. If one were obliged to locate Luhmann’s
work either in the Durkheimian or in the Weberian tradition, one would undoubtedly
have to call him a Durkheimian – in spite of Weber’s influence. For unlike Weber, who
also deals with the emergence of different systems of action, i.e. with instrumental,
traditional, value-oriented and affective action, Durkheim is primarily interested in
social differentiation and its impact on social solidarity.113 This shift of emphasis from
subjective action to the systematic differentiation of society also marks Luhmann’s
work where it takes on extreme forms.
Luhmann seems to defend the Durkheimian against the Marxist tradition when he
points out: ‘By describing society as a class society, societal theory in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries obscured the serious consequences of functional differentiation.’114
Naturally, this argument can be inverted, because the theory of social differentiation
hides symmetrically (since Durkheim)115 ‘the serious consequences’ of subjective
domination, subjection, violence and exploitation.
The systematic exclusion of this terminology eventually forces Luhmann to apply
the concept of action – which he never abandons – not only to individuals and groups
but even to the differentiated social systems. Actions appear to him as elements of
systems, not merely as attributes of individual or collective subjects. About social
systems he writes: ‘Their basic elements are communicative actions, i.e. events which
owe their unity to the fact that they choose a certain way of relating to other actions.’116
The idea that events ‘choose’ something (how does this happen in practice?) will seem
strange even to those who adopt a sceptical stance towards subjectivity and the subject.
In his comments on Luhmann’s work, Rainer Gresshoff quite rightly points out:
‘However, he does not “plead in favour of renouncing the concept of action in general”
[. . .], but envisages its “reconstruction” [. . .] in a way that avoids the deficits.’117
According to Luhmann, these deficits are due to the fact that Weber’s theory of action
aims at subjectivity.
Thus Luhmann breaks both with the Weberian and the Marxist tradition by
replacing individual and collective subject-actants (e.g. charismatic individuals and
social classes) by an anonymous process of differentiation: by a process without a
subject. On a typological level, this view of social evolution is akin to Althusser’s idea
that Marx’s philosophy of history is a process without a subject:118 ‘There is no “Subject

of science” except in an ideology of science.’119 Luhmann would have almost certainly
rejected Althusser’s Marxism, but he might have agreed with this particular sentence.
The arguments put forward by Luhmann, both against the transcendental subject of
philosophy and the individual or collective subject of psychologists and sociologists,
are quite similar to those of Althusser and his disciples. If one has a closer look at
Luhmann’s critique of the transcendental and the historical concepts of subjectivity,
one is frequently reminded of Althusser’s arguments. The two thinkers seem to agree
that subjectivity is an ideological construct and that the subject has its origins in an
anachronistic humanism.
To Luhmann, the transcendental subject of the humanist tradition seems
problematical:
A subject that underlies itself and the world, and that can recognize and
acknowledge no givens [Vorgegebenheiten] apart from itself, also underlies all
other ‘subjects’. Thus each underlies each? This can be asserted only if the subject
concept is interpreted in transcendental theoretical terms.120
However, this kind of argument yields a monstrous tautology in the sense of Fichte’s
idealist equation ‘I’ = ‘I’: ‘Individuality is conceived of, not individually, but as the most
general per se by – in this regard, too – letting subject and object coincide, namely, in
the concept of individual [. . .] with the individuals themselves. But in principle this
makes any communication superfluous.’121 If the transcendental universal subject
actually founds all individual subjects, then their thought should be based on one and
the same pattern.
This assumption could only be made within the framework of a generally accepted
humanist view of the world: ‘The flight into the subject was based on humanistic
premises; that is to say, on the assumption that natural or later transcendental premises
guaranteed a minimum of social congruence in the individual human being.’122 In the
last resort, this affinity as mutual recognition within the sphere of subjectivity is based
on ideology because the ‘figure of the subject’, as Luhmann puts it, ‘was used in both
liberal and in socialist ideologies, and was thus presupposed on both sides in the
dominating politico-ideological controversy of the past century and a half ’.123 This
consensus between two dominant ideologies is an equivalent of Althusser’s dominant
ideology which turns individuals into subjects. The individual subject thus appears as a
humanist ideological construct even in the context of systems theory.
Luhmann’s intention to discard not only the transcendental notion of the subject,
but along with it the sociological concept of individual and collective subjectivity, also
becomes clear in his Theory of Society. There he notes, with one eye on Habermas, that
the ‘project of modernity’ cannot be accounted for in conjunction with the notion of
subject: ‘It cannot be carried out on the basis of the subject concept if this concept
continues to denote only the individual consciousness.’124 This sentence sounds odd
because it calls into question Luhmann’s own remarks concerning the transcendental
subject (it seems to imply the existence of subjects other than individual subjects).
Moreover, it glosses over the fact that in Marxism (as in Habermas’s theory) the
collective subject (the class) as subject-actant is at the centre of the scene. Is it not the
case that collective subjects such as groups, organizations and committees – and not
systems – are responsible for actions, operations and communications?
The problem consists in the fact that Luhmann does not distinguish the various
subjective instances as actants or actors. In most cases, he tends to identify the
concept of subject with the individual or transcendental subject125 and to overlook
the complex interrelations between individual, infra-individual, collective, abstract
and mythical subjects. This bévue, as Althusser would say, is due to the fact that he
focuses on the systemic differentiation process which, in his discourse, supersedes
subjective action.
For the individual is by no means considered by Luhmann as a ‘micro-system’ or
the equivalent of a system. It is divided up among differentiated systems: ‘A human
being may appear to himself or to an observer as a unity, but he is not a system. And
it is even less possible to form a system out of a collection of human beings.’126 In
order to form systems, individuals would have to be able to access their physical
or psychic systems and observe the physical, chemical or biological processes within
their bodies.
Luhmann distinguishes three types of systems: the neuro-physiological, the psychic
and the social. While the first system is based on biological processes, the second
consists of ideas and the third of communications. Although these systems are linked
via ‘stimuli’ or ‘irritations’,127 they do not communicate directly with each other – and
similarly, the brain does not communicate directly with other organs. In this context,
‘man’ as individual subject appears as antiquated, because he is divided up into a neuro-
physiological and a psychic system and does not even participate in the social system
insofar as he belongs to its environment: as a compound of biological and psychic
factors. (At this stage, one may ask oneself what primary and secondary socialization
are all about: Are they not processes in which the biological, the psychic and the social
are inseparably intertwined?)128
What matters here is not a critique of this particular systemic construction, which
has some plausible and some funny aspects, but the question how this construction
affects the concept of subject. The first answer to this question is that Luhmann’s idea of
social evolution as differentiation results in a negation of individual-subjective unity.
In view of his thesis that the individual subject is not an autonomous or autopoietic
system – in the sense of ‘body’, ‘psyche’ or ‘society’ – but stands between different
autopoietic systems, it cannot be defined as an autonomous unit. One should add that
social differentiation takes place in the environment of humans (i.e. beyond physis and
psyche) and thus appears as a process beyond individual and collective control.
One could repeat in conjunction with Luhmann’s sociology what Foucault once
said about his ‘archaeology’: ‘The authority of the creative subject, as the raison d’être of
an oeuvre and the principle of its unity, is quite alien to it.’129 Very much like Foucault,
Luhmann eventually considers the individual subject as fragmented by differentiation,
as ‘enslaved sovereign, observed spectator’,130 i.e. as a unit that no longer deserves to be
called ‘subject’.
The second answer to the question how Luhmann’s construction of the differentiation
process affects the subject is that it illustrates the dialectic between liberation and
subjugation of individual subjects. In this respect, the author of contemporary systems

theory develops some of the arguments of Marx, Durkheim, M. Weber and Simmel.
The modern liberation of individual subjects from traditional constraints does offer
them – as politicians, artists or scientists – more autonomy, but negates them as human
beings by reducing their scope of action to one special task. Social differentiation
produces specialists who are estranged from ‘objective culture’ (Simmel) as a totality of
differentiated social systems. They confront this culture as an anonymous and opaque
whole.
At this point, one may ask whether Luhmann’s discourse as semantic and narrative
structure is not itself a product of this differentiated, anonymous totality. In Die
Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Luhmann confirms the assumption underlying the
present critique of his sociology: namely that the notion of system replaces, along with
the complementary notions of operation and communication, the closely related
concepts of subject and action.131
From the point of view of discourse analysis, his concept of function occupies a key
position. It indicates that the function of the actant ‘subject’ is taken over by the actant
‘system’. However, this actant continues to be a subject-actant whom Luhmann
systematically endows with the predicates generally attributed to individual and
collective subjects. Like these subjects, Luhmann’s ‘system’ can be described in terms of
cognition, action and narration in the sense of Greimas: as sujet cognitif, sujet de faire
and sujet sémio-narratif.132 The question is what exactly happens when a concept such
as ‘system’ is turned into an abstract subject-actant (it cannot be denied that it functions
as a subject-actant in Luhmann’s discourse) and is endowed with modalities inherent
in individual and collective subjects.
The answer is that this leads to a mystification of discourse which is due to the fact
that an abstract concept usurps, as subject-actant, the functions of individual and
collective actants. Although these actants are formally eliminated, all of their subjective
modalities (knowing, willing, being able to do / savoir, vouloir, pouvoir, Greimas) are
attributed to the subject-actant ‘system’ which observes something, knows something
and will do something.
This is what it looks like in Luhmann’s text: ‘A system can condition its relation to
the environment and thereby leave the environment to decide when which conditions
will be given. [. . .] Thus no meaning-constituting system can escape the meaningfulness
of all its own processes.’133 Human beings and animals may be able to ‘decide’ or to
‘escape’ – but can we make sense of ‘deciding environments’ or ‘escaping systems’? The
systematic suppression of subjectivity leads to its re-emergence at all levels of
Luhmann’s discourse – without him noticing it, because he identifies subjectivity in an
impressionist and unsystematic way with the transcendental and individual subject.
However, subjectivity is a category underlying the entire language system and human
communication – with or without the ‘I’ pronoun. Luhmann himself must have been
aware of that. His desperate polemics against the subjectivism of language can hardly
be explained otherwise.
However, the problems raised above do not only appear in a semiotic perspective. A
sociologist such as Rainer Gresshoff also points out: ‘Luhmann, on the other hand,
keeps using “compact expressions” such as “the communication / the system does
something / produces something”. One gains the impression that this is not fortuitous,
but is meant to express a particularity – the emergent autonomy of the social.’134
Gresshoff, who is mainly interested in a comparison between Luhmann’s systems theory
and M. Weber’s sociology of action, does not mean an ‘emergence of the social’ at the
expense of the subjective (like Helga Gripp-Hagelstange: cf. supra). But the question
remains whether the expression ‘autonomy of the social’ could not also be read as a
domination of the social over the individual and subjective in the sense of Gehlen.
In any case, Luhmann’s anthropomorphic conception of systems as actants amounts
to an anonymous view of social processes for which no subject is responsible. Helga
Gripp-Hagelstange’s definition of ‘observation’ shows to what extent this anonymity is
typical of literature on Luhmann’s theory: ‘As an operation, observation is virtually
blind. It does what it does, i.e. distinguish-and-indicate and nothing else.’135 What
disappears is the individual or collective observer – in a way reminiscent of the
nouveaux romans in the sense of Claude Simon, Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou in which
observation remains anonymous.
Along with the observing and acting subject some subjective categories used by
sociologists to explain the dynamics of society disappear: intentionality, interest and
critique. Luhmann even renounces the ‘old-European’ notion of domination (Herrschaft)
without which the antagonisms between intentions, interests and critiques are hard to
explain. What is left of social dynamics when the relations of domination between
individual and collective subjects are ignored? Only the ‘mechanisms of auto-regulation’136
mentioned by Lucien Goldmann in conjunction with late capitalism, one could argue.
These are described in a few words by Manfred Füllsack in an analysis of Luhmann’s
systems theory: ‘By increasing their complexity, i.e. their differentiation, systems make
it possible to reduce the complexity of their environment, thus assuring their
reproduction of this environment.’137 At this point, Luhmann’s actantial model comes
to the fore. Relying on their key modality of ‘differentiation’, systems as subject-actants
oppose the environment as anti-subject in order to perpetuate their control of an
object-actant that is vital for their survival: systemic self-reproduction. However,
Luhmann cannot answer the seemingly banal question why systems should be
interested in their self-reproduction because he does not see that, in this case, ‘reduction
of complexity’ is a mechanism of domination that can only be understood in
conjunction with concepts such as ‘subjectivity’, ‘interest’ and ‘domination over nature’.
Systems do not reproduce spontaneously, but are kept alive by groups, classes and
individuals and adapted to new developments and interests.
One can only agree with Christian Sigrist who blames Luhmann for playing down
the antagonism between ‘capital’ and ‘workforce’ and for ‘ignoring the different currents
within the workers’ movement’.138 ‘Here too’, concludes Sigrist, ‘the operation of de-
subjectification, to which social theory is exposed, takes its toll.’139
It also makes itself felt wherever it would be important to explain the hierarchical
relations between systems as resulting from individual and collective interests which
culminate in attempts to influence or dominate neighbouring systems. Luhmann quite
plausibly argues that for the political system the basic semantic difference government
/ opposition is relevant, whereas the economic system is based on the difference pay /
not pay and the scientific system on the difference true / not true. Unfortunately, he
tends to transform the multiple links between economics and politics into an idyllic
scenario: ‘Partial systems also communicate with systems in their environment (and
not only: via their environment). The economy, for example, pays taxes and thus makes
politics possible.’140 The theoretician who continues to use concepts such as subjectivity
and domination could respond with a parody: ‘The economy, for example, pays bribes
and thus destroys politics.’ The structural economic difference pay / not pay seems to
make all the difference even in politics . . .
In his critique of Luhmann’s approach, William Rasch aptly points out that the
economy enjoys a dominant position in contemporary society: ‘But precisely because
it needs these systems it determines these systems; it determines their type of
operation.’141
It goes without saying that Luhmann is well aware of some of the problems
underlying his thesis about the autonomy of systems: ‘Even scientific research finds
that its autonomy is called into question’,142 he points out in Die Wirtschaft der
Gesellschaft. Later on, he adds ‘that external interventions are possible’143 and goes on to
comment on the impact of politics on science:
It can impose priorities (e.g. peace, women, environment, consequences of

technical progress, culture) and encourage science to use corresponding
terminologies in applications or presentations. But this does not mean that
concepts are formed, let alone research results manipulated.144
The last sentence is simply misleading.

There is no need to be familiar with semiotics and the linguistic problem of
relevance145 in order to realize that the selection of themes and terminologies has a
lexical and semantic impact on conceptualization and may even determine the narrative
structures of the discourses involved, i.e. the research results. In short, when politicians
or businessmen can define the relevance criteria scientists have to observe (e.g. ‘gender
studies’ instead of ‘psychology’ or ‘German studies’ instead of ‘German literature’ in a
British university), then they influence conceptualization and in the long run also
decisions concerning the difference between ‘true’ and ‘not true’. Within the framework
of ‘German studies’ it is easier to call the autonomy of literature into question than
within the context of ‘German literature’.
In aesthetics in particular, Jean Baudrillard and Scott Lash have observed
postmodern processes of de-differentiation146 which, especially in Baudrillard’s case,
are seen in conjunction with market laws and the mediation by the exchange value.
Baudrillard speaks of a trans-esthétique marked by regular transitions from art to
advertising and marketing.147 Art, ‘like all vanishing forms’, he argues, ‘tries to multiply
in simulation, but soon it will have completely disappeared, leaving behind a huge
artificial museum [musée artificiel] and the unbridled advertising industry’.148 Like
Luhmann, Baudrillard ignores the dominant interests of individual and collective
subjects and turns operations into mythical actants to such a degree that the
encroachments of one system on another cannot be explained in terms of intentions or
interests. The ‘value’ (i.e. exchange value) is all-pervading, but its omnipresence is not
explained either.
Like social differentiation, the process of de-differentiation cannot be understood

independently of subjective interests. Luhmann ignores this insight whenever he
tries to understand de-differentiation as a consequence of differentiation: ‘But
dedifferentiation cannot mean that one can forget differentiations, for the “de” prefix
would then be meaningless.’149 This is undoubtedly the case, but one should above all
bear in mind that both differentiation and de-differentiation cannot be understood
without the driving force of subjective interests. Not only scientific research is subject
to heteronomy because political and economic interests manipulate its relevance
criteria; even political systems and art institutions feel the impact of heteronomous –
especially economic – interests. The political crises, which are frequently provoked by
the dubious financing of political parties, are mainly due to economic interference.
Their persistence suggests that the difference pay / not pay, which is supposed to
structure the economic system, is readily recognized as relevant within other systems.
Whoever refuses to pay fails to promote his economic interests in the political or his
political interests in the economic system. It is naive to speak simply of a ‘coupling’ of
systems, as Luhmann does on several occasions. It seems more realistic to speak of a
take-over because the latter invariably implies subjective interests.
It also turns out to be more realistic in the case of the art system. Baudrillard’s ‘trans-
aesthetics’ is exemplified in the ‘literary field’ where publishers encourage authors to
write novels – instead of poems or experimental texts. Authors such as Robert
Schneider announce their next bestseller, thus contradicting Luhmann’s idea of an
autopoietic and autonomous art system. The bestseller is not only a genre mediated by
the exchange value which disavows Luhmann’s assertion that the art system and the
economic system have no ‘common criteria’;150 it is also a market-oriented construction
of publishers whose relevance criteria are geared towards bestseller lists.
Against this background, Luhmann’s view of artistic autonomy appears as
unrealistic: ‘In the course of a prolonged self-observation, the art system can claim, in
questions of composition and style, autonomy vis-à-vis the customer, thus controlling
and transforming the criteria of judgement.’151 However, it seems appropriate to ask
whether artists have not in fact exchanged the heteronomy of the patronage for the
heteronomy of the market. The latter does not operate in an abstract way but through
concrete social (institutional) interests.
In this respect, Erich Köhler succeeded in adapting and correcting Luhmann’s
theory by revealing to what extent the rise and decline of literary genres within a
literary system is related to group and class interests. The feudal epic poem is thus
ousted from its central position in the literary system as soon as the noblesse d’épée is
weakened by the rise of absolutism and the bourgeoisie: ‘However, the nationalist
ideology, which continues to inspire attempts at a renewal, will not save a genre that
cannot cease celebrating the heroic existence of a class whose parasitic existence and
lack of function have become too obvious in spite of its social prestige.’152 At this
point, it would be tempting but wrong to adopt a functionalist perspective and to
argue (with Luhmann) that the literary system ‘registers’ the changes in the political
system and adapts to the new circumstances. This mythical way of talking ought to be
replaced by the argument that the feudal nobility is no longer able to defend its interests
in the art system. Its domination is superseded by the alliance between the monarchy
and the bourgeoisie in economics, politics and art, and this alliance gives rise to the
tragedy as the new genre of absolutism. By renouncing subjective categories such as
intention, interest and domination, Luhmann precludes himself from finding a
plausible explanation.
From his point of view, communist control of the arts in the former USSR, in China
and North Korea and religious control in Islamist Iran must appear either as
anachronisms or as anomalies. Unfortunately, it is by no means certain that these are
anachronisms Europeans and Americans have safely left behind. Luhmann cannot
account for the fact that the highly differentiated Roman society, which disposed of an
autonomous law system and an equally autonomous art, was later superseded by the
heteronomy of Christian feudalism. His attempts to explain this transition are hardly
convincing: ‘However, neither the technical conditions for communication nor social
structure were adequate for the purpose. Regressive developments delayed this switch
for more than a thousand years.’153 But why was differentiation possible from Greek
Antiquity to the Roman Empire? How could new heteronomies (fascism, Stalinism) be
imposed on culture and art in the middle of the twentieth century? These questions are
difficult to answer within any kind of theory (Marx did not have a plausible explanation
for the transition from the Roman to the feudal order either); but all attempts at
explaining these phenomena are hampered by a systematic elimination of subjective
factors. Systems and operations decide, act or adapt, and the real actors are dissolved in
abstractions.
The fact that these actors as subject-actants cannot be deleted from Luhmann’s text
is once more revealed by his remarks about the emergence of systems on the basis of
double contingency. Social systems come about by virtue of ego’s and alter’s (these terms
were introduced by Parsons and Shils) attempts to overcome the contingency which
affects both parties by measures of confidence. However, these parties are not simply
‘individuals’ (as in American functionalism): ‘The concepts of ego and alter should
leave open whether they concern psychic or social systems, and they should leave
open whether or not these systems adopt a determinate processing of meaning.’154
But in both cases we are dealing with individual or collective subject-actants, whose
subjectivity is inherent in the words ‘ego’ and ‘alter’. It is not by chance that ego is defined
as ‘a conscious thinking subject’ in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. This subjectivity is
latent in Luhmann’s postmodern language which does not succeed in convincing the
reader of the a priori existence of the system. The subject underlies this system and
keeps reappearing in its gaps.
By insisting on the non-subjective nature of the differentiation process and on the
specific character of systems, Luhmann only confirms in a sociological context the
kind of postmodern particularization favoured by thinkers such as Lyotard, Vattimo
or Zygmunt Bauman, all of whom insist on the uniqueness of ‘language games’
(Wittgenstein, Lyotard), ‘cultures’ (Vattimo) and ‘ethics’ (Bauman). This social and
linguistic situation was anticipated by the modernist writer Hermann Broch, who
wrote about the ‘disintegration of values’ and the drive of particular value-systems
towards autarky: ‘Like strangers they exist side by side, an economic value-system of
“good business” next to an aesthetic one of l’art pour l’art, a military code of values side
by side with a technical or an athletic, each autonomous, each “in and for itself ”.’155 This
is (critical) systems theory avant la lettre and at the same time postmodernism avant
la lettre.
The particularization of systems, which leads to their ‘autopoietic’ seclusion
(economics for the sake of profit, art for art’s sake, sport for sport’s sake), forms
the basis of Luhmann’s explanation of postmodernity in the sense of Lyotard.
Postmodernity ‘as incredulity toward metanarratives’156 appears to him as a result of
differentiation:
In this case, one can invoke the structural and operative autonomy (closure) of the
functional systems, each of which offers its own description of the system-
environment relationship and, along with it, its own description of society. This
leads to the loss of a unified ‘métarécit’ (Lyotard) and to a polycontextual
description of society.157
Luhmann not only continues Hermann Broch’s modernist argument – albeit with
quite different intentions – but anticipates a postmodernist like Baudrillard, whose
book L’Echange impossible (1999) he could not take into account any more. Right at
the beginning Baudrillard remarks: ‘The other spheres, the political, the legal, the
aesthetic are marked by the same in-equivalence and hence by the same eccentricity.
They have literally no meaning outside of themselves and cannot be exchanged for
anything else.’158 Here too, postmodern particularization appears as a process of
differentiation.
However, it is not only due to differentiation but also to the revolt of cultural,
political, religious and ideological particularities or fundamentalisms discussed by
Lyotard, Deleuze and Vattimo (cf. Chapter III, 2, 3). These are revolts against the
indifference of the exchange value which is partly responsible for the absence of a
metanarrative that could be universally recognized and mediate between the
differentiated systems and particularities. The only recognized universal mediator is
the exchange value as non-verbal communication. The radical pluralism of postmodern
thought (in all its versions) is merely the reverse of market-based indifference as
interchangeability of all particularities, all of which appear as contingent and arbitrary
in their claim to absolute validity.
In spite of his denials, Luhmann is a postmodern thinker par excellence. More clearly
than any other thinker of the postmodern constellation, he links a theory of the particularities
(the systems) to a theory of value-indifferent universalism: to the abstract theory of ‘world
society’. It is a theory which is itself a product of the differentiation process in that it treats
all of the particular systems – cultures, religions, legal systems, economies – as functional
equivalents in a world society dominated by the exchange value.
Luhmann himself describes the relationship between particularity and universality
(as functional equivalence) in conjunction with the concept of postmodernity:
A plurality of self-descriptions needs only to be admitted, a plurality of possibilities

in the ‘discourse’ of self-description that are neither tolerant nor intolerant of one
another, but that can no longer take note of one another. We have anticipated this
with the thesis that universalistic (self-inclusive) self-descriptions do not have
to be the only right, exclusive self-description. With an eye to the function of

self-descriptions, one must add: cannot be exclusive, for the function of function is
to admit functional equivalents.159
Like the differentiated systems, like Lyotard’s particular languages, Luhmann’s self-
descriptions no longer take notice of each other, because they take it for granted that
all particularities are interchangeable within the indifference of pluralism. Luhmann’s
universalistic theory of world society (rejected by Lyotard) is based on this market-
mediated interchangeability of all particularities.
Kneer and Nassehi quite rightly point out: ‘It is crucial, however, that the notion of
a unified world society does not cancel the radical differentiation of modern society.’160
It cannot cancel it precisely because the abstract idea of a world society is not only
mediated by the exchange value, but also emerges from the interchangeability of the
contingent particularities at the end of the differentiation process.
What is missing, however, is the observation of the deep antagonism that opposes
the religious, ideological and aesthetic particularities to the universal world society as
market society. What is missing is the insight that globalized postmodern society161
keeps provoking ever more radical reactions from individual and collective subjects.
Where indifference reigns universally, ideology enters the scene with dualistic dogmas
that provoke violence. It is not by chance that Luhmann, who follows Parsons in
considering power and money as means of communication,162 hardly ever uses the
word ‘violence’ (unlike Bourdieu).163
4 Alain Touraine’s alternative: Subject and movement
Unlike Luhmann, who tends to rely on Durkheim and Parsons rather than on Weber,164
Alain Touraine continues to develop Weber’s sociology of action, albeit in a critical
context. Not only his early Sociologie de l’action (1965) bears witness to this Weberian
heritage, but also Pierre Ansart’s analyses which present Touraine as a theoretician
who rejects both Parsons’s integration of the actors into the social system and their
submission to history and economic laws in Marxism. To these subject-negating
approaches, explains Ansart, Touraine opposes ‘M. Weber’s critique according to which
the task of sociology consists in reconstructing the meaning “expressed” by the actors.’165
On this level, Touraine’s approach can be grasped as verstehende Soziologie in Weber’s
sense and as a hermeneutic of action.
Touraine himself turns, especially in Le Retour de l’acteur (1984), a work debunked
by Luhmann,166 against a ‘sociology of order’,167 which ‘hides behind the “natural”
development of things’168 – like the ruling class. Opposing all ‘theories of order’, which
confirm the abdication of the subject in the course of rationalization, differentiation
and institutionalization, the French sociologist maps out a subject-centred theory
defined as ‘romantic’ by himself: ‘This is the origin of the new meaning attributed to the
concept of subject which aims at the critical distance separating individuals and
collectives from institutions, practices and ideologies. This [. . .] view of society can be
called romantic.’169
Such remarks inevitably provoke the question concerning the dialectics of

individual subjectivity. How can individual subjects distance themselves from
institutions, social practices and ideologies that are at the origin of their subjectivity?
Are we not dealing here with an escapist romanticism and an attempt to locate ‘true
subjectivity’ beyond society and its institutions? If this were the case, Touraine would
ignore the sociological insight underlying this book and summed up concisely by
Martin Rudolf Vogel: ‘Although subjectivity is also identity of individuals, it does not
originate exclusively in themselves, but is acquired by them in interaction with general
social forms.’170 On closer inspection, it appears that, far from bracketing out this basic
dialogical idea, Touraine develops and specifies it within his approach.
At the outset, he dismisses the ‘subject’ as defined by idealist philosophy which – as
was shown in the first chapter – identifies the individual subject with Reason or History,
thus turning it into an ascetic abstraction and a negation of living subjectivity. Touraine
describes a downward movement from divine omnipotence to human modesty which
eventually arrives at real life – at the basis of subjectivity as defined by himself: ‘The
notion of subject has undergone a number of mutations, descending from the heaven
of ideas to the realm of politics and subsequently to that of social labour relations; it is
now being linked to living experience.’171
Touraine mentions Foucault when he reminds us of the fact that, in its idealist and
political phases, the concept of subject was abused by the ruling classes to make
individual and collective subjects submit to Reason, History or the Party of the
proletariat.172 His alternative to the ‘strong’ subjectivities of idealism (of Descartes,
Fichte, Hegel, but also Sartre) is a ‘weak’ subjectivity in the sense of Gianni Vattimo’s
postmodern pensiero debole.173
This ‘weakness’ is due to the fact that we are dealing with a ‘subject fighting for its
survival’ (‘Sujet luttant pour sa survie’)174 and located by Touraine – as individual
subject – between the market and the cultural community (in the sense of Etzioni’s
communitarianism).175
The individual of hyper-modern societies is incessantly exposed to centrifugal

forces: to the market on the one hand, to the community on the other. Their
antagonism often leads to a split of the individual who acts sometimes as consumer,
sometimes as member of a religious sect. The subject manifests itself by resisting
this split, by its longing for individuality (désir d’individualité), i.e. by its wish to be
recognized as such in each of its actions and each social relationship.176
This description of individual subjectivity on the threshold of the twenty-first

century is characteristic of the contemporary subject discussion which is marked
by a general rejection of the metaphysical conception of subjectivity (from Descartes
to Sartre). At the same time, it overlaps with the construction of subjectivity
proposed by the author of this book who also tries to explain the dynamics of the
subject between the indifference of the market and ideological engagement, i.e. the
‘qualitative values of community’. This is the reason why Touraine’s sociology serves as
a transition to the last chapter which is closely related to this sociology and to the first
chapter.
At the same time, it is seen as a critique of Luhmann’s systems theory and Marxist
philosophy (from Marx to Lukács) with which Touraine deals in his early work. In
what follows, it will be shown to what extent his alternative emerges from his critique
of systems theory and Marxism; later on, the nexus of historicity, social movement and
individual subjectivity will be dealt with. Towards the end, Touraine’s critique of
modernity as rationalization and subject formation will be related to Giddens’s and
Ulrich Beck’s notions of subjectivity.
Touraine’s references to Luhmann are as rare as Luhmann’s references to Touraine
and suggest that contemporary French and German sociologists are only gradually
beginning to take notice of each other – if names such as Bourdieu and Baudrillard are
not taken into account. (Only a few of Luhmann’s books have been translated into
French.)177 It is not surprising therefore that Touraine, with his feel for the social
positioning of theories, locates Luhmann’s work within the problematic of
postmodernity, a problematic considered as a chimera by the German sociologist:
‘Postmodernity postulates a radical disjunction between system and actor: The system
is self-referential, autopoietic, says Luhmann, while the actors are no longer
distinguished with respect to social relations, but by virtue of their cultural difference.’178
Although the second half of this sentence is not applicable to Luhmann’s work, because
systems theory does not know any actors in the sense of Touraine, the statement as
such is of some importance, because it confirms the idea of the last section that
differentiation without a subject is symptomatic of postmodernity.
Touraine, who pleads in favour of a ‘critical sociology’ in Production de la société
(1973),179 blames systems theory for being ‘pathological’: ‘But this coexistence of
autopoietic systems and utilitarian actors (acteurs utilitaristes) is quite unable to grasp
the whole field of sociological analysis and corresponds to a pathological disintegration
of social life.’180 He could have added that systems theory emerged from the postmodern
collision of market-oriented universalism with a tendency towards particularization
and fragmentation (already observed by Hermann Broch).
Touraine’s critique of systems theory overlaps with the critique in the previous
section in one crucial point. It is hard to understand social developments as long as
the argument remains at the level of systems and neglects the level of subjects and
their actions: ‘Sociological analysis is constantly threatened by the separation of
two spheres: the systems and the actions.’181 It is one of Touraine’s basic aims to
link them. This is why, as early as in the 1960s and 70s, he speaks of a ‘system of
historical action’.182
He observes the other way of eliminating individual and collective subjects by
abstraction in Hegelian Marxism, whose advocates sacrifice social action to historical
laws and party discipline. The dialogue with Marxism is of fundamental importance
for Touraine’s sociology of action, because the early Touraine does not consider the
social class as an historical subject organized by the Party, but as a social movement – in
the sense of the workers’ movement. In Production de la société, he argues: ‘By social
movement I mean in principle the conflict-laden action of social classes as actors, who
struggle for supremacy within the historical system of action.’183 About two decades later,
Touraine drops the concept of class in Critique de la modernité: ‘The concept of social
class accompanied historicist thought. [. . .] For this reason the concept of social
movement ought to replace that of social class, in the same way as the analysis of action
ought to replace that of situations.’184
The concept of class, introduced into philosophical and economic discussion by the
Physiocrats,185 takes on metaphysical (Hegelian) connotations in Marxism. Marx, who
considers his philosophy as the ‘head of the proletariat’, engages the revolutionary class
(as a mythical actant) to take possession of a mythical object: ‘classless society’. In the
process, the working class as a movement is deprived of its autonomy, especially since
the Leninist Party subsequently decides what kind of consciousness it should adopt
from situation to situation. Thus the class is subjected to an historical teleology and to
the organization interpreting this teleology. Touraine comments: ‘The role of the party
is strongly emphasized by Lenin, and it is the conquest of the state that leads to the
subversion of the existing order, not the growing power of a social movement.’186 He
adds in Critique de la modernité: ‘Marx’s thought eliminates the social actor (acteur
social).’187 At the same time, Touraine distances himself from Marx and Lukács, ‘for
whom the actor is only important as the tool of an historical necessity’.188
In short, he dismisses both the systemic functionalism of Parsons and Luhmann
and the historicism of the Hegelian Marxists. He blames all systematic thinkers for
ignoring the social actions of individual and collective subjects, thereby depriving
themselves of the ability to explain social development in a concrete way, i.e. in
conjunction with the needs, interests and intentions of the subjects.
His book Le Retour de l’acteur, in which the problem of subjectivity occupies a
central position, is an attempt to reconstruct society from the point of view of acting
subjects. Touraine points out that political parties increasingly become ‘political
ventures’,‘while social demands are articulated much more directly by social movements
that differ from political parties’.189 As an alternative to systemic thought of Hegelian
and functionalist origin, he maps out his own triadic model of society:
Hence the three main elements of social life are: the subject as an alternative to
organized practices; historicity as an ensemble of cultural models – in the cognitive,
economic, ethical sense – and as an object of social conflicts; the social movements
which fight each other in order to give these cultural orientations a social
direction.190
This is at the same time the model of a postindustrial or programmed society, which
the French sociologist does not define as a predominance of science and the service
sector in the sense of Daniel Bell,191 but in relation to three complementary factors: the
disappearance of the industrial proletariat and its orientation towards production; the
rise of social movements, whose members increasingly focus on consumption; the
decline of the ‘meta-social guarantees of social order’ (‘garants méta-sociaux de l’ordrer
social’).192 Touraine means the metaphysical, rationalist and Hegelian-Marxist
ideologies which in the past provided the actors with meaning. One can hardly avoid
being reminded of Lyotard’s ‘metanarratives’ and realizing to what extent ‘postmodern’
and ‘postindustrial’ views of society overlap.
They are not identical because, from Touraine’s point of view, the collapse of
‘metasocial guarantees’ leads to the rise of social movements as collective subjects
whose scope of action is increased by the disappearance of ideological constraints. In a

radically secularized postindustrial society,193 the actors are able to influence social
developments directly and make possible what Touraine calls an ‘action de la société sur
elle-même’.194
Thus the context of historicity changes during the transition from industrial to
postindustrial society. Unlike the industrial class, which derived its consciousness from
a particular situation that was frequently defined (in its name) by Marxist intellectuals
or a Marxist party as ‘avant-garde of the proletariat’, the social movement defines itself
in actu: as an autonomous actor who is able to influence historicity in accordance with
its intentions and interests: ‘But what distinguishes the social movement from the class
is the fact that the latter can be defined in relation to its situation, whereas the social
movement is action, the action of a subject, i.e. of an actor who calls into question the
construction of historicity.’195 But how does this happen in social reality? How do social
movements emerge, and what types of social movements are there?
Insofar as the social movement loses the character of a class in the sense of the
working class, it does not emerge from a situation-based group or class consciousness,
but defines itself in relation to certain historical, social and political constellations or
events: in relation to a concrete need for action. In this context, May 1968 appears to
Touraine as the origin of the movement social: ‘In May 1968, the independence of the
social movement was proclaimed.’196 This is what it means: Parallel to the workers’
movement, its trade unions and its parties, new workers’ movements, students’
movements and movements of intellectuals emerge and defy the established
organizations. They rebel against particular types of misgovernment, against the state
and its elites which they hold responsible for this misgovernment. The trade unions
and the political parties try to break or slow down the impetus of the new competitors
for political power who tend to ask for the impossible (‘exigeons l’impossible’) and to
dissolve soon after entering the stage. In this respect Ulrich Beck certainly has a point
when he notes: ‘Social movements – mean, taken literally, coming and going. Especially
going. Self-dissolution is their leading member.’197
Although Touraine views the movement as a collective actor with a lot more
confidence, he is equally conscious of its instability. In his early writings (in the 1970s)
he still distinguishes three phases in the development of movements: ‘the break with
the institution, the political confrontation and the phase of growing institutional
influence’.198 This influence may also assume a ‘Constantinian’ character and turn into a
state-supporting power in analogy to the Church under Emperor Constantine.199 In
conjunction with the movement, Touraine points out in Production de la société: ‘It can
become Constantinian.’200 However, he also envisages the possibility of a sudden
dissolution and the recourse to violence.201
At any rate, he does take a more complex view of movements than Beck, who
associates them with decline and dissolution. This somewhat hasty association is at
least partly invalidated by the rise of ecological and feminist movements whose impact
on social institutions cannot be construed as a mere integration into the existing order.
The influence of ‘greens’ and women does eventually change politics and society in an
unending dialectical process of social integration and social change. This is what Touraine
means whenever he speaks of ‘social movements which fight for the direction of
historical development (direction de l’historicité).’202 The ‘greens’ and the feminists, for
example, envisage a different development of market society with a more pronounced
emphasis on social factors and a re-definition of the word ‘social’.
They differ crucially from the working-class movement as a traditional social
movement (‘movement sociétal’, says Touraine) insofar as they do not primarily defend
the interests of a relatively homogeneous group, but set out to change society as a
whole. Women are not simply interested in equality, but envisage a new definition of
gender relations – also in language and culture. Like the feminists, the ‘greens’ cannot
be understood as a traditional interest group. For they aim at society as a whole in the
sense that they seek to redefine the global relationship between nature and society.
This is why Touraine distinguishes the old mouvements sociétaux from the new
cultural and historical movements which are not held together by social or class
consciousness but by a problem-oriented consciousness. They are more akin to the
religious movements of the past than to modern class movements: ‘The most important
cultural movements of history were the religious movements; in our world, which
emerged from industrial society, women’s movements and ecological movements are
the most important.’203 Both of them act in the field of historicity in order to transform
this field.
Social movements, argues Touraine, no longer defend social interests in the narrow
sense (political interests, living standards, education), but subjectivity as such,
subjectivity as humanity: ‘The new social movements refuse to be identified with just
one social category; they appeal to the subject as such, to its dignity and self-esteem.’204
This statement does allow for ‘defensive’ interpretations. The collective subjects defend
their ‘life world’ (Husserl, Habermas) and defend themselves against de-subjectification,
against their reification by the systems (in the sense of Habermas).
If they act in this way at an historical, global level, for example, by opposing
commercialization, technocracy and the destruction of the environment, they are
called historical movements by Touraine: ‘The historical movements call into question
the rule of an elite rather than that of a class and appeal to the people against the
state [. . .]. The great ecological protests not only turn against the policy of a particular
country or a firm, but contest a general evolution.’205
In spite of these plausible arguments, which make Touraine appear as a kindred
spirit of Habermas, whom he relies on as a theoretician of the life world,206 his notion
of social movement gives rise to several questions. Can, for example, the movement of
the homeless or the illegal immigrants, mentioned by Touraine in Comment sortir du
libéralisme?,207 be compared with the social movements of women or the ‘greens’? Are
we not dealing with groups representing very particular group interests that differ
substantially from the universal orientations of feminists and ‘greens’? Can they be
subsumed under the same category as the ‘historical movements’?
This sociological question will not be dealt with here, but the question concerning
the difference between movements and anti-movements. Touraine writes about the
latter:
What distinguishes them fundamentally from social movements is the fact that
they identify with a particular historical existence: a group, an ethnic unit, a
religious community or a different type of community, and the fact that they never
invoke the notion of subject and the universalism inherent in it.208
Anti-movements are exemplified by undemocratic nationalist, fascist, fundamentalist

and Bolshevik groups.209
The question is, of course, whether the difference between ‘democratic movements’
and ‘anti-democratic anti-movements’ can be upheld in this form. Can we exclude
the idea that undemocratic movements produce and strengthen subjectivity? It is,
after all, a fact that Benito Mussolini began his career as a revolutionary syndicalist
in Georges Sorel’s movement which combined ideological elements from the Left and
the Right. Were Bolshevik organizations not at the core of many peace movements
whose absence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and during the Yugoslav
civil war can hardly be overlooked? It is impossible to deal with these questions within
the scope of this section. It is a fact, however, that even Touraine’s ‘anti-movements’
‘appeal to individuals as subjects’ in the sense of Althusser – thereby fulfilling Touraine’s
criteria.
For it is Touraine’s basic idea that in postindustrial society, the individual subject can
and should be strengthened by its links to a social movement. He sets out, as was shown
above, from the impossibility of an idealist subjectivity which is deemed to be identical
with itself as ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’. To him, the individual subject appears as a search: ‘It is a
search of the individual self for conditions that empower him to be the actor of his own
history.’210 Touraine does not ignore the obstacles which can make this search extremely
taxing: bureaucracies, market laws, communitarian ideologies of hermetic groups. For
him, the individual is a subject struggling for survival and torn ‘between instrumental
action and cultural identity, relating, in the first case, to the world of commodities, in
the second case to the world of the community’.211 However, what matters in the process
of subjectivity is keeping aloof from both the world of commodities with its reifying
mechanisms and from the repressive community and its ideologies. Translated into the
language of this book, one might put it this way: what matters is resisting both the
market-based indifference as interchangeability of values and ideological dualism
(which is not exclusively associated with communitarianism).
In Touraine’s case, this resistance is inconceivable without the support of the movement
as collective subject. In Critique de la modernité, he radicalizes his stance by postulating:
‘The subject exists only as social movement [. . .].’212 Later on, this statement is made
more concrete with respect to the relationship between the individual and the collective
subject: ‘The link-up between the personal construction of subjectivity and the social
movement is the core of this book.’213 In a much earlier work, in Le Retour de l’acteur
(1984), Touraine already spoke of a ‘transition from we to I’ (‘passage du nous au Je’).214
This point of view is confirmed in his more recent book La Fin des sociétés (2013)
where the acteur social is identified with the social movement.215
Although this argument sounds plausible since individual subjects may very well find
their identity in ecological, anarchist or feminist – but also in nationalist or fascist –
movements, the question concerning the dialectics of subjectivity returns. It is the
question raised by deconstructionist feminism. Could it be that individual subjects give
up their freedom when they let themselves be turned into subjects (subjected) by a
movement? (Cf. Chapter III, 8.) Here again, the ambivalence of subjectivity as freedom
and submission comes to the fore.
In his later writings, Touraine tries to solve this problem by imagining an individual
subject which turns instrumental reason against the community and the communitarian
cultural identity against the instrumentalism of the market: ‘It eludes the community
by instrumental reason and the market by its collective and at the same time personal
identity.’216 This sentence can also be paraphrased in the language of this book:
indifference in the sense of an exchangeability of values puts ideological engagement
into perspective and allows for a critical distance vis-à-vis one’s own ideology in the
sense of Norbert Elias.217 The dialectical relationship between engagement and critical
distance will be discussed in detail in the last chapter in conjunction with Dialogical
Theory.
Touraine continues the sociological tradition from Durkheim and Tönnies to Simmel
by emphasizing, on the one hand, the importance of the market for individual freedom
and by replacing, on the other hand, the traditional community by the movement and its
value orientation. In this respect, the core of his approach can be defined as ‘late modern’,
since the author retains the concept of individual and collective subjectivity, but at the
same time tries to avoid a relapse into traditionalist (‘communitarian’) thought by
pinning his hopes on contemporary urban movements. The late modern programme,
which he proposes as a remedy for the ‘disintegration of modernity’ in postmodernity, is
defined as follows: ‘The formation of new social actors and [. . .] a new economic and
social policy’.218
But what exactly does Touraine mean by ‘late modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’? To
begin with, he blames the ‘Frankfurt School’ – without a valid reason – for its ‘struggle
against the idea of subject’ (‘la lutte contre l’idée de sujet’)219 and subsequently slots
Foucault and Baudrillard into a negativist tradition which rejects all of modernity –
including subjectivity – as a destructive principle geared towards domination. Touraine
turns against this global and one-sided negation of modernity when he writes about
French postmodernist thinkers:
It is sufficient to realize how fast the radical critique of modernity led to a break
with the very idea of modernity, thus destroying itself by dissolving into
postmodernity. This was in particular the development of Baudrillard, who
attacked Foucault in order to explain his own move from critical Gauchisme to
postmodernism.220
This postmodern dismissal of modernity is contested by Touraine in a model of late

modernity intended to save the disintegrating modern constellation. He believes that
modernity is falling apart into four autonomous spheres: sexuality and consumption on
the individual level and nationalism and economic enterprise on a collective level.221
Unlike in the enlightened high modern era, when the nation held these four spheres
together, combining the development of the individual with that of the economy, in
late modernity the national turns into nationalism, and the four spheres are separated:
‘In sexuality, as in consumption, attrition and destruction set in; in the politics of
firms, the drives towards profit and power tend to obliterate the function of production;
and the various nationalisms are saturated with war, like all other differentiations.’222
But at the same time, each of these four spheres promises to fulfil the hopes of
modernity.
According to Touraine, individual and collective subjects are in a better position to
fulfil them. To begin with, he opposes the disintegration of modernity: ‘What is
generally called postmodernity and what I chose to call the radical disintegration of
the rationalist model of modernity, is the very thing the subject revolts against.’223 But
what exactly can the subject do against the modern process of disintegration? Touraine
realizes that it can no longer (as did the nation in the past) hold together the four
spheres. However, it can mediate between them independently of all strategies of
domination.
In Habermas’s words, it ought to defend the values of the life world against the
systems power and money. This is how Touraine himself expresses it: ‘The subject
comes about both in its struggle against the state apparatuses and in its respect of the
Other as subject; the social movement is the collective action in defence of the subject
against the power of the commodity, the economic venture and the state.’224 The
question is of course, whether social movements, which differ from social classes by
their ad hoc emergence and their instability, are capable of fulfilling this integrative
function.
Their structural weakness can hardly be changed by sociologists whom Touraine
expects to assist new movements in their actions.225 Jacques Le Goff may be far too
optimistic when he observes in conjunction with Touraine’s Un désir d’histoire: ‘Un
désir d’histoire expresses the wish that history as reality may once again set society in
motion and may lead to the recognition of sociology not as a mere science, but as
action.’226
Here sociological theory has turned full circle from postmodernity to the sociology
of action of the 1960s. The latter now appears as a sociology that is expected not only
to understand social action, but to make it possible. This may be asking too much. Even
the help of critical sociologists will not enable ephemeral social movements to bring
about fundamental changes in society, especially if such changes are envisaged within
the national framework. In the last chapter, it will appear that another important factor
has to be taken into account in order to increase the relevance of Touraine’s model.
Touraine is not the only European sociologist to analyse the situation of the
individual subject in late modern society. Apart from Bourdieu and Baudrillard,
whose theories were commented on in the second section, Anthony Giddens and
Ulrich Beck have dealt with this problem. Their approaches were commented on in the
first chapter and will now be compared with Touraine’s sociology of action by way of a
conclusion.
The three basic ideas that link Giddens’s and Beck’s works to Touraine’s sociology of
action are: (1) that modern and especially late modern society dissolves those traditional
values and patterns of action which formed the basis of individual subjectivity; (2) that
industrial society in the sense of Marx was superseded by a pluralized society in which
social classes and the labour movement fade into the background and new social
movements occupy the centre of the social scene; (3) that individuals are obliged to
search for their identity independently of traditions and class memberships.
A closer look at Giddens’s early work reveals that, mediating between Marx,
Durkheim and Weber, he seeks to explain late capitalism both from a Marxist and from
a liberal perspective,227 although he retains Marx’s class model. Thus David Held can
conclude towards the end of the 1980s: ‘Giddens wishes to affirm the centrality of class
in the determination of the character of contemporary society while at the same time
recognizing that this very perspective itself marginalizes or excludes certain types of
issues from consideration.’228 At a later stage, these issues move to the centre of the
scene, and Giddens focuses – like Touraine, albeit in a more moderate way – on ‘the
role of the social movements’.229 In this context, he speaks (like Touraine and Beck) of
‘the one-sided emphasis upon either capitalism or industrialism’230 and opens up late
modern perspectives in which the individual subject appears as isolated and self-
producing.
Unlike Touraine, Giddens does not establish a link between individual subjectivity
and social movements. His basic aim in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) is to show
how individual subjectivity comes about in late modernity through reflexivity: through
‘identity work’, some German sociologists would say.231 Giddens speaks of self-identity:
‘Self-identity, in other words, is not something that is just given, as a result of the
continuities of the individual’s action system, but something that has to be routinely
created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual.’232 This ‘reflexive
activity’ is seen by Giddens as a permanent shaping of one’s own biography which also
includes the body: ‘The body itself has become emancipated – the condition for its
reflexive restructuring.’233
Giddens turns against Foucault’s conception of subjectivity as subjection, pointing
to the fact ‘that the body has not become just an inert entity, subject to commodification
or “discipline” in Foucault’s sense’.234 He may be right, but he does not explain why.
Although he keeps mentioning them, he does not view the numerous handbooks and
guides that are meant to help disoriented readers find an identity as commercial media
and instruments of normalization in the sense of Link. Unlike Touraine, he does not
look out for a collective subject capable of strengthening and stabilizing individual
subjectivity.
From this point of view, his sociology cannot possibly appear as a social theory of
subjectivity. For a theory of this type sets out from the interaction between collective
and individual subjects and examines, with Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘the possibility of
institutions which favour autonomy’.235 As long as the institutional-political and the
actantial contexts (cf. Chapter I, 1, b) are bracketed out, late modern self-identity
cannot be adequately explained.
This argument also applies to Ulrich Beck’s analyses of a risk society which is
presented as a world beyond tradition and industrialization. In this world, neither
tradition nor class can form a basis of subjectivity. Like Simmel, Riesman and Giddens,
Beck views individualization as a market-based process: ‘Processes of individualization
deprive class differences of their relevance for identity in the life world.’236 The liberation
of individual subjects is at the same time their atomization and their dependence on
the market as consumerism and fashion: ‘The liberated individuals become dependent
on the labor market and because of that, dependent on education, consumption,
welfare state regulations and support, traffic planning, consumer supplies, and on
possibilities and fashions in medical, psychological and pedagogical counselling and

care.’237 Here the ambivalence of freedom in late capitalist society, i.e. of the process of
disembedding in the sense of Giddens, comes to the fore. It is inseparable from the
submission to the market, to advertising, fashion and ideology.
Against this backdrop, an ego-centred ethic aiming, in Beck’s case as in the works of
Giddens and Foucault, at a cultivation of the Self, seems problematical: ‘This value
system of individualization also contains elements of a new ethic based on the principle
of “duties vis-à-vis oneself ”.’238 However, this self-enhancement is permanently being
confronted with the void because the Self is limited in time as long as it is not linked to
a We or a historical project. As in Giddens’s theory, both factors are missing in Beck’s
approach, and their absence accounts for the absence of a sociological theory of
subjectivity in the sense of Touraine. This kind of theory goes well beyond the realm of
individual subjectivity. Whatever lies beyond this realm – for example, the dynamics of
social movements – is dealt with far too summarily by Beck who hardly ever examines
the nexus of individual and collective subjectivity.
This is another reason why the last chapter will take up some arguments of
Touraine’s sociologie de l’action, which is becoming increasingly important in
economics, where Blaise Ollivier raises the question concerning the new economic
actor (nouvel acteur économique).239 This question can assume a more general form,
for it is equally relevant for politics and society at large, where only new forms of
individual and collective subjectivity can ensure a continuation of the democratic
process.
Notes
1 Cf. R. zur Lippe, Autonomie als Selbstzerstörung. Zur bürgerlichen Subjektivität,
Frankfurt, Syndikat-EVA, 1984.
2 Ibid., S. 62.
3 E. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, New York-London, The Free Press-
Collier-Macmillan, 1964, p. 194.
4 Cf. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Society in the Late Modern Age,
Cambridge, Polity, 1991, pp. 17–20.
5 G. Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, Berlin, Duncker-Humblot, 1977 (6th ed.), p. 311.
6 G. Simmel, ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, in: idem, Das Individuum und die
Freiheit, Berlin, Wagenbach, 1984, pp. 193–4.
7 Ibid., p. 195.
8 G. Simmel, Über sociale Differenzierung. Sociologische und psychologische
Untersuchungen, Leipzig, Duncker-Humblot, 1890, p. 59.
9 Cf. E. Durkheim, ‘Sociology and its Scientific Field’. in: E. Durkheim et al., Essays
on Sociology and Philosophy (ed. K. H. Wolf), New York, Harper and Row, 1964,
pp. 365–8.
10 G. Simmel, ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, op. cit., p. 203.
11 Ibid.
12 G. Simmel, ‘Die Arbeitsteilung als Ursache für das Auseinandertreten der subjektiven
und der objektiven Kultur (1900)’, in: idem, Schriften zur Soziologie. Eine Auswahl
(ed. H.-J. Dahme, O. Rammstedt), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1983, p. 118 and p. 123.
13 A. Weber, Ideen zur Staats- und Kultursoziologie, Berlin, Juncker-Dünnhaupt, 1927,

p. 45.
14 G. Simmel, Grundfragen der Soziologie. Individuum und Gesellschaft, Berlin-New York,
De Gruyter, 1984 (4th ed.), p. 69.
15 M. Weber, ‘Die drei reinen Typen der legitimen Herrschaft’, in: idem, Soziologie.
Universalgeschichtliche Analysen. Politik (ed. J. Winckelmann), Stuttgart, Kröner, 1973
(5th ed.), p. 153.
16 M. Weber, ‘Einleitung in die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen’, in: idem, Soziologie,
op. cit, p. 437.
17 W. Schluchter, Rationalismus und Weltbeherrschung. Studien zu Max Weber, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1980, p. 64.
18 M. Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften, Tübingen, Mohr-Siebeck, 1921, p. 151.
19 G. Weipert, in: ‘Diskussion zum Thema: Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus’, in: Max
Weber und die Soziologie heute. Verhandlungen des fünfzehnten deutschen
Soziologentages, Tübingen, Mohr-Siebeck, 1965, p. 183.
20 Cf. A. M. Koch, Romance and Reason. Ontological and Social Sources of Alienation in
the Writings of Max Weber, Lanham-Boulder-Oxford, Lexington Books, 2006,
pp. 33–40.
21 Cf. Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, London, Penguin (1951), 1985, pp. 232–3 and p. 722.
22 C. Offe, in: ‘Max Weber und das Projekt der Moderne. Eine Diskussion mit Dieter
Henrich, Claus Offe und Wolfgang Schluchter’, in: Ch. Gneuss, J. Kocka (eds.), Max
Weber. Ein Symposium, München, DTV, 1988, p. 158.
23 A. Gehlen, Philosophische Anthropologie und Handlungslehre, Gesamtausgabe, vol. IV,
Frankfurt, Klostermann, 1983, p. 132. J. Weiß quite rightly points out in Weltverlust
und Subjektivität. Zur Kritik der Institutionenlehre Arnold Gehlens, Freiburg, Rombach,
1971, p. 210: ‘ “Subjectivity” is for Gehlen primarily and fundamentally a relapse into
the chaos of drives and needs.’
24 Cf. K. Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, The Process of Capitalist
Production (ed. F. Engels), New York, International Publishers, 1967, pp. 628–9.
25 Cf. E. Mandel, Le Troisième âge du capitalisme, Paris, Ed. de la Passion, 1997 and idem,
Les Ondes longues du développement capitaliste, Paris, Page Deux, 1998 and H.
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. The Ideology of Industrial Society, London, Sphere
Books, 1968, p. 41.
26 P. A. Baran, P. M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital. An Essay on the American Economic and
Social Order, London, Penguin, 1966, pp. 42–3.
27 Cf. T. Burns, G. M. Stalker, The Management of Innovation, London, Pergamon Press,
1961, chap. I.
28 Cf. P. Bernoux, La Sociologie des organisations, Paris, Seuil (1985), 2009 (new ed.),
chap. VIII: ‘Les nouvelles sociologies des organisations’.
29 Cf. V. de Gaulejac, La Société malade de la gestion. Idéologie gestionnaire, pouvoir
managérial et harcèlement social, Paris, Seuil (2005), 2009, chap. VIII: ‘La Gestion de soi’.
30 M. Crozier, Le Phénomène bureaucratique, Paris, Seuil, 1963, p. 352.
31 Cf. W. H. Whyte, The Organization Man, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956.
32 M. Crozier, Le Phénomène bureaucratique, op. cit., p. 353.
33 G. Simmel, ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, op. cit., p. 194.
34 G. A. Di Marco, Marx – Nietzsche – Weber. Gli ideali ascetici tra critica, genealogia,
comprensione, Naples, Guida, 1984, p. 119.
35 The weakening of solidarity by social differentiation and the division of labour is
discussed in: J. Neyer, ‘Individualism and Socialism in Durkheim’ and P. Bohannan,
‘Conscience Collective and Culture’, both in: E. Durkheim et al., Essays on Sociology
and Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 47–8 and p. 89.
36 A. Mitscherlich, Society without the Father. A Contribution to Social Psychology,
London-Sydney-Toronto, Tavistock, 1969, p. 147.
37 Cf. R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the
New Capitalism, New York, Norton, 1998, pp. 46–63.
38 A. Mitscherlich, Society without the Father, op. cit., p. 149.
39 A. Moravia, The Conformist, London, Prion Books, 1999, p. 24. (Il Conformista, Milan,
Bompiani, 1951, Mondadori, 1976, p. 22.)
40 Ibid.
41 Cf. K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge,
London-Henley, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1936), 1976, chap. V.
42 Cf. R. Michels, Political Parties. A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies in
Modern Democracy, New York, Dover Publications, 1959, p. 377: ‘Democracy and the
Iron Law of Oligarchy’.
43 H. Fleischer, ‘Marxismus: Sieg der Ideologie über die Ideologiekritik’, in: H. Fleischer
(ed.), Der Marxismus in seinem Zeitalter, Leipzig-Stuttgart, Reclam, 1994, p. 223.
44 Cf. J. Baudrillard, Ecran total, Paris, Galilée, 1997.
45 Cf. J. Baudrillard, Le Paroxyste indifférent. Entretiens avec Philippe Petit, Paris, Grasset-
Fasquelle, 1997, pp. 70–1: ‘No, I was never a sociologist in this particular sense.’
46 Dialogical Theory in the sense of chap. V. 2 focuses on this kind of overlapping of
heterogeneous discourses.
47 P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, Polity, 1992, p. 55.
48 P. Bourdieu, On Television, New York, The New Press, 1998, p. 25.
49 Ibid., p. 25–6.
50 Ibid., p. 27.
51 Ibid., p. 28.
52 Ibid., p. 7.
53 Ibid., p. 8.
54 Ibid.
55 P. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance. Against the New Myths of Our Time, Cambridge-
Oxford, Polity-Blackwell (2000), 2004, p. 74.
56 Cf. J. Jurt, Frankreichs engagierte Intellektuelle. Von Zola bis Bourdieu, Göttingen,
Wallstein, 2012 (2nd ed.), chap. X.
57 Cf. P. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance, op. cit., p. 8.
58 Ibid., p. 65.
59 Cf. ibid., p. 63. He quite rightly proposes the ‘creation of a European state capable of
controlling the European Bank (. . .).’
60 Cf. A. Touraine, La Fin des sociétés, Paris, Seuil, 2013, ‘L’Utopie européenne’.
61 G. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. I. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der
zweiten industriellen Revolution, Munich, Beck, 1983 (6th ed.), p. 102.
62 Ibid., p. 103.
63 Ibid., p. 105.
64 Cf. ibid., p. 106.
65 Ibid., p. 107.
66 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Wie man gedacht wird. Soziale Aphasie als Entmündigung des Subjekts’,
in: J. Wertheimer, P. V. Zima (eds.), Strategien der Verdummung, Munich, Beck (2001),
2006 (6th ed.).
67 G. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, op. cit., p. 111.
68 Ibid., p. 125.
69 Ibid., p. 128.
70 Cf. J. Baudrillard, Ecran total, op. cit., chap. I-II.
71 J. Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe, Paris, Gallimard, 1972,
p. 97.
72 J. Baudrillard, La Transparence du Mal. Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes, Paris,
Galilée, 1990, p. 13.
73 Ibid.
74 J. Baudrillard, Le Miroir de la production – ou l’illusion critique du matérialisme
historique, Paris, Galilée, 1975, p. 92.
75 J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, London-New Delhi-Singapore, Sage,
1993, chap. V: ‘Political Economy and Death’.
76 J. Baudrillard, L’Illusion de la fin – ou La grève des événements, Paris, Galilée, 1992,
p. 136.
77 Cf. J. Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal, op. cit., pp. 22–42.
78 J. Baudrillard, Le Paroxyste indifférent, op. cit., p. 13.
79 J. Baudrillard, Le Crime parfait, Paris, Galilée, 1995, p. 34.
80 Ibid., p. 147.
81 Quoted in German in: J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation, Paris, Galilée, 1981,
p. 231.
82 J. Baudrillard, L’Echange impossible, op. cit., p. 15.
83 Ibid., p. 72.
84 Ibid., p. 66.
85 G. Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, op. cit., p. 126.
86 Both in Le Crime parfait (op. cit.) and in L’Echange impossible (op. cit.), Baudrillard
asserts that social criticism is an illusion. In Le Crime parfait he speaks of ‘l’illusion de
la critique elle-même’ (p. 48) and in L’Echange impossible he denounces critical
thought as ‘deceptive’ (‘trompeuse’).
87 J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation, op. cit., p. 54.
88 J. Baudrillard, Les Stratégies fatales, Paris, Grasset-Fasquelle, 1983, pp. 122–3.
89 J. Baudrillard, L’Illusion de la fin, op. cit., p. 85.
90 Ibid.
91 Baudrillard uses the adjective ‘postmodern’ on several occasions, for example in
Simulacres et simulation, op. cit., p. 229. His position within the postmodern
problematic is discussed in some detail in: P. V. Zima, Modern / Postmodern. Society,
Philosophy, Literature, London-New York, Continuum (2010), 2012, pp. 54–64.
92 J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation, op. cit., p. 111.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 J. Baudrillard, L’Illusion de la fin, op. cit., p. 112.
96 Posthistoire (Gehlen, Baudrillard) and postmodernity do not exclude each other, as
Wolfgang Welsch seems to believe, for posthistoire can be deduced from Lyotard’s
scepticism vis-à-vis the metanarratives. (Cf. W. Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne,
Weinheim, VCH, 1991 [3rd ed.], p. 152.)
97 K. Kraemer, ‘Schwerelosigkeit der Zeichen? Die Paradoxie des selbstreferentiellen
Zeichens bei Baudrillard’, in: R. Bohn, D. Fuder (eds.), Baudrillard. Simulation und
Verführung, Munich, Fink, 1994, p. 68.
98 Cf. J. Baudrillard, La Gauche divine, Paris, Grasset, 1985, pp. 85–104.
99 Cf. J. Baudrillard, L’Effet Beaubourg, Paris, Galilée, 1977.
100 J. Baudrillard, ‘Facticité et séduction’, in: J. Baudrillard, M. Guillaume, Figures de

l’altérité, Paris, Ed. Descartes, 1992, p. 109.
101 N. Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1990, pp. 690–1.
102 N. Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. II, Stanford, Univ. Press, 2013, p. 172.
103 The most important forms of institutionalization are discussed in a sociological
context by: A. C. Zijderveld, Institutionalisering: een studie over het methodologisch
dilemma der sociale wetenschappen, Meppel, Boom, 1974. More recently, Virginie
Tournay analysed the dialectic between institution and individual action: V. Tournay,
Sociologie des institutions, Paris, PUF, 2011, pp. 113–16 and Penser le changement
institutionnel, Paris, PUF, 2014, chap. III.
104 H. Gripp-Hagelstange, Niklas Luhmann. Eine Einführung, Munich, Fink, 1997
(2nd ed.), p. 121.
105 Cf. B. Karsenti, Marcel Mauss. Le fait social total, Paris, PUF, 1994, especially chap. III:
‘De l’individuel au collectif ’ and T. Parsons, The Social System, London, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1951, pp. 51–7.
106 A. Nassehi, Der soziologische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2006, p. 300.
107 Cf. for example, A. Robbe-Grillet, Instantanés, Paris, Minuit, 1962, pp. 78–9.
108 Cf. C. Sigrist, ‘Das gesellschaftliche Milieu der Luhmannschen Theorie’, in: Das
Argument 6, November-December, 1989, p. 839.
109 N. Luhmann, Social Systems, Stanford, Univ. Press, 1995, p. 77.
110 Ibid., p. 76. (Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp [1984)], 1987, p. 115.)
111 V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, New York, Seminar Press,
1973, p. 70.
112 N. Luhmann, ‘Wie lassen sich latente Strukturen beobachten?’, in: P. Watzlawick,
P. Krieg (eds.), Das Auge des Betrachters. Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus, Munich,
Piper, 1991, p. 66. Cf. also N. Luhmann, ‘Die Richtigkeit soziologischer Theorie’,
in: Merkur 1, January 1987, p. 37: ‘The other subjects no longer observe the same
reality as we do. One therefore observes with predilection what the others cannot
observe.’ – In this case, one can observe a contradiction: Luhmann who, in Soziale
Systeme (p. 111), dismisses the concept of subject uses it three years later.
113 Cf. E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, New York, The Free Press, 1982,
chap. V.
114 N. Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. II, op. cit., p. 179.
115 Cf. A. W. Gouldner’s critique of functionalism as a thought geared towards
domination: The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, London, Heinemann, 1971.
116 N. Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. I, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1980,
p. 245.
117 R. Greshoff, Die theoretischen Konzeptionen des Sozialen von Max Weber und Niklas
Luhmann im Vergleich, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999, p. 117.
118 L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York, Monthly Review
Press, 1971, pp. 170–1.
119 Ibid., p. 171.
120 N. Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. II, op. cit, p. 271.
121 Ibid., p. 271–2.
122 Ibid., p. 275.
123 Ibid., p. 274
124 Ibid., p. 344.
125 Cf. ibid., pp. 272–3.

127 Cf. N. Luhmann, Social Systems, op. cit., p. 210: ‘We choose the term “human being” to
indicate that this concerns both the psychic and the organic systems of human
beings.’
128 Cf. Cl. Dubar, La Socialisation. Construction des identités sociales et professionnelles,
Paris, Armand Colin, 2010 (4th ed.), chap. V: ‘Pour une théorie sociologique de
l’identité’.
129 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London-New York, Routledge (1989),
2002, p. 156.
130 M. Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London-
New York, Routledge (1989), 2002, p. 340.
131 Cf. N. Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, op. cit., pp. 690–1.
132 Cf. A. J. Greimas, J. Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage,
Paris, Hachette, 1979, pp. 370–1.
133 N. Luhmann, Social Systems, op. cit., pp. 68–9.
134 R. Greshoff, ‘Lassen sich die Konzepte von Max Weber und Niklas Luhmann unter
dem Aspekt “Struktur und Ereignis” miteinander vermitteln?’, in: R. Greshoff,
G. Kneer (eds.), Struktur und Ereignis in theorievergleichender Perspektive. Ein
diskursives Buchprojekt, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999, p. 43.
135 H. Gripp-Hagelstange, Niklas Luhmann, op. cit., p. 44.
136 L. Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, London, Tavistock, 1977.
137 M. Füllsack, ‘Geltungsansprüche und Beobachtungen zweiter Ordnung. Wie nahe
kommen sich Diskurs- und Systemtheorie?’, in: Soziale Systeme 1, 1998, p. 189.
138 C. Sigrist, ‘Das gesellschaftliche Milieu der Luhmannschen Theorie’, op. cit., p. 847.
Complementary arguments are put forward by Hans-Joachim Giegel in his book
System und Krise. Kritik der Luhmannschen Gesellschaftstheorie (Theorie-Diskussion
Supplement 3. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,
1975, p. 138. He points out ‘that it is the form of this science which makes the subjects
submit to the existing social conditions’.
139 C. Sigrist, ‘Das gesellschaftliche Milieu der Luhmannschen Theorie’, op. cit., p. 847.
Complementary arguments are to be found in: E. Bolay, B. Trieb, Verkehrte
Subjektivität. Kritik der individuellen Ich-Identität, Frankfurt-New York, Campus,
1988, pp. 81–2.
140 N. Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1988), 1994, p. 50.
141 W. Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity. The Paradoxes of Differentiation, Stanford,
Univ. Press, 2000, p. 207.
142 N. Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, op. cit., p. 67.
143 N. Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, op. cit., p. 622.
144 Ibid., p. 639.
145 Cf. A. J. Greimas, Sémiotique et sciences sociales, Paris, Seuil, 1976, chap. I: ‘Du discours
scientifique en sciences sociales’ and E. Landowski, La Société réfléchie, Paris, Seuil,
1989, especially chap. X: ‘Simulacres et construction’.
146 Cf. J. Baudrillard, La Transparence du Mal, op. cit., pp. 22–42 and S. Lash, Sociology of
Postmodernism, London-New York, Routledge, 1990, especially ‘Part Two:
Postmodernist Culture’, where the de-differentiation of cultural production and
reception is dealt with.
147 Cf. P. V. Zima, Der europäische Künstlerroman. Von der romantischen Utopie zur
postmodernen Parodie, Tübingen, Francke, 2008, chap. VIII: ‘Ende der Literatur und
der Kunst?’
148 J. Baudrillard, La Transparence du Mal, op. cit., p. 24.

149 N. Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. II, op. cit., p. 346.
150 N. Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1995), 1998 (2nd ed.),
p. 267.
151 Ibid., p. 262.
152 E. Köhler, ‘Gattungssystem und Gesellschaftssystem’, in: Romanistische Zeitschrift für
Literaturgeschichte 1, 1977, p. 14.
153 N. Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. II, op. cit., pp. 226–7.
155 H. Broch, The Sleepwalkers, London-Melbourne-New York, Quartet Books, 1986,
p. 472.
156 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Univ.
Press, 2004, p. XIV.
157 N. Luhmann, Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. IV, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1995,
p. 174.
158 J. Baudrillard, L’Echange impossible, op. cit., p. 12.
159 N. Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. II, p. 346.
160 G. Kneer, A. Nassehi, Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Munich, Fink, 1997
(3rd ed.), p. 153.
161 Cf. G. Lohmann, Indifferenz und Gesellschaft. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit
Marx, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1991: The author examines the relationship between
indifference and the economy in Marx’s work.
162 Cf. N. Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, op. cit., p. 68: ‘Another step towards
clarification is possible if one follows Talcott Parsons and considers money as a
symbolically generalized medium which, in this respect similar to language, regulates
operations by virtue of a particular code.’
163 In Luhmann’s Social Systems, op. cit., p. 395, the word ‘violence’ only occurs once: as
‘physical violence’. There are more interesting forms of violence. Cf. H. Tyrell,
‘Physische Gewalt, gewaltsamer Konflikt und der “Staat” – Überlegungen zu neuerer
Literatur’, in: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 9, 1999, pp. 285–6.
164 In his study Die theoretischen Konzeptionen des Sozialen, op. cit., p. 313, R. Greshoff
draws the conclusion that Luhmann’s attempt to separate organic, psychic and social
systems fails because ‘the social systems cannot be detached from the psychic systems
(. . .).’
165 P. Ansart, Les Sociologies contemporaines, Paris, Seuil, 1990, p. 56.
166 Cf. N. Luhmann, Beobachtungen der Moderne, op. cit., p. 183.
167 A. Touraine, Le Retour de l’acteur. Essai de sociologie, Paris, Fayard, 1984, p. 84.
168 Ibid., p. 85.
169 Ibid., p. 78.
170 M. R. Vogel, Gesellschaftliche Subjektivitätsformen. Historische Voraussetzungen und
theoretische Konzepte, Frankfurt-New York, Campus, 1983, p. 14.
171 A. Touraine, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble? Egaux et différents, Paris, Fayard, 1997,
p. 123.
172 Cf. A. Touraine, Critique de la modernité, Paris, Fayard, 1992, p. 115.
173 Cf. A. Touraine, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble?, op. cit., p. 118 and p. 134.
174 Ibid., p. 146.
175 Cf. A. Etzioni, The Spirit of Community. Rights, Responsibilities and the
Communitarian Agenda, London, Fontana, 1995, especially the appendix which takes
on the form of a manifesto.
176 A. Touraine, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble?, op. cit., p. 134.

177 The fact that E. Durkheim and M. Weber ignored each other is commented on by
E. A. Tiryakian, ‘Ein Problem für die Wissenssoziologie: Die gegenseitige
Nichtbeachtung von Emile Durkheim und Max Weber’, in: W. Lepenies (ed.),
Geschichte der Soziologie. Studien zur kognitiven, sozialen und historischen Identität
einer Disziplin, vol. IV, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1981, pp. 23–4.
178 A. Touraine, Critique de la modernité, op. cit., p. 290.
179 A. Touraine, Production de la société, Paris, Seuil, 1973, p. 188.
180 A. Touraine, ‘La Formation du sujet’, in: F. Dubet, M. Wieviorka (eds.), Penser le sujet.
Autour d’Alain Touraine (Colloque de Cerisy), Paris, Fayard, 1995, p. 44.
181 A. Touraine, Pour la sociologie, Paris, Seuil, 1974, p. 33.
182 A. Touraine, Production de la société, op. cit., p. 404.
183 Ibid., p. 347.
184 A. Touraine, Critique de la modernité, op. cit., p. 282. This transition from the social
class to the social movement is announced in the 1980s in Le Retour de l’acteur, p. 114.
185 Cf. Th. L. M. Thurlings, ‘De Physiocraten’, in: idem, Turgot en zijn tijdgenoten. Schets
van de bevestiging van de economische wetenschap, Wageningen, Veenman en Zonen,
1978, p. 132.
188 Ibid., p. 424.
189 A. Touraine, Le Retour de l’acteur, op. cit., p. 67.
190 Ibid., p. 78.
191 Cf. D. Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society (1976), Harmondsworth, Penguin,
2000.
193 Cf. A. Touraine, Un nouveau paradigme. Pour comprendre le monde aujourd’hui, Paris,
Fayard, 2005, p. 250: ‘This extreme class consciousness no longer corresponds to our
ideas (. . .).’
197 U. Beck, Gegengifte. Die organisierte Unverantwortlichkeit, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1988,
p. 99.
198 A. Touraine, Pour la sociologie, op. cit., p. 198.
199 In the 1960s, the ‘Constantinian turn’ of Christianity and Marxism was at the centre
of the debates between Christians and Marxists: Cf. R. Garaudy, J. B. Metz, R. Rahner,
Der Dialog – oder ändert sich das Verhältnis zwischen Katholizismus und Marxismus?,
Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1966, p. 96.
201 Ibid., p. 415.
204 Ibid., p. 180.
205 Ibid., p. 185.
206 Cf. A. Touraine, Critique de la modernité, op. cit., pp. 390–1, where Touraine blames
Habermas for reducing society to a search for consensus, thereby subordinating the
subject to intersubjectivity: ‘The subject, not intersubjectivity, self-production, not
communication are the basis of civil life and give democracy a positive content.’
207 A. Touraine, Comment sortir du libéralisme?, Paris, Fayard, 1999, pp. 75–103.

209 Ibid., pp. 198–204.
210 Ibid., p. 102.
211 Ibid., p. 111.
213 Ibid., p. 331.
215 Cf. A. Touraine, La Fin des sociétés, Paris, Seuil, 2013, pp. 494–5.
216 A. Touraine, ‘La Formation du sujet’, op. cit., p. 32.
217 N. Elias, ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’, in: British Journal of Sociology
1,1956, p. 252.
218 A. Touraine, Comment sortir du libéralisme?, op. cit., p. 15.
219 A. Touraine, Critique de la modernité, op. cit., p. 201. For counter-arguments
cf. P. V. Zima, L’Ecole de Francfort. Dialectique de la particularité, Paris (1974),
L’Harmattan, 2005 (augmented ed.).
221 Cf. ibid., p. 124.
222 Ibid., p. 125.
223 Ibid., p. 292.
224 Ibid., p. 331.
225 Ibid., pp. 419–20 and A. Touraine, Comment sortir du libéralisme?, op. cit., pp. 147–54:
‘Le rôle des intellectuels’.
226 J. Le Goff, ‘Alain Touraine et l’histoire. D’après Un désir d’histoire’, in: F. Dubet,
M. Wieviorka (eds.), Penser le sujet, op. cit., p. 97. Cf. A. Touraine, Un désir d’histoire,
Paris, Stock, 1977.
227 Cf. A. Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the Writings of
Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, Cambridge, Univ. Press, 1971, pp. 243–7.
228 D. Held, ‘Citizenship and Autonomy’, in: D. Held, J. B. Thompson (eds.), Social Theory
of Modern Societies. Anthony Giddens and his Critics, Cambridge, Univ. Press, 1989,
p. 183.
229 A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, p. 158.
230 Ibid., p. 159.
231 Cf. H. Keupp et al., Identitätskonstruktionen. Das Patchwork der Identitäten in der
Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991, p. 52.
233 Ibid., p. 218.
234 Ibid.
235 C. Castoriadis, L’Institution imaginaire de la societé, Paris, 1975, p. 159.
236 U. Beck, ‘Jenseits von Stand und Klasse?’, in: U. Beck, E. Beck-Gernsheim (eds.),
Riskante Freiheiten, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1994, p. 57.
237 U. Beck, Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity, London-New Delhi-Singapore, Sage,
1992, pp. 130–1.
238 U. Beck, ‘Jenseits von Stand und Klasse?’, in: U. Beck, E. Beck-Gernsheim (eds.),
Riskante Freiheiten, op. cit., p. 56.
239 Cf. B. Ollivier, L’Acteur et le sujet. Vers un nouvel ordre économique, Paris, Desclée de
Brouwer, 1995.
248
V
Theory of the Subject: Towards a

Dialogical Subjectivity
In view of the multifarious modern projects and postmodern critiques of individual

subjectivity, the question dealt with in this chapter can hardly be avoided: Is individual
subjectivity still a meaningful concept in spite of the difficulties encountered by
postmodern subjects in their search for identity? The complementary question is
whether it is possible in the present situation to defend the notion of a subject ‘who is
aware and in control of himself, a figure of the person who does not capitulate’1 and at
the same time avoid an identity jargon, which – for example, in the case of Anthony
Giddens – can only be understood as an ideological reaction to the subject’s social
crises and to some radical postmodern criticisms.2
One could answer the second question by arguing that only a theory of radical
ambivalence can avoid the ideological abuse of concepts such as subjectivity and
identity: a theory which continues pleading for individual and collective subjectivity
and at the same time reflects ironically and self-ironically upon the sociological
critiques and postmodern deconstructions of the subject. The answer to the first
question, which touches upon some of the key problems of subjectivity, is outlined in
this chapter as a pars pro toto of the book as a whole.
Its end is not only a return to the first chapter, but a recapitulation of the problematic
of post-war Critical Theory3 whose representatives consider negativity and non-
identity as the only guarantees against the manipulation of the individual subject by
markets, ideologies and the culture industry. However, from the point of view of
contemporary dialectics, negativity no longer appears as the only solution. In the third
chapter (III, 1), it became clear that negation in its pure form leads to silence and the
abdication of the subject because, as Sartre explains in conjunction with Mallarmé’s
poetry, all alternatives to the radical negation of the existing order are tabooed.
Fortunately, negativity in the sense of Adorno and Horkheimer is not mere negation
because it contains a second idea which will be developed here in the first section: the
idea that genuine subjectivity is only possible as long as the subject refrains from
dominating and debasing the Other and alterity in general. This kind of negativity
does not stop at global negation, but leads to an open dialogue with the Other: the
other language, the other culture or the other theory. In spite of this openness, dialogue
does not exclude, as Bakhtin already pointed out, a critical and polemical attitude
towards the Other. Although a Hegelian incorporation or absorption of otherness
249
is avoided, the latter is viewed in a critical perspective – critical in the sense of

Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory.4 This critical attitude towards the Other
is accompanied by an ironical and critical view of one’s own subjectivity. On a
theoretical level, this means that it ought to be possible to revise one’s own stance and
theory whenever they turn out to be deficient in an open dialogue. This is at the same
time the critical-rationalist (Popperian) component of this kind of dialogue: a
component appropriated by the author in the course of his debates with Critical
Rationalism.
The self-critical stance prevailing in an open theoretical dialogue yields an ironical
and sceptical attitude towards one’s own political engagement. This engagement in
favour of European political integration will be commented on in the last section
where it will be accompanied by a theoretical and self-critical distance in the sense of
Norbert Elias:5 by the idea that any kind of political parti pris may blind a theoretician
whose discourse is not primarily geared towards knowledge but towards political
involvement. However, this idea should not be separated from the insight that critical
theories of society – in the sense of Critical Rationalism, Marxism, feminism and
Critical Theory – would not be possible without political engagement.6 Even Adorno’s
plea for negativity is inseparable from his social engagement in favour of individual
subjectivity, autonomy and emancipation. This negativity is preserved here in the non-
identity of subject and object and in the openness of the dialogue.
This dialogue as interaction between heterogeneous subjects and their languages
(sociolects, discourses) and as critical testing of theories has nothing to do with Jürgen
Habermas’s ideal speech situation. It will become clear that Habermas’s theory of
communication suppresses in a universalistic way all particular interests and
evaluations (cf. Chapter I, 2 and V, 2), whereas Dialogical Theory – conceived as a
continuation of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics – seeks to relate the particular to the
universal without sacrificing particular interests.
As a global critique of one-sided postmodern particularizations and pluralisms,
Dialogical Theory will not be content to criticize the tendency towards particularization
in Lyotard’s and Derrida’s deconstructions of subjectivity in order to make its plea
in favour of the individual subject sound more plausible. There are enough such
pleas. Thus Calvin O. Schrag queries Lyotard’s extreme particularization of ‘language
games’ by plausibly pointing out that between such ‘language games’ links do exist
that can be exploited by an individual subject aspiring towards coherence.7 Finally,
he envisages a new kind of subjectivity: ‘our refigured portrait of the self after
postmodernity’.8
Apart from the fact that this criticism of Lyotard’s postmodern theory is not new,9
Schrag’s approach is hardly convincing because it remains within philosophy and
ignores the hurdles confronting postmodern individual subjects in society and the
economy, in politics, language and the media. This is why this book is based on an
interdisciplinary approach towards subjectivity – in spite of all the difficulties such an
approach may involve. If the scopes and limits of contemporary subjectivity are to be
gauged, it is not sufficient to show that Lyotard’s and Derrida’s views of language and
communication are too particularistic; at the same time it is necessary to define the
position of the individual subject in relation to collective subjects and the historical
Theory of the Subject 251
process. This will be done in what follows, especially in conjunction with the fourth
chapter.
1 Subjectivity as dialogue
The individual subject, which was defined in the first chapter as a dialectic between
individuality and identity (in analogy to Ricœur’s ipséité and mêmeté), will now be
considered as a dialogical instance marked by ambivalence and negation, dialogism and
alterity, reflexivity, narrativity and identity construction.
All of these traits are ambivalent in the sense that the subject may thrive on a
permanent dialogue with the Other and at the same time be challenged and even
undermined by alterity, as is shown by authors such as R. D. Laing, Ulrich Beck and
Heiner Keupp, all of whom analyse situations of disorientation and disintegration. This
is why a dialogical theory of subjectivity is a late modern or modernist construct based
on ambivalence as unity of opposites without synthesis. Modernist novels such as Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu, Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Pirandello’s
Uno, nessuno e centomila show that the subject’s scope of action is considerable as long
as it is able to take advantage of ambivalence, alterity, reflexivity, narrativity, the
unconscious and chance. As instruments of criticism, ambivalence and irony can
strengthen subjectivity. But at the same time, the three novels remind us of the risks to
which the subject as acting and narrating instance is exposed: indecision, hesitation, a
speechless narrator and a disintegrating plot.10
Even Bakhtin, whose theory of the open dialogue, of ambivalence and alterity is
crucial to the argument of this chapter, was well aware of the possibility that the subject
of the modernist novel might disintegrate: ‘What Bakhtin blames Dostoyevsky for, is
the latter’s doubt concerning the encompassing exotopy, the stability, the reassuring
effect of the author’s consciousness which enabled the reader to see the truth.’11 In
other words, the theoretician of polyphony and dialogue distances himself from his
favourite author whose polyphony seems to exceed the limits of subjectivity.
At this stage, the dilemma of individual subjectivity manifests itself: How is it
possible to avoid submitting to ideology and nevertheless remain coherent within the
ambivalence of values and an open dialogue? The first (preliminary) answer might be:
it is only possible if one remains aware of the fact that even collective subjectivities
(states, governments, parties) are always balancing acts between self-assertion and
disintegration. Only an actor capable of radically changing, re-thinking and re-
narrating the entire life project or political project can fully take advantage of
ambivalence, dialogue, alterity and reflexivity by turning them into instruments of
identity construction. A radical change of this sort need not lead to self-abnegation or
incoherence. But identity construction cannot mean ‘coherence at all costs’. This would
entail a relapse into ideology.
This is one of the reasons why the idea of an ambivalent, dialogical and reflexive
subject is incompatible with the immutable transcendental subject of idealist
philosophy. Descartes’ cogito was as much an aspiration towards autarky as Kant’s ‘I
think’ (‘ich denke’) and Fichte’s ‘I’ (‘Ich’) in that it eliminated all traces of alterity. By
contrast, dialogical subjectivity aims at otherness. In spite of all imponderables and

contradictions inherent in dialogue, it thrives on alterity, even on that of its adversaries.
(a) Ambivalence and negation

The subject of the modernist novel (narrator, hero) is not the only instance in late
modernity to be marked by ambivalence. The position of the individual subject
within the postmodern problematic, a problematic structured by the indifference or
interchangeability of values, is equally ambivalent. Alain Touraine defines this position
in his own particular way by imagining postindustrial individuals as moving between
the value-indifferent market and the value-based human community. In his more
recent works, he sees them as oscillating ‘between instrumental action and cultural
identity’12 and hopes that the individual and collective actors of late modernity will be
able to escape both disintegration in the realm of quantitative instrumentalization and
ideological submission to a questionable community (e.g. a sect or an ethnic group).
Touraine hopes that the individual subject will be able to play the Scylla of
collectivism against the Charybdis of the market and vice versa.13 Personal identity in
the sense of Touraine comes about (as was shown at the end of the last chapter) in an
interplay of individual subjectivity and the collective subjectivity of movements. But
even movements can force individuals into submission, and Touraine would have to
advise, for example, feminists, who refuse to sacrifice their identity to the collectivism
of a movement, to rely on the individualizing mechanisms of the market.14
As was pointed out previously (Chapter IV, 4), Touraine’s idea of an ambivalent
subjectivity oscillating between the community and the market corresponds to the
construction of postmodernity proposed here. Within the postmodern problematic,15
which cannot be understood as a homogeneous system of values, the individual subject
stands between the dualistic dogma of ideology and the value-indifference of the
market.
The word ‘corresponds’ suggests that the two constructions are comparable, not
identical. For ‘ideology’ as defined here encompasses all dualistically structured
discourses from ‘communitarianism’ and nationalism to ecologism and feminism, and
the indifference of the market does not only refer to its quantitative and instrumental
aspects, but also – and above all – to its negation of all qualitative (political, ethical,
aesthetic) values. Hence Touraine’s conception of subjectivity between community and
the market can be incorporated into the more general model of an individual
subjectivity oscillating between ideology and market-based indifference.
Based on ambivalence as coincidentia oppositorum without (Hegelian) synthesis,
this model is closely related to the negative dialectics of the post-Hegelians (from
Vischer to Adorno)16 and to the literatures of modernism which discover, along with
psychoanalysis, the ambivalence of individual subjects. It is a modernist model that is
proposed here as an alternative to the particularizing and pluralizing models of
postmodernism.
On the one hand, Adorno’s negative dialectics appears as a Young Hegelian17
rejection of Hegel’s synthesizing system: ‘Such dialectics is negative. Its idea names the
difference from Hegel. In Hegel there was coincidence of identity and positivity.’18 On
the other hand, it can best be understood as a thought aiming at the coincidence of
opposites and an ambivalence open to experience. In this context, Adorno’s critique of a
rationalist ‘intolerance of ambiguity’ becomes more plausible: ‘This psychological
posture is that of an “intolerance to ambiguity”, an impatience with what is ambivalent
and not strictly definable: ultimately, it is the refusal of what is open, of what has not
been predetermined by any jurisdiction, ultimately of experience itself.’19
Here the transition from negative dialectics as an open discourse to Bakhtin’s open
dialogue is clearly discernible. The two types of discourse are linked by their common
aim to make the experience of particularity and alterity possible. This aim is exemplified
in Robert Musil’s anti-drama Die Schwärmer where the unmasking of the Other turns
into self-criticism and self-irony: ‘One finds a friend and it is a traitor! One unmasks a
traitor and it is a friend!’20 The drama deconstructs ideological dualism which
systematically identifies the traitor with the Other and thus suppresses the ambivalent
unity of ‘friend’ and ‘traitor’. However, the dialogue with the Other and alterity in
general is only possible beyond ideological dualism.
This insight is relevant to the ambivalent position of the individual subject in
postmodernity. On the one hand, it accepts the necessity of political and ideological
engagement, St Augustine’s credo ut intelligam, without which theory and literature
would turn into pastime activities; on the other hand, it is aware of the interchangeability
of ideological values in indifference, thus enabling itself to view ideological engagement
in a critical and ironical perspective.
With Adorno and Hermann Broch, it associates ambivalence with the paradox and
is thus able to consider the theory of relativity as an ‘inevitable blessing’. In Broch’s
novel Die Schuldlosen, the authoritarian ideologist Zacharias reacts aggressively to
ambivalence and paradox: ‘ “Or do you think it makes sense to call the theory of
relativity an inevitable evil?” “An inevitable blessing.” “Please, put an end to this waffle.
What does that mean?”.’21 It means that a social phenomenon such as social
differentiation can also be seen paradoxically as an ‘inevitable blessing’ in the sense that
it entails both liberties and limitations: very much like the market, ideological
engagement and the theory of relativity.
Contemporary sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim
also conceive of social evolution as an ambivalent and paradoxical process in which
individuals are forced to be free: ‘Individualization is a constraint, but a paradoxical
constraint obliging us to construct, to form ourselves, to present and promote
ourselves.’22 This process of self-construction is structured by ambivalence, and Ian
Craib quite rightly praises Freudian psychoanalysis for its research into individual
ambivalence.23
The recognition of ambivalence not only makes experience of the Other possible, as
Musil and Adorno knew, but also experience of oneself: for example, in conjunction
with androgyny, a phenomenon analysed in Virginia Woolf ’s modernist novel Orlando
(1928) and in contemporary psychological discussions. Commenting on the approach
of Elisabeth Badinter, Sophie Karmasin points out: ‘Human beings, who used to be
typified as male or female, have become androgynous beings capable of acting, arguing
and thinking in a sexually neutral way.’24 The idea is not sexual ‘neutrality’, but the
ability of man and woman to bring about the unity of opposites and to act – according
to situations – in a male or female fashion. What matters is not an exchange of roles,

bisexuality or transsexuality, but the comprehensive development of one’s own – ever
ambivalent – subjectivity. This development was possible at times in antiquity and in
feudal society, but was suppressed by the asceticism of the bourgeois order.25
What matters most is the ambivalent recognition of the Other in oneself. It is not
only an alternative to Fichte’s repressive monologue that eliminates otherness both on
the epistemological and the political level (cf. Chapter II, 1), but is also the basis of a
fruitful dialogue with the socially Other. In his study about dialogue, Francis Jacques
quite rightly points out: ‘The idea imposes itself that the very core of personality is
relational in character; to the extent that the subject’s most intimate activity is not simply
its own, but consists of two poles.’26 In what follows, this – originally Bakhtinian – idea
will be developed.
(b) Dialogue and reflexivity

In most of his publications, Mikhail M. Bakhtin sets out from the assumption that the
identity of the speaking and acting individual subject comes about in a permanent
dialogue with the Other and alterity in general. To him, language itself appears as an
open dialogue of languages, and he anticipates the notion of socio-linguistic situation
(cf. Chapter I, 1, c) when he emphasizes the linguistic nature of a society marked by the
coexistence of antagonistic groups.27 For him, it goes without saying that linguistic
polyphony and dialogue should not be considered as purely stylistic matters because
they are also ‘social facts’ (Durkheim) underlying the identity of the individual subject:
‘But Bakhtin begins by assuming that the self does not coincide with itself: it follows
from the dialogic structure of consciousness (the I/other relation) that “experience
exists even for the person undergoing it (the ‘I’) only in the material of signs (the
other)”.’28 In other words, the individual subject is a product of linguistic polyphony, of
the coexistence of heterogeneous languages all of which contribute to the formation of
its identity in the course of primary and secondary socialization. A case in point is the
child who grows up in a multilingual set-up in which several natural languages interact
(e.g. German, French, Italian in Switzerland or English and Spanish in some parts of
the United States) within specific ideological, religious or specialized group languages
or sociolects.
To Bakhtin, especially the ‘heterogeneity of language genres’, ‘raznorodost rečejnych
žanrov’29 seems crucial – and hence the relative heterogeneity of the speaking subject.
Unlike Saussure’s parole or Chomsky’s performance,30 individual utterance in Bakhtin’s
sense is not a neutral realization of the language system, but an expression of interests,
intentions and ideologies. This is why every single text can best be understood as a
metonymy or model of the linguistic polyphony of a particular society and historical
period. It is always a reaction to other spoken and written texts which it quotes, imitates
or parodies.
Bakhtin never attempted to replace society by language; together with Medvedev
and Voloshinov,31 he set out to describe ‘linguistic genres’ as articulations of particular
social interests. This assessment of his approach is confirmed by Goranka Lozanović,
who points out: ‘The word, the utterance, the dialogue as concrete realizations of these
multiple social layers are evaluative and expressive vehicles of social complexity.’32 The
national language is heterogeneous, and this is why the identity of the individual
subject appears as a unity within multiplicity.
This subject is incessantly confronted by numerous alterities to which it can react
positively, negatively or with indifference. In this respect, it is comparable to the
dialogical or polyphonic novel in the sense of Bakhtin in which incompatible social
positions interact. The word ‘interact’ is meant to evoke the ambivalent aspiration
towards coherence and identity that marks Bakhtin’s work in spite of its rejection of
monologue. Far from endorsing a postmodern negation of the individual subject,
Bakhtin underlines the importance of the author’s unitary perspective.33
Could ‘identity work’34 (Keupp) not be considered in analogy to the novelist’s
writing which integrates all sorts of languages in order to unify them in the author’s
discourse as the ‘ultimate guarantee of meaning’? This question does not aim exclusively
at novels such as Proust’s Recherche (especially Le Temps retrouvé) and Sartre’s La
Nausée, but also at radically ambivalent and polyphonic novels in the sense of Musil
and Kafka. Both endings are conceivable in the modernist novel of ambivalence: the
concluding Eureka and the insight into the meaninglessness and futility of the hero’s
endeavours. Individual and collective subjectivity can be considered as a permanent
oscillation between these two possibilities. This oscillation is always accompanied
by the fortunate or unfortunate coincidence or chance which will be discussed in
section (d).
The fact is that, within the context mapped out here, identity can only be conceived
of as dialogue, as resulting from the interaction with the Other, with alterity. At this
point, the sociologist Castoriadis confirms and completes Bakhtin’s hermeneutics
when he explains individual autonomy:
If the problem of autonomy consists in the subject’s ability to find a meaning

within itself, which is not its own and which it has to transform by implementing
it; if autonomy means the relationship in which the others have always been
present as alterity and selfhood of the subject – then autonomy, even in the
philosophical sense, can only be conceived of as a social problem and a social
relationship.35
Like Bakhtin’s work and the first chapter of this book (I, 3), this passage sketches an
alternative to the monologic constructions of Descartes, Kant, Fichte and Hegel. The
individual subject now appears as a dialogical, open unit which thrives on alterity and is
at the same time threatened by it. This ambivalence of alterity is hardly perceived by
Bakhtin and Castoriadis. I can learn a foreign language and absorb a foreign culture in
order to expand and enrich my identity; but I can also lose myself in the complexities
and contradictions of otherness and withdraw into my culture of origin because I feel
overtaxed. This problem is too often overlooked in a society whose intellectuals tend to
celebrate alterity without noticing its pitfalls. But otherness is both: opportunity and
danger. This also applies to the alterity of theories. A dialogue with them is crucial for
the development of one’s own approach – but it can also lead to eclecticism, incoherence
and sterility.
Julia Kristeva is right in claiming that we are strangers to ourselves: in a cultural,

linguistic and psychological sense.36 However, she overlooks the fact that, apart from
ideologies and cultural elements that I can incorporate, there are ideas and customs
which are incompatible with my subjectivity: for example, nationalist stereotypes,
polygamy, ritual mutilation, human sacrifice – or fox hunting.
Alterities in culture, language, ideology or theory have one factor in common: they
can stimulate reflexivity and a dialogical attitude. Encounters with the Other prompt a
reflexive attitude towards oneself and one’s own subjectivity. In this context, one can
hardly agree with Oswald Schwemmer’s apodictic statement according to which ‘the
subject is precisely the instance of our thoughts and actions which can turn everything
into an object except itself as subjectivity’.37 If one can assume in conjunction with the
first chapter (I, 1, c) that identity is the object-actant of an individual aspiring to become
a subject, then individual subjectivity can only be conceived of as a reflexive process of
self-analysis and self-construction. This also applies – although not on a psychological
level – to collective subjects such as political parties, trade unions and governments.
Aided by experts and advisors, they observe themselves in order to consolidate their
identity.
Thus reflexivity is, as Manfred Frank aptly points out,38 a prerequisite of subjectivity.
The other prerequisite is dialogue because it confronts the subject with an alterity that
triggers processes of self-reflection. At this point, it is hard to avoid the often neglected
question of what constitutes the object of reflection. An attempt will be made to answer
it in the next section.
(c) Identity as semantics and narrativity

Individual reflection can have many objects: emotions, dreams, career prospects, social
contacts, etc. The idea is not to analyse all of these, but to find out how individual and
collective subjects structure these objects at semantic, syntactic-narrative and
pragmatic levels. The analysis is based on the concepts introduced in the first chapter:
socio-linguistic situation, sociolect, discourse, relevance, classification and narration (cf.
Chapter I, 1, c).
The question how the (usually undocumented) individual biography comes about
can be answered more concretely in this context than within a general theory of
narration. The key concept is the socio-linguistic situation in which subjects interact
dialogically, reflect upon their actions or communications and constantly try to
avoid submission to collective actants such as the family, the institution and the
organization. Time and again, they rebel against the indifference of consumerism on
the one hand and against the dogmatic dualism of ideologies on the other, thus
oscillating between the ‘market’ and the ‘community’, as Touraine would put it. Their
situation is marked by a permanent power struggle in which the autonomy of the
subject is at stake.
This power aspect of communication and identity formation is overlooked by
psychologists like Heiner Keupp who imagine biographical narrations as processes of
successful or unsuccessful ‘identity work’: ‘Basic biographical narrations result from
the efforts of the individual. Maybe their quality is most clearly discernible if they are
related to the ideal type of a well-formed narration.’39 However, such ‘basic narrations’
may also be imposed by ideologies, as the story of Edelgard B. shows (cf. Chapter I, 1,
c). Keupp and his team quite rightly evoke the problem of relevance criteria: ‘What
is essential? The answer to this question is easy whenever a stable universe of
communication with others exists. If it does not exist, one has to tell more or one is not
understood because empathy can only be expected on a general level.’40
However, the decision in favour of certain relevance criteria on which a biographical
narration can be based does not only depend on the contrast between understanding
and not understanding, but also on the power structures into which the individual is
born. It can be assumed that, within the sociolect of a middle-class family, the alternative
apprenticeship / university studies is not considered relevant to the narrative programme
of the daughter or the son because the decision in favour of university education is
tacitly presupposed – unlike in the working-class family, where the gifted child has to
struggle against the tacit assumption that it will opt in favour of a ‘useful’ apprenticeship
in order to earn its own living.
In this context, Luis J. Prieto points out that the individual subject belongs to a
group ‘in which what can be called “symbolic power” endows certain viewpoints with
a special legitimacy’.41 Relevance criteria and the related classifications and definitions
depend on such viewpoints. In many working-class families, it goes without saying that
children have to recognize a ‘useful apprenticeship’ as the only option, and in many
Mexican families it is assumed that studying a philology is a privilege of the upper class
(‘estudio para señoritos’). With an optimism that may seem excessive, Pierre Bourdieu
suggests: ‘The dominated can escape the pressure of legitimate classification.’42 The
question is how . . .
A short answer could be: by reflecting upon their linguistic situation, their sociolect
and the dominant relevance criteria. But this kind of reflection is becoming ever more
difficult in a society ruled by mass media (by Baudrillard’s écran total). Moreover,
Rüdiger Bubner’s thesis according to which ‘reflection can defeat all kinds of destiny’43
seems to be inspired by excessive idealism.
In order to answer the question how realistic Bourdieu’s and Bubner’s appeals to
subjective autonomy actually are, it seems necessary to examine more closely the
subject’s ability to reflect upon its own semantic and narrative decisions. What exactly
is being reflected and under what conditions? If relevance in the sematic sense44 is
related to the socio-linguistic situation and the subject’s sociolect, the following
scenario emerges: the individual subject may become aware – as an adolescent or a
young adult – of the ‘polyphony’ (Bakhtin) of its social and linguistic situation and
begin to question the relevance criteria, the classifications and definitions of its group
language(s). This is one of the reasons why youngsters, who get to know new group
languages and their discourses in the course of their studies, often discard the entire
semantics of their family. At a later stage, after the PhD, young scientists may turn away
from the approach of their former supervisors. This sudden dissent is not only due to
the Oedipal ‘anxiety of influence’,45 so thoroughly analysed by Harold Bloom, but also
to the competition of relevance criteria and definitions in a polyphonic world in which
the sociolects of Critical Rationalism and systems theory may compete with those of
feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis.
In this case, it seems useful to distinguish with Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson
relevance as ‘classificatory concept’ from relevance as ‘comparative concept’.46 It stands
to reason that the collision of competing sociolects in a multilingual situation turns
relevance into a comparative criterion. Individual subjects in search of identity will not
only compare natural languages and their semantic potentials, but will also ask
themselves what ideological, religious and scientific languages in their social
environment can contribute to their identity constructions.
In such situations, the initial decision in favour of certain relevance criteria and
definitions cannot be dissociated from the end of the narrative, from its telos. If a young
woman decides to become an engineer, her career is open from one narrative sequence
to the next, but the goal is clearly defined. The professional identity as object-actant is
fixed – and so is the sender (destinateur, Greimas), ‘civil engineering’, who shapes this
identity, together with various helpers and opponents (university teachers, sceptical
men), in a dialogical and polemical process. What matters is the subject’s ability to cling
to the original actantial model: consciously and subconsciously.
In some instances, a seemingly stable ideological identity is called into question
because subjects begin to discover their unconscious and their sexuality. In such
situations, existing relevance criteria, the semantic base of the discourse, its actantial
model and the corresponding narrative, are often revised or rejected. This process is
illustrated by Victor J. Seidler’s biographical move from Marxism to psychoanalysis:
Though Marxism is a deeply historical theory, it can often discourage a recognition

of our personal, sexual and ethnic histories. The only way that I seemed to be able
to come to terms with my history was to acknowledge it more deeply. At this point
a historically sensitive formulation of psychoanalysis can be crucial.47
In this autobiographical passage, which marks a turning point in the narrator’s

discourse, some of the key concepts used in this book are implicit. The ideological and
theoretical sociolect of Marxism, whose discourses are geared towards abstract,
mythical and collective subject-actants such as ‘history’ (sender), ‘proletariat’ (subject),
‘bourgeoisie’ (anti-subject) and ‘classless society’ (object), prevents the reflecting
subject from developing its sexual and ethnic narratives as crucial components of
its identity. This insight is made possible in a socio-linguistic situation in which
different but related discourses of Marxism face competition from other group
languages and tend to lose their relevance for individual subject constitutions after the
disintegration of European communism. In this situation, it becomes easier to break
out of Marxism, and this emancipatory move favours individualization in the sense of
Giddens and Beck. Relying on psychoanalysis as a newly discovered language, the
individual subject perceives new relevance criteria, definitions and possibilities on the
semantic isotopy of the ‘unconscious’ (cf. Chapter III, 2) which may appear as the new
sender (destinateur). On this semantic level, other actantial models come to the fore,
some of which are made up of infra-individual instances: the ‘ego’, the ‘id’ and
the ‘super-ego’ – along with the ‘unconscious’ that can assume a narrative form in the
analysis of dreams and thus crucially contribute to identity formation: to the
appropriation of the object ‘identity’.
However, the ‘unconscious’ need not consolidate identity; it may also call into
question the coherence of the subject’s narrative programmes by permanent semantic
shifts, by iterability in the sense of Derrida (cf. Chapter III, 2). The emergence of
coherence as iterativity (Greimas) can be impeded if the discovery of the unconscious
invalidates all classifications and definitions of the past by projecting ambivalence and
contradiction into everyday life, into Marxism and ethnicity, thereby removing the
object ‘identity’ from sight. It is conceivable that the subject proves unable to break out
of this hermeneutic circle of psychoanalytic reflection. This does not seem to be the
case of somebody like Seidler who decides to redefine his masculinity,48 thus preserving
continuity and coherence.
Naturally, radical discontinuities are possible, as is shown in Proust’s novel A la
recherche du temps perdu. The narrator Marcel grows up in the snobbish society of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, whose members cultivate elegant conversation as a status
symbol. The ideal of this society, whose symbolic capital is looked after by the old
nobility of the Faubourg, is the brilliant causeur, the master of conversation. Blinded by
this ideal, Marcel goes to great lengths in order to acquire the habitus (Bourdieu) of the
causeur and to impress others by witty talk. But gradually he discovers the nihilism of
conversation which does not admit any qualitative (cognitive, ethical, political) values
or differences because, as empty form or ritual, it is indifferent to all contents. What
matters is the right word at the right moment. The causeur can contradict himself as
much as he likes as long as he does it in a brilliant way.
However, conversation as sociolect does not exist in isolation; it is contested by the
discourses of art (of the composer Vinteuil, the painter Elstir and the writer Bergotte)
which keep unmasking it as a rhetoric indifferent to all values. This polyphony of the
pseudo-aristocratic world makes Marcel ponder on the true nature of his social milieu.
Eventually, in Le Temps retrouvé, he breaks with the Faubourg because, thanks to chance
and coincidence that appeal to his unconscious, he discovers the relevant semantic
difference between the spoken word of conversation and the written word of literature
– along with the semantic isotopy of ‘writing’. This is why, at the end of the novel, the
hero’s discourse tends to coincide with that of the narrator and the author Proust. In
many respects, the last part of the novel reproduces Proust’s language in Contre Sainte-
Beuve and the Carnets.49 The narrator as author discovers in writing the world of
qualitative differences (‘le monde des différences’)50 which he looked for in vain in the
world of conversation. A new semantic relevance inaugurates a new story that is not
narrated any more. But Proust’s essayistic, paratactically structured and fragmentary
novel shows how problematical subjectivity has become in late modernity.51
The basic ambivalence of the subject is due to the fact that both extremes are
conceivable: coherence and disintegration, iterativity and iterability in the sense of the
third chapter. These extremes form a dialectical nexus that calls into question both the
idealist and monological definitions of subjectivity proposed by Descartes, Kant, Fichte
or Hegel and their postmodern deconstructions. Dialogue, alterity and reflexivity are
ambivalent because they can both strengthen the subject’s coherence and cause its
disintegration. This insight does not justify a general scepticism towards subjectivity,
but is meant to yield a dialectical and flexible concept of the subject which is less
vulnerable to postmodern critiques.
(d) The ambivalence of chance

Concepts such as ‘subject constitution’, ‘identity formation’ and ‘identity work’
are related to the notion of intentionality and imply that narrative biographical
programmes always coincide with the intentions of their authors. However, individual
and collective subjectivity is ambivalent: not only because it can be strengthened or
weakened by a dialogue with the Other, but also because it is exposed to the contingency
of chance. It is a well-known fact that chance has always two sides to it: fortune and
misfortune. One should add that an event, which promises to be a stroke of luck, may
turn into misfortune a few moments later. A driver, whose car breaks down in the
middle of nowhere, is full of hope when he hears an approaching vehicle; his hope
dwindles when he realizes that the vehicle is driven by his worst enemy. Although this
caricature may not be realistic, it shows how easily chance can change the direction of
a narrative.
But what exactly is ‘chance’? Hermann Lübbe answers: ‘In practical philosophy, we
call events or processes “contingent” if they interfere with actions independently of the
latter.’52 Translated into the semiotics of narrative, this means that chance as a contingent
event is not foreseen within the narrative programme of the narrating and acting
subject. This does not imply that it cannot be integrated into this programme: for
chance as a stroke of luck can promote both individual and collective narrative
programmes. Lübbe considers every kind of chance as a challenge to the subject:
‘Chances that jeopardize the meaning of our action [. . .] challenge us to reintegrate
them into this meaning.’53 Luck within misfortune can yield a completely new narrative
programme: ‘An accident ends a normal career as a pianist and inaugurates an
extraordinary career as a critic.’54 In other words, the chance-related failure in one area
of life may lead to unexpected success in another area.
The basic ambivalence of chance seems to consist in the fact that the contingent
event – very much like dialogue and reflection – can contribute to both subject
constitution and subject disintegration. Neither Hegel nor his disciple and critic
Friedrich Theodor Vischer took this ambivalence of chance into account. While Hegel
tried to ban chance from systematic philosophy by integrating it into necessity, Vischer
insisted on the importance of chance, but considered it mainly as a negative
phenomenon.
Hegel holds ‘that the World of intelligence and conscious volition is not abandoned
to chance, but must show itself in the light of the self-cognizant Idea’.55 It is hardly
surprising that human action, which is often marked by irrationality, envy, forgetfulness
and alcoholism, falls short of this lofty ideal. A few decades after Hegel’s death,
Vischer wrote a satirical novel in which this ideal is ridiculed: Auch Einer. Eine
Reisebekanntschaft (1879). His favourite topic is a situation dominated by chance or the
‘malice of objects’56 and a concatenation of events beyond human control. An
anthropomorphic nature and its objects are seen as acting independently of human
intentions and projects.
Although Hegel tries to integrate chance into historical necessity, whereas
Vischer endows it with grotesque and almost mythical powers, both thinkers agree
on one point: chance appears to them as something negative and trivial that cannot
interfere with the course of history – or as an element that foils our intentions and
actions and eventually makes history appear as a meaningless agglomeration of
disasters.
However, chance need be neither trivial nor negative. It can be extremely productive:
for example, in an examination in which we are asked to comment on a topic we
happen to have explored in great detail. Discussing the role of chance in Balzac’s work,
Erich Köhler shows that the contingent event contributes crucially to the liberation of
the subject from the constraints of causality, necessity and fatality. It extends its scope
of action, enhances its autonomy: ‘Moreover, this very chance corrects the causal
motivation as an instrument of fatality by introducing moments in which autonomous
decisions become possible. Chance offers alternatives.’57
We are thus dealing with three models of contingency or chance. While Hegel
holds that the contingent event is trivial, Vischer tends to demonize chance, and to
Köhler it appears as a liberating principle.58 At this point, a return to the second chapter
(II, 8) might prove helpful. Unlike in Hegelian and Marxist discourses, which tend
to exclude all that is contingent and particular, contingency leads to distress and
disorientation in the works of the early Sartre and is experienced as a source of
liberation in Hesse and surrealism, where it helps the subject to break out of ideologies
and social conventions.
Eventually, contingency turns out to be ambivalent; it is liberation and submission,
chance and risk. In this respect, it is structurally similar to alterity, dialogue and
reflection which can contribute to the constitution or the disintegration of subjectivity.
The latter appears as oscillating permanently between the pole of construction and the
pole of deconstruction.
However, chance is not related to alterity in a purely formal way (i.e. as a strange
body in the subject’s narrative programme). It is an aspect of this alterity because, as
Vischer knew, it represents nature (the non-rational) within culture. This is the reason
why it is not only negated by Hegelians and Marxists, but by all ideologists hostile to
nature.
This fact is amply illustrated by Camus’s novel L’Etranger (The Outsider) in which
the narrator Meursault shoots an Arab in a situation dominated by the contingency of
nature. The public prosecutor, who represents a legal system whose discourses are
structured by Christian teleology, denies the role of chance: ‘To which the prosecutor
retorted that in this case “chance” or “mere coincidence” seemed to play a remarkably
large part.’59 This ironical remark is meant to insinuate that not chance, but a responsible
subject, is at the centre of the scene. However, this subject is defined as such within a
Christian and humanist ideology from which it seeks to escape by invoking contingency
and the indifference of nature. Within the ideological discourse, it is defined as a
Christian subject responsible to ‘God’ as its sender, because this discourse excludes a
contingency originating (as is the case in the novel) in the natural antagonism of fire
(sun) and water (sea).60 Its ‘intolerance of ambiguity’ (Adorno) confirms the Christian
origin of Hegelianism and the Hegelianism-Platonism of Christian religion. The latter
are related by their hostility towards nature – a hostility spotted early on by Nietzsche.
Their polemics against ‘chance’ are not aimed at something trivial, but – as Vischer
knew – at nature as the Other of Mind or Logos.
This means that an ambivalent and dialectical view, which makes chance appear
both as an obstacle and an opportunity in the subject’s development, opens subjectivity
to alterity: to inner and outer nature. In this context, the subject as self-producing
identity (cf. Chapter I, 1, c) recognizes the individual as its ipse (Ricœur), as the natural
basis of its social aspirations. The biologically contingent character of this basis is clear
to everyone, even to those who are not familiar with Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘most
humans are obviously by chance in this world’ (cf. Chapter II, 4). At the same time, the
subject recognizes the vital function of nature which is being increasingly exploited
and streamlined by a rationalist and Hegelian Logos. The models of a Dialogical Theory
and a dialogical Europe developed in the last sections ought to be read as reactions to
this process of streamlining.
2 The subject of Dialogical Theory
The subject of theory was already discussed in the first chapter (I, 1, d) in order to
explain the position of the author and clarify his arguments. The key argument of the
first chapter that will be resumed and developed here can be summed up in a few
words: a permanent dialogue with the Other (the other theory) encourages reflection on
the particularity and contingency of one’s own discourse and socio-linguistic situation; at
the same time, the ability to reflect upon the ideological basis of one’s theory holds
ideological dualism and discursive monologue at bay. In this respect, the subject of
theory hardly differs from the (general) dialogical subject as defined in the last section.
But unlike the subject of everyday life, it pursues a particular goal by seeking to
direct theory formation towards alterity and dialogue. The point is not to search – with
Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas61 – for a transcendental foundation62 of
arguments, but to ask how, in a fragmented and pluralist society, theoretical (scientific)
communication is possible in the human sciences. The preliminary answer is: by
reflecting upon one’s own and one’s discussion partner’s social and linguistic conditions of
theory formation.
This answer could provoke an ironical question: What do we gain if we discover
that these conditions are so heterogeneous that they preclude a dialogue? This
question is too extreme and thus beside the point because what is at stake is not a
comparison or interaction of incommensurate perspectives, but of theories
constructing similar objects (e.g. ‘religion’, ‘ideology’, ‘art’). More important than this
observation is the assumption that all theories as sociolects are – like ideologies
or literary texts – secondary modelling systems (in the sense of Lotman) produced
within the primary system of a natural language.63 Although they cannot be reduced to
this primary system without losing their function as specialized languages, they can
always communicate with each other via the primary system. One cannot but agree
with Karl-Otto Apel’s assumption that everyday language functions as a universal
metalanguage.64
However, the subject of Dialogical Theory is not only interested in scanning the
scopes and limits of scientific communication in postmodern fragmentation; it aims at
turning fragmentation into a theoretical asset and to give the critical testing of hypotheses
and theory formation in general a new impulse by introducing a dialogical confrontation

of heterogeneous theories.
In the process, the individualist and idealist character of the notion of intersubjectivity
is revealed. The ambiguity of this notion consists in the fact that it addresses – at least
in principle – all scientists involved in a problem, but in reality is only valid within the
sociolect of a scientific group. Thus a hypothesis accepted within a group of critical
rationalists may not even be understood in a group of systems theorists, let alone
accepted. A psychoanalytic hypothesis may not be accepted by critical rationalists
because it is not ‘falsifiable’ or refutable – or because it contains concepts which are not
deemed scientific.
This is why the subject of Dialogical Theory aims beyond the criterion of
intersubjectivity by adding the inter-collective criterion of interdiscursivity that is
geared towards communication between heterogeneous groups of scientists. At present
the question is: Which theorems or hypotheses that have been tested on an intersubjective
level within a particular group can also claim validity between ideologically and
scientifically heterogeneous groups?
The importance of this question for the constitution of the subject of theory is
obvious. If one remains within intersubjectivity, which is de facto (in spite of all
universalistic declarations to the contrary) always intersubjectivity within a group and
its language, then one’s subjectivity is inevitably shaped by a particular ideology. Only
a confrontation with heterogeneous groups of scientists and their sociolects reveals
alterity and allows for genuine dissent. Only beyond one’s own collective and its
language is there subjective liberty: the possibility of authentic scientific experience.
(a) Particularism vs. universalism: Lyotard and Habermas

A fruitful confrontation of heterogeneous discourses as envisaged here is possible
neither in Lyotard’s nor in Habermas’s models of language. In Lyotard’s case, this is due
to the fact that ‘language games’ are simply incommensurate; in Habermas’s case, a
meaningful confrontation of heterogeneous units is made impossible by his drive
towards uniformity which eliminates all particularities. In both cases, individual
subjectivity is hollowed out. Lyotard prevents the subject from crossing the boundaries
of its language while Habermas prescribes universally valid language rules to those
who participate in dialogue.
Although Lyotard calls the concept of subjectivity into question (cf. Chapter III, 1),
his key works La Condition postmoderne (1979) and Le Différend (1983) could be read
both as pleas for the respect of particular subjectivities in language and politics and as
deconstructions of individual subjectivity between incommensurate language games.
Let us have a closer look at his arguments.
He counters Habermas’s accusation that he is an irrationalist by arguing that ‘reason
is multiple’65 and that respecting the multiplicity of reasons (in science, law, ethics
and aesthetics) is all but irrational. In this respect, one cannot but agree with him.
He sets out from the politically and epistemologically plausible premise that it is both
wrong and unjust to judge one kind of language (here: sociolect) within another
language. According to him, it would be unjust and misleading to assess the value
of ethnomethodology, deconstruction or psychoanalysis within Critical Rationalism

and debunk all of these approaches because their hypotheses are not ‘falsifiable’
(refutable).66
Starting from Lyotard’s critique of Cartesian and rationalist universalism, all
scientists taking part in scientific discussions ought to realize that their criteria for
scientific standards are in the first place their particular criteria and that generally valid
criteria based on consensus will possibly crystallize in the course of the debates. Such
considerations are beneficial to theoretical dialogue because they invite all participants
to respect the Other’s subjectivity. (This is of course not how Lyotard, the critic of
subjectivity, would express it.)
His perspective is so particularistic that he could not even envisage a dialogue of
heterogeneous positions as sketched above. When he argues in The Postmodern
Condition ‘that there is no possibility that language games can be unified or totalized in
any metadiscourse’,67 he is certainly right because Hegel’s attempt at totalization boils
down to a philosophical take-over that cancels dialogue. Francis Jacques comments:
‘Until Hegel, the philosopher speaks for all and in the name of all; he recognizes the
other person only as a listener who is to be taught or as an adversary whose argument
has to be overcome like an obstacle.’68 As a radical critique of Hegel, Lyotard’s theory of
the ‘differend’ certainly contains moments of truth which are anticipated by Adorno’s
plea for the particular that is trivialized by Hegel (cf. Chapter II, 6).
However, Lyotard lapses into the other extreme whenever he views the social world
of ‘language games’ as an island world in which each island differs radically from all the
others: ‘The examination of language games, just like the critique of the faculties,
identifies and reinforces the separation of language from itself. There is no unity to
language; there are islands of language, each of them ruled by a different regime,
untranslatable into the others.’69 This particularization of language yields absurdities
when Lyotard asserts that the ‘differend’ is inherent in individual discourses which
combine heterogeneous phrase systems (originating in ethics, law or epistemology)
and when he criticizes the ‘case of one genre being invaded by another, in particular of
ethics and law by the cognitive [. . .]’.70 But it is difficult to imagine ethics and law
without elements of the ‘cognitive’, because ethics and law cannot do without logic and
argument.
The following aspects of Lyotard’s critique of language ought to be highlighted:
(a) It is certainly true that subjects of discourse (never mentioned by Lyotard) suffer
an injustice whenever heterogeneous phrase systems (e.g. sermon and science) are
connected in such a way that their differing criteria of truth are distorted. (b) In his
zeal to defend the particular, Lyotard seems to have forgotten the second part of
his postmodern credo: his plea in favour of heterogeneity and plurality. According
to Bakhtin, discourses can never be understood as monological monads which have
never absorbed otherness. For each discourse, each sociolect is a secondary modelling
system (Lotman) that originates in natural language and communicates with other
languages via this primary system. Moreover, almost every sociolect absorbs on the
lexical, semantic and narrative levels elements of other sociolects. Marxism is a
synthesis of Hegelianism and British Political Economy, Critical Rationalism emerged
from a liberal ideology, the discourses of the Vienna Circle, M. Weber’s sociology,
etc. Derrida’s deconstruction is inconceivable without Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s

critiques of metaphysics, Saussure’s linguistics, Freudian psychoanalysis, etc. Individual
and collective subjects, who are themselves dialogical syntheses of different languages,
are responsible for all of these combinations. (c) This also applies to Lyotard,
who violates the linguistic rules defined by himself in The Postmodern Condition
and The Differend, whenever he combines, in his very different publications,
heterogeneous languages such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s
philosophies and Lévinas’s ethics in order to produce what is generally called
‘postmodern thought’.
It is interesting to note that Lyotard uses the idea of linguistic heterogeneity in
analogy to the concept of the sublime (cf. Chapter III, 1). Eventually, this idea leads to
the insight that subjectivity is destroyed by the contradictions inherent in language and
that ‘each so-called individual is divisible and plausibly divided into a number of
partners.’71 Relying on Lyotard’s extremely heterogeneous intellectual biography and
his synthesizing work, one could also look at the matter the other way round: the
subject aims at a dialogical synthesis of heterogeneous languages.
In the introduction to this chapter, Calvin O. Schrag’s critique of Lyotard was
mentioned, especially his argument that there are transitions between the different
languages and that, in spite of its linguistic heterogeneity, the subject ‘remains present
to itself ’.72 This idea was anticipated in Germany by Manfred Frank who points out that
no ‘differend’ in Lyotard’s sense can be total because only languages which have certain
items in common can contradict each other.73 This is why it would be important to
examine the dialectic between identity and difference more closely.
Habermas does not do this. He accuses postmodern thinkers of being irrational
because they dismiss modern universalism74 and at the same time reinstates this
universalism by imposing on the communicating subjects a universally valid language
that deletes all (ideological, psychological) particularities. He himself takes the view
that one can only respond to the growing multiplicity of contemporary society by
making the rules of communication more abstract (i.e. by abstracting from
particularities): ‘The greater this multiplicity becomes, the more abstract the rules and
principles have to be that protect the integrity and the equality-based coexistence of
ever more estranged subjects and ways of life which insist on their difference and
alterity.’75 In short, Habermas would reject the accusation of being repressively
universalistic and argue that the high degree of abstraction postulated for the rules of
communication in an ideal speech situation is meant to protect the particularities of
the communicating subjects. The question remains how rules, which since Descartes
and Kant tend to negate all particularities (cf. Chapter II, 1), can at the same time
protect them.
Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action can certainly be read as a large-scale
attempt to neutralize all psychic, cultural and ideological particularities in a
universalistic manner. This neutralization of the particular is achieved in two phases:
by postulating a homogeneous life world common to all participants and by reducing
individual communications to speech acts as pragmatic forms of sentences. In both
phases, the discourse as transphrastic, semantic and narrative structure expressing
subjective interests is eliminated.
Habermas distinguishes a real (social) from a formal-pragmatic life world that

corresponds to the ideal speech situation and is defined as follows:
But the life world does not only have a context-founding function. It offers at the
same time a reservoir of convictions used by the communicating individuals, who
can thus satisfy the need for agreement arising in a particular situation by recurring
to generally accepted interpretations. As a resource the life world is fundamental in
processes of communication.76
Habermas obviously means the formal-pragmatic life world he has thoroughly purged
of all social strategies, antagonisms and ideological conflicts.
It is not altogether surprising that many critics have asked Habermas to explain the
consensus-oriented separation between the real and the formal-pragmatic life world.77
Even if one assumes (as the author of this book does) that Habermas has never really
succeeded in justifying this separation because the very idea of a homogeneous life
world, which obliterates social conflicts, is prone to misunderstandings, it is not difficult
to understand the function of the separation in Habermas’s discourse. It underlies the
distinction between a real and an ideal speech situation and justifies the argument ‘that
in each discourse we mutually presuppose an ideal speech situation’.78
What exactly does this ideal speech situation look like? It can be defined in a few
points. (a) As an idealizing construction it differs radically from the real communication
of everyday life. (b) It is free from social constraints and presupposes the communicative
equality of all participants. (c) It presupposes the interchangeability of dialogue roles.
(d) The only constraint it admits is that of the better argument. (e) It is presupposed by
all participants in every real communication.
In what follows, it will be shown that this construction is contradictory because it
negates what it is designed to further, namely the communication between heterogeneous
subjects. (a) An ideal speech situation which abstracts from real conditions of social
speech is only conceivable as an exchange of hollow phrases. (b) All sociolects and the
discourses they produce articulate interests and value judgements that are inherent in
the discursive relevance criteria, classifications and narrative sequences, all of which
form the subjectivity of the participants (i.e. the speaking subjects cannot renounce these
linguistic elements without negating their subjectivity and remaining speechless). (c) In
this context, the ‘interchangeability of dialogue roles’ is impossible because my role
depends on my discourse (sociolect). I may be able to ‘play’ the critical rationalist or the
‘Habermasian’ – but without believing in what I say. (d) The postulate that only the
constraint of the ‘better argument’ is acceptable is naive insofar as each sociolect (each
‘paradigm’, Kuhn would say) evaluates arguments differently. Habermas and Apel, for
example, would not accept the critical-rationalist argument that their hypotheses are
not ‘falsifiable’ (refutable).79 (e) Although one may expect good will and understanding
in every real communication, one cannot possibly expect the participants to give up
their sociolects and discourses – which constitute their subjectivity.
Habermas seems to expect this when he writes: ‘The communicated meanings
are basically identical for all members of a language community.’80 How is such a
‘language community’ to be imagined – and where is it? To the postmodernist or
deconstructionist reader, the following sentence may sound like a threat: ‘Different
speakers may not use the same expression with different meanings.’81 Who will prohibit
this? The homogeneous community imposed on the speakers by Habermas? The ‘ideal
speech situation’ that abstracts not only from all social constraints and power relations
of real socio-linguistic situations, but also from the concrete linguistic subjectivities of
the participants?
Habermas’s linguistic problem consists in his reliance on the Anglo-American
theory of speech acts which ignores the discourse as transphrastic structure in which
subjectivity comes about: ‘A speech act produces the conditions in which a sentence can
be used in an utterance; but at the same time it has the form of a sentence.’82 What
matters, however, is that it is not sentences which constitute individual and collective
subjectivity (because they are polysemous and polyfunctional), but discourses as
semantic and narrative structures. Since Habermas ignores discourse in its semiotic
(transphrastic) form, he also has to ignore subjectivity in its linguistic form: as a
discourse guided by interests.
A complementary aspect of the problem is revealed by Rainer Leschke who
points out ‘that linguistic structure is considered by Habermas as an anthropological
constant’. He adds: ‘The historical and sociological dependencies of the construct of a
communication free of domination are completely overlooked.’83 In fact, we are dealing
with an ‘idealization of concrete conditions’,84 as Leschke puts it. In what follows, this
misleading idealization will be dismissed and it will appear that the concrete or real
conditions of social communication offer possibilities ignored by both Lyotard and
Habermas.
(b) From the particular to the universal: Critical testing

It was shown that both Lyotard and Habermas deprive the individual subject of
power: in Lyotard’s case, its identity is lost among heterogeneous language games; in
Habermas’s case, it has to submit to abstract language rules. But the real subject of
theory, considered as a flexible dialogical instance, has a number of options when
facing the multiplicity of languages in a fragmented society.
Above all, it sees social heterogeneity as a chance for self-realization. Starting from
the criticism of Lyotard’s approach and from Lotman’s idea that all language games or
sociolects are secondary modelling systems rooted in the primary system of natural
language, the subject of theory attempts to relate heterogeneous languages to one
another in a dialogical perspective. At the same time, it views alterity as a catalyst in the
process of knowledge and subject formation.
The fact that alterity is not only an inter-individual but also (and above all) an inter-
collective matter, which appears whenever different groups of scientists try to tackle a
concrete problem, was recognized in very different contexts by Maurice Halbwachs
and Karl Mannheim.
Halbwachs, a French sociologist of the Durkheim group, sets out from the premise
that social differentiation generates different and competing ‘group logics’. He explains:
‘In that way many different logics evolved, each of which is only recognized within a
particular group that uses it after creating it.’85 But unlike Lyotard, Halbwachs is not led
to believe that society and language are incurably heterogeneous and subjectivity a
process of disintegration. The reason: ‘All these partial logics do of course share one
and the same origin.’86
Mannheim too, is aware of the heterogeneity of group languages, but he also scans
the horizon for possibilities of successful communication. To him, the difference
between communication within a world view or ‘perspective’ and communication
between world views or ‘perspectives’ appears as crucial. Within a particular perspective,
terminology is homogeneous and guarantees a relatively unproblematic –
intersubjective – communication. Like Halbwachs, Mannheim discovers
that when observers have different perspectives, ‘objectivity’ is attainable only in a

more roundabout fashion. In such a case, what has been correctly but differently
perceived by the two perspectives must be understood in the light of the differences
in structure of these varied modes of perception. An effort must be made to find a
formula for translating the results of one into those of the other and to discover a
common denominator for these varying perspectivistic insights.87
In Halbwachs’s, as in Mannheim’s works, one is struck by the fact that their authors
acknowledge the heterogeneity of scientific ‘perspectives’ or ‘logics’, but regard them as
obstacles to communication that can be overcome by retracing them to a common
origin or by translating them into one another. The model proposed here differs from
the models of the two sociologists in that it makes the heterogeneity of communicating
languages or sociolects (‘perspectives’, Mannheim; ‘group logics’, Halbwachs) appear as
an obstacle and an opportunity at the same time: as a challenge to the subject of theory
to go beyond itself and the language structures in which it originates in order to
become reflexive.
‘Become reflexive’ means: to turn one’s own discourse, sociolect and socio-linguistic
situation of origin into objects of critical analysis. At the same time, one’s own ideology
and culture are observed from the outside as it were: through the eyes of a stranger.
In the process, one’s own subjectivity is called into question: How does my discourse
as semantic and narrative structure come about? What relevance criteria, classifications
and actantial models is it based on? How does it differ in this respect from the discourse
of my interlocutor? Which discourses are possible within the sociolects of Marxism,
Critical Theory, Critical Rationalism or feminism? Which discourses are excluded and
for what reasons? What blind spots result from these exclusions?
Each of these questions may cause a certain discontent within one’s own sociolect
and prompt the insight that the objects we refer to are not identical with reality, but
constructed by us in a hypothetical manner. For discussions with other scientists
sporadically make us realize that outside our own sociolect(s) the same objects are
constructed differently. Objects such as ‘political party’, ‘institution’, ‘ideology’, ‘art’ and
‘subject’ are defined differently from sociolect to sociolect.
If, in the face of this liberating insight, one refuses to ‘escape from freedom’
(Fromm)88 and submit to an ideological and theoretical group language such as
Marxism or systems theory, one will doubt the practicability of intersubjective testing of
hypotheses. The intersubjectivity criterion is based on the idealist premise that, with
some good will, all individual subjects can somehow communicate, ‘because no subject
would come across the idea to communicate signs to another subject if it could not
presuppose intersubjectivity’.89
However, as soon as it becomes clear that we are not simply dealing with rational
individuals or scientists using a universal language, but (directly or indirectly) with
groups and sociolects, which do not always recognize each other’s terminologies and
arguments, the idea emerges that intersubjectivity as interindividual testing of
hypotheses is only possible within a particular group and its sociolect.
This idea is hardly ever explicitly formulated and very often ignored in the social
sciences. Thus Ronald Kurt introduces his study about subjectivity and intersubjectivity
with the following three sentences: ‘Sociology deals with social action. And social
action is linked to subjects who synthesize meaning. Therefore, sociology without a
subject is meaningless.’90 Within the sociolect of a phenomenological sociology in the
sense of Alfred Schütz, whom Ronald Kurt relies on, this may be the case. Within
Luhmann’s systems theory, matters look very different (cf. Chapter IV, 3) because his
sociology does not deal with the social actions of subjects and hence makes subject-
centred sociologies appear meaningless. In short, statements based on intersubjective
consensus within a particular group language may very well be dismissed as wrong,
irrational or absurd in another group language.
If, in the social sciences, the validity of intersubjectivity as a criterion for correct or
true statements is limited to a particular sociolect, then its claim to universal
applicability is lost. In extreme cases, intersubjective criticism or testing merely
confirms a collective doxa that the subject of Dialogical Theory cannot be content with.
Like the subject of everyday life that moves between ideologies and languages in order
to avoid submitting to one of them, the subject of theory moves between scientific
languages in order to gain an overview, enabling it to reflect upon the social and
linguistic situation of its time and upon the possibilities it offers scientists to articulate
their interests.
One of these possibilities seems to be the criterion of interdiscursive (intercollective)
criticism and testing of hypotheses that completes and corrects the individualist
criterion of intersubjectivity. Far from being ‘collectivist’, this move from the
interindividual to the intercollective level enhances the autonomy of the individual
subject who is no longer prisoner in a particular group language, but able to move
critically between sociolects and discourses and to assess their positions within a
particular socio-linguistic situation.
This reflexive and critical stance of the theorist of dialogue is not comparable to that
of Mannheim’s ‘free-floating intellectual’91 because this theorist does not deny a social
attachment to groups and their values. But his stance is similar to the position of most
subjects between ideology and market-based indifference. Confronting the indifference
of the market, which makes all ideological and theoretical positions appear as
interchangeable,92 he is led to reflect upon the contingent character of all (including his
own) value judgements and upon their effects on his own discourse and his object
constructions.
With Luhmann he asks, for example, which aspects of society he ignores (from the
point of view of a second degree observer) if he constructs reality in the perspective of
the subject instead of constructing it along the lines of a systems theory.93 He analyses
his own and his interlocutor’s ability to engage in dialogue: an ability that not only
depends on good will but also on the structure of a discourse. If this discourse is based
on a dualist structure in the sense of ideological dualism (cf. Chapter I, 1, d), a fruitful
dialogue is unlikely to come about because the discourse suppresses ambivalence and
the self-irony that goes with it. This means that the perspective opened up by
indifference enables the theorist to recognize the relativity of his premises and to view
with a certain critical and ironical distance his own value judgements and those of his
interlocutors.
This market-oriented critical distance would open onto a sterile relativism if it were
not permanently linked to an ideological engagement. Commenting on this problem,
Norbert Elias, who related the concepts ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’, ‘participant’
and ‘inquirer’ to one another, writes about scientists:
The problem confronting them is not simply to discard the latter role in favour of
the former. They cannot cease to take part in, and to be affected by, the social and
political affairs of their groups and their time. Their own participation and
involvement, moreover, is itself one of the conditions for comprehending the
problems they try to solve as scientists.94
Credo ut intelligam: without a conservative, individualist, ecological, feminist or

Marxist engagement, science would degenerate into empty rhetoric.
But what does the subject of Dialogical Theory stand for? The answer might be: for the
dialogical overcoming of his own and his interlocutor’s particularity and for a joint search
for truth which points beyond all particularities involved. In a debate about Dialogical
Theory in the German review Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften (4, 1999), the attempt to link
dialectically the particular and the universal led to several misunderstandings. Dialogical
Theory was misunderstood both as a postmodern plea for radical particularization and
as a rationalist attempt to impose universalist criteria (cf. Chapter V, 2, d). It is neither of
these two extremes, but an attempt to relate particular theoretical positions to one another
in order to make them yield insights in the course of a dialogue which can be generalized as
moments of truth located beyond the participating particularities.
In other words, it seems meaningful to use the polyphony (Bakhtin) of the real
speech situation, the socio-linguistic situation, for theoretical dialogue in order to
show that fruitful consensus is only possible among partly dissenting heterogeneous
groups and their languages. The basic idea is that the consensus reached between
heterogeneous positions (sociolects) is worth more than an intersubjective consensus
within a sociolect because it is accompanied and corrected by dissent.
(c) Interdiscursive theorems: Consensus and dissent

It is not by chance that Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ is frequently described as
consensus-oriented, whereas Lyotard’s ‘differend’ is seen as geared towards dissent.95
The dialogical subject, who is neither willing to accept disintegration among a
multitude of particularities nor the submission to an abstract universalism, opts in
favour of a dialectics of consensus and dissent. The permanent possibility of dissent on

the part of my interlocutor helps me to maintain a critical distance towards my own
sociolect and to see to it that my discourse avoids dogmatization.
The idea that the subject of Dialogical Theory ought to give up the search for a
Kantian transcendental foundation of knowledge (a search pursued by Apel and
Habermas)96 and replace it with critical testing originates in Critical Rationalism.
Commenting on the latter, Hans Albert writes:
In it [in Critical Rationalism] the Aristotelian ideal of knowledge and the search
for an absolutely certain foundation of knowledge is abandoned and replaced by a
consistent fallibilism accompanied by a methodological rationalism in which the
requirement of a foundation is replaced by critical testing.97
The question which leads from this observation to Dialogical Theory is: ‘Who tests?’
The answer ‘competent theoreticians or scientists’ is unsatisfactory because, as was
shown above, social science is heterogeneous and its heterogeneity is increasing. A
sociological hypothesis accepted as ‘useful’ or ‘worth testing’ by the disciples of Alain
Touraine may very well be rejected as meaningless by followers of Luhmann’s systems
theory because it contains the word ‘subject’. Psychoanalysts may go to great lengths in
order to give their hypotheses a ‘falsifiable’ (refutable) character and formulate as
follows: ‘There is no socialization without repression.’98 Critical rationalists are unlikely
to accept this hypothesis, simply because they reject the concept of the ‘unconscious’
which is inherent in the notion of ‘repression’. In other words, certain statements from
sociolect A are rejected in sociolects B, C or D – not only for formal, logical, but also
(and above all) for lexical, semantic, i.e. ideological reasons.
This basic problem, which has hitherto been neglected by scientists, lies at the core
of Dialogical Theory. This theory starts from the assumption that intersubjective
testing within a group of scientists may prove useful, but does not imply a critique of
ideology. For this reason it raises the question how statements or hypotheses can be
tested among heterogeneous theories and their languages.
This question not only originates in the discussions between Critical Theory and
Critical Rationalism, Lyotard and Habermas, but also in older discussions. Among
them is the polemical debate between Russian Formalists and Marxists which was
highly politicized and eventually led to the silencing of the Formalists under a
totalitarian regime. In spite of its abrupt ending, the debate reveals to what extent the
creative freedom of the subject of theory is to be found between the fronts and not
either in Marxism or in Formalism. The Formalists asked how the literary text is made
on a technical and stylistic level, whereas the Marxist focused on the genetic question
why a text is produced in a particular socio-historical situation. In the course of the
controversies of the 1920s, but especially during the discussions that took place in
Western Europe in the 1970s and 80s,99 it became clear that the question concerning
the why had to be linked to the question concerning the how – in spite of the fact that
the two questions originated in ideologically heterogeneous theories.100
Since then, sociosemiotics, the sociology of texts and critical narratology link the
how to the why and search for a sociological explanation of literary (artistic) forms.
Why did a certain way of writing (style, genre) come about in a particular social and
linguistic situation? This synthesizing question could never have emerged from either
the Formalist or the Marxist discourse. It is the product of a collision between
heterogeneous theoretical languages; it is interdiscursive in character.
In conjunction with the Formalism-Marxism debate the question arises: Which
theoretical statements are accepted among groups of scientists (i.e. on an interdiscursive
level) and which are rejected and why? In the process, a dialectics of consensus and
dissent comes to the fore. Given the fact that, as secondary modelling systems, even
heterogeneous sociolects overlap within the primary system of natural language on
lexical and semantic levels, they allow not only for communication but also for partial
consensus. However, as soon as arguments are put forward which are particular to the
lexical and semantic repertoire of the other sociolect, our own sociolect may react with
resistance and dissent. To the question whether their hypotheses are ‘falsifiable’ (in the
Popperian sense), Marxists, feminists and psychoanalysts tend to react with polemics.
Similarly, critical rationalists will not willingly accept concepts such as ‘surplus value’,
‘androgyny’ or ‘phallogocentrism’ because these concepts are not neutral (unlike
concepts such as ‘vertical’ or ‘horizontal’) but articulate interests and values that are
linked to particular sociolects.
Each theoretical dialogue thus tends to call into question the subjectivity of the
participants. Whenever somebody maintains that notions such as ‘androgyny’ or
‘phallogocentrism’ are meaningless words, then gender studies as a whole may be at
risk – along with those who identify with them. In such cases, the only option available
seems to be a defence of one’s own sociolect and its vocabulary in discourses using this
vocabulary. Commenting on the interaction of scientific paradigms, Thomas S. Kuhn
remarks: ‘Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense.’101
Although a paradigm in the natural sciences differs qualitatively from a sociolect in the
social sciences,102 they are both marked by a linguistic, social (ideological) and
narcissistic hermetism that stands in the way of communication. Kuhn comments:
‘Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing
paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life.’103
In this passage, Kuhn seems to yield – quite unnecessarily – to a postmodern
particularization à la Lyotard. For it was shown that some of his ideas concerning
paradigms were anticipated by Halbwachs and Mannheim within completely different
sociolects and socio-linguistic situations: for example, the idea that each collective
system follows a particular logic and applies this logic to itself and all other systems.
This can be considered as an interdiscursive theorem (linking Halbwachs, Mannheim
and Kuhn) which shows that gaps between heterogeneous systems can be bridged and
that the latter are not as incompatible as Kuhn and Lyotard suggest. A dialogue between
them seems possible.
One of the results of this intercollective or interdiscursive dialogue could be
interdiscursive theorems, i.e. theorems that are not anchored exclusively in the language
of one particular group, but are recognized within different groups. The search for
interdiscursive theorems is based on the idea that, in a scientific dialogue, consensus
and dissent form a dialectic nexus and that a consensus within dissent is more interesting
than a consensus reached by the members of a relatively homogeneous group. This
means that Dialogical Theory is geared neither towards consensus nor towards dissent,
but towards their interaction. In this respect too, it corresponds to a dialogical
subjectivity which thrives on a permanent dialogue with otherness.
The construction of the concept of ‘ideology’ in a dialogue between Critical Theory
and Critical Rationalism shows to what extent consensus and dissent are related. In
both types of theory, ‘ideology’ is defined as dualistic, monological thought that
identifies with reality, i.e. with its objects. In this context, Ernst Topitsch and Kurt
Salamun explain: ‘In conjunction with ideological modes of thought one frequently
makes the experience that orientation towards the world is based on a rigid bipolar,
dichotomous or dualistic scheme that is applied to virtually all social and political
phenomena, whatever their complexity.’104 Later on, Salamun criticizes the positivistic
tendency towards identifying thought with reality when he asks: ‘To what extent are
value judgements presented as such within ideologies and to what extent are they
concealed as self-evident facts that have been seemingly deduced from factual
knowledge with compelling necessity?’105 In this passage, both the identifying
mechanisms of ideological discourse (discourse = reality) and its tendency towards
monologue (discourse = truth) are dealt with.
Thus the interdiscursive definition of ‘ideology’ emerging from a dialogue between
Critical Theory and Critical Rationalism could be summed up as follows: Ideology is a
dualistic and monologic discourse whose subject does not reflect upon the contingency of
its value judgements, but identifies with reality thereby precluding the dialogue with other
discourses (cf. Chapter I, 1, d).
A dialogue with critical rationalists could prompt Critical Theory to become more
interested in strategies of immunization which are discussed in detail by Salamun in
conjunction with Popper’s approach: for example, implicit assumptions, empty phrases,
ambiguous expressions.106 This leads to the question how such strategies can be
analysed on a linguistic level.
These considerations should not be mistaken for an attempt to synthesize
heterogeneous viewpoints or – worse – bring about a global synthesis between Critical
Theory and Critical Rationalism in spite of their frequent confrontations and
quarrels.107 Such an attempt could only lead to confusion and ruin the dialogue
envisaged here. The aim is a consensus within dissent, and dissent is revealed as soon as
it becomes clear that, within Critical Theory, the alternative to ideology is dialectics –
and not ‘falsifiability’ or ‘refutability’ as in Critical Rationalism.
Dissent also breaks out when advocates of Critical Theory turn the critique of
ideology against the critical rationalists. Could it be that their Weberian attempts to
abstain from value judgements conceal certain social values underlying the relevance
criteria and classifications of their discourses and of their sociolect as a whole?
What matters is not the answer to this question but the insight that the interdiscursive
definition of ‘ideology’ emerges from a consensus in dissent and thus differs qualitatively
from definitions produced on an intradiscursive level within a particular group
language and type of discourse. The interdiscursive definition has a different social and
linguistic status.
Refusing to think exclusively within a particular theory and its sociolect, the subject
of Dialogical Theory also moves between consensus and dissent. It keeps moving
between collective languages and communities of scientists. At the same time, it adopts
a heretic attitude towards its own theory (i.e. Critical Theory) by directing it towards
semiotics and the critical testing of Critical Rationalism. It nevertheless holds on to the
values of Critical Theory – especially to its idea of an autonomous subject – and expects
its interlocutors to abide by their theoretical positions and their scale of values. For a
dialogue only makes sense if our interlocutors maintain their identities, their otherness.
(d) The practice of dialogue: Psyche, language, politics

(metacommentaries to a discussion)
Dialogical Theory in its general form (not as a theory of dialogical subjectivity) was
discussed in a special issue of the German review Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 4.
Although Bakhtin was hardly ever mentioned in the course of the debates involving
mainly philosophers and social scientists, the discussion as a whole was marked by
polyphony in Bakhtin’s sense.
The basic tenets of such a discussion were summed up by Anton Simons: ‘None of
the participants has a truth monopoly. Each statement is followed by an answer of the
Other, and this answer cannot be entirely anticipated. Although we can try to convince
the Other, this situation in itself implies that he may not adopt our viewpoint.’108 The
dialogue is open, unending and, in this respect, is structured in very much the same
way as dialogical subjectivity whose openness guarantees versatility and an unhampered
development.
Not all critiques of Dialogical Theory set out from this consideration. They ranged
from approvals and attempts to apply Dialogical Theory to outright rejection. On the
whole, they revealed a highly fragmented postmodern communication situation
marked by scientific differentiation, ideological antagonisms and group interests.
Against this background, it is not altogether surprising that one of the participants
writes: ‘One [can] fully agree with Zima’s intention’,109 while another warns his readers
‘against continuing the kind of activities propagated by Zima’.110 The following
contradictory statements can only be understood in the context of a dialogical and
polemical plurality: ‘The project is clear’111 and: ‘I could not understand this text.’112
This kind of problem cannot be solved in conjunction with factors such as ‘good
will’, ‘linguistic competence’ or ‘level of intelligence’. This is why, in spite of its ethical
aspects,113 Dialogical Theory is neither an ethic, nor an ‘appeal to good instincts’,114 nor
a theory of individual cognition, but a sociosemiotic115 aiming at the social and
linguistic conditions under which individual factors such as ‘good will’ may or may not
manifest themselves. If somebody lacks good will (for psychic, social or ideological
reasons), then the best arguments are put forward in vain. Dialogical Theory was not
mapped out for this kind of person, but for those who refuse to be turned into subjects
(i.e. subjected) by a particular group language – be it that of Critical Theory, Critical
Rationalism, systems theory or Marxism. It is intended for those who hope to gain new
insights and increase their autonomy by crossing language borders and by getting to
know those who are different. What is thus required (apart from a theoretical
competence), is the search for knowledge and truth that cannot be successful within a
monologue.
The discussion in Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften also revealed the somewhat

discouraging fact that there are quite a few scientists who are not interested in crossing
borders, but prefer to remain within the group language they grew up with.116 They
resemble individuals who resent conversations in a foreign language (because they
threaten their subjectivity) and who therefore show little interest in scientific
discussions that take place in other languages and cultures. The interest in another
culture often runs parallel to the interest in another group language or another
science.117 The often unavowed refusal to leave one’s culture or language bears witness
to a narcissistic fear of otherness. In the foreign culture or language, in the other group
language and its ‘strange’ terminology, the linguistic foundations of one’s own
subjectivity might be threatened.
Fortunately, not all participants suffered from xenophobia. Many of them helped
the author to transform Dialogical Theory into a ‘building site’118 that could at one
point become a forum for further discussions. During the debate, four basic questions
crystallized which will be commented on briefly because they may have come up in the
reader’s mind. (a) How can homogeneous group languages be distinguished from
heterogeneous ones? (b) How can theorems of one sociolect be translated into the
language of another sociolect? (c) What impact do collective interests have on the
dialogue between groups of scientists? (d) How do discussions in the natural sciences
differ from discussions in the cultural sciences?
The first question can be answered as follows: theories or compounds of theories can
be linguistically homogeneous for genetic or for typological reasons, either because they
influenced each other or because they evolved in similar historical and social situations.
In this respect, all phenomenological approaches in philosophy, sociology, linguistics
and literary theory are linguistically homogeneous and compatible because they
emerged from Husserl’s phenomenology and influenced each other in many cases. In a
different context, Critical Theory is related to Freudian psychoanalysis because the latter
had a considerable impact on the thought of authors such as Adorno, Horkheimer,
Marcuse and Fromm. On a typological level (i.e. without mutual influence or a common
origin), Critical Theory is akin to Alain Touraine’s sociology of action (cf. Chapter IV, 4)
which was also conceived as a critique of society and designed as a support for individual
and collective subjects. Heterogeneous on a typological level are theories emerging from
ideologically different collective languages and using incompatible actantial models
(e.g. collective instead of individual actants) which articulate (partly) incompatible
social interests: for example, Critical Theory and Critical Rationalism whose attitudes
towards liberal capitalism are incompatible. This argument also applies to Baudrillard’s
social philosophy and Luhmann’s systems theory. This is why a dialogue between these
four heterogeneous theory compounds is of particular interest because it can yield
interdiscursive theorems: for example, the idea common to critical theorists and critical
rationalists that ideologies are dualistic discourses whose dualisms are intensified in
times of crisis – or the idea shared by Baudrillard and Luhmann that individual actions
have been replaced by systemic operations. (It is obvious that this subject-negating idea
is also important for Critical Theory and Touraine’s sociology of action.)
It may be useful to point out that similarities and divergences are always theoretical
constructions. From Luhmann’s point of view, both Critical Theory and Critical
Rationalism may appear as subject-centred theories of action. Nevertheless, this

somewhat unorthodox reconstruction does not make the two theory compounds
linguistically or ideologically homogeneous.119
The problem of translating group languages into one another is difficult to solve
because ideological and theoretical sociolects, which emerge as secondary modelling
systems from the primary system of natural language (Lotman), articulate particular
points of view and the corresponding interests. This is why they differ from natural
languages which do not express particular interests of individuals or groups. Left-wing
and right-wing groupings can translate their manifestos or programmes into all
languages; but a Marxist group will refuse to use the word ‘stratum’ for ‘class’ in order to
make itself understood in American Functionalism. At this point, it becomes clear how
ideological problems can turn into linguistic and theoretical ones. However, it is
precisely this heterogeneity as a source of dissent that appeals to the theoretician of
dialogue because it produces a fascinating phenomenon: ideologically heterogeneous
theories often intersect, and at their intersections theorems emerge which are quite
independent of all kinds of collective consensus and collective doxa. The aim of all this
cannot be, of course, to find a scientific language common to all sociolects, a universal
language in the sense of Otto Neurath.120 Such a universal language would only level off
all the differences that matter and that are crucial for the emergence of scientific
languages. The fact is that the psychoanalyst wishes to express ideas which are different
from those of the psychologist and hence needs a terminology that differs from that of
empirical psychology. If, for communication’s sake, psychologists and psychoanalysts
decided to express all of their ideas in a natural language (English, French, German),
they would give up their subjectivity as scientists. The natural language is nevertheless,
as primary system and as the most general metalanguage, crucial to the communication
between heterogeneous scientific group languages. Problems of translatability, of
semantic equivalence or non-equivalence can best be formulated in a natural language.
The fact that an equivalence in the logical or mathematical sense is as impossible
between natural languages as between scientific sociolects, is confirmed by both
semiotics and theories of translation.121 However, what matters is not semantic
equivalence (e.g. of the word ‘ideology’ in Critical Rationalism and in Critical Theory),
but the agreement on interdiscursive theorems or statements such as: ‘In times of
political crisis the dualisms of ideological discourses are intensified.’
During the debates, the Marxist Wolfgang Fritz Haug quite rightly emphasized the
role of collective interests and of domination in an interdiscursive dialogue. He objects
to Dialogical Theory: ‘In outlining the problem, Zima already reduces antagonisms to
differences and the antagonists to strangers who are defined as “heterogeneous”.’122 He
goes on to ask: ‘But are those heterogeneous instances not also antagonistic because
they represent antagonistic social groups?’123 At this point a misunderstanding has
crept in to which semiotic theories often fall prey in Marxist discourses. Marxists tend
to assume that semiotics is an attempt to replace society and its economy with language.
This is obviously not the case. For it goes without saying that language groups are held
together by material interests and that – as was pointed out elsewhere124 – such interests
are articulated in the lexical repertoire of a sociolect, in its semantic and narrative
structures. This fact became manifest during the polemical discussions between
Marxists and Formalists (cf. supra) and is time and again revealed in debates between
Marxists and feminists, psychoanalysts and critical rationalists, functionalists and
advocates of Critical Theory. All depends on how objects such as ‘society’ or ‘socio-
linguistic situation’ are constructed in discourses. If the constructions are aimed at
dialogue because the discourse subject seeks new experience and knowledge,
antagonisms tend to become differences. Who can seriously believe that a fruitful
discussion with the ‘class enemy’ is possible? In his novel The Man without Qualities,
Robert Musil shows that such discussions end in silence.125 Haug himself tells us that
several Marxist-Leninists left a debate on ‘interparadigmatic communication’ organized
by him.126 He ought to have realized that constructions of society and language that are
based on class antagonisms are prone to ideological dualism. If critical rationalists or
advocates of systems theory are light-heartedly defined as ‘proponents of capitalist
interests’, then dialogue becomes impossible and subjectivity is petrified in ideology.
The autonomy of the subject coincides with its freedom to move among sociolects and
groups without submitting to a particular dualism or an ideological and theoretical
linguistic ruling. In this respect, Dialogical Theory is not only a discourse of ambivalence
whose subject seeks truth in the discourse of an opponent, but also (and maybe above all)
a discourse of individual freedom.
In the cultural sciences, this freedom is permanently threatened by ideological
engagement because subjects tend to identify with particular ideological and theoretical
(scientific) programmes. The sociologist Johann August Schülein and the physicist
Rudolf A. Treumann, who took part in the discussion published in Ethik und
Sozialwissenschaften, both took the view that natural scientists speak a homogeneous
language (e.g. in physics) and that for this reason interdiscursivity was not relevant
to them. Thus Schülein points out that natural scientists ‘have a common language
(or find it more easily)’ and that ‘the contact between physicists and chemists [. . .]
is not as burdened by problems as that between utilitarians and systems theorists
within sociology (not to mention the contact between sociologists and historians)’.127
This argument is confirmed by Treumann: ‘Naturally, the methodological advantage
of the natural sciences is due to the existence of an objective language which
makes it possible to test the validity and the quality of a theory. This language is
mathematics.’128 Thanks to this language, which seems to unify the subjectivities of all
natural scientists, it is not difficult for subjects of natural sciences to revise their
opinions, on the contrary. ‘Nothing is easier for him’, writes Treumann about the subject
of physics, ‘than revising his opinion if confronted with a new observation, insight
or theory.’129
This may sound like a simplification if one takes into account the paradigmatic
hurdles discussed by Thomas S. Kuhn or Karin Knorr-Cetina’s empirical studies which
emphasize the linguistic heterogeneity of natural sciences.130 But on the whole, it can
be assumed that the multiplicity of – ideological – languages that marks cultural
sciences does not exist in natural science. Unlike in the natural sciences, individual and
collective engagement in the cultural sciences shows to what extent subjective identities
can be called into question by new insights and new theories (e.g. by psychoanalysis,
feminism or deconstruction). If, for example, a social scientist such as Theodor
Geiger,131 who sets out from an individualist ideology, denies the existence of collective
consciousness, he not only threatens the foundations of Durkheim’s sociology, but at

the same time calls into question the Durkheimian moral subject who would like to
strengthen the conscience collective and the cohesion of society as a whole. A possible
reaction to this ‘threat’ is the ideological monologue whose subject categorically refuses
to embark on an open dialogue with the Other.
In this situation, interdiscursive dialogue makes it possible for individual subjects to
reconsider their engagement critically and to reassess their ideology by trying to look
at it through the eyes of others, their interlocutors. It is this kind of critical attitude
towards one’s own point of view that preserves the individual subject from being
subjected by an ideological and theoretical compound. Only in a situation where the
voice of the Other is still heard is there hope for individual development.
3 ‘The dialogue or Europe’
This epilogue, which is both a conclusion and an outlook, is meant to link dialogical
subjectivity to the emerging polyphonic identity of Europe and at the same time return
to the topics of the second chapter. In that chapter, Fichte’s subjective idealism appeared
as a metaphysical attempt to subsume otherness to the One, the Germanic origin. The
Romance nations were thus presented as Latinized Germanic tribes who had forsaken
their native tongues (cf. Chapter II, 1).
Fichte’s philosophy may not be a model of German and European romanticism,132
for romanticism as an international phenomenon is – very much like modernism or
postmodernism – a complex and contradictory problematic (not an ideology) within
which liberal, conservative and even anarchistic tendencies coexist and interact. It will
never be possible to relate the works of Shelley, Coleridge, Chateaubriand and Victor
Hugo to a common ideological denominator because romanticism is politically and
aesthetically too heterogeneous. In spite of this, it can be shown that there is a romantic
tendency towards unification, a tendency to oppose the authentic One to the inauthentic
Other. Unlike modernism, whose authors have introduced stylistic heterogeneity and
literary polyphony (Bakhtin), the romantic discourse is marked by a penchant towards
homogeneity, stylistic or aesthetic unity and monologue.
This penchant is discernible in Novalis’s essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799)
where the Reformation is not primarily seen as a justifiable critique, but as a threat to
the One, to homogeneity. The first sentence announces a yearning for lost unity: ‘It was
a beautiful, magnificent era, when Europe was a Christian country, when One
Christianity inhabited this continent formed by human hand.’133 What matters is not
the question to what extent the past referred to by Novalis is a myth, but the theme of
the One and Indivisible that runs through his text.
In view of this monistic orientation, it is hardly surprising to hear the author
conclude: ‘The Reformation heralded the end of Christianity.’134 Although he shows a
lot more understanding for the Protestants than Fichte for the ‘foreign nations’, he
never makes a secret of his idea that the loss of unity entails the loss of authenticity.
Although he admits that the Protestants introduced important reforms, he blames
them for forgetting ‘the necessary result of their process, [for separating] the inseparable
[for dividing] the indivisible Church and [deserting] the universal Christian
community within which alone the real, permanent renaissance was possible’.135
The similarity of the argument patterns is striking. Like Fichte, who regrets the
separation of the ‘Latinized Germanic nations’ from the original Germanic tribe,
Novalis considers the Protestant secession as a sin, not as an invitation to dialogue. In
what follows, a model of European integration will be mapped out that is not indebted
to a homogeneous past but aims at a polyphonic unity in the linguistic, social and
political sense. This unity could become the basis of a dialogical identity of individual
subjects: not only in Europe, but also in other multilingual regions of the world.
(a) Language and subjectivity

The arguments of the first two sections of this chapter are developed here along with
the central idea that the interaction with the Other is crucial to the development of
one’s own subjectivity. Dialogical Theory starts from the assumption that the testing of
hypotheses should not stop at the borders of one’s own sociolect, but should take place
between heterogeneous group languages. What applies to the relations between
sociolects as secondary modelling systems also applies to the interaction of natural
languages as primary systems.
In present-day Europe, in the European Union, the individual subject stands
between languages and has the possibility to learn the language(s) of the Other and to
experience cultural alterity. From the point of view of another culture, the world often
looks very different from what it appears to be in one’s own culture. Whoever refuses
to surrender to a ready-made opinion by subscribing to a particular newspaper or by
routinely watching a certain national TV programme, might look for alternatives in
other cultures and languages. A versatile person of this sort might find that the Croatian
Jutarnji list and the Serbian Politika (both rich in relevant and questionable reports)
present developments in the Balkans in a very different light from British, German or
French media. An even more curious reader, who ventures to cross the Macedonian
border into Greece, will experience the verbal battles between Ta Nea and To Vima
which sometimes open up stunning perspectives for Greece, its neighbours and the
Balkans as a whole. Within this cultural and ideological multiplicity, an autonomous
and critical stance vis-à-vis Balkan history and politics is more likely to crystallize than
among the stereotypes of West-European tabloids. Like the movement between
scientific sociolects, the polyphonic oscillation between natural languages can widen
the horizon of the critical and self-critical subject.
Commenting on Roman antiquity, Bakhtin shows that, far from being an abstract
utopia, multilingualism is a European phenomenon: ‘Roman literature at the outset
was characterized by trilingualism. “Three souls” lived in the breast of Ennius.’136
Habermas remains well below this level when, discussing European unity, he pleads in
favour of the universal use of English: ‘Even the necessity of a common language –
English as second first language – should not turn into an insuperable obstacle, given
the contemporary state of education.’137 Konrad Schröder quite rightly objects that the
model of a ‘universal language’, which proclaims English (or rather: international
English) the ‘only supranational means of communication in the EU’,138 reduces the
other European languages ‘to the level of regional languages or patois’.139 This could
entail resentment, nationalist reactions and even the atrophy of languages. Schröder
seems to follow Bakhtin when he proposes a European trilingualism based on the idea
that one ought to know one’s neighbour’s language: ‘This is why the linguistic and
cultural education of the citizens of the European Union ought to follow the pattern
regional language / national language, language of the neighbour (in a general sense),
international language.’140 This approach is succinctly endorsed by Thierry Fontenelle:
‘Multilingualism is a key element of the European building.’141
This multilingualism was also a salient feature of medieval Europe whose feudal
families and clans occasionally used up to six or seven languages. Naturally, this
polyglot communication often turned into a Babylonian confusion, and Jacques Le
Goff explains how medieval scholars attempted to ban the ghost of Babel by using
Latin. ‘But what kind of Latin?’ he asks, and answers: ‘An artificial Latin, from which its
authentic heirs, the “popular languages” dissociated themselves.’142 Invigorated by
popular support, these heirs made up the linguistic situation of medieval Europe
because they dominated everyday life. ‘The living reality of the medieval West’, writes
Le Goff, ‘is the triumph of the popular languages, the growing number of interpreters,
translations, dictionaries.’143 This multiplicity, which anticipates that of the European
Union, was celebrated in 1030 by the Hungarian King Stephen I:
The guests, who come from different countries, bring along different languages,
customs, instruments and weapons, and this great multiplicity is a credit to the
kingdom, an adornment for the court and for the external enemies a source of fear.
For a kingdom that only disposes of one language and one tradition is weak and
vulnerable.144
He might have added that the subjects of such a kingdom are also ‘weak and vulnerable’
because they are prisoners of one language or culture and hence incapable of perceiving
alternatives.
From this point of view, the European Union, in which ‘all official languages [. . .] are
in principle also working languages’,145 appears as a permanent critique of ideological
monologue insofar as it offers individual subjects the possibility to consider cultures,
languages and ideologies from the outside as it were, thus depriving them of their claim
to absolute validity. Whoever was able to listen to the BBC or to Radio Moscow during
the Second World War was not at the mercy of National Socialist propaganda. Even in
contemporary European society, those who can rely on the media of other cultures will
be in a better position to criticize a nationalist ideology or the policy of a media mogul
than somebody who is monolingual and hence more dependent on an ideology or a
media monologue.
Once more, the ambivalent relationship between individual autonomy and dialogue
comes to the fore. A dialogue with cultural, scientific or ideological otherness can
confuse us; but it can also strengthen our subjectivity by enhancing its critical capacities.
One of the greatest problems of European integration is due to this ambivalence. For
many, the cultural and linguistic polyphony of Europe is a chance they will take
advantage of; for others, it may turn out to be a risk they cannot cope with. Therefore it
is the responsibility of the national governments of Europe and of its supranational

institutions to improve multilingual education and to create more European schools
and universities, especially in border areas.146 For individual subjectivity also depends
on institutions, as Castoriadis rightly points out.147
Relying on George Herbert Mead’s sociology of interaction, Dragan Sorić shows to
what extent European integration has an impact on the formation of individual
identities. The generalized Other in the sense of Mead stretches across national borders
and influences the constitution of subjects on an intercultural level: ‘The framework of
the so called “generalized other” was extended beyond national borders to cover large
parts of Europe and thus became the basis of identity expansion.’148 Moreover, the
Other may no longer appear as a stranger, but as a European relative: ‘Within the
consciousness of every European, it became clear that the other identity has a lot in
common with one’s own.’149 More often than not, the emergence of a European identity
leads to the historical insight that the former stranger is closer to us than we think
because Europe has always been a polyphonic unity.150
(b) Movement and historicity

In spite of these developments, the polyphonic unity of Europe cannot be the only
basis of a new individual subjectivity. The latter depends to a large extent on social
movements in the sense of Touraine (cf. Chapter IV, 4) which envisage a united Europe
that goes well beyond a ‘common market’. The ‘greens’, militant women, workers
threatened by unemployment and the unemployed themselves are not primarily
interested in the completion of the European market (the importance of which is
not in doubt), but in a new subjectivity that successfully resists reification by market
laws and state bureaucracies. The basic aim of these groups and their members, who in
the past were objects rather than subjects of history, is to become recognized actors
whose actions have an impact on economic and political developments and on
administration.
In agreement with Touraine’s theory of social action and the new social movements,
Pierre Bourdieu pleads in favour of a European labour movement which would not
impede the economic and financial integration process, but give it a new direction by
adding a social dimension. Although he tends to exaggerate, Bourdieu is certainly not
wrong when he points out that the advocates of neo-liberalism are more interested in
economic advantages than in a European federal state:
Only a European social state would be capable of countering the disintegratory

effects of monetary economics. But Mr Tietmeyer and the neo-liberals do not want
either national states, which they see as simple obstacles to the free functioning of
the economy, or, a fortiori, the supranational state, which they want to reduce to a
bank.151
In the end, Bourdieu quite rightly pleads in favour of a ‘European state’152 capable of
controlling the European Central Bank. At the same time, he asks the members of the
Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB) to form, together with other European
trade unions, a supranational workers’ movement that would protect the employees of
Europe against international ‘social dumping’.153
A European trade union of this kind would not only protect its members, but at the
same time act at the level of historicity in the sense of Touraine. Completing the
projects of big business, which until now has been the driving force of European
integration, it would contribute to the development of a social and political Europe
capable of controlling the multinational trusts and the European economy as a whole.
This development presupposes a new consciousness of workers, employees and the
unemployed who would no longer content themselves with defensive actions, but
would take the offensive by demanding structural changes.
The expression ‘structural changes’ refers neither to a mythical nor to a real (and
failed) socialism, but to a new subjectivity of employees aiming at a social Europe in
which the potential of workers’ control and self-administration would be re-examined.
The debates about alternative forms of economic organization have not come to an
end – yet. In some respects, they complete Alain Touraine’s and Blaise Ollivier’s research
into the development of new individual and collective subjectivities in the economy
and in society.154
The analyses of Lore Voigt-Weber reveal the importance of alternative businesses:
‘Alternative businesses see it as their primary political goal not to cut themselves off or
to be marginalized, but to have an impact on society and to practise criticism by trying
out alternative ways of working and living.’155 Voigt-Weber considers this approach as
an alternative to traditional left-wing policies, which relied heavily on the ‘revolutionary
role of the proletariat’, and invokes W. Kraushaar who – like Touraine and Ollivier –
emphasizes the role of the subjective factor in an alternative economy: ‘Instead of a
direct attack on the structures of the capitalist system, the main objective of the
strategies in question is the development of the subjects along with the construction
of an alternative economic system.’156 It would be important to ensure that
this development of a new subjectivity based on workers’ control is not limited to
local experiments, but endorsed by a European trade union movement at the
level of historicity. At this level too, Work as the Other of Capital ought to recover
its speech.
Along with the workforce, in which the oldest movements of Europe originate,
women’s movements and ecological movements are having an increasing impact on
European politics. Like workers’ movements of the past, they also seek alternatives to a
male-dominated economy by adopting the perspective of an exploited nature and an
equally exploited female workforce. Touraine considers them as the most important
movements in contemporary society (cf. Chapter IV, 4), and their importance is due to
the fact that a dialogical unity of Europe is impossible as long as half of its population
is disadvantaged and nature continues to be exploited.
Together with movements of workers and the unemployed, women’s organizations
and ecological groupings try to influence European historicity in order to make sure
that social development takes a different direction on a regional, national and
supranational level. It is by no means certain that the direction will change because
economic forces continue to dominate events – and the historical process is open-
ended.
This is probably the reason why Françoise Gaspard, who seeks to develop Touraine’s
approach, dwells upon the ambivalence of feminist movements. On the one hand, she
realizes that these movements are unstable and often ephemeral (cf. Chapter III, 8); on
the other hand, she emphasizes what has been achieved so far: ‘In the meantime,
however, social relations have changed thanks to the activities of women.’157 Ideas
about the function of gender in the professional world have also changed in the sense
that the ideological dualism separating rigorously male from female professions is
gradually dissolving. ‘The concept of androgyny as a social and personal strategy of
self-assertion’158 in the sense of Sophie Karmasin has certainly not abolished the
traditional role distribution, but stereotype ideas about geology, engineering or science
as necessarily male professions are being eroded by a changing practice. Gradually,
society accepts the excluded Other and thus changes its appearance. The popularization
of ‘androgyny’ is a symptom of this structural and functional change.
In an analogous fashion, environment ideologies make themselves felt in the
economy. Although not everything is as eco-friendly as producers claim in adverts,
‘nature’ and ‘environment’ are nowadays among the most important economic and
political topics. ‘Green’ movements and parties have crucially contributed to this
change by criticizing the subjugation of nature by civilization and by pointing to the
dependence of culture on nature. For Europe, this insight is crucial because this densely
populated continent is about to be suffocated by its economy, its polluting conurbations
and its traffic jams. It goes without saying that a rationally ‘green’ environmental policy
is in the interest of humanity as a whole.
The question as to what all of these social movements have in common can be
answered in in one word: subjectivity. Both workers and the unemployed begin to
move in order to cease being objects of administration and to turn into subjects. In a
complementary fashion, groups of women have been agitating since the nineteenth
century in order to make themselves heard and gain recognition for the excluded half
of society. The main goal of ecological movements is also subjectivity, for the latter
would become meaningless if its biological basis, individuality as corporeity, were
destroyed by an environmental catastrophe. The spirit vanishes if it is abandoned by
nature. Repressed and tabooed by rationalists and Hegelians alike, this insight was
regained by the Young Hegelians and Nietzsche and put into practice by the ecological
movements of Europe.
Together with other groupings, the three movements – workers, women, ‘greens’ –
aim at historicity in the sense of Touraine. They categorically reject the evaluation of
social developments on the basis of purely quantitative criteria. The exchange value, the
market-orientation and the maximization of profit are not decisive to them, but
qualitative values such as health, equality, self-realization and creativity. They mobilize
ideological potentials against market-based indifference, alterity against reification.
The individual subject of late modernity, who adopts the point of view of ambivalence,
will seek to avoid both: indifference and ideology (in the sense of dualism and
monologue).
Since it seems unlikely that the ephemeral social movements alone will be able to
bring about a qualitative change in historicity, the question arises whether a historical
instance is in sight that could turn into a driving force and make this change possible.
This instance can only be a future European federal government which takes Pierre
Bourdieu’s warnings seriously and sees to it that the European Union does not
degenerate into a ‘common market’ dominated by banks.
(c) Towards European politics

In spite of their heterogeneous character and their instability, the social movements
may one day respond positively to the proposal of a European government to act in
unison in order to make sure that the European Union will not be reduced to its
economy. For this reason Europe not only needs a constitution, as Jürgen Habermas
quite rightly points out,159 but also a federal government capable of relating the
ideological projects of the various movements to the economic development of the
country as a whole. The historical importance of the economy for European integration
should not be underestimated. Hitherto it has been the driving force of unification
which now suffers from a political deficit.
Balancing this deficit would be one of the main tasks of a European government
which, far from agitating against the economy or ‘capital’, would defend the Union’s
economic interests and the common currency. For it will appear in the course of time
that a stable common currency presupposes political integration and that those who
believe that a currency union is possible without a political union are wrong.160 The
expression ‘European politics’ also refers to a common economic and financial policy
that would thwart all attempts to reduce the EU to a ‘common market’ and to leave its
destiny in the hands of bankers and financial markets.
However, ‘European politics’ go well beyond the economic domain. They are meant
to encourage the aspirations of social movements and strengthen their subjectivities
on an individual and collective level. What applies to economic and monetary union
also applies to social movements. In view of a progressing economic and political
integration, they can only be successful on a European level. A European government
could crucially contribute to their success by seeing to it that, in addition to a
quantitative, economic historicity, a historicity of cultural values and political aims
emerges. This is what Touraine means when he refers to the ecological movements and
to women’s movements as mouvements culturels.161
In this context, European politics would not only deal with economics and social
movements, but also with nations. At first sight, the relationship between the EU and
its nation states might appear as antagonistic. It is often presented in this light in the
media, for example, in The Economist (6 November 1999), where P. David discusses
the question of British unity and identity under the title ‘Undoing Britain’. ‘Is one of the
world’s most durable states dissolving itself?’162 he asks, and ponders on the European
Union as an identity project that might compete with traditional British identity.163 The
presence of the European Union, he argues, makes Scottish independence seem
realistic, because without this presence the nationalist project of the SNP would be full
of gaps and imponderables: How could an independent Scotland be defended? What
currency would it use?164 It may well be that European integration will unleash
centrifugal forces in some nation states (e.g. in Spain or even in Italy) when a common
foreign and defence policy takes shape.
On the whole, however, European integration looks more like a completion of

national projects, not like their negation. This is amply illustrated by the EU’s support
for young democracies such as Greece, Portugal and Spain and by the national hopes
which countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary,
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia project into their European
future – after decades of subjugation and humiliation. Outside the Union, Albanians,
Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Ukrainians hope to develop
functioning democracies which will one day enable them to join the European project.
Against this background, it seems misleading to postulate an antagonism between
European federation and nation. It seems more likely that the words ‘nation’ and
‘national identity’ will take on new meanings in a European context. National
aspirations may very well be linked to European ambitions and projected onto a
European level. In 1986, for example, a Catalonian political party asked the European
Community to recognize Catalan as one of its working languages: ‘que el català hi fos
una de les lengues de traball’.165 A European government familiar with recent history
will take requests of this kind very seriously because they originate in countries which
were subjugated and whose populations hope to realize their identities within the
European Union.
This link between national and European identity was revealed in the days of German
reunification. Unlike nationalist politicians, who considered this event with mixed
feelings, a European federalist could consider this process of reunification as the
geographical, political and symbolic core of European unity. For the two reunifications –
the German and the European – coincide, if not chronologically, at least structurally,
and announce an era in which European identity encompasses national and regional
identity. Subjectivity as a search for identity (cf. Chapter I, 1, c) emerges on a collective
level within a common project, and this project appears, from a German point of
view, as German-European reunification. In a South European perspective, it appears as a
process of democratization. Many inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe see it as a
‘return to Europe’ – and their point of view is shared by those inhabitants of post-imperial
Britain who identify with a European future because they realize that the past never
returns.
Against this backdrop, the task of a European government takes on concrete
contours. It would seek to strengthen the collective subjectivities of movements, nations
and regions within the framework of a new, polyphonic historicity. Only if the collective
subjects and their languages have a chance to develop is there a hope that the individual
subject as a member of a minority or a small nation, as a working woman or an
unemployed man, can make sense of the future within a historical project and escape
the atomization of contemporary narcissism.
This development can hardly materialize as long as institutional and collective
support is missing. In this situation, individual subjects will continue to be manipulated
by nationalist propaganda, market laws and a growing advertising industry. This is the
reason why, in this book, individual subjectivity was always considered in conjunction
with collective subjectivity and institutional conditions: because the search for identity
always takes place in a particular historical, social and linguistic context. This context
is open and subject to contingency.
Notes
1 T. W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. I, New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1991, p. 106.
2 Cf. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age,
Cambridge, Polity, 1991.
3 Cf. R. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School. Its History, Theories and Political Significance,
Cambridge, Polity, 1995, chap. VII and VIII.
4 Cf. M. Horkheimer, Traditionelle und kritische Theorie, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1970, p. 30.
5 Cf. N. Elias, ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’, in: British Journal of Sociology
1, 1956, pp. 234–5.
6 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Idéologie, théorie et altérité: l’enjeu éthique de la critique littéraire’, in:
Etudes littéraires 3, 1999, pp. 17–18.
7 C. O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity, New Haven-London, Yale Univ. Press, 1997,
p. 30: ‘The slide from diversity, plurality, and multiplicity to heterogeneity, paralogy,
and incommensurability is too hurried (. . .).’
8 Ibid., S. 32.
9 Cf. W. Welsch, Vernunft. Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der
transversalen Vernunft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1996, chap. X.
10 The silence of the narrator in the modern novel is discussed in: P. V. Zima, Roman und
Ideologie. Zur Sozialgeschichte des modernen Romans, Munich, Fink, 1999 (reprint),
chap. X.
11 T. Todorov, ‘Bakhtine et l’altérité’, in: Poétique 40, 1979, p. 507.
12 A. Touraine, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble? Egaux et différents, Paris, Fayard, 1997,
p. 111.
13 Cf. A. Touraine, ‘La Formation du sujet’, in: F. Dubet, M. Wieviorka (eds.), Penser le
sujet. Autour d’Alain Touraine (Colloque de Cerisy), Paris, Fayard, 1995, p. 32.
14 Indirectly Touraine does this in his book Comment sortir du libéralisme?, Paris, Fayard,
1999, pp. 116–17.
15 The idea that late modernity and postmodernity are problematics (i.e. noetic systems
dominated by certain questions and problems) and not homogeneous world views is
developed in: P. V. Zima, Modern / Postmodern. Society, Philosophy, Literature,
London-New York, Continuum, 2010, chap. I.
16 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Ambivalence et dialectique: entre Benjamin et Bakhtine’, in: idem:
Théorie critique du discours. La discursivité entre Adorno et le postmodernisme, Paris,
17 Cf. P. V. Zima, The Philosophy of Modern Literary Theory, London-New Brunswick,
Athlone-Continuum, 1999, chap. V. 3: ‘Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s Young Hegelian Aesthetics’.
18 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1973), London-New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 141.
19 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London, Athlone, 1997, pp. 115–16.
20 R. Musil, Die Schwärmer, in: idem, Gesammelte Werke, vol. VI, Hamburg, Rowohlt,
1978, p. 379.
21 H. Broch, Die Schuldlosen, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1974, p. 147.
22 U. Beck, E. Beck-Gernsheim, ‘Individualisierung in modernen Gesellschaften
– Perspektiven und Kontroversen einer subjektorientierten Soziologie’, in: U. Beck,
E. Beck-Gernsheim (eds.), Riskante Freiheiten, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1994, p. 14.
23 I. Craib, Experiencing Identity, London, Sage, 1998, p. 55.
24 S. Karmasin, ‘Das Androgyniekonzept als soziale und personale
Durchsetzungsstrategie’, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3, 1992, p. 4.
25 Cf. E. Zolla, L’androgino. L’umana nostalgia dell’interezza, Como, Red Edizioni, 1989.
26 F. Jacques, Dialogiques, Paris, PUF, 1979, p. 6.

27 M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, Cambridge (Mass.)-London, M. I. T. Press,
1968, chap. II.
28 M. Holquist, Bakhtin and his World, London-New York, Routledge, 1990, p. 49.
29 M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Problema rečejnych žanrov’, in: idem, Estetika slovesnogo tvorčestva,
Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1979, p. 237.
30 Cf. A. Ponzio, Michail Bachtin. Alle origini della semiotica sovietica, Bari, Dedalo, 1980,
pp. 175–6.
31 Cf. M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in: idem, The Dialogic Imagination. Four
Essays (ed. M. Holquist), Austin, Univ. of Textas Press, 1981, p. 316: ‘We sense acutely
the various distances between the author and various aspects of his language, which
smack of the social universes and belief systems of others.’
32 G. Lozanović, ‘Roman i dialogičnost u Bahtina’, in: Umjetnost Riječi 3–4, 1993, p. 211.
33 Cf. T. Todorov, Mikhaïl Bakhtine – le principe dialogique suivi de Ecrits du Cercle de
Bakhtine, Paris, Seuil, 1981, p. 156.
34 Cf. H. Keupp, Riskante Chancen. Das Subjekt zwischen Psychokultur und
Selbstorganisation. Sozialpsychologische Studien, Heidelberg, Asanger, 1988, pp. 141–51.
35 C. Castoriadis, L’Institution imaginaire de la société, Paris, Seuil, 1975, p. 159.
36 J. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1994.
37 O. Schwemmer, ‘Die symbolische Gestalt der Subjektivität oder Ein altes Rätsel noch
einmal bedacht’, in: W. Hogrebe (ed.), Subjektivität, Munich, Fink, 1998, p. 50.
38 M. Frank, ‘Subjekt, Person, Individuum’, in: M. Frank, G. Raulet, W. van Reijen (eds.),
Die Frage nach dem Subjekt, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1988, pp. 10–11.
40 Ibid., p. 330.
41 L. J. Prieto, Pertinence et pratique. Essai de sémiologie, Paris, Minuit, 1975, p. 148.
42 P. Bourdieu, Leçon sur la leçon, Paris, Minuit, 1982, p. 15.
43 R. Bubner, ‘Wie wichtig ist Subjektivität? Über einige Selbstverständlichkeiten und
mögliche Mißverständnisse der Gegenwart’, in: W. Hogrebe (ed.), Subjektivität, op. cit.,
p. 246.
44 Different linguistic meanings of relevance are discussed in: D. Sperber, D. Wilson,
Relevance. Communication and Cognition, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, chap. III.
45 Cf. H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry, Oxford, Univ. Press, 1973.
46 Cf. D. Sperber and D. Wilson, Relevance, op. cit., p. 124.
47 V. J. Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity. Reason, Language and Sexuality, London-New
York, Routledge, 1989, p. 101.
48 Ibid., p. 200.
49 Cf. M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Paris, Gallimard, Bibl. de la Pléiade, 1971,
pp. 598–9; M. Proust, Le Carnet de 1980 (établi et présenté par P. Kolb), Paris,
Gallimard (Cahiers Marcel Proust), 1976, pp. 97–8.
50 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Von Marcel Proust zur Dekonstruktion: Le “monde des différences”’, in:
U. Link-Heer, V. Roloff (eds.), Marcel Proust und die Philosophie, Frankfurt, Insel, 1997.
51 Cf. P. V. Zima, Roman und Ideologie, op. cit., chap. II.
52 H. Lübbe, ‘Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung’, in: G. v. Graevenitz, O.
Marquardt (eds.), Kontingenz, Munich, Fink, 1998, p. 35.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, New York, Dover Publications, 1956, p. 10.
56 F. T. Vischer, Auch Einer. Eine Reisebekanntschaft, vol. II, Wurmlingen, Schwäbische

Verlagsgesellschaft, 1879 (reprint s.d.), p. 289.
57 E. Köhler, Der literarische Zufall, das Mögliche und die Notwendigkeit, Munich, Fink,
1973, p. 47.
58 Cf. ibid., pp. 48–9.
59 A. Camus, The Outsider, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961, p. 96.
60 The reconstruction of the narrator’s subjectivity in the discourses of ideology are
commented on in: P. V. Zima, L’Indifférence romanesque. Sartre, Moravia, Camus
(1982), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005 (revised ed.), chap. IV.
61 Cf. K.-O. Apel, ‘Die Kommunikationsgemeinschaft als transzendentale Voraussetzung
der Sozialwissenschaften’, in: idem, Transformation der Philosophie, vol. II, Das Apriori
der Kommunikationsgemeinschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1973), 1976 and: J. Habermas,
The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II, The Critique of Functionalist Reason,
Cambridge-Oxford, Polity-Blackwell, 1989, chap. V.
62 A critique of Apel’s approach can be found in: H. Albert, Transzendentale Träumereien.
Karl-Otto Apels Sprachspiele und sein hermeneutischer Gott, Hamburg, Hoffmann und
Campe, 1975, pp. 147–9.
63 Cf. Y. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, Ann Arbor, Univ. of Michigan Press,
1977, chap. II.
64 Cf. K.-O. Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, vol. II, op. cit., pp. 341–3.
65 J.-F. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, Minneapolis, The Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997,
p. 127.
66 Cf. P. V. Zima, Modern / Postmodern, op. cit., pp. 221–4.
67 J.-L. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Univ.
Press, 2004, p. 36.
68 F. Jacques, Dialogiques, op. cit., p. 10.
69 J.-F. Lyotard, Political Writings, London, UCL Press, 1993, p. 20.
70 J.-F. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, op. cit., p. 135.
71 Ibid., p. 140.
72 C. O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity, op. cit., pp. 32–3.
73 Cf. M. Frank, Die Grenzen der Verständigung. Ein Geistergespräch zwischen Lyotard und
Habermas, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1988, p. 79.
74 Cf. J. Habermas, ‘Philosophie und Wissenschaft als Literatur?’, in: idem,
Nachmetaphysisches Denken. Philosophische Aufsätze, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (1988),
1992, pp. 242–7.
75 J. Habermas, Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 202.
76 J. Habermas, Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns,
77 Cf. J. Alexander, ‘Habermas’ neue Kritische Theorie: Anspruch und Probleme’, in:
A. Honneth, A. Joas (eds.), Kommunikatives Handeln. Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas’
‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns’, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1986, p. 95.
78 J. Habermas, ‘Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen
Kompetenz’, in: J. Habermas, N. Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder
Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung?, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1971,
p. 136.
79 The relationship between sociolects is similar to that between paradigms as described
by Thomas S. Kuhn: ‘Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s
defense.’ (T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago-London, The Univ.
of Chicago Press [1962], 1996 [3rd ed.], p. 94.)
80 J. Habermas, ‘Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik’, in: idem, Kultur und

Kritik. Verstreute Aufsätze, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1973, p. 283.
81 J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge-Oxford,
Polity-Blackwell (1990), 1992, p. 87.
82 J. Habermas, ‘Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen
Kompetenz’, op. cit., p. 103.
83 R. Leschke, Metamorphosen des Subjekts. Hermeneutische Reaktionen auf die (post-)
strukturalistische Herausforderung, vol. I, Frankfurt-Bern-Paris, Lang, 1987, p. 184.
84 Ibid.
85 M. Halbwachs, Classes sociales et morphologie, Paris, Minuit, 1972, p. 150.
86 Ibid., p. 151.
87 K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge,
London-Henley, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1936), 1976, p. 270.
88 Cf. E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941), New York, Avon Books, 1965, chap. V.
89 R. Kurt, Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität. Kritik der konstruktivistischen Vernunft,
Frankfurt-New York, Campus, 1995, p. 173.
90 Ibid., p. 5.
91 A critique of Mannheim’s concept of ‘free-floating intellectuals’ can be found in:
P. V. Zima, Ideologie und Theorie. Eine Diskurskritik, Tübingen-Basel, Francke, 1989,
chap. III. 2.
92 An example of indifference as interchangeability of positions is: S. Fish, Is There a Text
in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge (Mass.)-London,
Harvard Univ. Press, 1982 (2nd ed.), pp. 14–16. Fish’s point of view is criticized in:
P. V. Zima, The Philosopohy of Modern Literary Theory, op. cit., chap. IX.
93 Cf. N. Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1990, p. 76,
where it is said ‘that for all kinds of observation an observer, i.e. a system, is
responsible which therefore can itself be observed’. But who observes systems theory
and its blind spots?
94 N. Elias, ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’, in: The British Journal of
Sociology 1, 1956, p. 237.
95 Cf. M. Frank, Die Grenzen der Verständigung, op. cit., p. 10.
96 Cf. K.-O. Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, vol. II, op. cit., p. 429 and J. Habermas,
Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, op. cit., p. 163.
97 H. Albert, Die Wissenschaft und die Fehlbarkeit der Vernunft, Tübingen, Mohr-Siebeck,
1982, p. 48.
98 This example is a paraphrase of Popper’s own examples in: The Logic of Scientific
Discovery (1959), London-New York, Routledge, 2002.
99 Cf. for example: T. Benett, Formalism and Marxism, London, Methuen, 1979,
Routledge, 1989.
100 The Hegelian origin of Marxist aesthetics is discussed in: P. V. Zima, The Philosophy of
Modern Literary Theory, op. cit., chap. V.
101 T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, op. cit., p. 94.
102 The specific character of paradigms in natural sciences is discussed in: K. Bayertz,
Wissenschaftstheorie und Paradigmabegriff, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1981, p. 110.
103 T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, op. cit., p. 94.
104 E. Topitsch, K. Salamun, Ideologie. Herrschaft des Vor-Urteils, Vienna, Langen-Müller,
1972, p. 57.
105 K. Salamun, Ideologie und Aufklärung. Weltanschauungstheorie und Politik, Vienna-
Cologne-Graz, Böhlau, 1988, p. 105.
106 Cf. ibid., p. 77 and p. 105.

107 Cf. A. Giddens (ed.), Positivism and Sociology, London, Heinemann (1974), 1978.
108 A. Simons, Het groteske van de taal. Over het werk van Michail Bachtin, Amsterdam,
SUA, 1990, p. 9.
109 W. Neuser, ‘Wissenschaftliche Kommunikation und wissenschaftliche Position’, in:
Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 4, 1999, pp. 635–6.
110 G. Endruweit, ‘Regeln für interdisziplinäre Forschung statt einer Theorie des
Holzwegs’, in: Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften, op. cit., p. 614.
111 H. Bußhof, ‘Dialogische Theorie: Bedingung für Erkenntnisfortschritt in den
Sozialwissenschaften?’, in: Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften, op. cit., p. 607.
112 W. Nothdurft, ‘Unverständnis und Vermutung – eine trostlose Lese-Erfahrung’, in:
Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften, op. cit., p. 638.
113 Cf. P. V. Zima, ‘Idéologie, théorie et altérité: l’enjeu éthique de la critique littéraire’,
op. cit., note 6.
114 Cf. F. Apel, ‘Dialogische Theorie und Kanalbauwesen’, in: Ethik und
Sozialwissenschaften, op. cit., p. 597.
115 Cf. P. V. Zima, Textsoziologie. Eine kritische Einführung, Stuttgart, Metzler,
1980.
116 Cf. Ph. W. Balsinger, ‘Dialogische Theorie? – Methodische Konzeption!’, in: Ethik und
Sozialwissenschaften, op. cit., p. 604. Balsinger suggests that Dialogical Theory be
replaced by P. Lorenzen’s constructivism. Not much is gained by this move – from a
dialogical point of view.
117 It is interesting to note that English, German and French debates about ideology
rarely overlap. Cf. for example: O. Reboul, Langage et idéologie, Paris, PUF, 1980 and
K.-H. Roters, Reflexionen über Ideologie und Ideologiekritik, Würzburg, Königshausen
und Neumann, 1998. The two bibliographies reveal two fundamentally different
scientific cultures.
118 Cf. H. Nicklas, ‘Die Dialogische Theorie: Eine Baustelle’, in: Ethik und
119 Object constructions in sociology, psychology or the theory of literature can differ in
many respects, but they are never entirely arbitrary and often overlap in crucial
points.
120 Cf. O. Neurath, ‘Universaljargon und Terminologie’, in: idem, Gesammelte
philosophische und methodologische Schriften, vol. II, eds. R. Haller, H. Rutte, Vienna,
Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1981, p. 906. Neurath discusses the possibility of a universal
scientific language.
121 Cf. W. Dressler, ‘Der Beitrag der Textlinguistik zur Übersetzungswissenschaft’, in:
V. Kapp (ed.), Übersetzer und Dolmetscher. Theoretische Grundlagen, Ausbildung,
Berufspraxis, Heidelberg, Quelle und Meyer, 1974, p. 62: ‘A complete, unequivocal (. . .)
equivalence does not exist in translation (. . .).’
122 W. F. Haug, ‘Möglichkeiten und Grenzen interparadigmatischer Kommunikation’, in:
Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften, op. cit., p. 619.
123 Ibid., pp. 619–20.
124 Cf. P. V. Zima, Ideologie und Theorie, op. cit., chap. VII where ‘relevance’ and
‘classification’ are considered as instruments of domination.
125 R. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Gesammelte Werke, vol. IV, Hamburg,
Rowohlt, 1978, p. 1455.
126 W. F. Haug, ‘Möglichkeiten und Grenzen interparadigmatischer Kommunikation’,
op. cit., p. 618.
127 J. A. Schülein, ‘Gegenstandslogik, Theoriestruktur, Institutionalisierung. Vom Problem

der Dialogfähigkeit zum Problem der Theoriebalance’, in: Ethik und
128 R. A. Treumann, ‘Verständigung und Verstehen’, in: Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften,
op. cit., p. 652.
129 Ibid.
130 Cf. K. Knorr-Cetina, Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Zur Anthropologie der
Wissenschaft, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1984, pp. 271–3.
131 Cf. T. Geiger, Arbeiten zur Soziologie. Methode, moderne Gesellschaft, Rechtssoziologie,
Ideologiekritik, Neuwied-Berlin, Luchterhand, 1962, p. 427.
132 Cf. A. v. Bormann (ed.), Volk – Nation – Europa. Zur Romantisierung und
Entromantisierung politischer Begriffe, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1998.
133 Novalis (F. von Hardenberg), ‘Die Christenheit oder Europa’, in: idem, Schriften,
vol. III, Stuttgart-Berlin-Cologne, Kohlhammer, 1983, p. 507.
134 Ibid., p. 513.
135 Ibid., p. 511.
136 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, op. cit., p. 63.
137 J. Habermas, Die Einbeziehung des Anderen. Studien zur politischen Theorie, Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1997 (2nd ed.), p. 191.
138 K. Schröder, ‘Dreisprachigkeit der Unionsbürger – Ein europäischer Traum?’, in:
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2, 1999, p. 156.
139 Ibid.
140 Ibid, p. 159.
141 T. Fontenelle, ‘English and Multilingualism in the European Union’, in: Zeitschrift für
Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2, 1999, p. 123.
142 J. Le Goff, La Civilisation de l’Occident médiéval, Paris, Flammarion, 1982, pp. 254–5.
143 Ibid., p. 255.
144 Ibid., pp. 256–7.
145 K. Schröder, ‘Dreisprachigkeit der Unionsbürger – ein europäischer Traum?’, op. cit.,
p. 155.
146 The foundation of European universities in bilingual and trilingual regions such as
Catalonia and Istria could contribute to the development of these regions.
147 Cf. C. Castoriadis, L’Institution imaginaire de la société, op. cit., chap. VI.
148 D. Sorić, Die Genese einer europäischen Identität. George Herbert Meads
Identitätskonzeption dargestellt am Beispiel des europäischen Einigungsprozesses,
Marburg, Tectum Verlag, 1996, p. 107.
149 Ibid.
150 The Istrian-Croatian author Milan Rakovac presents the trilingual peninsula of Istria
(Slovenian, Croatian, Italian) as a possible model of a polyphonic Europe:
cf. M. Rakovac, ‘Mens sana in utopia histriana’, in: Vjesnik, 27th May 2000, p. 4.
151 P. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance. Against the Myths of Our Time, Cambridge-Oxford,
Polity-Blackwell (2000), 2004, p. 62.
152 Ibid., p. 63.
153 Ibid., p. 62.
154 Cf. B. Ollivier, L’Acteur et le sujet. Vers un nouvel acteur économique, Paris, Desclée de
Brouwer, 1995.
155 L. Voigt-Weber, ‘Alternativ profitieren? – Strukturen und Probleme alternativen
Wirtschaftens in der Bundesrepublik’, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 1–2,
1986, p. 157.
156 Ibid., p. 158.

157 F. Gaspard, ‘Le Sujet est-il neutre?’, in: F. Dubet, M. Wieviorka (eds.), Penser le sujet,
op. cit., p. 152.
158 Cf. S. Karmasin, ‘Das Androgyniekonzept als soziale und personale
Durchsetzungsstrategie’, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3, 1992.
159 Cf. J. Habermas, Die Einbeziehung des Anderen, op. cit., p. 189–91.
160 Cf. B. Scholten, ‘Euro-visie’, in: Europa in beweging 1, 2000, p. 2: ‘The EMU will also
function without a political union.’
161 Cf. A. Touraine, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble?, op. cit., pp. 175–83.
162 P. David, ‘Undoing Britain’, in: The Economist (‘A Survey of Britain’), 6th November
1999, p. 3.
163 Ibid., p. 4.
164 Ibid., p. 7.
165 Quotation from the election programme of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in
view of the European elections in June 1986.
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Index
abandonment of concept of subject 32, Critical Theory 13, 22, 50, 66, 98–102,
45–6, 48 250
Abel, G. 89 damaged life 150, 152
Abercrombie, N. 57 n.122 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno
absolute 'I' 72 and Horkheimer) 19, 22, 68, 98, 99,
absolute Spirit 78 100, 186, 202
absolute thought 82 and the dogma of idealism 3
abstract subject 18–19, 22, 26, 49, 77, 89, essay style 66
203, 213, 218, 231 and Foucault 157
absurdity 115 and Hegel 100, 109
actantial models 9, 11, 17, 34, 69, 75, 82–3, identitarian thought 18
90, 106, 114, 180, 224, 258, 275 and ideology 162
actants 7–10, 31, 38, 51, 70, 180, 218, 232, intolerance of ambiguity 253, 261
258 and Kierkegaard 85, 86
action (social) 180, 232, 237, 269, 281 Minima Moralia 37–8, 66, 102
action, concept of 220, 229, 239, 251, 275, negative aesthetics 136, 140, 183–4
281 Negative Dialectics (Adorno, 1966) 23,
actors 5, 11, 15, 32–3, 42, 49, 71, 104–5, 29, 46, 50, 100, 138, 250
111, 116, 152, 179–81, 205, 218, 221, negativity 249, 250, 252
227, 229–35, 239, 251–2 and Nietzsche 98
adaptation 37, 87 particularization 264
adaptive control systems 40 Philosophy of Modern Music 118
addressees (destinataires) 9, 67, 82 ‘psychotechnical manipulation’ 117
addressers (destinateurs) revised psychoanalysis 41
divine addressers 68, 82, 83, 87, 95, 114 and Sartre 98
and Nietzsche 89 on subjective experience 44
and Other 179 and the sublime 135, 139
in theories of the subject 7, 8, 11, 16, 34 and truth 168
truth 83 aesthetics
World Spirit as 73–8 and the autonomy of the subject
Adler Magister 86 70
Adorno, G. 62 n.245, 100 de-differentiation 225
Adorno, T. W. and narcissism 176
Aesthetic Theory (Adorno, 1970) 23, radical aesthetics 134
45–6, 65, 100, 138, 139, 148 and the sublime 135–7
Authoritarian Personality 103 agency 179, 186, 202
autonomy 37 Albert, H. 271
and coherence 183–4 Alexander, J. 288 n.77
and the consciousness of nonidentity alienation
23 and alterity 215
contradiction in theory of subject 138 and anomie 175
305
306 Index
and A Clockwork Orange 115 ambiguity 1–3, 69, 72, 81–2, 88, 134,
and convention 83 141–3, 171, 188, 203, 209, 253, 261,
and culture 204 263
Deleuze on 144 ambivalence
as division 171 ambivalence of nature 108
and language 173 ambivalence of values 107, 109–15
language wall 168 and bureaucracy 205
and mass psychology 104–5 and chance 260–2
and psychoanalysis 173 and dialogical views of subjectivity
and stigmatization 154–8 251, 259
subject-object 78 and feminism 180, 187, 282
and truth 148 in literature 45, 49
Allport, G. W. 38 and modernism/ postmodernism 51,
alterity 171
and alienation 215 and multilingualism 280
and Bakhtin 20 and negation 252–4
and chance 261 and Nietzsche 86–92
and Critical Theory 98–102 and particularity 82, 85
and dialogical views of subjectivity radical ambivalence 249
251, 252 and Sartre 93
and ego 227 anachronism 227
and Fichte’s ‘I’ 91 anarchism 82, 84, 235
and knowledge 267 Anders, G. 210, 212–13, 215, 216
and nature 76, 97 androgyny 180, 187, 253–4, 282
and open dialogue 253, 255 animal man 33
and reflexivity 256 anomie 31, 175
and the stranger within 111 Ansart, P. 229
Althusser, L. anthropology 168, 267
and anti-movements 235 anti-addresser (anti-destinateurs) 7, 11, 75,
category of the subject 12–13, 14, 26 90
and the dogma of idealism 3 ‘anticipation of reconciliation’ 2
and failing subjectivity 159 anti-movements 234–5
and Freud 168 antiquated character of man 212
hybrid position re late modernity anti-social individuals 105, 117
134 anti-subjects (anti-sujects) 7, 9, 75, 90,
ideological malleability of subject 116, 224
135 anxious ‘I’ 48
and ideology 162, 221 Apel, F. 290 n.114
interpellation 165 Apel, K.-O. 162, 262, 266
and Lacan 167–8, 169 apocalypticism 216
and language 102 aporias 46, 50–3, 181, 182, 186–7
and Luhmann 220–1 arbitrariness of the sign 141, see also
and over-determination 36 signifier-signified
and pluralism 164 Aristotle 92, 271
and power 181 Aron, R. 165
process without subject 93 art
production of subjectivity problem and Baudrillard 225
160–1 mimetic principle of art 23, 46, 65,
subjugation 51 98–102, 159
Index 307
postmodern art 140 shift from inner to other-directed

and sociolects 259 individual 28
surrealism 112, 139 subjective 12, 16, 25, 26, 36
artificial actants 7–10 of systems 225
artificial intelligence 9, 24 autopoiesis 222, 226, 227, 231
artificial subjects 9, 24 auto-reflexivity 15
Arvon, H. 84 auto-regulation 224
Asholt, W. 131 n.295 avant-garde 113, 137–8, 139, 188, see also
Aubenque, P. 123 n.54 surrealism
Auch Einer (Vischer) 50, 65, 81, 109, 260
Aufhebung 85 Bachelard, G. 168
aura 137–8 Badinter, E. 180, 253
Austin, J.L. 143 Bakhtin, M. M.
autarchic being 97 and alterity 20
authenticity 148, 150, 278 and ambivalence 188
authoritarian personality 102–3 in definition of subject 3
authorized language 210 dialogical views of subjectivity 49
authorship 47 and the dogma of idealism 3
autobiography 43, 258 and modernism 82
autonomous subject 3–6, 26, 29, 37, 46, 48, multilingualism 279–80
77, 140, 159, 274 open dialogue 254
autonomy and the Other 49, 102, 249
artistic 226 and polyphony 270, 274, 278
and autopoiesis 222 theory of dialogue 51, 251, 254–6
and Bakhtin 255 Balibar, E. 194 n.160
and beauty 137 Balsinger, Ph. W. 290 n.116
and Bourdieu 257 Balzac, H. de 261
in capitalism 29 Bannister, R. C. 39
vs concessions to heteronomy and Banton, T. 163
submission 65 Baran, P. A. 206, 209
at cost of nature 65 Barrès, M. 45
and the crisis of values 205 Barth, J. 140
and Foucault 47 Barthes, R. 43, 46, 48–9
of functional systems 227 Bartonek, A. 129 n.227
and heteronomy 70 Bataille, G. 141
in historical process, without subject Baudelaire, C. 107, 173, 175
161 Baudrillard, J.
illusion of 150 critiques of modernity 51
individual autonomy lost in capitalist libidinally invested appearance 178
systems 30 and Luhmann 32
inner-directed vs other-directed types and the media 52, 209–17, 225,
208 228
and innovation 138, 139 and postmodernism 236
and intercollectivity 269 simulacra 29, 30
and media market economics 211 and sociological views of individual
in modernism 106 subjectivity 202, 205, 209–17
and multilingualism 280 structural vs fractal stadium 28, 49
and postmodernism 115 Bauman, Z. 155, 158, 227
and self-destruction 202, 203 Baumann, P. 69
308 Index
Baumgartner, H. M. 2 Bourdieu, P. 104, 181, 208, 209–17, 229,

Bayertz, K. 289 n.102 257, 281, 284
beautiful, images of the 136–7 bourgeoisie 53, 83, 157, 161, 163, 181
Beauvoir, S. de 179, 180, 188 Bourget, P. 45
Beck, E. 86 Boyne, R. 199 n.296
Beck, U. 5, 17, 28, 30, 31, 41, 166, 182, 231, Braitling, P. 77
233, 237, 238–9, 251, 253, 258 Breton, A. 66, 95, 97, 112, 113, 149, 179
Becker, J. 121, 144–5 Broch, H. 34, 44, 66, 106–8, 109, 227–8,
Beckett, S. 46, 102 231, 253
Beck-Gernsheim, E. 253 Bröckling, U. 192 n.114
becoming, existing is a 86 Bruder, K.-J. 4, 37
Beethoven, L. van 117–18 Bubner, R. 15, 202, 257
behaviourist theories 38–42, 148 Buchanan, K. 43
Being 92, 169, 170 bureaucracy 204, 205, 206, 217
Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 93 Bürger, Ch. 62 n.237
Bell, D. 28, 29–30, 31, 162, 165, 175, 232 Bürger, P. 48–9
Benett, T. 289 n.99 Burgess, A. 67, 115–21, 147
Benhabib, S. 198 n.278 Burns, T. 206
Bénichou, P. 137, 138 Burton, A. 59 n.175
Benjamin, W. 45, 100, 137–8, 186 Bußhof, H. 290 n.111
Bentham, J. 84 Butler, J. 179, 180, 181, 185
Benton, T. 194 n.172
Berlin, I. 4–5, 13 Callenbach, E. 121
Bernet, R. 143 Calvino, I. 50
Bernoux, P. 206 Camus, A. 22, 23, 50, 88, 97, 101, 114, 261
Bernstein, B. 42 capitalism, see also exchange values,
Best, S. 128 n.221 society based on
‘better world,’ concepts of 121, 134, 147 and the decline of the subject 48, 49, 52
Bichat, M.-F.-X. 156 and flexible normalism 166
bilingualism/ multilingualism 51, 53, 254, and freedom 238
258, 279–80 and Giddens 237
Binet, A. 35 individualist capitalism 206
biography 43, 256–7 liberal to consumer-orientated 29
biological individual 6 mass organizations 28, 29, 46, 102, 103,
Bischof, L. J. 38 154, 209
Bloch, E. 79, 123 n.60 and modernity 28
Bloom, H. 257 monopoly capitalism 34, 46, 52, 206
body 68, 71, 78, 81, 114, 154, 238, see also and the sociology of organisations 206
corporeity capitalisme d’organisation 28, 29
Bogdal, K.-M. 63 n.256 Caravetta, P. 152
Bohannan, P. 240 n.35 Carrouges, M. 113
Böhme, G. 71, 72, 139 Cartesian philosophy, see Descartes, R.
Böhme, H. 71, 72 Castoriadis, C. 238, 255, 281
Bohn, R. 242 n.97 categorical imperative 89
Bolay, E. 244 n. 139 Cavell, M. 59 n.157
Bolz, N. W. 98 chain of signifiers 36
Borchmeyer, D. 45 chance 50, 82, 96, 97, 114, 260–2
Bordoni, C. 57 n.110 chaos 205–6
Bormann, A. von 291 n.132 character traits 38
Index 309
charismatic leaders 106, 205, 207, 220 computers 9

child-mother relationship 169, 174, 176 conceptualization 135, 186, 225
Chomsky, N. 42, 210, 254 configuration vs system 100
Christianity conformism 116, 206
and chance 261 conscience collective 278
Christian hegemonies 164 consciousness
Christian teleology 22 collective 52
and European integration 278 and essence 92–3
and Kierkegaard 85 and ‘I’ subjects 72
metanarrative 34 Marxist 78
and Nietzsche 87, 91 of nonidentity 23
revival of 106 of self 15
Chvatik, K. 193 n.144 and semantics 143
civilization 9, 33, 105, 114, 151, 283 consensus
Cixous, H. 184 consensus and dissent in
class, social 5, 42, 237 interdiscursive theorems 270–4
class consciousness 5, 78, 107, 233 sociology of 24
class struggle 23, 27, 78 consistency postulate 38
classification 256, 257, 258 Constantinian turn 233
classification systems 43 constraint of the better argument 24,
classless society 232 265–6
Cléro, J.-P. 196 n.200 constructivism 69
client-centred theory 40 contingency 65, 80–6, 108–15, 146, 159,
Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess) 67, 115–21, 227, 260–2
134, 147, 150, 152 contradiction 51, 85, 146
closed states 73 convention, vs nature 83
coalition governments 10, 17, 51, 163 Cornell, D. 198 n.278
code, restricted vs elaborated 42 corporeal ‘I’ 48
cogitatio 93 corporeity 15, 18, 31, 150, 155, 156
cogito (Cartesian) 50, 65, 67–72, 89, 95, counter-addressers 67
143, 172, 251 Coupland, N. 42
coherence 41, 146, 160, 183, 251, 255 Courtés, J. 54 n.29, 59 n.176, 131 n.307,
coincidence of opposites 111 191 n.66, 191 n.67, 198 n.283,
collective actants 76, 78, 82, 101 244 n.132
collective revolt 116, 119 Coward, R. 189
collective symbols vs individual 113 Craib, I. 253
collective vs individual subjects 3–20 creativity 93, 95, 114
Colville, G. M. M. 97 crisis
Combe, D. 61 n.233 crisis of the subject 108–15
commodity fetishism 213 ideological subjectivity 13, 32
communication 8, 24, 98, 223, 226, 250, of social values/ social disintegration
256, 265–6, 268, 272, 276 34, 37, 40, 45, 50, 88, 107, 205
communism 5, 78, 163 critical art 101
communitarianism 230, 235, 236 critical distance 236, 270
community 4, 29, 105, 183, 203, 231, 236, critical narratology 271–2
252, 256, 266, 272 Critical Rationalism 19, 250, 257, 264, 271,
community-market conceptions of 275
subjectivity 236, 252, 256 critical reflection 183
complex adaptive systems 40, 224 critical sociology 231
310 Index
critical testing 271 deconstruction 11, 35, 138, 145, 146, 151,
Critical Theory 158–9, 160, 167, 171, 179, 183, 186
and Adorno 45, 66 de-differentiation 225
as basis for definition of the subject 2, 3 Del Giudice, D. 120
and the crisis of values 50 Deleuze, G. 3, 27, 28, 36, 133, 141–7, 160
and Critical Rationalism 273, 275 demeanour 31
and Deleuze 144 democracy
and Dialogical Theory 249, 250, 273–4 anti-democratic anti-movements 235
and the dogma of idealism 3 democratic movements 235
and experience 147 and ecological death 25
and Foucault 155, 157 de-normalization 166
and Goffman 154 dépassement 78
vs intersubjectivity 24 dependence of the subject 47
and Laing 37 Derrida, J.
in modernity 80 on authorship 47
and nature 65–6 deconstructionism 24, 98
nature-history 22 and the dogma of idealism 3
and one-dimensionality of society 116 and feminism 179
outline of 98–102 and Foucault 159, 160
and postmodernism 145 and identity 16
and psychoanalysis 275 iterability vs iterativity 143–7, 259
and Sartre 98 and Lacan 172
and self-reflection 13 logocentric closure 185
vs structuralism 26 narrative subjectivity 36
weakness of the ‘I’ 102–8 and over-determination 36
critique of ideology 271, 273 particularization 250
Crozier, M. 32, 206–7 and postmodernism 159
cult of the self 178 and power 180
culture ‘presence of meaning’ 36
cultural discontent 33 repetition of a sign 27, 39, 143–5
cultural movements 284 and Saussure 142
cultural specificity 207 on structured systems 109
and the subversion of the subject
Dahme, H.-J. 239 n.12 141–7
Dalí, S. 96 Descartes, R.
damaged life 150, 152 autonomy 48
dandy, the 176–7, 178 cogito/ spirit 50, 65, 67–72, 89, 95, 172
Daniel, C. 29, 32 and Foucault 157
Darwin, Ch. 23 late modern rejection of 65
dasein 170 and otherness 185
data society 28 and postmodernism 153
David, P. 284 and Sartre 93
de Beauvoir, S. 179, 180, 188 subjectivity anchored in thought 3
de Sévigné, Madame 49 and subjectivity in philosophy 67–73
De Waele, J.P. 61 n.219 universal reason 155, 157
death-drive 26, 156 Descombes, V. 15
Debord, G. 198 n.273 despairing hope 138, 148
decentred subject 167–75 destiny 90
decline of the subject 50–3 detachment 68, 80, 149, 270
Index 311
determinism 93, 158 Dostoevsky, F. 3, 20, 251

D’Hondt, J. 124 n.91 double (literary figure) 110–11
dialectics 22–3, 28, 42, 46–7, 51, 80, double articulation of language 141
98–100, 138, 160, 180, 201–39, double contingency 227
249–52, 270–3 drama 46
dialogical subjectivity 8, 27, 36, 49, 52, dreams 80, 95, 97, 112, 138, 171
251–62 Dreier, V. 57 n.122
Dialogical Theory 18, 20, 101, 249–85 Dressler, W. 290 n.121
dialogism 188, 251 dualism 18–19, 45, 68, 73–4, 77, 110–11,
dialogue 254–6 133, 183, 235, 253, 262, 270, 277, 283
dictatorship of the proletariat 78 Dubar, Cl. 244 n.128
différance 141, 142, 143, 159, 180, 181 Dubet, F. 198 n.291, 199 n.293, 246 n.180,
difference 13, 16, 26–7, 98, 109, 141–6, 247 n.226, 286 n.13, 291 n.157
214–15, 231, 265 Ducrot, O. 197 n.259
‘differend’ 140, 264, 270 Durkheim, E.
differentiation (social) 146–7, 173, 183, collective consciousness 52
203, 206, 209, 217, 220, 225, 228, constraints of modernity 201
253, 267 and the decline of the subject 49
Dionysus 90 differentiation 203, 204, 218, 220
disappearance of the subject 2, 33, 48 division of labour 28
discontent in civilization 33, 102–8, 114 on individual/ collective subjects 4
discontinuity 16 mechanical solidarity 3, 105
discontinuous systematicities 159 moral subject 278
discourse 47, 68–70, 75, 79, 83, 90, 146, self-destruction 202
158, 160–6, 172, 180, 219, 223, 228, social facts 254
253, 256, 258–9, 264–7, 273, 277 and the sociology of organisations 206
discursive formation 47, 159–60, 164 on subjugation 31
disembedding 4, 17, 41, 203, 239 Düsing, K. 123 n.54
disengaged reason 68 dynamic unit, subject as 9–10, 15, 17, 27,
disintegration 36, 230
social 34, 37, 41, 44–5, 51, 133–52, 237
of the subject 45, 50–3, 86–92, 102–3, Ebeling, H. 25
111 Eco, U. 46, 50, 121, 140
of values 107, 227 eco-feminism 52, 121
dissent 270–4 ecological disaster 25, 30
dissolution of social movements 233 ecological movements 52, 166, 233, 235,
divided self 147–52, 171 283, 284
divine addressers 68, 82, 83, 86, 95, 114 Edelgard B. 12, 13, 14, 257
division (Spaltung) 171 effacement of the speaker 160
division of labour 28, 107, 203, 207 efficiency 207
division of the subject 147–52 ego 8, 104, 104–8, 227
Djurić M. 88 egoism 4, 70, 204
doing and not doing 70 ego-superego-id divisions 8–9, 35, 68, 70,
dominant ideologies 163, 221, 225 95, 105, 258
domination 19 Eißler, K.R. 198 n.276
Donzelot, J. 36, 157, 175 Elam, D. 181, 185–6
Dor, J. 173 electronic media 209
D’Ormesson, J. 47 Elias, N. 4, 102, 236, 250, 270
Dornberg, M. 97 elimination of the subject 33, 48
312 Index
Ellenberger, H. F. 35 and chance 82

Ellis, J. 189 existential minimum 152
emancipation 116, 152, 203, 258 and feminism 187
emotional stability 39 narrative structure as existential act
empiricism 145 12
empowerment 218 and responsibility 65–6
‘end of history’ 170 and Sartre 21–7, 92–3, 94, 97
‘end of ideology’ 162, 164 existing, subject is 86
endless repetition 137 experience 37, 44, 147, 154, 212, 263
Endruweit, G. 290 n.110 Eysenck, H. J. 39
engagement, ideological 236, 250, 252–3, Eysenck, M. W. 38, 39
270, 277 Eysenck, S. B.G. 39
Engels, F. 23, 78, 100 Eysteinsson, A. 113
English as universal language 279–80
Enlightenment 24, 40, 155, 181, 183 Facebook 178
enunciation actants 7 Fages, J. B. 169, 172
environment ideologies 283 Fähnders, W. 131 n.295
Erikson, E. H. 40–1 fait social 218
erosion of authority 208 false consciousness 213
escape from freedom 107, 268 false self 152
essay 9, 23, 44, 65, 85, 88, 100, 109, 112, 259 false society 174
essayism 65, 84–5, 100, 109 falsification (refutation) 263, 264, 266, 271,
essence 91, 156, 213 273
establishment, challenges to 116 families 36, 40, 148, 157, 174–9, 212, 257
estrangement 35 fascism 13, 104, 106, 161, 165, 208, 235
eternal character of ideology 162, 164, 166 fate 8, 90, 120, 261
Eternal Recurrence 151 father-image 103, 169, 173
Eternal Return 87, 90 fatherless society 52, 169, 176, 207
ethics ‘faule Existenz’/ ‘worthless existence’ 77
and the autonomy of the subject 70 Faye, J.-P. 12
and Nietzsche 89 feedback/ feedforward 40
Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 270, 274, ‘feeling at home in one’s body’ 31
277 femininity 91–2, 93, 97
etymology of ‘subject’ 2–3 feminism 12, 52, 91, 121, 135, 166, 169,
Etzioni, A. 230 179–89, 233, 235, 252, 282
Europe 278–85 Fern Haber, H. 182, 183
European integration 99, 102, 250, 278–85 Fetz, R. L. 45
European Union 279–80, 284–5 feudalism 4, 164, 181, 201
event 11, 42, 69, 90, 144, 146, 160, 211–13, Feuerbach, L. 18, 83
220, 260–1 Fichte, I.H. 122 n.36
evolutionary solutions 175, 213 Fichte, J. G.
exchange values, society based on 28, 29, and Althusser 168
32, 52, 99, 110, 134, 136, 144, 166, Hegel on 73–4
177, 180, 186, 201–2, 203, 207, 210, ‘I’ = ‘I’ 173, 221
211, 213, 214, 225, 228 idealist ‘I’ 161
exchangeability of individuals 178, 214 and Marx 161
existentialism and Nietzsche 91
and Adorno 102–3 and otherness 185
and Beckett 46 and Stirner 83
Index 313
subjective idealism 278 fragmentation, social 107, 163, 231, 262–3,

subjectivity anchored in thought 3 267–70
and subjectivity in philosophy 69–73 ‘frames’ 154
fiction vs perception 93 Frank, M. 6–7, 15, 27, 28, 202, 256, 265
Fish, S. 289 n.92 Frankfurt School 158, 236
Flaubert, G. 22 Fraser, N. 185
Fleischer, H. 209 free floating intellectuals 208, 269
flexible man 208 freedom
flexible normalism 165 and aesthetic negativity 138
Fontán, A. 54 n.30 in capitalism 238
Fontenelle, T. 280 and collective revolt 116
Ford, D. H. 40 and Dialogical Theory 277
Ford, M.E. 40 escape from freedom 107, 268
Formalism-Marxism 271–2, 276 freedom in context 94
Foucault, M. freedom of action 204
and archaeology 222 ‘freedom to the object 100
and A Clockwork Orange 115, 118 in historical process, without subject
and Critical Theory 148, 158 161
critiques of modernity 51 and indifference 208
and Descartes 157 individual autonomy 4
and the divine addresser 84 and negation 93
and the dogma of idealism 3 negative vs positive liberty 4–5
and feminism 180, 185 and Nietzsche 89
and Goffman 153 and objective necessity 79
and Habermas 156 and over-determination 47
and Hegel 159 and Sartre 65–6, 94
ideological malleability of subject 116 and spirit 74, 75–6
and Lacan 167 and state morality 87
and Laing 150 vs subjugation 65
and Link 165 French sociology 27, 32, 49, 206, 217, 231
on normality 165 Frenkel- Brunswik, E. 102
and over-determination 36 Freud, S., see also psychoanalysis
on patients 157 and Althusser 168
and Pêcheux 164 and Descartes 173
and postmodernism 47, 152, 156, 159, and the father-image 103
236 and humanism 168
and power 102, 157, 180, 181 ideology is eternal 162
and rationality 155, 159 infra-individual actants 8–9
rejection of modernist utopias 134 mass hysteria, theory of 104–8
return to the subject 48 and Nietzsche 35
socialization 87 penis envy 185
and subjection 238 and Sartre 95
and subjective submission 160 and socialization 36
subjectivity as illusion 36 superego-ego-id divisions 8–9, 35, 68,
theory of the subject 20, 25–6 70, 95, 105, 258
and Touraine 230 and transfer 104
foundation (hypokeimenon) 2, 35 Friedberg, E. 32
Fowles, J. 121 Friedrich, H. 136
fractal stage of social evolution 214, 215 Fromm, E. 41, 103, 107, 268
314 Index
Fuder, D. 242 n.97 Goldmann, L. 28, 29–30, 33, 38, 47, 48, 101,
Füllsack, M. 224 224
function 8, 218, 223 Gorz, A. 58 n.144
functionalism 154, 226 Gouldner, A. W. 24
fundament/ foundation (hypokeimenon, Grabher, G. M. 45
subiectum) xi, 2, 34, 51, 69, 98, 107, Graevenitz, G. von 131 n.306, 287 n.52
271 grammatical subjects 2
fundamentalism 166, 235 Gramsci, A. 186
fury of disappearance 215 Greek etymology 2–3
‘green’ movements 233–4, 283
Gadet, F. 164 green politics 12
Gans, M. 124 n.92, 193 n.146 Greimas, A. J.
Garaudy, R. 246 n.199 on individual/ collective subjects 3, 9,
Garfinkel, H. 61 n.221 31, 38
Gaspard, F. 182, 185, 186, 283 and iterativity 146
Gaulejac, V. de 206 mission 9
Gehlen, A. 205–6, 211, 218 on modalities 42
Geiger, T. 277 modalities 79, 223
Geisenhanslüke, A. 63 n.256 pouvoir faire 180
gender 180, 183, see also feminism; and repetition 143
women savoir faire 75
gender linguistics 42 on sociolects 12
genealogy of morals 83 structural semiotics 7–8
generalized Other 20, 281 vouloir faire 91
genetic engineering 156 Gresshoff, R. 220, 223
Genette, G. 112 Grimaud, M. 112
genre 43–4, 226, 254 Gripp-Hagelstange, H. 218, 224
George, F. 97 grotesque, the 82
George, S. 138 group conformity 116
Gergen, M. 61 n.219 Grubauer, F. 6, 31–2
Gerhardt, V. 90 Grujić P. 79
German idealism 82 Grunberger, B. 129 n.252
German sociology 28, 32, 49, 217, 231 Guattari, F. 157
Gethmann, C.F. 54 n.44 Guédez, A. 161
Geyer, P. 45 Guillaume, M. 58 n.138, 243 n.100
Giard, L. 57 n.107, 193 n.128
Giddens, A. 4, 17, 28, 30, 31, 41, 42, 52, 149, Habermas, J.
166, 203, 237–8, 249, 258 and Adorno 99
Gide, A. 120 on aporias 46
Giegel, H.-J. 244 n.138 on European politics 284
Ginsburg, G.P. 61 n.219 ideal speech situation 24–5, 250, 265,
globalization 166, 207, 228 266–7
Gneuss, Ch. 240 n.22 on individual/ collective subjects 12
Gnüg, H. 45 intersubjective communication 23, 26,
God 33, 37, 67, 72, 73–8, 86, 92–3, 261, see 158
also divine addressers and life worlds 234, 237
Goebbels, J.P. 12 and Luhmann 221
Goethe, J.W. 80, 184 particularism vs universalism 263–7
Goffman, E. 49, 84, 135, 144, 150, 153–8 project of modernity 153, 183
Index 315
on social sciences 20, 156 synthesizing systems 252

and Touraine 234 totalization 264
transcendental foundation 221, 250, World Spirit (Weltgeist) 73–8
262, 271 Hegelian Marxism 22, 231
universal English 279 Hegelianism 19, 73–9, 81, 85, 98, 145, 161,
universal pragmatics 23–4 261, 264
Hagenbüchle, R. 45 Heidegger, M. 15, 25, 91, 98, 134, 150, 169,
Halbwachs, M. 267–8 216, 265
Haldane, S. 122 n.20 Held, D. 238
Hall, S. 16 helpers (adjuvants) 7
Haller, R. 56 n.98, 290 n.120 Henrich, D. 240 n.22
Hampson, S. E. 39 Heraclitus 39
Handel, G.F. 117 hermeneutics 3, 16, 19, 27, 145, 159, 255
Harée, R. 61 n.219 heroes/anti-heroes 18
harmony, aesthetic 137 Hesse, H. 111, 112, 114, 149, 171, 187, 261
Hartfiel, G. 57 n.122 heterogeneity 20, 33, 35, 39, 44, 47, 51, 144,
Hartman, A. 135 164, 254, 264, 265, 268, 271–2, 275
Hartman, G. H. 186 heteronomous intellectuals 208
hasard objectif 96 heteronomy 28, 51, 65, 70, 135, 144, 212,
Haug, W. F. 276, 277 226
hedonism 29 Hill, S. 57 n.122
Hegel, G. W. F. Hillis Miller, J. 146
and Adorno 99 Hillmann, K.-H. 57 n.122
and anthropology 168 historical movements 234
and Baudrillard 215 historical subject, disintegration of 160,
and Being 170, 173 185
and chance 260–1 historicity 232–3, 281–3
and Christianity 261 History/ history 10, 22, 23, 49, 65, 90, 92–3,
vs Critical Theory 99 100, 101, 159–60, 181, 232
criticised by Prieto 20 History of the World 77
critiques of Hegel 80–6 Hobbes, T. 18, 25, 34, 83, 105–6, 157, 169,
and the decentred subject 171 202, 205
and Deleuze 145 Hodge, R. 43
and Derrida 141 Höfer, R. 60 n.209
and the end of history 171 Höffe, O. 69
and Foucault 159 Hogrebe, W. 54 n.44, 55 n.47, 55 n.49,
History 22, 23, 65, 77 287 n.37, 287 n.43
hypokeimenon and subiectum 2 Hölderlin, F. 100
individuality 18 Holquist, M. 287 n.28, 287 n.31
and Kierkegaard 188 homogeneity 47, 72, 116, 163, 267, 275
and Lacan 171 Honneth, A. 288 n.77
late modern rejection of 65 Hook, S. 124 n.91
and Nietzsche 88 Hörisch, J. 142
and otherness 185, 249 Horkheimer, M.
and Sartre 92–3, 95 Critical Theory 13, 22, 50, 66, 98–102,
and self-destruction 202 250
and Spinoza 160 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno
subjectivity anchored in thought 3, 51 and Horkheimer) 19, 22, 68, 98, 99,
and subjectivity in philosophy 69–79 100, 186, 202
316 Index
and the dogma of idealism 3 individual subject 3–20

and Foucault 157 individualism 4, 34, 38, 46, 51, 84, 201
identitarian thought 18 individuality
on nature 19 definition 6
negativity 249 individualist capitalism 206
and Sartre 98 longing for 230
Hove, W. van 57 n.122 and psychoanalysis 34
Huber, W. 9 and sociology 28
humanism 26, 29, 33, 218, 221, 261 vs subjectivity 14–15
humanist Marxism 101, 161 in theoretical discourses 18
Hume, D. 145 individualization 238, 239, 253, 258
Husserl, E. 93, 188, 234, 275 individuum ineffabile 100
Huxley, A. 26, 116 indivisible subject 16
hyper-modernity 230 industrialization 31, 239
hyper-reality 29 infra-individual actants 7–10, 34, 85, 106
hypertrophy 204, 205 in-group identification 104
hypokeimenon 2–3 inhuman, the 118, 136, 139
inner world 149
‘I’ as subject 2, 34, 36, 71–2, 75 inner-directed vs other-directed types 29,
Idea 76 208
Ideal Ego 176 innocence between opposites 45
ideal speech situation 24, 250, 266–7, 270 innovation 136, 138–9
ideal types 165, 179 institutionalization 205, 217
idealism, dogma of 3, 22–3, 27, 71, 78, 230, intellectuals 33, 208, 212, 269
251 intentionality 224, 260, 274
id-ego-superego divisions 8–9, 35, 68, 70, interactionist approach 8, 39–40
95, 105, 258 intercollectivity 269, 272
identitarian thought 18 interdisciplinary approach 2, 43, 180, 250,
identity, definitions 16–17 262–78
identity materials 17 interdiscourse 164
identity vs personality 40 interdiscursivity between sciences 263,
identity work (Identitätsarbeit) 16, 238, 269, 270–4
255 interiority 149
ideological identification 19 internationalism 212
ideological subjectivity 12–20, 27, 110, 161 interpellation 165
Il conformista (Moravia, 1951) 13, 208 intersubjective communication 23, 26, 158,
illusion, subjectivity as 37, 52, 65, 133 262–78
images, celebrity 29 intersubjective testing of hypotheses 268–9
imaginary (l’imaginaire) 35, 87, 140, 169, intolerance of ambiguity 261
171, 173, 174–9 involuntary memory 44
impotence 73–9 involvement 38, 209
incest taboos 109, 169, 176 ipseity (ipséité: selfhood) 15, 17, 93, 95,
incredulity 168, 227 154, 251, 262
indifference 111, 134–5, 144, 166, 174–9, Irigaray, L. 180, 184–5
182, 186, 208, 214, 228, 235, 252 irony 43, 96, 110, 116, 136, 150, 183, 251
indifferentiation 214 irradiated stage of social evolution 213
individual and collective subjects 3–20 irretrievable ‘I’ 48
individual consciousness of cognition iterability 141–7, 259
(definition of subject) 2 iterativity 141–7, 259
Index 317
Jacoby, R. 192 n.86 and Sartre 92–3

Jacques, F. 254, 264 and submission 65
Jaeggi, U. 26, 163 Kim. T.H. 53 n.20
Jakobson, R. 172 Kimmerle, G. 67, 68
Janet, P. 35 Kinsey reports 165
jargon, group 117, 249 Kipfer, D. 138
Jaspers, K. 85 Klauß, H. 19
Jauß, H. R. 44 Kneer, G. 229
‘Je est un autre’ (‘I is someone else’) 97 Knodt, R. 91
Jeanson, F. 22, 101 Knorr-Cetina, K. 277
Jencks, C. 140 Knörzer, G. 195 n.192
Jespersen, O. 42 Koch, A.M. 240 n.20
Joas, A. 288 n.77 Kocka, J. 240 n.22
Johnson, B. 186 Köhler, E. 226, 261
journalism 209–11 Kohut, H. 176
Joyce, J. 50 Kolb, P. 287 n.49
Julien, P. 173, 196 n.200, 197 n.238, Koselleck, R. 63 n.270
197 n.250 Köster, P. 90
Jullian, P. 176 Kraemer, K. 216
Jung, C. G. 34, 35, 111 Kraushaar, W. 282
Juranville, A. 172 Kress, G. 43
Jurt, J. 57 n.109, 195 n.187, 198 n.277, Krieg, P. 243 n.112
241 n.56 Kristeva, J. 179, 180, 188, 256
Kuhn, T. S. 14, 24, 266, 272, 277
Kafka, F. 6, 49, 50, 52, 88, 114, 175, 187, 205, Kunyzin, G. 79
255 Kurt, R. 269
Kant, I.
corporeity 18 Lacan, J.
and Hegel 73–4 and Althusser 169
late modern rejection of 65 and the decentred subject 167–75
and Nietzsche 89 dependence of the subject 47
subjectivity anchored in thought 3 and the dogma of idealism 3
and subjectivity in philosophy 69–73 epiphenomenon of language 102
and the sublime 135, 137, 139 and Freud 36, 173
‘thing in itself ’ 169 and Hegel 171
Kapp, V. 290 n.121 and history 170
Karmasin, S. 253, 283 and the imaginary 169, 173
Karsenti, B. 243 n.105 imaginary to symbolic stadium
Kellerer, C. 113 transition 36
Kellner, D. 128 n.221 and Kristeva 188
Kermode, F. 186 and late modernity 134
Keupp, H. 16–17, 41, 251, 255, 256 and narcissism 174–9
Keynsian economics 52 narrative subjectivity 36
Kierkegaard, S. and Nietzsche 87
critiques of Hegel 80, 82–6 and the signifier 171–2
and the dogma of idealism 3 and structuralism 172
and existentialism 188 Lai, G. 17, 111
and Nietzsche 88 Laing, R. D. 36–8, 44, 49, 84, 134, 147–52,
particularity 22 154, 174
318 Index
Lakatos, I. 56 n.101, 251 traditional societies 28

Lakoff, R. 43 universal knowledge 65
Landowski, E. 244 n.145 Lauble, M. 56 n.87
Lang, H. 197 n.247 Lautréamont 113
language Lawrence, D. H. 49, 113
and Bakhtin 254–6 layers of personality 113
group jargon 117. see also sociolects Le Goff, J. 237, 280
homogenous language 24 Lecourt, D. 62 n.249
individual and collective subjects 3–20 Leenhardt, J. 58 n.131
individual subject as epiphenomenon Lefébure, S. 43
of language 102 Lefebvre, J.-P. 78
and Lacan 169 legal domination 204
language acquisition 11 Lehmann, G. K. 91
language communities 266–7 Lejeune, P. 43–4
language games 227, 250, 263–4, 267 Lemaire, A. 167, 169, 172, 173
language wall 168, 174 Lenin, V. I. 232
and the Law of Order 169 Lepenies, W. 246 n.177
as limits of poetry 136 Leschke, R. 27–8, 267
linguistic capital 210 Leviathan (Hobbes) 25, 83, 105–6
loss of subjectivity 144 Lévinas, E. 265
Luhmann on 219 Levinson, D.J. 102
and Lyotard 264–5 Lévi-Strauss, Cl. 46, 90, 109
and Nietzsche 88–9 liberalism 28, 29, 38, 46, 83, 103, 111, 161,
and open dialogue 254 206
and patriarchies 180 liberty (negative, positive) 4–5
and the split subject 171 Lieber, H.-J. 194 n.169
and subjective submission 160 life world (Lebenswelt) 12, 24, 234, 237,
and subjectivity 279–81 265–6
subjectivity as linguistic problem 31 Lindner, B. 128 n.219
as symbolic power structure 210 linguistics 10–17, 42–50, 84, 100, 141–7,
and truth 100, 171 159, 276
languages Link, Ch. 68, 153
supremacy of 19 Link, J. XIV 26, 162, 164–5, 173, 209, 238
unification of 24 Link-Heer, U. 44, 188
Laplanche, J. 197 n.262 Lippe, R. zur 4, 202
Lasch, Ch. 37, 49, 52, 174–8, 207 literature 3, 42–50, 65, 81, 226, 255, 271–2,
Lash, S. 225 see also poetry
late modernity logocentric closure 185
crisis of individual subjectivity in late logos 77, 95, 157
modern sociology 203–9, 217 Lohmann, G. 245 n.161
and dialogical views of subjectivity 251 ‘lonely crowd’ 207
and the dilemma of modern Lorenzen, P. 290 n.116
subjectivity 92 Lorenzer, A. 36
and Hegel 80 Lotman, Y. 262, 264, 267, 276
individual subject in 34, 45, 50 love 36, 83, 176, 187
nature and contingency 108–15 Lovibond, S. 182–3, 186
and negative dialectics 98 Löwenthal, L. 29
and subjugation 134 Löwith, K. 80, 88
and Touraine 236 Lozanović G. 254
Index 319
Lübbe, H. 260 Marcuse, H. 37, 107, 116, 134, 147, 148,

Lüdke, W.M. 56 n.93, 128 n.219 150, 158, 206
Luhmann, N. market forces 52, 134
and Baudrillard 210 market societies 4, 5, 83, 110, 165, 173, 177,
critical intellectuals 212 180, 201, 203, 225, 228, 231, 235,
and Critical Theory 275 238, 252
elimination of the subject 49, 205, Marquard, O. 131 n.306, 287 n.52
217–29 Martinet, A. 141–7
‘end of ideology’ 162 Marx, K.
and Habermas 12 and Adorno 101
ideological manicheism 18 and Baudrillard 215
knowledge accumulation 161 and the dogma of idealism 3
and ‘old European thought’ 120 on exchange function of money 177
social systems theory 31–2, 107, 202, and feminism 185
269 on individual/ collective subjects 4, 5
and Touraine 229, 231, 232 and Luhmann 161
Lukács, G. 5, 7, 8, 78–9, 85, 107, 232 misunderstanding of 48
Lyotard, J.-F. and Nietzsche 207
critiques of modernity 51 and the sociology of organisations 206
differend 140, 264, 270 and subjectivity in philosophy 78
and feminism 185 subject-object 80
metanarrative 22, 232 Marxism
negation of the subject 29, 74 and Adorno 100
and paradigms 272 and Althusser 162–3, 168
particularism vs univeralism 263–7 and Baudrillard 213
particularization 227–8, 250 and capitalism 29
pluralism 135 and chance 261
rejection of modernist utopias 134 criticised by Camus 22
sacrifice of individual subject 146 gender relations 180
and the sublime 135–40, 144 and Giddens 237
transition from Adorno 134 and History 23
and truth 168 humanist Marxism 29, 33
lyrical subject 45 and identity 258
and individual subjects 21
Mach, E. 34, 48, 108 and Luhmann 218, 220
Macherey, P. 78, 161 Marxism-Leninism 19, 26, 79, 161
Macpherson, C.B. 83 Marxist Hegelianism 79
madness 109, 150, 157 Marxist science 162–3, 164, 173
Magic Theatre 111, 112 neo-Marxism 29, 100, 101
malice of the object 81, 260 vs Russian Formalists 271, 276
malin génie 67 and social class 232–3
Mallarmé, S. 45, 48, 135–40, 174, 219, 249 social movements 232
Man without Qualities, The (Musil) 16, and Spinoza 161
109, 277 and subjectivity in philosophy 78
Mandel, E. 206 and Touraine 231
manicheism 18 transition from Hegelianism 73–9
Mann, T. 106, 118 masculinity 91, 93, 135, 180, 183
Mannheim, K. 208, 267–8, 269, 272 masks 35, 111, 151
Marco, G. A. di 207 masochism 103
320 Index
mass hysteria 104–8 modernism 4, 106, 110–11, 114–21,

mass organizations 28, 29, 46, 102, 103, 134–89, 252
154, 209 modernist art 139
mass psychology 104–5 modernity 25, 50–3, 80, 98, see also late
Masterman, M. 24 modernity
Mauron, Ch. 172 money, functions of 4, 177, 203, 207, 237
Mauss, M. 180, 218 monism 71, 278
Mautz, K. A. 83, 84 monologic attitude 18, 49, 71, 79, 92, 255,
Me 8, 82–4 259, 264
Mead, G. H. 8, 11, 20, 24, 281 monopoly capitalism 34, 46, 52, 206
meaning Monsieur Teste 71–3
linguistic 141–2 Montaigne, M. de 4, 48
and repetition of the sign 146 Montesquiou, R. de 176
mechanical solidarity 3–4, 105, 203, 204 Mooij, A. 169
mechanisms of regulation 166 Moraldo, S. M. 110
media 28, 29, 37, 49, 51, 52, 102, 104, 107, Moravia, A. 13, 208
178, 209–17, 257 Morin, E. 28, 32
medical humanism 25, 156 Moroni, M. 62 n.244
Medvedev, P. N. 254 Morris, Ch. W. 54 n.25
megalomania 72 mother 169
mêmeté 15, 16, 17, 93, 251 mother-child relationship 169, 174, 176,
memory 44 188
Merleau-Ponty, M. 26, 118 movement and historicity 281–3
Merton, R. K. 31 Mukařovský, J. x
Mészáros, I. 195 n.191, 201 multiculturalism 53
metanarrative 22, 227–8, 232 multilingualism 51, 53, 254, 279–80
metaphysical concepts of subject 1–17, multiple identities 41, 45, 108–9, 151, 187
86–92, 230 multiple personalities 35, 171, 188
meta-social guarantees of social order 232 multiplicity of beginnings 112
Metz, J.B. 246 n.199 Musgrave, A. 56 n.101
Meyer, R.W. 123 n.54 music 117–18, 119
Meyer, T. 121 n.2 Musil, R. 3, 16, 18, 23, 49, 50, 51, 66, 88,
Meyer-Drawes, K. 45 108–9, 110, 112, 187, 251, 253, 255,
Michels, R. 209 277
Middleton, D. J. 43 Mussolini, B. 235
Mill, J. S. 125 n.123 mutual understanding paradigm 23
mimesis 46, 65, 98–100 myth 17, 90–1, 162, 278
mimetic principle of art 23, 46, 65, 98–102, mythical subjects 9–11, 23, 29, 31, 49, 75,
158 76, 162, 218, 219, 225, 232
Minow-Pinkey, M. 187
mirror, and feminism 185 narcissism 37–8, 72, 73, 74, 90, 103, 104,
mirror stage 169, 173 169, 173, 174–9, 207
Mischel, W. 38–9 narration 256–7
misogyny 91, 97 narrative identity 16, 43–8
misunderstandings 48, 148, 276 narrative programme 7–8, 9, 11, 16, 31, 77,
Mitchell, J. 185 146, 256–9
Mitscherlich, A. 52, 170, 208 narrative syntax 43
Möckel-Rieke, H. 184 Nassehi, A. 218, 229
modalities 7, 8–9, 42, 77, 79, 223 national identities 52, 284–5
Index 321
National Socialism 12, 13, 26, 104, 106, Nieden, S. zur 12

165, 208 Nietzsche, F.
national spirit (Volksgeist) 76, 77 ambivalence of values 109
nationalism 104, 235, 236 and autonomy 205
nation-states 10, 207, 281 and Camus 22
nature and chance 261
and ambivalence 98 contingency 65
as anti-subject 75 crisis of the individual subject 45
and body 68, 71 and Critical Theory 98–100
and chance 261, 262 criticism of metaphysical concept of
and contingency 108–15 subject 86–92
vs convention 83 critiques of Hegel 96
and definitions of individual 6 and cultural specificity 207
domination over 19, 22, 25, 68 cultural values 35
and the dream 80 and the decentred subject 171
and existentialism 22 and Derrida 143
Hesse’s pact with 114 and the dogma of idealism 3
and the id 106 doubt of discursive identity of sign and
mythical state of 90 subject 27
‘natural’ development 229 and Foucault 159
nature-culture distinction 6, 34, 114, and Freud 35
169 and Laing 151
Nietzsche on 90 misunderstanding of 48
repression 97 repetition of a sign 39
repression of 65 and Sartre 92–3
and self-renunciation 76 superman 72
and spirit 80 truth 84
and surrealism 95 and Weber 205
and thought 68 nihilation of facticity 94
néantisation 93, 97, 148 nihilism 207
necessity 27, 81, 260 nominalism 145
negation 93, 97, 115, 252–4 nonconceptual in the concept 23
negative dialectics 98 non-identity 86, 101, 249
negative vs positive liberty 4–5 non-subjects 12
negativity 94, 98–102, 136–7, 139, 169, 186, non-theoretical theory 23, 65, 100
236, 249 norm (social) 149, 158, 165
Nenon, T. 69 normalism 26, 162–6, 173
neo-empiricism 145 normalization 26, 36, 148, 153, 155, 157,
neo-liberalism 33, 281 158–67, 173, 209
neo-Marxism 29, 100 Norris, Ch. 158
Nerlich, M. xiii Nothdurft, W. 290 n.112
Neurath, O. 24, 276 nothingness 33, 94, 147–8, 179, 214
neurosis 109, 173, 174 Novalis (F. von Hardenberg) 278–9
Neuser, W. 290 n.109 Nussbaum, J. F. 42
new economic actor 239
Newspeak 5, 8 object actants 7, 16–17
Neyer, J. 240 n.35 objective chance 96, 112
Nicholson, L. 185 objective constraints 218
Nicklas, H. 290 n.118 objective culture 52
322 Index
objectivity other-directedness 29, 35

in science 18 otherness
vs subjectivity in culture 52 in collective identity 52
objet trouvé 96, 112 and the decentred subject 179
Oedipus complex 103 and Dialogical Theory 20
Oehler, K. 53 n.8 and dialogical views of subjectivity 51,
Offe, C. 205 252
Ogilvie, B. 174 dissolution of the individual in 144
oligarchy 206, 209 and feminism 185
oligopoly 209 inner-directed vs other-directed types
Oliva, A. B. 140 208
Oliver, K. 91 linguistic 11
Ollivier, B. 239, 282 and narcissism 72
omnipotence 45, 73–9 and nature 80
omnipresence and the liquidation of the and negativity 249
subject 217–29 opportunity and danger 255
one-dimensionality 134, 147, 158, 213, and pure thought 97
214 overcoming 150, 151, 158, 163, 216
open dialogue 251, 253, 254–6 over-determination
opponents (opposants) 7 and autonomy 26, 51
organic solidarity 203 and A Clockwork Orange 120
organisations, sociology of 206–9 dominant ideologies 161
organized social systems 31 and feminism 181
Orlando (Woolf) 180, 186–7, 189, 253 and freedom 14, 47, 65
Ormesson, J. de 47 and heteronomy 135
Orwell, G. 26, 116 ideological 44–5
Other by ideologies 52
and ambivalence 254 and Lacan 36
and Bakhtin 49, 102, 249 by media 52
and body-nature split 71 and narcissism 37–8
and Critical Theory 98 narrative programme 12
and the decentred subject 179 and nature 77
and desire 174, 176 and negation of the subject 47
Dialogical Theory 102, 274 restricted vs elaborated code 42
and dialogical views of subjectivity revelation of 50
251 socialization 11
and European integration 281
exchangeability of individuals panoptical transparency 26
214 paradigm 24, 27, 272
and feminism 187 paradox 85, 88, 96, 138, 253
and the ‘I’ (Hegel) 73 paranoia 136
and identity 255 paratactic theory 46, 100
and the imaginary 169 Parnet, C. 145
and modernism 115 parole 42, 142, 210, 254
negation of 92, 97 Parsons, T. 24, 31, 218, 227, 229, 232
and negativity 249 particularism vs univeralism 263–70
and open dialogue 253 particularity 228, 253
and reflexivity 256 particularization 65, 82, 84, 86–92, 100,
Work and Capital 282 142, 159, 183, 227, 231, 250, 272
Index 323
partriarchy 169, 179 possibility of differences without a concept

Pascal, B. 48 144
paternal authority, decline of 174–9 posthistoire 216
pathologies of society 37, 40, 134 postindustrial society
Pêcheux, M. 12, 14, 160–1, 164, 165, 181 and ambivalence 252
peer groups 11, 115 and mass psychology 104–5
Peirce, Ch. S. 24 overlap with postmodern 232
Péquignot, B. 197 n.233 and social movements 235
perception vs fiction 93 and sociology 29–30
persona 35, 111 post-metaphysical world 34
personality, theory of 8, 38–42, 45, 111, postmodernity
113, 203 and Adorno 98, 100
personalized narratives 31 and ambivalence 252–3
Pervin, L. A. 38, 39 aporias of the subject 50–3
Petropoulou, P. 130 n.285 and autonomy 106
Pfister, M. 61 n.230, 61 n.231 and criticism of totalitarianism 104
phallus 169, 176, 179 decline of the subject 50–3
phenomenological approaches 275 and Dialogical Theory 249–85
philosophy disintegration and submission 133–89
and ambiguity of subjectivity 2–3 and disintegration of the subject 46,
state of the debate 21–7 207
physis 14, 15, 69, 222 and Hegel 80
Piercy, M. 121 and ideological stability 41
Pirandello, L. 50, 108, 109, 111, 251 and individual/collective subjects 5
Plato 67, 142, 184, 261 loss of autonomy as symptom 217
Plotinus 74–5 and Luhmann 228, 231
pluralism 145, 163, 183, 186, 228, 237, 250, and Lyotard 250, 265
264 and Nietzsche 87
Poe, E. A. 172 postmodern literature 49–50
poetry 45, 100, 101, 136, 173, 226 postmodern problematic 252
Pöggeler, O. 75 sociological viewpoint of the dialectics
politics of individual subjectivity 201–39
and coherence 183 and sociology 27–33
Dialogical Theory and social state of the debate 22, 25–7
movements 102 and Touraine 236
politics of experience 154 transition from modernism 115–21,
politics of identity 154 134–89
and subjective initiative 205 and truth 84
towards European politics 284–5 poststructuralism 100
the undecidable is the political 186 potential, and subjectivity 15
polyphony 20, 187, 257, 270, 274, 278, power
279–81 and anonymity 155
polysemy 143 conforming with powers that be 102
Pontalis, B. 197 n.262 and contingency 159
Ponzio, A. 287 n.30 and discourse 159
Popper, K. R. 20, 250, 273 empowerment vs loss of power
positive freedom 13, 14 dialectic 218
positivist theories 38–42 Foucault on 102, 157, 180, 181
possessive individualism 34, 83, 201 and knowledge 157
324 Index
pastoral power 155 psychology 38, 150

and rationality 158 psychosis 173
as system 237 psychosocial moratoria 40
pragmatism 23, 159, 265–6 ‘psychotechnical manipulation’ 117
predestination 120 psychotherapy 150
presence of meaning 35, 141, 146 pure thought 71, 97
presupposition 17, 34, 146 purified ‘I’ 77
Pries, Ch. 190 n.32 Pusch, L. F. 198 n.285
Prieto, L. J. 19–20, 257 Pynchon, T. 50, 121, 136
primary socialization 11, 36, 87, 208, 222
private self-fashioning 158 qualitative values of community 230
problematic 51, 65, 80, 82, 85, 108, 111–13, qualities, lack of 16
121, 134–5, 141–2, 145, 149–51, 168,
183, 219, 231, 249, 252, 278 Rabaté, D. 61 n.233
process without subject 205 Racine, J. 48
processes, subjectivity as 27, 36, 40, 189 Rademacher, H. 72
production of subjectivity problem 160 Radical Constructivism 69
programmed society 28 radical indeterminacy 186
programming 153 Rahner, R. 246 n.199
progressive-regressive method 22 Rakovac, M. 291 n.150
project 12 Rammstedt, O. 239 n.12
project of modernity 152, 183 Rasch, W. 225
proletariat 5, 78, 79, 101, 232, 282 ratio 69, 98–102
Propp, V. 8 rationalist discourses 19, 23, 50
Protestant ethic 29, 30, 278 rationality
protonormalism 165 and divine work 76
Proust, M. 8, 44, 50, 108–9, 111–12, 114, and Foucault 154, 155, 159
149, 171, 175, 176–7, 188, 251, 255, and freedom 94
259 and the Other 98
providence 82 reason vs nature of subjectivity 65
pseudo-events 147–8 state reason 77
pseudo-objectivity 92 Rattansi, A. 199 n.296
pseudo-science 162 Raulet, G. 57 n.120, 287 n.38
pseudo-subjects 26, 50, 109, 154 real, the 169
psyche 14, 71, 103, 222 realizing modalities 7–8
psychiatry 34, 153, 154, 157 reason
psychoanalysis Foucault on 157
and ambivalence 252, 253 and Nietzsche 88–9
and breaks in identity 17 reason is torture 155, 157
and feminism 187 as totalizing thought 73–4
and Fichte’s ‘I’ 72 vs understanding 139
and Lacan 168, 173 Reboul, O. 290 n.117
and penis envy 185 reflection 14–15, 17, 19, 31, 32, 65, 211
and Sartre 95, 114 reflexivity 183, 238, 254–6, 268
and Seidler 258 Reformation 278
and social psychology 33–42 refutability 263, 264, 266, 271, 273
and surrealism 112, 113 regional identities 52
and transfer 104–5 regression 173, 175
and truth 168 Reid, R. 25, 156
Index 325
reification, ideological 158–67 Safouan, M. 176

Reijen, W. van 57 n.120, 61 n.226, 62 n.244, Salamun, K. 273
287 n.38 sameness (mêmeté) 15, 16, 17, 39, 40, 93,
relapse 173 251
relativism 136 Sanford, R. N. 102
relevance 11, 43, 225, 226, 256, 257, 258 sanity 150
religion Sartre, J.-P.
Althusser on 161 autobiography 44, 47–8
and the disorientated subject 135 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 93–4
and flexible normalism 166 and Camus 101
vs ideology 162 contingency and chance 114, 261
and late modernity 86 critiques of surrealism and
Marxist critique of 82 psychoanalysis 92–8
and possessive individualism 201–2 and existentialism 33, 36
religious spirit 85 existentialism 84
and social movements 234 freedom 65–6
remembering ‘I’ 44 on Hegel 88
Renner, R.G. 195 n.194 heroic subjectivity 22
repetition 26–7, 39, 137, 143–7, 166 and the imaginary 169–70
repression 65, 89, 97, 172 La Nausée (1938) 66, 93, 96, 114, 255
Rescio, A. 138 and Laing 147
‘responsible person’ definitions of subject as modernist 6
2 particularization 65
restricted vs elaborated code 42 on poetry 136
Rétif, F. 188 projet 12
return to the subject 48 and radical negation 249
reversibility 152, 155 Sassanelli, G. 176
Reynolds, M. 35 Saussure, F. de 42, 142, 172, 210, 218, 254
Ribot, T. 35 Sautet, M. 127 n.179
Ricardou, J. 224 scepticism 205
Ricœur, P. 3, 15–16, 17, 28, 93, 94, 251, 262 Schäfers, B. 54 n.24, 57 n.122, 131 n.308
Riedel, M. 123 n.54 Schärer, P. 197 n.255
Riesman, D. 29, 30–1, 175, 207, 208, 215, Schiller, F. 107, 118
238 Schindler, I. 122 n.43
Rimbaud, A. 97 schizophrenic behaviour 150, 151
risk society 29–30, 216, 238 Schlegel, A. W. 75
Ritter, J. 80 Schlegel brothers 75
Robbe-Grillet, A. 50, 120, 218, 224 Schlette, H.R. 56 n.87
Rogers, C. R. 38, 40 Schlieben-Lange, B. 61 n.212
Roloff, V. 287 n.50 Schluchter, W. 240 n.17, 240 n.22
Romanticism 34, 75, 150, 230, 278 Schmidinger, H. M. 85, 86
Rorty, R. 183 Schmidt, A. 26, 47
Rosen, M. 77 Schmitz, H. 77, 123 n.45
Rosenfeld, U. 172 Schmitz-Emans, M. 44
Rosenthal, B. 56 n.86 Schneider, R. 226
Roters, K.-H. 290 n.117 Schneider, U. 90
ruling class ideologies 163, 229 Schopenhauer, A, 70
Rutte, H. 56 n.98, 290 n.120 Schrag, C. O. 250, 265
Ryan, M. 200 n.321 Schröder, K. 279–80
326 Index
Schrödter, H. 53 n.1, 53 n.2, 53 n.23, selfhood (ipséité) 15, 17, 93, 95, 154, 251,
195 n.192 262
Schülein, J. A. 277 self-identity 238
Schulte, G. 91 self-knowledge 76
Schulte Nordholt, A. 44 self-negation 115
Schulte-Sasse, J. 62 n.237 self-organizing systems 40
Schulz, P. 45 self-perception 154
Schulz, W. 121 n.1 self-preservation 24
Schulz-Buschhaus, U. 45 self-reflexivity 65, 120
Schütz, A. 269 self-renunciation 76
Schwab, G. 46 selfsameness 40
Schwab, W. 174 self-sufficiency 90, 97
Schwemmer, O. 256 semantic isotopy 258
science without a subject 162, 164 semantics, see also signifier-signified
scientific language 168 chain of signifiers 36
scientific theory identity as semantics 256
and Foucault 46–7 semiotics 3, 42–50, 153–8
and ideology 162 Sennett, R. 208
and individuality 18 sensual perception 68–9
normal science 14 sexuality 65, 97, 103, 104, 120, 157, 180,
and normalism 26 183, 214, 236, 253–4, 258
process without subject 27 Shapiro, M.J. 194 n.148
and semantics 12 Shils, E. A. 227
as a system 71 sight (sense) 19
universality 19 signifier-signified 35, 39, 141–2, 172
scientistic ideology 39 Sigrist, Ch. 219, 224
Scott, J.W. 199 n.312, 199 n.313 Simmel, G.
‘second dimension’ 117, 121, 158 crisis of the subject 49
secondary modelling systems 262, 264, on differentiation 107
267, 271–2, 279 on economics 207
secondary socialization 11, 37, 87, 208, 222 on individual/ collective subjects 4
sects 7, 8 on individualization 238
secularism 28, 34 on social differentiation 203–4
secularization 70, 114, 166, 202, 232 on subjective vs objective culture 52
Seidler, V. J. 258–9 on subjugation 31
Self 8, 86, 98, 148, 238, 239 Simon, Cl. 224
self-abnegation 186 Simon, J. 127 n.172
self-awareness 78, 154 Simons, A. 274
self-consciousness 75, 170 Simson, F.H. 122 n.20
self-containment 74 simulacra 30, 215
self-created subject 71, 158 simulation 215
self-criticism 65, 211, 250, 253 Singer, L. 199 n.313
self-destruction 202 Sittlichkeit 77, 89
self-direction 154 Skadelig, O. 117, 119
self-empowerment (Selbstermächtigung) Skinner, B.F. 38
72, 90 slips of the tongue 50
self-enhancement 239 Smith, A. 94
self-enrichment 206 social class vs social movements 231–2
self-fulfillment 52 social competence 42
Index 327
social contexts of identity 41 and language 170

social criticism 152, 158, 185 religious spirit 85
social differentiation 107 and subjectivity in philosophy 283
social domination 42 World Spirit (Weltgeist) 73–8
social evolution 253 spirits of nations 75
social movements 182, 202, 212, 231–2, split subject 147–52, 171
232–8, 252, 281, 282 stability of meaning 141–3
social pathology 151 Stalinism 104, 165, 208
social psychology 33–42, 153–8 Stalker, G.M. 206
social sciences 99, 155, 262–78 state of nature 83, 105, 169
social semiotics 14, 26–7 state reason 77, 78
social systems theory 21–2, 31–2, 107, 202, state-family relations 157
269 states (nations) 10, 207, 281
social time 90 Steenbakkers, P. 163
social values, theory of 83 Stehle, H. 195 n.174
socialization 11, 36, 87, 174, 208, 222 Steinwachs, G. 95, 113
society, individual and collective subjects Stekeler-Weithofer, P. 55 n.49
in 3–20 stigmatization 154–8
sociolects 11–17, 19, 20, 24, 42–3, 47–8, Stirner, M. 65, 80, 82–6, 89, 90
117, 211, 256, 257, 258, 259, 263, Stockinger, P. 54 n.34
264, 268, 271–2 stranger within 111, 256
socio-linguistic situation 10–17, 42–50, stream of consciousness 97, 143
254, 256–8, 262, 268–70, 277 structural semiotics 7, 9, 115
sociolinguistics 10–17, 42–50, 256 structuralism 26, 46–7, 158–9, 167, 171,
sociology 3, 4, 27–33, 52, 86, 155, 201–39, 181
269 structure-action distinction 31
sociology of action 220, 229, 239, 251, 275, subiectum 2–3, 9, 12, 25, 26, 50, 78, 118
281 subject in process 189
sociosemiotics 271–2, 274 subject of theory 17–20
Socrates 65, 92 subject-actant/ actant sujet 7, 204, 218,
sogetto scisso 147–52 220, 223, 227
solidarities 17, 104–5, 203–4, 220 subject-historicity-social movements triad
Sorel, G. 235 232–3
Sorić D. 281 subjection 11, 238
Soupault, P. 97, 113 subjective appropriation 76
sovereignty 83, 157, 161 subjective culture 204–6
Soviet ideology 79 subjective stability 166
space and time 69, 140 subjugated vs disintegrating instance 3
specular state 183 subjugation 8–9, 25, 26, 31, 51, 65, 65–121
speech, and subjectivity 31 sublime 135–40, 265
speech act theory 143, 267 sublime feeling 134
Sperber, D. 258 submission 65, 87, 115, 119, 152–88
Spinoza, B. 74, 93, 161 subversion of the subject 27
Spirit 65 sujet assujetti 161
spirit superego-ego-id divisions 8–9, 35, 68, 70,
absolute Spirit 77 95, 105–6, 258
being of the spirit 170 Superman 72, 87, 90–1, 207
cogito/ spirit 50, 65, 67–72, 89, 95, 143, supra-individual actants 7–10
172, 251 supra-individual subjects 84, 86, 160
328 Index
supranational states 281 Tönnies, F. 4, 28, 203

surrealism 65, 95–6, 112, 138, 139, 149, 261 Topitsch, E. 273
Süskind, P. 49, 120, 176 total screen 209, 213, 257
Svevo, I. 50, 66, 110, 111, 171, 187, 188 totalitarianism 5, 12, 13, 103, 104, 106
Sweezy, P. M. 206, 209 totality 73, 73–4, 77, 92, 164, 204
symbolic order 173, 188 Touraine, A. 3, 5, 28, 32–3, 49, 167, 182,
symbolic power 257 202, 205, 209, 229–39, 252, 256, 275,
symbolic violence 169, 172–4, 257 281, 282
symbolic-imaginary-real triad 169 trade unions 52, 212
systematic thought 108 traditional societies 28
systematization 87 tragedy of the culture process 204
system-environment distinction 12, 31, traits 38
222 trans-avant-garde 140
systems theory 32, 221–2, 231 transcendental foundation 221, 251, 271
systems-life world distinction 12 trans-esthétique 225, 226
Szondi, P. 46 transfer 104
translation of sociolects 275, 276
Tabbi, J. 136 transparency, as domination of subject 26
Talbot, M. M. 42–3 Treumann, R. 277
taxonomies 19 Trieb, B. 244 n.139
Taylor, Ch. 52, 68 trilingualism 279–80
technologies truth
media 209–17 and Adorno 100, 168
and narcissism 37 creation of the True 93
television 104, 136, 178, 210–17 and feminism 183
television 104, 136, 178, 210–17 and Foucault 159
Tesnière, L. 8 identity of thought 86
theory of dialogue 51 and language 102, 171
theory of discontinuous systematicities and madness 157
159 metaphysical concepts of 84
theory of literature 42–50 and Nietzsche 88–9, 151
theory of personality 38–42 and objectivity 213
theory of relativity 253 and pseudo-events 148
theory of science (Wissenschaftslehre) 71, true word 168, 173
73 true-not true 225
theory of the subject 17–20 Turner, B.S. 57 n.122
thetic phase 188 Tyrell, H. 245 n.163
Thompson, J.B. 247 n.228
thought unconscious
as negation 93 and disintegration of the subject
and Nietzsche 89 111–12
reason as totalizing thought 73–4 and division 171
Thulstrup, N. 85 eternality of 161
Thurlings, Th. L. M. 246 n.185 and the imaginary 171
Thurshwell, A. 198 n.278 and language 171
Tiedemann, R. 100 and the liberated subject 97
Tietmeyer, H. 281 Musil on 109
Tiryakian, E.A. 246 n.177 nature-thought 80
Todorov, T. 286 n.11, 287 n.33 and normalization 173
Index 329
and psychoanalysis 33, 35 rejection of modernist utopias 134

semantic isotopy 258 repetition of a sign 27
and surrealism 95 and repetition of the sign 145–7
undecidability, politics of 186 and the subversion of the subject
undemocratic movements 235 141–7
understanding and imagination 140 transition from Laing 134, 147–52
Ungar, S. 96 Verwindung 174, 216
Unique, the 90 Verdiglione, A. 190 n.26
unity of opposites 51, 251 Verwindung 150, 151, 158, 174, 216
universal language 276, 279–80 Verzar, A. 123 n.46
universal pragmatics 23 Vincent, J.-M. 193 n.138
universal reason 82, 155, 157, 205 Vinken, B. 184
universalism 228, 232, 235, 263–7, 270 violence 115, 119, 149, 155, 157, 218, 229,
use values (vs exchange values) 29, 32, 233
213–14, 215, 216 virtualizing modalities 7–8
utilitarian actors 231 Vischer, F. T. 50, 65, 66, 76, 78, 80–6, 96,
utilitarianism 84 108, 112, 141, 171, 252, 260–1
utopianism 24, 118, 121, 134, 183 Vogel, M. R. 230
Voigt-Weber, L. 282
Valéry, P. 3, 45, 48, 101, 135, 136, 137, 138 Volhard, E. 81, 126 n.147
values Volkelt, J. 80
ambivalence of values 107, 109–15 Voloshinov, V. 219–20, 254
crisis of social values/ social
disintegration 34, 37, 40, 44–5, 50, Warnock, M. 93
88, 107, 205 Watson, J.B. 38
in Critical Theory 273 Watzlawick, P. 243 n.112
and division of labour 107 weak subjectivity 230
exchange values, society based on 28, weakness of the ‘I’ 102–8
29, 32, 52, 99, 110, 134, 136, 144, Weber, A. 49, 204
166, 178, 180, 186, 201–2, 203, 207, Weber, M.
210, 211, 213, 214, 225, 228 action, concept of 204, 205–7, 229
vs functional hierarchies 179 and the decline of the subject 49
indifference 111, 134–5, 144, 166, ideal types 165, 179
174–9, 182, 186, 208, 214, 228, 235, on individual/ collective subjects 4
252 and Nietzsche 207
indistinguishability of values 214 Protestant ethic 29–31
individual’s supreme value 174–9 and the sociology of organisations
and postmodernism 49–50, 207 206–7, 209, 211, 218
Sartre on 93 on subjugation 31
use values (vs exchange values) 28, 29, Weipert, G. 240 n.19
32, 213–14, 215, 216 Weiß, J. 240 n.23
value development 213–16 Wellmer, A. 139
Van de Putte, A. 163 Welsch, W. 139
Vattimo, G. Wenturis, N. 57 n.122
critiques of modernity 51 Wertheimer, J. 241 n.66
and the dogma of idealism 3 Weststeijn, W.G. 61 n.226, 62 n.244
on Nietzsche 150 Wetz, F. J. 115
particularization 227 wholeness, tendency towards 40
pluralism 135 Whyte W. H. 207
330 Index
Wieviorka, M. 198 n.291, 199 n.293, Young Hegelians 65–6, 76, 78, 82, 85, 86,
246 n.180, 247 n.226, 286 n.13, 98, 100, 159, 188, 252, 283
292 n.157
Wiggershaus, R. 286 n.3 Zijderveld, A.C. 243 n.103
will to power 89 Zima, P. V. 49, 54 n.32, 55 n.48, 55 n.65,
Williams, C. 63 n.259 55 n.67, 55 n.74, 56 n.77, 56 n.99,
Wilson, D. 258 58 n.140, 60 n.204, 61 n.227,
Winckelmann, J. 240 n.15 62 n.250, 63 n.256, 63 n.264,
Wittgenstein, L. x, 227, 265 63 n.265, 63 n.267, 121 n.7,
Wolf, K.H. 239 n.9 125 n.115, 128 n.206, 130 n.273,
women 131 n.288, 131 n.301, 131 n.302,
femininity 97 134, 167, 189 n.1, 189 n.2, 189 n.6,
feminism 12, 52, 91, 121, 135, 166, 169, 190 n.34, 190 n.46, 191 n.81, 193
179–89, 234, 236, 252, 282 n.138, 194 n.165, 194 n.167, 198
gender linguistics 42 n.264, 199 n.300, 199 n.303, 241
and social movements 234, 282, 284 n.66, 242 n.91, 244 n.147, 247 n.219,
Wood, J. K. 40 274, 276, 286 n.6, 286 n.10, 286
Woolf, V. 179, 180, 186–7, 188, 189, 253 n.15, 286 n.16, 286 n.17, 287 n.50,
workers’ control 282 287 n.51, 288 n.60, 288 n.66,
working class movements 233–4 289 n.91, 289 n.92, 289 n.100,
working classes, new 33, 101, 282 290 n.113, 290 n.115, 290 n.124
World Spirit (Weltgeist) 73–8, 81, 87, 101, Zinser, H. 8
162 Zourabichvili, F. 146
‘worthless existence’ (‘faule Existenz’) 77 Zurhorst, G. 128 n.212

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Subjectivity and Identity

Deconstruction and Critical Theory

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2015

© Peter V. Zima, 2015

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-78093-780-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

II Subjectivity Between Metaphysics and Modernism: The Subject as a

III Disintegration and Submission of the Individual Subject in

IV The Dialectics of Individual Subjectivity from a Sociological

V Theory of the Subject: Towards a Dialogical Subjectivity 249

2 The subject of Dialogical Theory 262

The fact that individual subjectivity cannot be viewed independently of collective

Theories of the Subject: Deﬁnitions of the Term

In contemporary debates, the ‘disappearance of the subject’1 is about to become a

What has not disappeared because it continues to be a pre-condition of any

1 The concept of subject and the subject of theory

(a) Individual and collective subjects in society and language

members belonging to a particular tribe. Even in European feudalism the individual

This concise description of the individual subject’s ‘embeddedness’ in traditional

(b) Subject and actant: Infra-individual, individual, artiﬁcial and

Individuality [. . .] means, considered from outside, certain physical features, a

This is an almost complete presentation of Freud’s mythical and military actantial

unit, as a dynamic, permanently shifting equilibrium resulting from the interaction of

(c) Individual and collective subjects as discursive instances:

course of which it reacts imitatively, consensually or polemically to other discourses

conﬂicts’, the ‘green’ politician constructs an antagonism between economy and

characteristic feature of secularized bourgeois society,46 and that in contemporary

First there is being-in-the world, then understanding, then interpreting, then

(d) The subject of theory

Every experience, every thought of a character is internally dialogic, adorned with

2 The state of the debate

all theological, philosophical, psychological, sociological and literary debates so that

(a) From existentialism to postmodernity: Philosophy

Sweeping statements of this kind expose themselves to contemporary criticism,

Inverting the idealist hierarchy, Adorno pleads in favour of a ‘preponderance of the

His model is based on the two complementary notions of ‘intersubjectivity’ and

death of man as he was constructed by “medical humanism”.’107 What matters here is

(b) From the lonely crowd to the social movement: Sociology

in which the human, both as individual and as community, is deprived of its

In other words: modernity as industrial society becomes a problem in view of ecological

(c) From psychoanalysis and the theory of personality to social

Lacan sees the Freudian unconscious as an interaction of signiﬁers when he describes

But he is right in not using ‘narcissism’ in order to explain the disintegration of

The question is why.

and consistent personality structure, the consistency of which is maintained in very

If it is correct that the social processes of disembedding entail new frameworks of

What do Keupp’s alternatives look like?

(d) Individual subjectivity in linguistics and the theory of literature

Lakoﬀ reports seeing a man ‘helpless with suppressed laughter at a discussion

Doing so means overturning the traditional problem, no longer raising the

3 Aporias of the individual subject in modernity

45 L. Althusser, On Ideology, op. cit., p. 49.

103 Ibid., p. 195.

154 Ibid., p. 106.

183 S. E. Hampson, The Construction of Personality, op. cit., p. 81.

211 Cf. ibid., p. 151.

Subjectivity Between Metaphysics and

same time: ‘Whenever freedom is at stake, Sartre’s thought is constantly aware of

1 Subjectivity from Descartes and Kant to Fichte: ‘Monsieur Teste’

Isolated as it is, this psychoanalytic explanation is insuﬃcient because it glosses over

2 From Hegel to Marxism: Omnipotence and impotence

‘Theory of science’ (Wissenschaftslehre), of a ‘completely insuﬃcient externality’ and