Can Subjectivity Be Salvaged?

Papastephanou, Marianna.
Common Knowledge, Volume 11, Issue 1, Winter 2005, pp. 136-159 (Article)

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ARTICLES: Refreshing Philosophy

CAN SUBJECTIVITY BE SALVAGED?

Marianna Papastephanou

Discourse on subjectivity reached its culmination in modernity. German Idealist accounts of self-reection, Hegel and his master-slave narrative, and Husserls transcendental ego exemplify this intensive interest in identity formation. Setting aside the theoretical complexities of those approaches, we see that their concerns boil down to the issue of what we are and how we achieve our unity and homogeneity as living and knowing subjects. Such unity is taken for granted since it is regarded as the chief attribute of rational beings. Postmodern reactions to speculative philosophy, however, recant, among other things, the ontological and epistemological optimism of this discourse.1 Still, in spite of the initial excitement caused by newly formulated theories about the liquidation of the subject, this debate can by no means be considered settled. Most of the contemporary defenders of subjectivity acknowledge the faults of the old accounts but are reluctant to go as far as effacing the subject by sweeping away either its autonomy and freedom or its agency and self-transformation. Dieter Henrich argues, plausibly, that there was an epoch in which subjectivity was discovered but this does not mean that subjectivity was invented.2 In my opinion, this comment implies, rst, that self-acquaintance is not the outcome of a particular and historically locatable discourse but is rather an unavoidable
1. See, for example, Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes after the Subject? ? (London: Routledge, 1991). 2. Dieter Henrich, The Origins of the Theory of the Subject, in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, ed. Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 32.

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revolved) with the reconstruction of subjectivity itself. My title is a questionCan subjectivity be salvaged?which indicates a concern more than a claim. The word can and the question mark are meant to convey that my concern for subjectivity operates within connes, which are speciable. It is denitely not the self-regarding (egoistic) dimensions of identity that we should rescue, for they do not seem to be in particular danger, theoretical or practical, in our time. Even if they were threatened, more altruism and openness to alterity is something we could live with. Moreover, my title does not refer to the kind of idealistically conceived subjectivity that is transparent, always identical, self-referential, and therefore very poorly informative about the I as concrete and situated existence. The sense I give to the term subjectivity I borrow from Lvinas: The I is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity throughout all that happens to it.3 To the question Can subjectivity be salvaged? I could offer perhaps two kinds of answer. One is a long answer and presupposes a new direction in research. That new paradigm, unlike older accounts of subjectivity, would be sensitive to otherness within the self as well as outside it and would be critical of both modern individualism and the postmodern discourse of the death of the subject. The other answer is short and cannot be more than suggestive and inconclusive; it cannot by denition play the role of the long response. This article embodies, I am afraid, the short answer. In it, I discuss aspects of the issue of subjectivity in relation to the Enlightenment in order to propose that Cartesian rationalism
3. Emmanuel Lvinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1996), 36. I select this minimalist denition because I do not intend to discuss Lvi-

nas in this article or commit myself to the rest of his theory, although many of his ideas are compatible with the line of argument I am pursuing.

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ist attempts to reduce the origins of subjectivity to a specic erato the time of Descartes, Neuzeit, the Enlightenmentare bound to misre because they confuse the reconstruction of the problematic (around which theories of the subject

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even if unconsciouspresupposition of any lived experience. We are conscious of our unique being in the world not because some theory has disclosed it to us but because we have such fundamental feelings as human beings. Second, the intensication of interest in self-reection during a specic epoch does not necessarily entail that theories of self-consciousness characterize that epoch exclusively: we cannot presume that other times have lacked conceptions of subjectivity or that future philosophies can dispense with all accounts of it. Even a theory of the liquidation of the subject is a theory of subjectivity, after all. What is most plausible about Henrichs remark is the tacit claim that to relinquish a theory that views the subject as the absolute origin of all certainty does not amount to proving the experience of self-familiarity illusory or expendable. Thus, all postmodern-

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was not the only source informing individualism. I investigate how the modern conception of humanism as well as the modern understanding of nature and technologyrather than Cartesian solipsism (with its isolating exaggeration of the potential of the lonely self)are behind modern glorications of reason and the subject. By taking this approach, I by no means aim to salvage Descartess theory or to defend it against well-worn postmodern criticisms. My aim is rather to expose the problems stemming from the indictment of reason. In my opinion, the pathologies of subject-centered cultures should not be attributed to the subjects rational capacity as such. Like other current approaches, mine is critical (perhaps more critical than other approaches) of the priority that liberalism attaches to the subject and its concomitant rationality. But unlike the others, my approach does not incriminate all possible accounts of self and reason, nor does it question their ontological and epistemological signicance.

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The Subject and the Enlightenment Many postmodernist critiques of modernity go very far in challenging the idea of rational identity. Questioning the transhistorical character of reason or seeing it as a survival mechanism is not the only or the most crucial aspect of their attack on modern rationality. Reason is often seen as a product of humanism and of an ination of subjectivity to an absolute by Cartesian solipsism.4 On the part of most critics, an exposition of reason as inherently relative goes hand in hand with a critique of subjectivity. Ironically, however, to depict reason as relative does not amount to overcoming the danger of egoistic selfhood. A relativization of reason is not only compatible with the notion that subjectivity is a product of Western humanism; the relativization of reason can be identied as a predictable further step in the development of individualistic theory. The former can be accommodated comfortably within the latter with no harm done to individualism; the relativization of reason may even enhance individualism. Everyday experience offers concrete examples of how one may place relativism and irrationalism at the service of ones own interests. If all standards are relative (and therefore, there are no standards in the strict sense), I am allowed to do as I please. Thus, whether a radical questioning of reason necessarily succeeds in undermining the sovereignty of the modern subject is rather dubiousat best, debatable. Implicit or explicit preoccupation with the oppositional couple body/mind has led, I think, to the dominant modern understanding of subjectivity in the West. The ramications of that understanding have been criticized forcefully
4 . It should be mentioned here that, unlike many of his followers and some of his postmodernist colleagues, Foucault avoids such oversimplications and speaks for a more nuanced understanding of both the Enlightenment and humanism. See Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in The Foucault Reader r, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

their voices somewhere in between and avoided both unmitigated rationalism and nihilistic materialism.7 But I think one can responsibly say that the premises of those polar views form the basis for two dominant trends of the period: (1) an empirical ontology that sees Being as a totality of objects (each subject is one of these and is an object in the eyes of another fellow being) and (2) an idealism that gives priority to a self-transparent knowing subject over a now manipulable and knowable ux of experience. In both these cases, the subject apparently triumphs: either because of its survival needs and its peculiar modes of gratifying them or because of its rationalistic superiority, the subject becomes the master of the world. (Hegels narrative of the achievement of self-consciousness through recognition and the master-slave relation is a typical example of a theory of subjectivity relying tacitly on the superiority of the reective subject.) 8 In some fashionable interpretations, the Enlightenment is represented as a primarily Cartesian era of self-assuredness marked by the victory of Platonic

5. Theories by La Mettrie, Holbach, and de Sade, for instance. 6. Descartes, for example, argued that, of the three modi cognoscendi, only the intellectus s offers real truths and has to be kept clearly distinct from imagination (which refers to material things). Spinoza makes a similar distinction between knowledge of imagination and knowledge arrived at through the application of rational concepts and categories. The same mistrust of knowledge coming from or concerning bodies in the Cartesian theory is displayed by the distinction between, and the priority of, the certitudo modi procendendi i over the certitudo objecti. See Panajotis Kondylis, Europaikos Diafotismos, 2 vols. (Athens: Themelion, 1987), 2:220 34 [in German, Die Aufkl lrung im Rahmen des Neuzeitlichen Rationalismus s (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag, 1981)].

7. I am thinking of the nihilistic materialism of de Sade and La Mettrie, which uncouples the Ought from the Is in order to disparage the former, and which draws out the radically relativistic and historically bound consequences of enlightened thought. Cf. the criticism of Richard Rorty in Karl-Otto Apel, Wittgenstein and Heidegger: Language Games and Lifeforms, in From a Transcendentalr Semiotic Point of View, ed. Marianna Papastephanou (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1998), 152. 8. See G. W. F. Hegel, Lordship and Bondage, in Hegels Dialectic of Desire and Recognition, ed. John ONeill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 29 37.

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over the last century by various and often opposing schools of thought. Associated concepts, like humanism and individualism, have often been saddled with negative meanings. Understanding the subject as a body represents it as biologically determined and without a history or social role shaping its individuality. As a possessor of mind, the subject is seen as the locus of certainty, knowledge, clarity, and transparency. In some theories of the early modern period, the subject gures as neither mind nor body but as the tenuous unity between those forces. In these latter theories, however, mind and body are ontologically asymmetrical. There is always a privileged dimension: either it is the body, with its autonomous and material existence, its needs and desires;5 or else, the privileged dimension is the mind, with its independent and pure form, organizing and controlling matter and external reality, turning real objects into concepts.6 These views cannot be taken to characterize the era as a whole: most early modern philosophers found

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mathematics over Aristotelian physics (Newton and the Cambridge Platonists over scholasticism). But one can also argue, by contrast, that what was of decisive importance for the modern conception of the subject was the rehabilitation of nature and matter, both as categories and as elds of research: natural science and technology, it is argued, have enhanced the position of human beings in the world.9 The Enlightenments rehabilitation of nature and matter is often overlooked for polemical reasons: the pathologies of the West are attributed (for example, by neopragmatism) to narratives of subjective redemption rather than to narratives of liberal progress. The Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa did contribute to the argument that the thinking subject is the basis of all knowledge. But Cartesian physics in its further implications could be directed against t the idea of a subject materially independent and separated from the rest of the material world and thus could be directed against the conception of a self-centered subject as a spatiotemporally insulated and closed system. In other words, according to Cartesian dualism, the subject is not spatiotemporally locatable. An assumption of subjects as unique bodies in space and time presupposes that the Cartesian identication of matter and extension (excluding the possibility of vacuum between objects) is wrong. An object (or a subject) as atomon assumes a Newtonian and not a Cartesian universe. Newton employed the corpuscular theory against the Cartesian rejection of physical bodies as atoms separated from one another by means of vacuum. Newton did so, in order to show that matter should not be identied with extension. Moreover, for Newton, whatever does not exist in space cannot exist at all. Given these Newtonian theses, one can easily reach the conclusion that, within the worldview to which Newton was one of the major contributors, a subject exists as a spatiotemporal singularity, with two major consequences for an empirical ontology: (a) A subject in its bodily dimension is determined by categories of space and time, and it strives for its self-preservation as s a singularity; (b) this corporeal singularity is the crucial element that distinguishes each human being from another, from other living organisms, and from inanimate nature.10 We should not forget that even in Hegels narrative, the slave-to-be submits to the master because of the slaves animal fear of death, the threat to his or her spatiotemporal existence. What distinguishes one human being from another is primarily its existence as an unprecedented and unrepeatable physical unit,

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9. This argument, which is crucial for judging and proving false the most cherished interpretations of modernity by postmodernist thinkers, runs through one of the most thoroughly researched studies of European enlightenment, Kondyliss two-volume work mentioned in note 6.

10. See Kondyliss comment on the Enlightenment reception of the criticisms against atomism: The rejection of atomism, as a corollary of the identication of matter with extension, was not acceptable as such, even more because it seemed to vindicate the alchemists: if the essence of a body is only extension, then anything can be transformed to anything else. Kondylis, Europaikos Diafotismos, 2:315; translation mine. See also 2:30720.

status. Even normativity is founded on the causalities of self-preservationas both anthropological pessimism and anthropological optimism show.12 Seen from this perspective, liberalism is extraordinarily compatible with the kind of individualism that can be coupled with a utilitarian understanding of human nature as primarily pleasure-seeking (where pleasure is assessed quantitatively). However, understanding the drive of self-preservation to be the motive power of all action entails the risk of giving up moral and political constraints. A sufcient amount of empirical rationalism was considered during the Enlightenment to be good insurance against the risks that the rehabilitation of matter entailed for morality and social order.13 A subject is not only a body, it is also a mind; and the more complex the relation between mind and body, the more the subject becomes capable of nding a metaphysical or naturalistic foundation for normativity. (A crude empiricism that totally y excluded the dimensions of culture and self-reection or art as secondary to facticity was regarded as a path to immoral behavior: a one-dimensional and too radical adherence to the material world.) Philosophers and scientists gradually enriched nature with properties and thereby endowed it
11. My extrapolationthat the modern conception of subjectivity emphasized more the aspect of spatiotemporal identication and preservation of ones space (so central to old and contemporary individualism) than the aspect of unique life historyis compatible, despite its coming via another route, with Foucaults account. Elaborating in his later work on the creative relation of the subject to itself, Foucault argues that an aesthetic of existence was essential to antiquity and foreign to the Middle Ages, that it reappeared in the Renaissance and then again in 19th century dandyism, but those were only episodes. See Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Rabinow, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 245, 251.

12. Ethics is grounded in the love for oneself not only by Machiavelli and Hobbes but also by their ideological opponents (such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson), albeit for different reasons and in pursuit of different aims. See Kondylis, Europaikos Diafotismos, 2:44 86. 13. A sufcient amountbut preferably nothing like the Cartesian intellectualist excess, since the rehabilitation of experience and matter disrupts the preeminence of the intellectus.

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to self-preservation, understood as the fulllment of basic corporeal needs. The egoistic element not only acquires legitimation but is raised to a transhistorical

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rather than its roles in society or in any biographical patterns: individuality as a result of a unique life history is reduced to spatiotemporal singularity.11 Egoism, self-interest (interpreted as self-preservation and self-promotion), and antagonism with other interest-seekers thus gain priority within the set of constitutive human experiences. As a consequence, other dimensions of the subject lose their philosophical signicance. Its place in a given society, its conformity to a culture, its roots in a tradition, its self-understanding (which might be unique and at odds with that of the majority) are overlooked. Moreover, the subjects capacity to form an internal reality through imagination and artistic experience, and its formation via class, race, and gender determinations, become secondary. All other needs give way

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with autonomous existence, motion, and life. The ontological rehabilitation of matter (as opposed to Descartess contempt for it) was achieved simultaneously with the secularization of worldviews and the redescription of reason as to some extent mutable and dependent on historical change. All phenomena that can be interpreted will be interpreted without a primum movens s or a deus ex machina. Matter is thus the only unique substance: a carrierrich in contentof all possible properties or modi.14 One might claim that the liberal conception of a self-centered subjecta subject that turns itself and others into objects to be studied, used, and exploited might be epistemologically compatible with the Cartesian cogito. However, the liberal subject, thus dened, would be ontologically more detached, closed, and antagonistic to nature and to other subjects than Cartesian connes would permit. A more materialist and less rationalist framework is necessary. Hence, it is ironically but precisely the rehabilitation of matter that afrmed the liberal elevation of the subject to sovereignty over the world (including the natural world). The conception of reason most useful to the liberal worldview has, therefore, not been that of Descartes, Leibniz, or Spinoza, but rather that of the Newtonian tradition. Yet that conception of reason is a construction, not a transhistorical reality. The damage caused to humanity by its supposed adherence to rationality should be attributed not to reason as such but to the way one era interpreted and applied it. Thinkers of the Enlightenment tended to regard reason as a tool of survival for self-centered beings; but that notion, like the Enlightenment notion of subjectivity, can be formulated differently, in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the past. To begin doing so, I will draw now on the work of Jrgen Habermas.

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Habermas and Intersubjectivity Habermas shares with some postmodernist thinkers a hostility to the philosophy of consciousness and to the Cartesianism often associated with it. As his debate with Dieter Henrich shows, Habermas is reluctant to commit himself to a theory of introsubjectivity since his project is better promoted by a theory of inter subjectivity.15 Then again, his idea of intersubjectivity presupposes a conception of the subject that bears some resemblance to the one held by German idealism and traditional hermeneutics. Thus, although for Habermas plurality has an at least temporal priority over singularity, any idea of the liquidation of the subject would be incompatible with his theory.16 The distinction between the phenom14. I am indebted here to Kondylis, Europaikos Diafotismos, 2:260 83. 15. See Jrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, vol. 1 (1986 ; reprint, Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 392 95. 16. Plurality has priority over singularity, for Habermas, because society and language represent an always already of human experience and the precondition of the existence and formation of individuals.

worlds of mind and body.17 As Panajotis Kondylis argues, the basic intention of the Enlightenment was precisely to harmonize reason with the sensuous world, or in other words, the Ought and the Is through a normative concept of Nature.18 Habermas too wishes to redress the Ought/Is and body/mind dichotomies, but this time in linguistic terms. It is in the middle period of his career that he accomplishes this task.19 It is also in that period that, through his renegotiation of the constellation reason, intersubjectivity, and language, he provides an account of the subject that avoids the problems of the philosophy of consciousness without reducing the self to a product of anonymous forces. However, I will draw mainly on Habermass earlier work herefor two reasons. His early ideas are crucial to the development of communicative action theory while being more relevant to questions concerning the Enlightenment. Second, the treatment of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in his early writings is more even-handed than in the rest of his work, and his concentration on the communicative paradigm and its benets is less exaggerated. Communicative action theory and its success in recasting issues of subjectivity in linguistic terms were achieved at the expense of a theory of introsubjectivity and its necessity. If one wishes to retain what has been gained along the way without paying the same price, one has to return to the initial stage of the theory and consider its counterfactual possibilitiesthose possibilities that have not yet been pursued fully. In this vein, it may be useful to examine how Habermas renegotiates the premises of some prior philosophical conceptions of the subject. For Hegel, the self-consciousness of an I is acquired through the dialectical relation of the I with the other; the other is not the I itselfas in Fichtebut another ego. Fichte derived the identity of the ego from consciousness reexively returning to itself.20 For Kant, in contrast to Hegel, the transcendental unity of apperception has to be derived from the I think and not from any empirical subject that poses as the other. Thus, as Habermas argues, Kant puries the original apperception, which is to guarantee the unity of transcendental consciousness, of all empirical contents.21 Both Fichte and Kant assume the subjectivity of self-knowing, whereas Hegel derives the I from intersubjectivity. (Schellings argument also

17. See Habermas, From Kant to Hegel and Back AgainThe Move Towards Detranscendentalization, European Journal of Philosophy 7.2 (August 1999): 129 57. 18. Kondylis, Europaikos Diafotismos, 2:350. 19. By the middle period, I mean roughly the 1980s, the years in which Habermas published his books The Theory

of Communicative Action, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, and Postmetaphysical Thinking g. 20. Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon, 1988), 144. 21. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 144.

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enal (body) and the intelligible (mind) that dominates in the Cartesian worldview does not hold for Habermas. Thus, Habermas takes further even than did Kant the insight of the Enlightenment that there should be no tension between the

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lies within the framework of subjectivity, but, unlike these other thinkers, he conceives subjectivity as prereective self-acquaintancea move that many contemporary inheritors of hermeneutics view sympathetically.)22 Now Fichte, in contrast to Kant, rejects the transcendental priority of selfreection over the ego and argues for a spontaneous positing of the ego to itself.23 Seen in this way, self-consciousness ceases to be the ultimate representation that accompanies and guarantees all other representations and becomes instead, to quote Habermas, an action that goes back inside itself, thus rendering itself transparent.24 The Fichtean coupling of reason and action, divested of its absolutistic and monological residue, can serve as a basis for self-critical reconstructive theories (psychoanalysis or critique of ideology, for instance).25 Or so I would read the following remark of Habermass: The concept of an interest of reason already appears in Kants transcendental philosophy. But Fichte, after subordinating theoretical to practical reason, is the rst to develop this concept of an emancipatory interest inherent in acting reason.26 What may be viewed as Fichtean in Habermass theory is his idea that reason is not opposed to action but, on the contrary, stems from an interest in action. This is the step that Fichte takes further than Kant does. However, Fichte, by identifying the act of self-consciousness as the original transcendental experience, remains within the absolutistic mode of thinking, since his pretension is to give a full account of an origin.27 Fichtes theory of an ego generating or positing the world cannot dispense with the framework of subjectivity. As Habermas writes, Fichte only deepens Kants transcendental unity of self-consciousness; the abstract unity of synthesis is resolved into the original action which produces the unity of the opposition of the I and the other by which the I knows itself.28

22. See Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism? trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). I nd a more orthodox Habermasian alternative to Schelling more appealing than the alternative that Frank offers. A prereective consciousness seems to me equivalent to a prelinguistic origin the existence of which I may not dispute (it is acceptable in the same way as the hypothesis of an unconscious mind); but its philosophical role as the safeguard of the uniqueness, identity, and autonomy of the subject is not convincing because it seems to point to a kernel of the subject before intersubjectivity and thus to an initial closure of the subject. 23. What Fichte demands is just this reection that goes one step further than self-consciousness. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 38. For an illuminating explanation of Fichtes theory of subjectivity, see Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987).

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24. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 38. 25. This aspect of Habermass theory is not solely due to Fichtean inuence. Geoffrey Hawthorn offers a different explanation: Habermas has accepted Husserls point that in addition to the instrumental and communicative interests there is the interest for theoria . . . an interest not just to grasp the phenomenal essence of the world but also to grasp the essence of ones own intentionality in so doing. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair r, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 239. Again, I would add, this point does not entail the absolutistic and monological overtones of transcendental theories of intentionality. 26 . Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 198 ; emphasis added. Habermas rejects the subordination of theoretical to practical reason, at least in his recent work. 27. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 37. 28. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 145.

communicative action theory in many ways.30 What concerns us here is the aspect of Marxian thought that is relevant to the issue of cognitive interests and reason. How Kant, Fichte, and Hegel relate to this issue is concisely expressed by Habermas: Kant takes formal logic in order to derive the categories of the understanding from the table of judgments. Fichte and Hegel take transcendental logic in order to reconstruct, respectively, the act of the absolute ego from pure apperception and the dialectical movement of the absolute notion (Begriff ) from the antinomies and paralogisms of pure reason.31 On the contrary, for Marx, synthesis takes place in the medium of labor rather than of thought: Marx restricts Fichtes absolute ego to the contingent human species.32 The notion of synthesis is of great importance in the Habermasian interpretation (and critique) of the relation between Marxian and Kantian ideas, for synthesis in Marxian materialistic terms keeps the Kantian distinction between form and matter: The concept of synthesis retains from Kant the xed framework within which the subject forms a substance that it encounters.33

29. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 210. 30 . For more on the way Habermas reinterprets the Marxian theory of value, see Wellmer, Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). 31. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 31. 32. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 40. 33. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 35. Marx is also Kantian when he restricts the relations of the human species with nature to the domain of instrumental action.

Marx distances himself from Kant, though, when he establishes productive forces as the medium of thein this case empiricalsynthesis, in the context of a natural environment. Moreover, Marx is un-Kantian when he speaks of categories of human manipulation through which the synthesis of the material of labor receives its actual unity. Kants parallel assumption is that there are categories of understanding through which The material of intuition by the imagination receives its necessary unity. Marx rejects the ahistorical character of the transcendental consciousness: The identity of societal subjects . . . alters in the scope of their power of technical control. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 3540.

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they stave off the danger of favoring oppressive totality and unity over diversity and heterogeneity. Habermass encounter with Marxian thought (particularly the early anthropological Marx of the Paris manuscripts) proved constructive for his

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In short, Habermas acknowledges the importance of the Kantian shift to epistemology, but at the same time he sees the partiality and inadequacy of a critique of knowledge that is based on a self-referential reason. Against it, Habermas promotes the Fichtean connection of reason and interest, which allows the interest embedded in reason to acquire primacy through a constitutive role for knowing and acting.29 Against Fichtes transcendentalism and his assumption of an isolated actor, Habermas poses the Hegelian themes of intersubjectivity and dialectics. As against Hegels absolutism of Geist t in evolution, Habermas suggests the Marxian synthesis. All of these moves can be useful in the attempt to reformulate our understanding of subjectivity: they indicate the distance that our reformulation must keep from the idealist self-afrmation of the ego, and

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Be that as it may, knowledge in Habermass early work is rehabilitated to the extent that, without becoming an absolute, it gains an emancipatory character through its relation to those cognitive interests that are not servile to self-preservation, social order, and political control. By this means Habermas challenges the assumption that subjectivity is primarily motivated by self-interest and that reason and knowledge are mere survival mechanisms, derivative from self-interest, gaining independence from it only through sublimation. Of course, this position does not entail that all knowledge is innocent or that no knowledge has been exploited by mechanisms of power. Foucaults analyses are deeply revealing with regard to such possibilities. But the Habermasian grounding of knowledge leaves space for understanding and developing cognitive interests that in principle transcend strategic use and power (nomological, hermeneutic-reconstructive sciences, for instance) and also for unmasking cognitive interests oriented toward strategic use and power (psychoanalysis, critique of ideology, deconstruction). Habermass reworking of ideas from Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx has, then, this goal: to offer an account of reason that is not at odds with experience, life, action, or emancipation, and to redeem knowledge-constitutive interests. The coupling of knowledge and interest is crucial and preconditions the later distinction between strategic and communicative rationality. And that distinction in turn enables a solution to the paradox of reason (reason regarding itself critically) and grounds the possibility for rational, self-reective subjectivity.34 In Habermass words:
My intention is to renew a critical social theory that secures its normative foundations by taking in the experience of thought gained along the way from Kant through Hegel to Marx, and from Marx through Peirce and Dilthey to M. Weber and G. H. Mead, and by working them up into a theory of rationality. This is a matter of explicating a concept of reason that falls prey neither to historicism nor to the sociology of knowledge, and that does not stand abstractly over against history and the complex of social life. Only with this attempt can the Kantian meaning of critique . . . attain a position of honour within the HegelianMarxist tradition.35

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These accounts are of pivotal importance for the notion of reection as thinking about subjectivity. (Self-) reection does not provide a supposedly absolute, disinterested, and infallible knowledge of objects, unmediated by any kind of othernessand it by no means provides the I, the ego itself as object, with absolute transparence and lucidity. Reection does not offer to the subject the inane and illusory satisfaction that he or she is in absolute control of him- or

34. See Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1 and 2.

35. Habermas, in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held (London: Macmillan, 1982), 232.

empiricism both contributed to the sway of self-centered subjectivity, we realize the signicance of Habermass distance from and rejection of both of them. We read in his book Knowledge and Human Interests: knowledge-constitutive interests would be completely misunderstood if viewed as mere functions of the reproduction of social life. . . . For knowledge is neither a mere instrument of an organisms adaptation to a changing environment nor the act of a pure rational being removed from the context of life in contemplation. And further, the experience of reection articulates itself substantially in the concept of a self-formative process. Methodically it leads to a standpoint from which the identity of reason with the will to reason freely arises.38 As against Fichtes, Habermass notion of reection is not the absolute idea of a self-formative process that abstracts from the world and experience.39 As against Hegel, Habermas holds that the life and action of a self-constituting species-subject cannot be conceived as the absolute movement of reection; history does not map the orbit of an evolving Spirit. The desire for the other and for knowing the other and the self is not metaphysical, at least not in the Hegelian sense. Within a linguistic-pragmatic paradigm of thought, the absolute self-positing of the ego (by Fichte) and the absolute movement of mind (in Hegels conception) are seen as failures to understand that a selfformative process is not unconditioned. The contingent conditions determining
36. Once again, a close reading of early Habermasian texts will follow because I see as crucial that approach of his to reection. In brief, it shows that any attempt to assimilate the theories of the second-generation Frankfurt School to rationalism or idealism amounts to a drastic misunderstanding. Lyotards critique of the Habermasian idea of consensus seems to be based on such a misunderstanding. 37. In the philosophical tradition these two legitimate forms of self-knowledge have generally remained undifferentiated and have both been included under the term of reection. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 2223.

38 . Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 197, emphasis added. 39. As Manfred Frank writes, we can even agree with the idea that the individual is different in itself (and not only different from other things): the incalculability of the contexts into which it can enter constantly displaces the margins of its previous unity with itself. Frank, What is Neostructuralism? 379.

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herself and of the outside world. Reection is not merely a device for surviving or primarily for exploiting otherness (be it that of nature or of humans), and it is not a mere sociohistorical projection either.36 A further break with the past becomes noticeable with the Apelian and Habermasian distinction between selfreection and rational reconstructions. The former brings to consciousness the self-formative phases of the development of the individual, and the latter deal with anonymous rule systems, which any subjects whatsoever can comply with, insofar as they have acquired the corresponding competence with respect to these rules.37 Two points are particularly important for my argument here. On the one hand, there is a rejection of absolutism and idealism; on the other, a disconnection of cognitive interests and biologism. If we recall that Enlightenment idealism and

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that process are both subjective and objective in nature. The idea of the interest of reason, idealistic in origin, has to be redeemed via a materialistic interpretation. Emancipation is intertwined with communicative and d with instrumental action: The emancipatory interest itself is dependent on the interests in possible intersubjective action-orientation and in possible technical control.40 As much as Habermas is against idealist abstraction from the material and the concrete, he is equally opposed to vitalism and naturalism:
The interest of self-preservation proceeds in accordance with the interest of reason. But the interest of self-preservation is indirect. It is neither an empirical need nor the system property of an organism. For the interest of self-preservation absolutely cannot be dened independently of the cultural conditions represented by work, language, and power. The interest of self-preservation cannot aim at the reproduction of the life of the species automatically and without thought, because under the conditions of the existence of culture this species must rst interpret what it counts as life.41

This account of self-preservation and its dependence on cultural interpretations of life has an apparent afnity with Cornelius Castoriadiss rejection of biologistic and psychoanalytic interpretations of needs. According to Castoriadis, the social imaginary, the source of human meaning, precedes the desire for survival and reproduction ontogenetically and phylogenetically. It would not be a misrepresentation to say that for Habermas, as for Castoriadis, any interpretation, or even fulllment, of needs rests on an a priori that is sociolinguistic and contextual. This premise is particularly useful for Castoriadis and Habermas in showing that the liberal (and capitalist) conception of the egoistic individualthe individual as interested primarily in self-preservationis merely an assumption, relative to other cultural assumptions and historical factors. The accommodation of (self-) reection in linguistic structures rescues it from attacks by postmodern philosophy which, while generally justied, are too comprehensive. Reection is a visual metaphor that means to mirror: to pose an object in front of a subject or (in the case of self-reection) to objectify oneself for oneself. This sort of connection between knowing and representing or objectify-

40. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 210. 41. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 288. The last sentence quoted is very reminiscent of Castoriadiss reworking of the psychoanalytic denitions of drives and his objections to the philosophical leap that led the Freud of Totem and Taboo to explain the emergence of societies from a supposedly normless, institutionless, speechless, and instinct-determined community. Castoriadis demonstrates that this scientistic explanation of socialization

and institutionalization is fraught with intractable difculties. See Cornelius Castoriadis, Anthropologia, Politike, Philosophia (Athens: Hypsilon, 1993). A merit of pragmatic philosophy of language is that it displays an awareness of these difculties and thus does not appeal to a prelinguistic and presocial origin of speech and sociality. Whereas the Lacan of the Ecrits s seems to preserve this Freudian idea in his account of the emergence of the Symbolic Order.

betrays that it is the same as the original. Such a consciousness of identity, Manfred Frank writes, falls outside of the play between reected and reecting: if it occurs, it would be the result of a consciousness that is not one with the reection.42 In the original Greek version of the story, Narcissus is condemned by the gods to fall in love with himself for failing to respond to the desire of the others. The ultimate voyeur is indifferent to otherness. In an absence of consensus (feeling with the other), Narcissus is immersed in a deleterious preoccupation with the mirrored image as his object of desire. Understanding thought to be produced by a subject in encounter with an object reduces reection to an autoerotic introspection. The paradigm of the subject-object philosophy cannot provide, on its own, a convincing account of self-consciousness. That paradigm has at least to be supplemented by a theory of intersubjectivity sufciently developed to meet an introsubjective explanation halfway. As I have tried to show with my reading of early Habermasian ideas, knowledge and self-reection go beyond the conceptual horizons of the philosophy of consciousness and therefore cannot be described adequately with visual metaphors such as those of the myth of Narcissus.43 Hence the pragmatic-linguistic theory of intersubjectivity cannot be subjected to the critique postmodernism has directed against other defenses of subjectivity. Moreover, the pragmaticlinguistic theory escapes the critique that defenders of subjectivity articulate against postmodernism. As they argue, a rearrangement of the relation of subject
42. Frank, What is Neo-structuralism? 276. 43. However, it does seem to me that this myth has been treated very partially. Erotic desire is presented, for instance by Freud, as something to sublimate, and self-love is interpreted as a sick egoism that has to be transcended morally (which is to say, culturally). In other interpretations, Echo, the female gure in the myth, is given a

dubious role; for example, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Echo, New Literary History 24.1 (winter 1993): 1743. Or else the impossibility of self-knowing is overemphasized (as by Lacan, Derrida, and Gasche). New interpretations of the myth might be undertaken from a more comprehensive point of view, one informed by a theory of communication as an attempt to approach otherness.

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The myth of Narcissus has served as a pattern for many interesting interpretations of self-consciousness. Narcissuss face is reected in the waters of a lake, but he does not have the sense of an identity: For nothing about the image

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ing has been discussed extensively not only by its defendersDescartes, Kant, and Hegel, for instancebut by its early opponents as well. Schelling, Fichte, and the Romantics developed a sophisticated and often difcult to grasp critique of consciousness as self-reection. Several philosophers, including Derrida (in his book Dissemination) and Levinas, have used the metaphor of the distorting tain of a mirror to examine the problems encountered by theories that assume the subject thinks clearly and perfectly mirrors its objects in thought. The purpose of this critique of reection is to expose the illusory, arrogant, and self-absorbed character of the assumption that our inner world is fully accessible and controllable. The critique also aims to do justice to human powers that remain unnoticed or escape articulation while they secretly motivate human action.

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to object in a postmodern waythat is, as a relation of perpetual deferral and nonidentityoffers to philosophy, at best, an opportunity to highlight the need for escaping the whole paradigm of subject-object. At worst, the postmodern approach perpetuates the old paradigm of thought since it does no more than modify the relation between a subject and an object without offering the concep4 Habermass theory of intersubjectivity tual means for superseding that relation.44 steers clear of both dangers, both the danger of traditional subjectivism and that of postmodern relativism. But his theory moreover gives the impression, especially in the writings of his middle period, that the subject-object dipole can be abandoned altogether. To improve our understanding of the dipole is one thing; to reject it totally as by denition complicit in bad metaphysics is quite another. If we take the latter step (as Habermas seems to do in his later work), we end up with serious epistemological difculties,45 and the preoccupation with introsubjectivity becomes more problematic.46

Habermas and Foucault It has been my aim thus far to show that rationalism is not the only route to an inated subjectivity. Without underestimating the importance of the rehabilitation of matter, I have tried to show how debunking the ideology of an absolute and transparent reason did not sufce to efface the Cartesian subject. On the contrary, the Cartesian subject was enhanced by giving it a fresh, now material, justication (though the subject could not by this means be restored to its social, cultural, and private or expressive dimensions).47 The autocratic self that reduces otherness to an object at its disposal is not necessarily a corollary of Cartesian despiritualized nature (res extensa a). The autocratic self can become just as deeply entrenched by means of naturalism or empiricism. After all, rationalism is associated historically not only with the cogito and the reication or despiritualization of the external world; it is associated as well with Leibnizian monadology

44. For a similar critique of some postmodern attempts of this kind, see Frank, What is Neostructuralism? 278 81. 45. Apel plausibly criticizes Habermas with regard to the latters treatment of questions of the real and our epistemological access to it. See Apel, Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism, trans. John Michael Krois (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 233 n. 19. 46. On this issue, see Papastephanou, Subjectivity in Process: Kristeva, Discourse Theory, and the Trials of Psychoanalysis, in A Matter of Discourse: Community and Communication in Contemporary Philosophies, ed. Ams Nascimento (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1998), 191 92.

47. By stressing the importance of aspects of individuality other than spatiotemporally understood singularity, I do not intend to undermine the importance of matter. Ethically, the nonrepeatability and uniqueness of a body, even purely in its existence in space and time, the impossibility of its reappearance, as well as its vulnerability, point to the sanctity of life and stipulate nonviolence. It is the asymmetrical privileging of the objectication of the ego that is my target here.

of subjectivity, one that does not seek to establish, either ontologically or anthropologically, the primacy of a human self de ned as egoistic and monological. To reveal the benets of that alternative to the reliance on behaviorism (with its emphasis on self-preservation and power), I will turn now from Habermas to Foucault. I must stress at the outset that not all of Foucaults work offers itself to the reading that follows. It is the work of what Foucault termed his middle period that concerns mealong with, at least implicitly, the poststructuralist reception of Discipline and Punish and the conclusions, largely positivist, that poststructuralists have drawn from that book.48 By positivist, here, I mean the theoretical tendency to reject all agency and reduce subjectivity to a behavioral construct (of stimulus and response) shaped by conditions external to the subject. In other words, the subject is seen as a passive outcome of anonymous forces operating behind its back. This idea is positivist because it reects the antihumanist suspicion of areas of experience that do not conform to the expectations of objectivism and scientism. (Objectivism holds that true existants are exclusively the spatially and temporally locatable ones; scientism holds that true objects of knowledge are exclusively the measurable and manipulable realities.) Some relativists or postmodernists have simply challenged the positivist claim to solid knowledge, not realizing that negation of an explicit premise cannot overcome a whole framework of thought. They have counterposed no alternative ontologies. What is needed is a full break from the deeper implicit assumptions of positivism. We have still, for example, not gotten beyond conceiving the subject as a surface on which external reality acts randomly. My concern here is with the survival in Foucaults understanding of the
48. For this periodization of his work, see Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 208. In the second part (the middle period, so to speak), Foucault studied the objectivization of the subject through dividing practices. This emphasis on the objec-

tivizing role of anonymous forces explains, in my opinion, the positivist and determinist reading of Foucault by many poststructuralists, which consolidated the death of the subject jargon.

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and Spinozan pantheism. My point is that we will remain trapped in an ontology that we mostly now reject so long as we do not escape its underlying behavioristic psychologyby which I mean a psychology that has self-preservation as its core mechanism. Even if culture and language are said to be one with nature, even if the subject becomes totally lost in its linguistic construction and cultural determination, the positivistic ontology will always be present, though perhaps concealed. Some postmodern theories do not discern the connection of scientism, which they justiably attack, with the ontology from which they unconsciously borrow their implicit assumptions. As to my detour through Habermass encounter with past philosophies of subjectivity, my aim was to show, negatively, that the alternative to Cartesian subjectivity will not be nonsubjectivity. The alternative must be a different account

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body of the positivistic notion of the subject as a self-serving being. On Axel Honneths account, Foucaults argument about the human soul
deduces rst from social inuences (which are themselves presented as merely external coercive procedures that produce subjects) the formation of a sort of psychic life of humans, and it then connects the representation of the human soul directly to this. If Foucault really supposes he has in this way worked out the origin of human subjectivity, then he must have been led astray by a very crude version of behaviourism that represents psychic processes as the result of constant conditioning.49

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Honneth astutely adds that when Foucault attempts to analyse the means of social coercion . . . he is satised with a conception of technique that works solely on the human body, since he regards the psychic properties of subjects, and thus their personality structures, entirely as products of specic types of corporal disciplining.50 Foucaults effacement of the subject, however, does not mean that he lacks an interest in subjectivity. Even when treating the subject as thoroughly conditioned by techniques, Foucault remains within the discourse of subjectivityas he made clear in his discussion of the development of his ideas.51 His insistence that the subject had been the theme of his research all along (rather than the concept of power as such) is convincing but should not be misconstrued. He was not retrospectively rehabilitating the self-constituting subject. He said that it was only the later phase of his research that concerned the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject.52 The History of Sexuality (and others among his later texts) may disprove the relevance of charges of behaviorism to the whole of Foucaults oeuvre but not their relevance to the works of his middle phase or to their reception by inuential poststructuralists. Moreover, understanding the subject as corporealand behavioristically conditionedis a long Western tradition. A paradigmatic case is Nietzsches theory of socialization as inscription. To treat socialization as inscription on bodiesand bodies, as surfaces subjected to inscription for the sake of both individual unity (the body being understood as fragmented) and social orderrepresents a kind of cultural determinism that underscores the priority of the ego in subject-object relations. A generalization of such ideas, by means of which social order is thought to be thoroughly explained, leads to subtle, covert, or unconscious alliances between the theoretical assumptions of poststructuralism

49. Honneth, Foucaults Theory of Society: A SystemsTheoretic Dissolution of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, in The Critique and Power: Reective Stages in Critical Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 169.

50. Honneth, Foucaults Theory, 179. 51. Foucault, Subject and Power, 208. 52. Foucault, Subject and Power, 208.

ence that is drastically separated from that of knowledge. This value-neutrality may lead in either of two directions. The self-referential subject, as a concept, may reach its apogee, or else the empirical subject may be seen as more or less determined by the logic of stimulus and response. In the latter case, political or emancipatory interests will be reduced to matters of decision and volition, which in positivistic terms means that politics is relegated to the sphere of nonrational personal choice.54 Arbitrariness and a lack of serious criteria lurk behind reductions of this sort and carry along many negative implications for ethics and politics, one of them being the imposition of new tyrannies or the uncritical perpetuation of old ones. Jacques Derrida has warned against such moves: one step further toward a sort of original an-archy risks producing or reproducing the hierarchy. Thought, Derrida continues, requires both the principle of reason and d what is beyond the principle of reason, both the arkhe and an-archy. Between the two, the difference of a breath or an accent, only the enactment t of this thought can decide.55 Poststructuralism celebrates the twilight of abstract reason, but in its more responsible versions poststructuralist theory defends a contextualized reason against a politically ineffective relativism and against the dangers of nihilism. However, poststructuralists usually issue a blanket critique of the Enlighten-

53. Elizabeth Grosz, Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason, in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 195 96 ; emphasis added. 54. To be sure, this description is so roughly sketched that it by no means exhausts whatever positivism or scientism

is. Equally, my brief account of basic poststructuralist views on the issue do not apply to every poststructuralist author but only to general tendencies. 55. Jacques Derrida, The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils, Diacritics 13.2 (fall 1983): 320, 18 19.

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Among the most decisive factors, in my view, for conclusions of this sort is how, after the full establishment of the sciences and technology as premier products of civilization, reason is now conceived. In the context of positivism, reason supposedly becomes value-neutral, since value is ousted to a sphere of experi-

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and those of capitalism. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris conception of bodies as machines (and the schizophrenic ethics they suggest as a way to survive under capitalism) afrm once more how close to behaviorism, on the one hand, and to capitalism, on the other hand, such theories can turn out to be. Lacking a theory of an autonomous subject or a universalistic theory of reason, some poststructuralist thinkers write in crudely behaviorist and even Hobbesian terms. For example (and the italics in this excerpt are mine): If subjects are produced, in analogy with the production of commodities, then the only thing capable of acting as raw materials for the production analogy are human (biological) bodies. As pliable esh, the body is the unspecied raw matter of social inscription, producing subjects as subjects of a particular kind.53

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ment project, displaying a complacent reliance on its own assumptions about the incommensurability of language gamesand displaying, too, a cultural determinism that effaces autonomy for the subject. Having such accounts as its basic theoretical insights, poststructuralism has great difculties in clarifying without confusion what kind of reason a context-determined reason is and what potential it has. In general, it seems easier in poststructuralist writings to criticize reason as tyrannical and give it up as one more metaphysical imposition than to work out the kind of contextual rationality it employs (whenever it does so). Similarly, the subject and its relation to reection (the latter both as self-reection and as rational reconstruction of human competences) are declared to be illusions. What is left is a being-in-culture, taking on or subjected to power relations, the formation of alliances, and strategic action. Human interests lose any generalizable character, any universal expectations, that would transcend private episodes, localism, and tribalism. The positivistic constellationvalue-neutral reason, absolute subject, voluntaristic ethical choiceis reversed to yield the contrary theses: there is no reason, there is no subject, there is no individual morality. At least three major premises are shared by positivism and poststructuralism. The rst is that reason is disinterested, impartial, absolute, and independent of experience (of course, positivists glorify these attributes of reason whereas poststructuralists reject reason because of them). The second shared premise is that the subject is conditioned; and the third, that agency and participation in public life should be conceived in purely noncognitive terms. In both positivism and poststructuralism, theory and practice are kept apart, and the effectiveness of politics curtailed, because this set of premises is shared by the adversaries of emancipation movements. In this vein, I believe that Habermass early critique of positivism is plausible and timely if also directed toward some supposed opponents of positivism: Emancipation by means of enlightenment is replaced by instruction in control over objective or objectied processes. Socially effective theory is no longer directed toward the consciousness of human beings who live together and discuss matters with each other, but to the behavior r of human beings who manipulate.56 Apparently the uncoupling of reason and interest, the renunciation of reasons will to the rational, underlies any account of a subject lacking means of critical reection and critical self-reection.57 Positivism understood itself as a celebration of

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56. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 255; emphasis added. 57. Habermas, Theory and Practice, 254. The grand narratives of the eighteenth century assumed a reason that takes up a partisan position. In the conict between critique and dogmatism, reason had an interest in critique, and reection included the emancipatory task of demystication. In this way, the cognitive and the voluntary elements are not in opposition. From Holbach, Fichte, Hegel, and down to Marx, reason is partial, partisan, and

interested. The coupling of reason and interest is not the only signicant postulate of the grand narratives, but it is the one we most need to retain and reelaborate. As Habermas has said, the poststructuralist throws the baby out with the bathwater when contributing to the emancipatory interest of reason volens-nollens unmasking the weaknesses, absolutisms, and even violence and tyranny of the grand narrativesyet without realizing the continuing importance of some aspects of them.

his later texts, Foucault describes a third possible stage of genealogy as an historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.59 As I understand him, moral action is aestheticized to the extent that it becomes a corollary of a particular mode of subjective self-creation. One should be bound to norms insofar as those facilitate the elevation of ones life (bios s) to a piece of art, to a beautiful existence. Thus, one should not follow norms out of a deontological and cognitivist conviction that maxims of action have atemporal

58. There are signicant similiarities, worth establishing here, between the argument of Derridas essay The Principle of Reason and various arguments of Habermas. I will need to quote Derrida at lengththe bracketed material is mine: It is possible to speak of this new responsibility that I have invoked only by sounding a call to practice it. It would be the responsibility of a community of thought for which the frontier between basic [disinterested] and oriented [engaged] research would no longer be secured, or in any event not under the same conditions as before. I call it a community of thought in the broad senseat largerather than a community of research, of science or philosophy, since these values are most often subjected to the unquestioned authority of a principle of reason. Now reason is only one species of thoughtwhich does not mean that thought is irrational. (Derrida, Principle of Reason, 16.) It is worth interrupting the quotation at this point to question whether Derrida means that other species of thought are also rational, even if different from the principle of reason. If we assume, in a Habermasian way, that the principle of reason corresponds to a cognitive mode of being and thinking, is there then a

need to rehabilitate other forms of reasoning that correspond to the normative or expressive contents of our experience? Derrida continues (italics mine): Such a community would interrogate the essence of reason and of the principle of reason, the values of the basic, of the principial, of radicality, of the arkhe in general, and it would attempt to draw out all the possible consequences of this questioning. It is not certain that such thinking can bring together a community or found an institution in the traditional sense of these words. What is meant by community and institution must be rethought. This thinking must also unmaskan innite taskall the ruses of end-orienting reason, the paths by which apparently disinterested research can nd itself indirectly reappropriated, reinvested by programs of all sorts. That does not mean that orientation is bad in itself and that it must be combatted, far from it. Rather, I am dening the necessity for a new way of educating students that will prepare them to undertake new analyses in order to evaluate these ends and to choose, when possible, among them all. 59. Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 237.

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turalists. That late departure of his contributes (as much as Habermasian theory does) to the realization of the need to salvage subjectivity, but it fails to go further than Habermas does because Foucault mistrusts intersubjectivity and reason. In

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disinterested reason. But by dening reason as means-ends rationality, positivism subjugated it to purposiveness, contractuality, strategic thinking, and a distorted notion of science and technology; hence, despite its declarations, positivism subjugated reason to interest. On this point, Habermas converges with Derrida: both argue that positivism has made the redenition of reason, interest, and subjectivity an urgent priority.58 Critiques of positivism, among them deconstruction, have created a space for reconstruction that I believe a pragmatic-linguistic reformulation of reason could ll. In this context, I would like to examine the turn in Foucaults later work toward ethics and the subjects rapport soi. That turn, in my view, represents a departure from his previous insights and from their appropriation by poststruc-

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validity (as traditional theories of subjectivity used to assume). Ones relation to oneself, the constitution of the subject by the subject itself, should mirror the assumption of existential choice as a creative activityminus the metaphysical (Sartrean) emphasis on authenticity as a relation one has to ones own self prior to creative activity. The examination of the relationship between moral action and moral code in The History of Sexuality (and in some later interviews and opuscules of Foucaults) has important, complex, and multifaceted ramications for subjectivity and agency that are beyond my scope here. What is crucial is that self-reection, self-constitution, and responsible action may be given back to subjectivity without recourse to the essentialism or transcendentalism of past accounts. The subject as a kind of actor and creator can be rescued rather than relinquished. On this point, Habermas and the later Foucault are at one. Foucaults idea of how one becomes a subject concerns self-awareness and self-reection as discourse about introsubjectivity. His argument is convincingperhaps even more successful than Habermass rescue of the subject-object dipole from its old metaphysical connotations. Many critics have pointed out Habermass lack of serious consideration of introsubjectivity, and one can easily see that the Habermas of the Communicative Action Theory phase is too committed to the linguistic normativity of intersubjectivity to allow room for engagement with introsubjectivity as existential choice.60 However, Foucaults aestheticization of ethicsand his concern with subjectivity as self-creation, introsubjective in characterrisk monological selfassertion. He recuperates the idea of a life conducted such that it leaves to others memories of a beautiful existence. And while this idea does presuppose the subjects bond with alterity (with the others who remember), that bond does not go beyond existential choice.61 Lacking a theory of intersubjectivity to complement the theory of introsubjectivity and accommodate the desire for the other at a deeper layer of subjective formation, Foucaults account of the subject brings it once again close to egoism. It is no accident that to an interviewers question, But isnt the Greek concern with the self just an early version of our self-absorption which many consider a central problem in our society? Foucault responded evasively.62 His stress was on the difference between the ancient care for the self and the modern variety, and rightly so. But he did not well articulate what could protect the ancient conception (epimeleia eaytou) from its modern overtuning or what could preclude the latter being preferred to the former. To do so, he needed

60. See, for instance, Joel Whitebook, From Schoenberg to Odysseus: Aesthetic, Psychic, and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer, New German Critique 58 (winter 1993): 45 64 , and Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment (London: Verso, 1995).

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61. Foucault, Genealogy of Ethics, 230. 62. Foucault, Genealogy of Ethics, 245.

he could not rely on any kind of implicit validity in responding. He could not say, for example, that what separates the ancient from the modern care of the self is the formers better engagement with others or that it was based on sensitive and intersubjectively reasonable existential choices. In answering the question posed, Foucault could rely only on the sheer desirability of the ancient model as an oppositional reaction against the modern. This sort of response reintroduces the danger of behaviorism through the back door: agency is yet again a response to an external but direct challenge rather than a choice made consciously according to criteria of validity. Habermas solves the paradox of reason by dividing rationality in two: the strategic-monological kind and the communicative-intersubjective kind. He moreover empowers the subject without restoring claims concerning selftransparence, egoistic self-assertion, or the constraints on self-creation occasioned by binary oppositions such as mind versus body.64 Foucault gives the

63. Foucault, Subject and Power, 210. 64. By contrast, for Foucault there are various possible forms of reason but no way to decide rationally which one is more rational than the rest. Hence I would take issue with Deborah Cook when, in her discussion of Habermas and Foucault, she concludes that neither thinker escapes the performative contradiction involved in using the tools of reason to criticize reason. (The Subject Finds a Voice: Foucaults Turn toward Subjectivity [New York: Peter Lang, 1993], 119.) Actually, Habermas assumes a conception of reason as both immanent and transcendent and solves the paradox of reason by preferring communicative to strategic rationality. (See Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1.) For Foucault, reason is exclusively imma-

nent; it cannot be transcendent. One consequence is that necessary repression of subjective desire cannot be segregated from the surplus repression that is characteristic of modernity in particular. (The latter, being grounded in the binarism of mind versus body, is therefore expendable.) Evidence of this problem in Foucaults later work is his notion that self-mastery occurs when self-relation starts resembling sublimation of our most elementary passions. To my knowledge, Foucault does not provide means for judging what degree of sublimation is affordable by the subject, nor how emancipation could be connected to the negating of such sublimation. For to do so would assume a rational yardstick.

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for investigating the links between them. He asks, Shall we try reason? and responds, to my mind, nothing would be more sterile.63 Hence, when asked about the difference between the Greek aesthetic of subjectivity, which Foucault approved, and the modern prioritization of individualism, which he rejected,

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a theory of intersubjectivity coordinated with a conception of reason not only as immanent but also transcendentcapable, that is, of self-criticism. In other words, he required a solution to the paradox of reason that would undermine subject-centered rationality. Foucaults theory, even in its late phase, does not regard communicative reason as a mediating possibility between irrationalism and the old conception of self-assertive rationality. Foucault thus deprives reason of emancipatory force, which he reserves exclusively for forms of resistance. But resistance marks a strategic alliance of agents (against hegemonic power) and not an intersubjectively justied preference for one mode of existing over another. In discussing the relationship between rationalization and power, Foucault rejects reason as a means

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subject a voice, but, in his dismissive treatment of reason, he divests subjective existential choice of its orientation toward the other. He overlooks the signicance that intersubjectivity has, not as a nexus of power relations, but as an IThou encounter. Perhaps a new attempt to salvage subjectivity could take a complementary approach to these two theories. That new approach would need the Foucauldian turn to the rapport soi i but supplemented with Habermass reformulation of reason and intersubjectivity. Conversely, Habermass favorable treatment of the subject cannot promise its full recuperation unless a consideration of introsubjectivity takes place.

A Qualied Yes The self tends to be understood in the West as a singularity in space and time, or as a product of culture and society, or as the totality of an unmediated internal world of intentions, desires, and needs. Constructions of the self along such lines can be interpreted as symptoms of a reductive way of thinking, or as expressions of a wish to reverse hierarchies for polemical reasons, or as expressions of reluctance to defend a balance between a unique, unprecedented individuality and a deterministically shaped, conformist singularity. Against these tendencies Habermas writes: Although the singularity of an object can be explicated in terms of a numerically ascertainable identity, I would like henceforth to speak of the individuality of a being only when this being can be distinguished from all (or at least most) other things through qualitative determinations.65 Habermass notion of individuality, like Manfred Franks, includes all the components of a personality that correspond to different world relations.66 Individuality, seen in this way, is much richer and more promising and pluralistic than singularity as a basis for understanding subjectivity because this approach readmits those aspects of Being that were excluded by modern philosophy as nonobjective realities. As Habermas makes this point: The philosophical tradition . . . has always held only privative concepts or negatively encircling formulas ready for what is individual because it has privileged the being of entities, the knowledge of objects, d these with and the assertoric sentence or propositional content and has equated 67 the comprehensible. One might add that the needs that correspond to this conception of the subject have triumphed over whatever cannot be justied with assertoric sentences. As a result, normativity has become dependent on an additional human property that is at odds with desire and instinct. That property is
65. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 154. 66. See Frank, Two Centuries of Philosophical Critique of Reason and its Postmodern Radicalization, trans. Wilke and Gray, in Reason and its Other: Rationalization in Modern German Philosophy and Culture, ed. Dieter Freundlieb and Wayne Hudson (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 67 85. 67. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 143.

the many, are by no ontological necessity irreconcilable opposites. And postmetaphysical thought cannot gain much from the effacement of the subject in the name of a radical diversity. When subjectivity is lost in a simply numerical plurality, the one is absorbed by the many and, ironically, the winner is not freedom, resistance, emancipation, and equality for all, but conformism, submission, and silence. The total elimination of the subject sweeps away any possibility for a rational critique of rationality and, consequently, for the realization of the eternal displacement of ones own identity.

68. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, 116 ; emphasis added.

Papastephanou

must forfeit their ontological space. Our conceptual horizons could then become broad enough to accommodate more balanced accounts of the self. Reason and feelings, the cognitive and the affective, the private and the public, the one and

Can Subjec t iv it y Be Salvaged?

reason which, with its unifying and formative power, applies categories to reality and organizes pluralities into singularities. In this way, the subject as a carrier of thought turns against itself as a carrier of feelings and against nature as a locus of plurality and sublimity. At war with a philosophy that tyrannically favors singularity over plurality, the opponents of Enlightenment seem ready for a farewell to reason and subjectivity. But, as Habermas writes, the metaphysical priority of unity above plurality and the contextualistic priority of plurality above unity are secret accomplices.68 To the question Can subjectivity be salvaged? philosophy may respond, then, with a qualied yes, but only on this condition: the old binary oppositions surrounding the discourse on subjectivity and the tensions that they occasion

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