Nina Power points out that the ‘subject’ came about by way of the word ‘citizen. In this way it moved from adjective to noun. Yet it was only by way of the ‘citizen’ that universality could come to the ‘subject’.
Linguistically, there is evidence in the term of a move from adjective to noun, from individuals who are subjected to the power of another, to the representation or active force of a people or a community as a set of ‘subjects’ who can be appealed to, interpellated (action of interjecting or interposing an action or remark that interrupts. The subject has a history of being loud hailered by those in power).
Yet the category ‘political subject’ has, at different historical
points, operated in completely antonymic ways (the semantic relation that holds between two words): from the passive subservience of a subject (subjectum, ‘that which is kept down’—literally ‘that which is thrown underneath’),
to the active subject, and its seizure of politics itself.
Which is evident in events today in the Middle East. The active subject with the aid of technology has brought about change. Could it have been done without the aid of technology?
Hurrah and bravo to the oppressed peoples of the Middle East and to Science.
Recommended reading:
Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006
Towards an Anthropology of
Infinitude: Badiou and the Political
Subject
Nina Power
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