Bearing in mind the tide of subjection we face round the clock; politics, education, consumerism, media, it could be confidently claimed ours is an age in which the individual subject is in increasing search of itself.
Yet it is a requisite of liberal, democratic politics to presuppose the existence of individual subjects. These citizen/subjects are deemed capable of reflective and critical distance from a possible course of action. They are also assumed to be equal to the task of taking and being charged with unique responsibility for those actions, ultimately responsive to the force of better reasons and would act accordingly, i.e. at the polling booth. Yet throughout many contemporary social science and humanities disciplines, a widespread and deep scepticism about the possibility of such individual agency and such responsiveness reigns. A scepticism which seems healthy to me.
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