. For some the subject/self – a psycho-social entity capable of self-awareness (what is the 'self' being aware of in self awareness, is it another self?) and purposeful agency – was a simple fact: start pretending it isn’t there, and you introduce a virulent strain of fictionality into the world.
Others, however, made precisely the opposite point, that to insist on the death
of the subject was not to create but to expose a deep fictionally in all moral
and political institutions, a form of pretence that must be repressed if civil
society is to function.
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that countless
centuries of torture and punishment were required to induce a naturally
self-forgetful animal to undertake even the most minimal legal acts: keeping a
promise, say, or repaying a debt. For Nietzsche, the evolution of the ‘sovereign
subject’ represented a deeply anti-natural development in the history of the
species, one in constant danger of being undone because the legal or ethical
imperatives the subject was supposed to obey were founded not in transcendental
or natural laws but in blood and force
Nietzsche’s comparison of ‘that little changeling, the subject’ to the atom was
prescient, for numerous thinkers since his time have attempted to split it, to
discover beneath its apparent unity the actual, irreducible forces that comprise
it.
What Richard Rorty called the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, which was repealed subsequently in literary theory, was driven by the conviction that the only thing real in the subject was language, and that the only way for humanists to compete with scientists was for them to redirect their attention away from humanistic pseudo-entities such as beliefs and values, and the ‘inner’ selves that possess them, and towards what Saussure had called the ‘concrete entity’ of language
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