Towards the Impersonal Subject

Abstract

While great part of the twentieth century was characterized by the ‘deconstruction’ of the Subject, in recent years we have witnessed a revitalization of the modern notion of “agent-subject”, although rethought in a different way. Although recognizing the ethical-political motivations of such re-proposal, this essay expresses a critical evaluation of the latter. Through a genealogical excavation of the logical and semantic displacements that have originated the notion of ‘responsible agent-subject’, from the Scholastics to Locke, the essay shows its constitutively contradictory structure that emerges from its logical articulation with the ‘dispositive of the person’. Against the excluding effects that derive from it, the essay proposes a new embodiment, both philosophical and political, of the ‘impersonal subject’.