Subjectivity as an Unlimited Semiosis: Lacan and Peirce

The discussion on subjectivity isbased on the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan'sunderstanding of subjectivity as constructed inand through language, and the philosopherCharles Sanders Peirce's general ideas ofsignifying construction as an unlimitedsign-exchanging process – the idea of theunlimited semiosis. The article advocatescombining Lacanian subjectivity and Peirceansemiosis in a model of the formal structure ofthe semiosis of Lacanian subjectivity. In thelight of this model the article claims thatLacanian subjectivity opens to a process ofsubjectivization within the semiosis ofsubjectivity, whereby that which is other ismade our own. Two researchers' differentarguments on subjectivity, both of which referto Lacan's ideas on subjectivity, are used asdiscussion partners in the exploration of thesemiosis of Lacanian subjectivity. While theone researcher claims that subjectivity is anideological construction, the other maintainsthat subjectivity is a free play of signs. Thearticle claims that neither of these tworesearchers considers that there may be aprocess of subjectivization in the semiosis ofsubjectivity. Thus the one researcher can claimthat subjectivity `is constituted outside ofitself', and the other can maintain that `thesubject is doomed to perpetual exile fromitself' in the construction of her or hissubjectivity.     

Aesthetics of Surrender: Levinas and the Disruption of Agency in Moral Education

Education has long been charged with the taskof forming and shaping subjectivity andidentity. However, the prevailing view ofeducation as a project of producing rationalautonomous subjects has been challenged bypostmodern and poststructuralist critiques ofsubstantial subjectivity. In a similar vein,Emmanuel Levinas inverts the traditionalconception of subjectivity, claiming that weare constituted as subjects only in respondingto the other. In other words, subjectivity isderivative of an existentially priorresponsibility to and for the other. Hisconception of ethical responsibility is thusalso a radical departure from the prevailingview of what it means to be a responsible moralagent. In this paper, I use jazz improvisationas a metaphor to focus on three interrelatedaspects of ethical responsibility on Levinas'saccount: passivity, heteronomy, andinescapability. I then point toward some waysin which reframing responsibility andsubjectivity along this line might offer newpossibilities for conceiving subjectivity andmoral agency in education.     

Narrative and discursive approaches to the analysis of subjectivity in psychotherapy

This paper reviews research that utilises language-based analyses (narrative analysis, discourse analysis and conversation analysis) to examine aspects of subjectivity in the context of psychotherapy. The studies reviewed fall broadly into two main groups. On the one hand, studies which share a view of subjectivity as the sum of internal 'voices' in dialogue adopt a narrative approach, examine subjectivity in terms of organisation, coherence and self-reflection, and consider psychotherapy a process of restoring an organised polyphony. On the other hand, studies which conceptualise subjectivity in terms of 'subject positions' adopt a discursive approach, emphasise the availability of subject positions and flexibility in adopting them and examine psychotherapy as a process of facilitating the flexible adoption by the client of a variety of subject positions. Theoretical, epistemological and methodological issues regarding each of the two approaches are discussed, along with representative studies. We finally examine the implications of these two approaches for understanding psychotherapeutic practice and for theorising and researching subjectivity.     

The Normative Resources of Kierkegaard's Subjectivity Principle

Kierkegaard's subjectivity principle is a critique of modern epistemology that remains normative. These norms result from analysis of subjectivity in terms of its reflexive and constitutional elements. Kierkegaard's epistemology is intrinsically theological and explicates human subjectivity in terms of Christian doctrinal concepts such as revelation, sin and atonement. Here the superiority of Christianity is located not in its propositions as such, but in a way of being that effectuates a certain propositional understanding of the world as it establishes the ground for human subjectivity.     

Immediacy ‐ subjectivity ‐ revelation

Kierkegaard's fundamental view of life was negative and Gnostic. It was through his interpretation of life that his vision of the nothingness of existence became positive. What formed the material of Kierkegaard's interpretation was the common experience of existence, what ‘all’ men know. His concept of existence has a threefold content : immediacy, subjectivity, and the Christian Revelation. Immediate reality that is not made content of subjectivity becomes empty changeableness, and subjectivity that does not appropriate immediacy deprives itself of the concrete (as with the mystic). Immediacy's ‘text’ first acquires a qualitative transcendent content through the ‘repetition’ of subjective choice. Kierkegaard takes this appropriation of the immediate to be also the self‐development of subjectivity. Consciousness of guilt is an expression of a God‐relationship. Implicated with this consciousness is the consciousness of the nothingness of everything — echoed in man as dread. Yet even when subjectivity is conscious of guilt the truth remains immanent in subjectivity. In the Christian Revelation truth is outside man: subjectivity is untruth (sin).     

Reflexivity,Subjectivity, and the Constructed Self: A Buddhist Model

The aim of this article is to take up three closely connected questions. First, does consciousness essentially involve subjectivity? Second, what is the connection, if any, between pre-reflective self-consciousness and subjectivity? And, third, does consciousness necessarily involve an ego or self? I will draw on the Yogācāra–Madhyamaka synthesis of ?āntarak?ita (eighth century common era) to develop an account of the relation between consciousness, subjectivity, and the self. I will argue, first, that phenomenal consciousness is reflexive or self-illuminating (svaprakā?ya). Second, I will argue that consciousness necessarily involves minimal subjectivity. Third, I will argue that neither the reflexivity nor the subjectivity of consciousness implies that there is any entity such as the self or ego over and above reflexive consciousness. Fourth, I will argue that what we normally think of as ‘the self’ is best understood as a complex, multi-layered process (aha?kāra, ‘I-making’) that emerges within the pre-egoic flow of subjective consciousness.     

Embodying sexual subjectivity after cancer: A qualitative study of people with cancer and intimate partners

Research has increasingly recognised the profound impact that cancer can have upon embodied subjectivity. However, there has been little acknowledgement of the centrality of sexuality to subjectivity, and marginalisation of the experiences of intimate partners of people with cancer. This Australian qualitative study explores the post-cancer experiences of embodied sexual subjectivity for 44 people with cancer (23 women and 21 men) and 35 partners of people with cancer (18 women and 17 men) across a range of cancer types and stages. Semi-structured interviews were analysed with theoretical thematic analysis, guided by a post-structuralist approach to sexual subjectivity as a dynamic process of becoming that can change over time, and by Williams’ [(1996). The vicissitudes of embodiment across the chronic illness trajectory. Body and Society, 2, 23–47] framework on post-illness embodiment. Participants took up the following post-cancer subject positions: ‘dys-embodied sexual subjectivity’ – characterised by bodily betrayal, sexual loss, lack of acceptance, depression, and anxiety; ‘re-embodied sexual subjectivity’ – characterised by greater sexual confidence, acceptance, the exploration of non-coital sexual practices and increased relational closeness; and ‘oscillating sexual subjectivity’ – involving a shift between states of sexual dys-embodiment and sexual re-embodiment. The findings point to the importance of focusing on the sexual health of people with cancer and partners across the cancer trajectory.     

Ethics,Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions

Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions for educational research that centres ethics: Ethics and (human) subjectivity; and Ethics-in-assemblage. While both approaches might be seen as commensurable, they can also be seen as quite divergent. Using Michel Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and ethics, as well as recent work in Anthropology, I present a methodological direction for research into ethical subjectivity, how students come to see themselves as self-reflective ethical actors. Relevant here is the tension between ethics and politics, individual and collective modes of being, as both are crucial to both struggles for justice on a damaged planet. The second direction involves a sociomaterialist approach that employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ as well as Karen Barad’s notion ‘entangled responsibility’ to show that ethics can also be seen to co-emerge with/in phenomena that exceed human relations. In short, exploring ethics through educational research means simultaneously examining ethics as subjectivity and ethics as co-emergent larger assemblages/phenomena.     

Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual

This paper develops a neglected area in psychoanalytic theorizing: namely the collective aspects of individual subjectivity in the one-to-many object relationship. Using group theory allows us to describe this point of articulation between the individual and the group, allowing a more nuanced theoretical development of the social link in psychoanalysis. Subjectivity is inter-subjectivity in a radical way that extends beyond a singular one and singular other to pluralities of differences. We are both particles and waves; our subjectivity has a double provenance. This makes subjectivity inherently dynamic, inherently unstable, inherently dependent on groups of others, just as groups of others depend on the individuals that comprise them.     

Influence of personal therapy on learning and development of psychotherapeutic skills

The aim of the present study was to investigate psychodynamic psychotherapists’ experience of the influence of personal therapy on professional growth during training with a focus on the acquisition of knowledge and the development of psychotherapeutic skills. Thematic analysis was conducted on interviews with former students (N=10) at two training institutes for psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The resulting theme “professional subjectivity” indicated that personal therapy was experienced as having a positive effect on learning and growth of professional skill by facilitating the development of a theory- and knowledge-based professional subjectivity, a personally founded, professional attitude. Important elements of this development are “shared experience,” “personal influence,” and “knowledge integration.” The emergence of professional subjectivity proved to be an important factor in terms of professional advancement for future psychotherapists. Finding and relating to their own subjectivity was crucial in the process of developing a personally founded, professional attitude in the clinical work.     

'Stream of consciousness' and 'ownership of thought' in indigenous people in central Australia

Fifteen Central Australian Aboriginal adults (8 patients, 7 colleagues) were presented with a culturally modified version of Flavell's 'stream of consciousness' experiment (pictures of persons with empty or 'busy' thought-bubbles, and an invitation to assign a picture to the mental state of a second experimenter seen reading or sitting quietly). Only 4 people assigned the empty thought bubble to the quiet experimenter. This result was at least as good as that of a sample of Stanford College students tested by Flavell. The experiment provoked detailed comments from the informants about subjectivity, suggesting great subtlety of phenomenological awareness in Central Australian Aboriginal people, and attributing a kind of subjectivity to non-human entities, including inanimate elements. We learnt that the Western Deserts dialect term watiya was reserved for the subjectivity attributed to trees and rocks. The ownership of all thought was attributed to the tjukurpa (the Aboriginal dreaming). These Aboriginal cultural attributions were compared and contrasted with reflections developed by Jung and the post-Jungian David Holt on the nature of subjectivity, and religious notions of the redemption of matter.     

Subject in first person--subject in third person: subject, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity

In this article, the author traces the history of the concepts of subject, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity in different psychoanalytic theories in the last decades. She argues that the uniqueness of these concepts and their different implications were not emphasized enough. The author discusses the various implications and contexts of the concept of subject in psychoanalytic theory proper and to relate as to: (1). The need to distinguish between the concepts of subject and subjectivity; (2). The mutual interdependence of the subject and his subjectivity and the intersubjective domain (both in the development of the individual and in theoretical thought pertaining to it). Her point of departure is from the position of the subject as a free creature, the centrality of the experiencing individual, from his/her perspective—the subject in the first person. She tries to explain the paradox implicit in the experiential dimension, the place of the other as participant, as both negating and recognizing—the subject in the third person. She suggests the interdependency of the first-person experience of subjectivity on the intersubjective dimension.     

Humanistic Constructionism in the Analysis of Subjectivity

A sociologist who has to confront him/herself with social change cannot avoid running into subjectivity, which is seen as a clear indicator of the most recent tendencies that are going through contemporary society. The demand for subjectivity, generically considered as self-consciousness and the need for self-fulfilment, is undoubtedly a distinguishing feature of our age. The central role this concept has gained within recent sociological literature, however, coincides with the rise of a postmodern sociology, which tends to put forward a precise image of subjectivity that I would call “minimalist.” Through its call for subjectivity, postmodern sociology intends to celebrate indeed a radical freeing from the ethical, social, and relational constraints that would have oppressed human beings during modernity, which was characterized by a high degree of sociocentrism. Although I share all the contentions that aim at underlining the positive achievements of subjectivity over the constrictions and the de-personalizing forces that distressed the so-called homo sociologicus, I think we need nonetheless to distance ourselves from this new reductionism, which levels out subjectivity to its postmodern conception, and to underline instead the existence of a dual aspect in contemporary subjectivity. As a matter of fact, along with its minimalist and disengaged aspect, conceptualized in the homo psychologicus, another possible expression, called “significant subjectivity” is emerging, which is a typical feature of the kind of human I propose to define civicus, a human who distinguishes him/herself because of the ability to become the bearer of an authentic form of responsible freedom. Consequently, we can identify two different aspects, at least, in contemporary subjectivity, notably a minimalist and a significant aspect.     

主体的复归与现象学的先验转向

现象学的先验转向是由意义自在转向先验主体,由完全悬置自我到复归主体,这一方面是由于观念自在论的种种困难所促成,另一方面主体主义哲学惟有通过先验转向才能克服其主观性悖论,先验观念论是主体主义哲学最后和最高的形式,而这种最高形式中也隐藏着先验主体的一些理论困难。     

Kant,Neo‐Kantians,and Transcendental Subjectivity

This article discusses an interpretation of Kant's conception of transcendental subjectivity, which manages to avoid many of the concerns that have been raised by analytic interpreters over this doctrine. It is an interpretation put forward by selected C19 and early C20 neo‐Kantian writers. The article starts out by offering a neo‐Kantian interpretation of the object as something that is constituted by the categories and that serves as a standard of truth within a theory of judgment (I). The second part explicates transcendental subjectivity as the system of categories, which is self‐referential and constitutes objects (II), in order to then evaluate this conception by means of a comparison with Hegel's absolute subject (III). Rather than delineating the differences between neo‐Kantian writers, the article systematically expounds a shared project, which consists in providing the ultimate foundation for judgments by means of an anti‐psychologist and non‐metaphysical interpretation of transcendental subjectivity.     

The Ghostly Other: Understanding Racism from Confucian and Enlightenment Models of Subjectivity

The overwhelming motif of nineteenth century anti-Semitic discourse is the metaphor of the Jew as a ghost. In all cultures, the ghost represents the antithesis of what is categorically human: it represents the other par excellence. By using the heuristic of the ghost to interpret how Enlightenment discourse has dealt with the other, this article will argue that the Enlightenment model of the self and its relation to others was a contributing factor to Modern Racism. Enlightenment discourse on subjectivity finds its counterpart in Confucian notions of subjectivity. By looking at how ghosts are understood within Confucian discourse and how they are evoked in popular literature, I argue that Confucian philosophy’s model of subjectivity contributed to the success of the Chinese empire’s assimilation project.     

Psychoanalysis, Parents, and God: Julia Kristeva on Subjectivity and the Imaginary Father

This article examines Julia Kristeva's theories of language, subjectivity, and faith. Kristeva's perspectives contain surprising resources for feminist theologians concerned about gender-inclusive language for God. Her concept of the Imaginary father offers a way to understand how God-language functions for person in relation to their subjectivity. Such an understanding can assist feminist thinkers to move beyond contemporary stalemates in theological appropriations of object relations theory, toward new feminist perspectives on subjectivity and new practices for transforming gendered language about God.     

Being marked as different: The emotional politics of experiences of depression and migrant belongings

This article asks the question: “What does it mean to think about ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ when migratory experience is enmeshed with the story of depression?”. The article focuses on the personal story of a woman who migrated from the United States (US) to Australia, and whose sense of disconnection and displacement in relation to everyday life is embedded within a narrative of depression. Our discussion of her twin narratives of emotional distress and migration is located within theoretical debates about depression, migration and the constitution of subjectivity. In particular, we draw on psychoanalytical approaches to subjectivity to argue that her emotional distress and the medical diagnosis of depression together represent a form of ‘experienc[ing] oneself as a subject’ (Butler, 2005), and function as a precondition to her narrative of migration. Ultimately, we conclude, the woman's intertwined narratives of depression and migration operate simultaneously to provide retroactive order to her subjectivity.     

Subjectivity and symbolization

The aim of this paper has been to demonstrate that the emergence of subjectivity as a central concept in psychoanalysis is both consistent with and intertwined with the emergence of a new great generative idea (Langer, 1942), now in its nascent stage. Langer's (1942) thesis that symbolization and the power of symbols provide the basis for the fundamental assumptions of the new great generative idea was presented in condensed form. Langer's work was then integrated with that of contemporary psychoanalytic theoretical writers, which tends to support Langer's thesis. Freud's discoveries were revolutionary insofar as they resulted in the posing of new kinds of questions that have to do with symbols and their meanings. To that extent the birth of psychoanalysis itself appears as one manifestation of the emerging new generative idea. The issue of subjectivity was examined from the specific vantage point of recent conceptualizations of self and self-experience. Symbolization, it was shown, is a crucial factor in both self-experience and conceptualizations of self. Finally, it was suggested by the author that some of the existing baffling problems concerning subjectivity, the concept of self, and self-experience may disappear in the context of the new great generative idea, based on fundamental assumptions about the power of symbols.     

What can self-disorders in schizophrenia tell us about the nature of subjectivity? A psychopathological investigation

The purpose of this article is to show how schizophrenia, understood as a distortion of the most intimate structures of subjectivity, illustrates the nature of subjectivity as such, while at the same time how philosophical considerations may help to understand schizophrenia. More precisely, schizophrenic experiences of self-alienation seem to reflect a congealing or concretization of a form of differentiation or potential alterity implicit in the dynamic nature of subjectivity. In other words, we propose that the structure of subjectivity includes potential divisions and fissures that condition the experiences of radical self-alienation seen in schizophrenia. In order to elucidate how this alterity emerges within the self in schizophrenia and in order to consider its conditions of possibility we examine the disorders of the self as described in phenomenological psychopathology. We especially use the work of the Japanese psychiatrists Mari Nagai, her teacher Bin Kimura, and the French psychiatrist Henry Ey, supplemented with clinical material from our own research. Finally, we shed light on the development of the psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, which are understood as the expressions of a radical alterization (i.e., becoming other) of the self.