In the lecture delivered between January and March 1980, Michel Foucault, after completing his studies of “power-knowledge,” attached new importance to the subject—specifically, to a form of subjectivity experienced in the injunction to speak of oneself, to better submit onself to others.
Who comes after the subject? According to Étienne Balibar, it is the citizen—grasped not in her isolated sovereignty, but as a member of an emerging community. Yet the equality of rights that modernity proclaims does not preclude the possibility of segregation and exclusion. In this long interview, the philosopher Balibar explores this paradox, which fuels his method of analysis.
It has been said since the 1970s that the “death of the subject” is an irrevocable given of any modern conception of the self. Jerrold Seigel shows how to go beyond this simplistic approach: with a multi-dimensional vision of the self, taking into account its bodily, social and reflexive nature, he demonstrates that the self has been at the core of Western philosophy and historical experience from Locke to Derrida.
