Abstract
Boelderl examines the current state of political theories as developed by ‘deconstructionist’ French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe regarding their respective stances on the political role of the subject. The dereliction of the subject, meaning the process of recognizing its inner weakness right within the enactment of its highest capacities, reveals itself to be the very condition of the possibility of acting politically, because political action always already implies acknowledging the permanent (ontological) groundlessness of the subject, which in turn calls for its continuous becoming. Given this insight, Boelderl concludes with the question if the subject, rather than being able of giving its life a (political) sense, might not be political in itself insofar as it is required to give its sense a life.
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Notes
- 1.
The question of the relationship between presentation and representation is being developed by both thinkers in the context of Jacques Derrida’s so-called deconstruction.
- 2.
See the programmatic outline of the symposium Political Abilities held in Innsbruck, Austria, on 27–29 March 2014.
- 3.
Man is thus a person in the sense of the possibility of addressing or being addressed, but man is still no I, insofar as the I refers to a reaction to the act of addressing or, as Freud (1960, p. 20) put it, a surface-I (as a response) to the act of addressing.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
On the expressions ‘survival’, ‘over-life’, and ‘more than life’, which remind to Georg Simmel in his late period and suggest a certain filiation of classical philosophy of life and Derrida’s deconstruction; see, for example, Derrida (2010). However, survival plays an important role already in 1964 for Derrida, that is, in his earliest period and even then in the context of the question of birth (see in this respect Derrida, 2005b).
- 7.
This marks both the point of connection and at the same time the point of criticism of Heidegger from the point of view of the ‘post-structuralist’ readers.
- 8.
On this motif of the double nature of the subject in Derrida and the former’s derivation in terms of the history of ideas, see also my lecture, ‘Das Ende des Buches ist der Anfang der Schrift—Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von (christlichem) Neuplatonismus und “heidnischer” Hermetik’, given on 1 October 2004 at the University of Siegen by invitation of the research project Mystik und Moderne, organized by Klaus Vondung and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (as yet unpublished).
- 9.
This is the case at least since a period which has been called the period of Enlightenment and which not coincidentally comes along with the discovery or invention of the political subject.
- 10.
‘One ought to be able to formalize the law of this insurmountable gap. This is a little what I am always doing. Identification is a difference to itself, a difference with/of itself […] The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is at once a chance, a sign of life, and a wound. If it closed in on birth, on a plenitude of the utterance or the knowledge that says “I am born,” that would be death’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 340).
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Boelderl, A.R. (2016). After the Subject is Before the Subject: On the Political Meaning of Subjectivation in Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. In: Oberprantacher, A., Siclodi, A. (eds) Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51659-6_2
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