Hello everybody,
Finally, I will stop lurking and say something.
I am speaking from a background of feminist writing theory which has for
years had things to say about the construction of subjectivity in the
individual.
An important starting point for many feminist discussions concerning the
construction of subjectivity in general is the theory elaborated by Emile
Benveniste (Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966),
that our human sense of subjectivity is an affect of deixis in language.
Benveniste argues that the deictic dimension of language is distributed over
a range of words which point to the here and now of a speaker in time, that
is, pronouns, conjugated verb forms and terms of location such as here, now,
this, that and there, all of which are relative to the most powerfully
deictic term of all and the one most implicated in our sense of ego
namely, the first-person subject pronoun, I.
This theoretical framework is congruent with the idea that subjectivities
are in process, and never completely whole; and that people may experience a
divided sense of themselves as subjects, on one hand, and objects, say, on
the other. We would be, nevertheless, first and foremost, subjects of
language and our sense of subjectivity is an affect of that epistemological
status.
Susan
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