Re: [xmca] subjectivity question

From: Mary K. Bryson (mary.bryson@ubc.ca)
Date: Fri Nov 11 2005 - 09:12:50 PST


>> Poststructuralists claim to have "deconstructed the subject", for them
>> it is an illusion.

Actually, I recommended three texts that are post-structural and not
deconstructionist in their methodology. Late-career Foucault and current
Butler do not take as their target the deconstruction of the subject at all.
In the Butler text, and also Cavarero, the authors provide very
comprehensive analyses of the major philosophical perspectives for thinking
about subject-object relations, and there are minor, but not insignificant
overlaps with what concerns most CHAT citizens --- inter-subjectivities. And
there are overlaps in literature, which I sometimes think is most profitably
sought in the literature from psychoanalysis on object relations -- a good
chunk of the Butler text looks at this literature.

I was thinking about all of this yesterday -- the way in which we are
speaking different languages in this community <as in any other community>
such that by the time one message gets across the great divide, almost all
the meaning is lost. It seems a very potent difference to note that for some
of us -- like, me, for example -- psychology is not about "mental
processes", and if I am to talk at all about psychology, then it is to be
interested in the ways in which scholarly traditions endeavor to provide an
account of interiority that is rich enough and complex enough to be situated
in a context of geographic, historical, chronological <at minimum> flux. And
this actually, is where I find that LSV started off on the right track in
his work on semiotics, and then got derailed by mentalistic traditions
which, likely because of his very early death, never got back on track. So
for me, Bakhtin is more helpful, when I am looking back to foundational
texts.

Mary

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