Rethinking The Subject

Since the early 1970s, European thinkers have departed notably from their predecessors in order to pursue analytical programmes more thoroughly their own. This text brings together in one volume some of the most influential writings of Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu, Pizzorno, Macfarlane and other authors whose ideas have had a worldwide influence in recent social thory. This anthology is testament to the central importance of three contemporary themes, each familiar to earlier thinkers but never definitely formulated or resolved. The first two concern the nature and modalities of power and legitimacy in society. The third, and most fundamental, deals with the nature and modalities of the "self" or "subject". These themes owe their special contemporary relevance to an array of events - from the collapse of colonialism to the birth of test-tube babies. Janmes Fauion's introduction traces the historical context of these events and themes. It also traces the lineaments of a still incohoate intellectual movement, of which this anthologies contributors are the vangaurd.
Whether "modernist" or "post-modernist", this movement leads away from a "world-constituting subject", which in one guise or another has served as the ontological fround of social reflection and research since Kant. It points instead toward ontological pluralism and toward polytheic diagnostics of heterogeneous forces that constitute a multiplicity of worlds and subjects.