WHO COMES AFTER THE POLITICAL SUBJECT? : The question of the subject in the deconstruction of political metaphysics

Sammanfattning

This thesis aims to engage with the concept of the political subject, and thus with the political understood as, or through, such a subject. The question that structures this engagement is one posed by Jean-Luc Nancy in 1988: Who comes after the subject? Faced with this question, I traverse three interpretative moments. First, I provide a reading of the conceptual tension between an “overcoming” of the subject and an affirmation of some who. Here, I argue that this tension articulates the stakes of a particular political and theoretical moment – one that is confronted by the aporias and conundrums of our political vocabulary without thereby being granted the means to maneuver without it. Second, I turn to the work of Nancy and his colleague and friend Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in order to provide a reading of the motif of the “political subject” – a motif which is recurrent in their work, but never systematically developed. I argue that the political subject is to be understood as a political configuration of the pre-political and essential ground of the political itself, which – in being conceived as pre-political – circumscribes what, how, and for whom, the political can play out. Third, I turn towards attempts found in Adriana Cavarero, Sylvia Wynter and Nancy himself at making sense of the “who” of the political without re-inscribing it in the abovementioned structure. Through this reading, I come to argue that this might be possible by conceiving of this who not as a new essence, but as an excess which – given the relational and mimetic field necessary for articulating a pre-political essence in the first place – can never ultimately be contained in the model of the subject.