Life After the Subject

The Introduction to this special issue examines the transformation of theoretical practices in the humanities between the late 1980s and the present. It maps the path leading from the titular question of the 1991 volume Who Comes After the Subject? to this issue's question of what comes after t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cultural critique 2017-03, Vol.96 (1), p.1-36
Main Authors: Haines, Christian P, Grattan, Sean
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Biopolitics
Capitalism
Concept of being
Deconstruction
Individuation
Materialism
Philosophical object
Philosophical subject
Potentiality
Queer theory
Semiotic signs
Subjectivity
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Summary:The Introduction to this special issue examines the transformation of theoretical practices in the humanities between the late 1980s and the present. It maps the path leading from the titular question of the 1991 volume Who Comes After the Subject? to this issue's question of what comes after the subject. While this essay focuses in particular on the biopolitical turn in the humanities, it also addresses the emergence of affect studies, the new materialisms, and posthumanism as different genres of thinking the whatness of subjectivity and its aftermath. Rather than reveling in life after the subject, this essay marks the ambivalence of this whatness, which, on the one hand, designates the insecurity of any “who,” the many violences through which selfhood can be crushed, and, on the other hand, the reinvention of politics through a tarrying with heterogeneous materialities, the production of new ways of being with others in the world.
ISSN:0882-4371
1460-2458
1534-5203
1460-2458
DOI:10.1353/cul.2017.a669098