Abstract

My dissertation entitled The Subject and the Feminine investigates the evolution of the category of the subject after the Freudian discovery of the unconscious. Is it possible and desirable to eliminate the category of the subject in the name of a generic anti-essentialism? Following the impulse of the Freudian and Lacanian reconfiguration of subjectivity and Heidegger's re-thinking of the question of being, I argue that we must retain the notion of the subject, but that we must theorize it differently, that is, not as pure thinking substance, but as the result of the articulation of the antinomy of logos and pathos. I maintain that the condition for this articulation lies in the fact of sexuation, that is, of sexual difference. In other words, the human subject---the subject of consciousness---is constituted by the encounter of language with the non-sense of sexual difference. ;Sexuation is, then, at the same time the condition of the possibility and impossibility of subjectivity. The subject comes into being as a response to the question of sexual difference, but at the same time such a question can find no answer because the fact of sexual difference does not belong to the order of sense. Thus, sexual difference is at the same time the cause and the limit of signification. The result of this impasse is the fundamentally ethical rather than rational nature of human existence. The human being is from the very start exposed to and dependent on an element of radical otherness that is always re-encountered in the dimension of pathos and most often disavowed in the relation to the other sex. What my work investigates is the way in which the ethical moment---what I would define as love, that is, the fidelity to the heteronomous---is expressed or repressed in the representation and theorization of the feminine