Excerpt

Where the subject has been resurrected in recent theory, it has largely been to move it beyond a certain impasse. This impasse is not new; indeed, it is perhaps constitutive of the notion of the subject itself since Kant.¹ Theoretical reflection on the subject has since then been plagued by the fundamental paradox of thinking cognition in general terms: any transhistorical conception of the boundaries of thought necessarily assumes what it excludes—namely, the contingent being that thought them in the first place. One can think, it seems, the consistency of the subject, but only at the cost of the contingency…