Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This text is about the subject. It is about subjection. It is about the violence of the word. It does not seek to present a fixed or final account of these problems: they are recognized, but not deciphered they are touched upon, but not possessed. ;Its starting point, and its central motif, is the image of the artificial man. This image, which turns the state into a great body with the sovereign as its head and to which subjects are attached as so many organs, is an ancient one. But in the first half of the seventeenth century it acquired a new intensity. It is to be found over and over in the political and philisophical treatises of this period; in Bodin's Six Bookes Of A Commonweale; in Forset's A Comparative Discorvse Of The Bodies Natvral And Politiqve; and in the text and emblem of Hobbes' Leviathan. So many dreams of a perfectly organized Body. The effects of these dreams are not confined to theory. Taken together they constitute a kind of corpus on the art of subjection. They aim at a type of subjection--where to be a subject is to be subject to a sovereign--modelled on the body subjected to the soul. But events soon impinge upon these dreams. The organs begin to detach themselves from the Body of the sovereign, they rise up against the king. The detached organs will become private individuals and in the newly found interiority of being each individual will become his own sovereign and subject. ;With the critical influence of Nietzsche, Foucault, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, ever-present the text maps this movement from the artificial to the sovereign man. And in doing so, it attempts to gauge the networks of subjection in which we ourselves have been caught