| Popis: |
This chapter turns to the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, along with examples such as Titian’s Venus Blindfolding Cupid and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, to examine how the subject of poststructuralism is neither unified nor an origin, and is thus a far cry from the unique individual who has traditionally represented humanity in the Free West. The difference between the terms ‘subject’ and ‘identity’ is outlined, and the chapter explores how psychoanalysis deepens poststructuralism’s questioning of the view that consciousness is an origin by redoubling consciousness with unconscious desires that exercise other determinations, according to an agenda we don’t even recognize. The free individual, poststructuralism proposes, is no longer either individual or free. Does this mean we cannot resist our own subjection and that cultural norms (about sex, gender, and binary oppositions, for example) are beyond challenge? No, though there might be a price to pay. The chapter engages with Foucault’s claim that there is by definition no power without the possibility of resistance, and it concludes with a discussion of poststructuralism’s radical edge in a world that often privileges unity and identity. |
