The Subject

There is no single conception of the subject in philosophy but a complex array of ‘subjects’ satisfying different descriptions and roles in areas like metaphysics, ethics and epistemology (or theory of knowledge). However, it is possible to give some initial characterisations of the concepts of subjectivity most relevant to Derrida’s approach to philosophy. One key notion of the subject is that of a centre of psychological life; a ‘self’ which remains numerically identical ‘beneath’ or ‘behind’ one’s actions or experiences. For Descartes, the very act of thinking or experiencing implies the existence of a psychological subject, which he subsequently identifies with an immaterial mind. The act of ‘reflection’ (roughly, the monitoring one’s inner life) thus acquires an epistemic privilege famously exemplified in his foundational assertion that the act of thinking (cogito) presupposes the existence of the ‘I’ who thinks. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant claims that this reflective ‘I think’ does not imply the existence of Cartesian mindstuff but is, rather, a ‘transcendental subject’, a condition of possibility for knowledge. For Kant, I can only represent the world as being a certain way if it is possible for me to be conscious of so representing it. The founder of modern phenomenology, Edmund Husserl – a philosopher who figures extensively in Derrida’s early work – asserts, likewise, that the transcendental subject is not in the world (like the psychological subject) but is the framework within which any world can be thought or experienced. For Husserl, like Descartes, the founding privilege of subjectivity derives from the subjective immediacy or ‘self-presence’ of mental states. He claims that every experience or thought has an intentional content by which it ‘refers’ to some object thought about or experienced. All that is relevant to the content of a thought, however, is the manner in which its ‘intentional object’ is presented for the subject rather than the empirical existence or non-existence of that object. This self-presence supposedly affords an a priori framework in which philosophical questions about the nature of reality or the