Serres‘ notion of parasiting as a modality of relationships among humans or between humans and the world is a radical reconsideration of the Other. His
parasitology recovers the guest and the space in-between the host and the guest from backstage. Since Enlightenment the guest has been neglected, oppressed, repressed, denunciated, or, at best, neutralized by tyrannical reign of the host. The list of the
supreme and governing host/the inferior and subordinate guest could be, for example, as follows: subject/object, identity/ multiplicity, logos/sense (emotion), essence/mixture,
head (speech)/hand (gesture) (Leroi-Gourhan 1993), and structure/emergence. But it should be noted that Serres‘ parasitology is a project neither to destroy the host, nor to replace it with the guest or the space in-between; its aim is to parasite, to supplement one-sided story, so as to write a new story of relationality, by entering the relations.
Serres is not the only or the first thinker who digs out the problematic of the Other. There have been continuous efforts in critical questioning and redefining of a human subject in relation to the Other for the past three or four decades. In fact, there has been an obsession with the notion of subjectivity since the Enlightenment. Once it has been released from the creation of God, the prime and fundamental concern for great thinkers has come to be, inevitably, ―Then, who are we?‖ The consequence is that the Christian subject, together with the earlier ones, the Pagan and the Classical, has given way to the Reasoning, Cartesian subject. But after all of its triumph and
discontent, the Cartesian subject has been placed under rigorous interrogation from the late nineteenth century, notably by Husserl, and, coming through the twentieth century, it has eventually been superseded by the Psychoanalytic, the Semiotic, the Policed, the Postmodern, the Ontological, the Becoming, and, more recently, to the Posthuman subject.
It is worth noting that these examples of re-routings of the notion of a subject are not in a chronological order in any sense: they are homeorrhectic, to borrow Serres‘
(1982b: 74-75) word. It is an expression to characterize an organism, which he sees as a hyper-complex system. For Serres an organism is not in equilibrium but in a temporary state of imbalance; in other words, it is relatively stable in and by this imbalance, which is neither static nor homeostatic but homeorrhectic. In order to emphasize the idea of continual movement and exchange, Serres replaces the term ―homeostasis‖ with homeorrhesis, exploiting four Greek words, ―homos‖ (same), ―rhysis‖ (flow),
―syrrhein‖ (to flow together), and ―diarrhein‖ (to flow through). Thoughts on
subjectivity have been flowing together and through, and to choose one conception of subjectivity from this river somehow gives an answer to the problematic of relationship between a subject and the world at that time.
While most of the influential arguments in the critical reconfigurations of a human subject and its relationship with the Other begin with a tacit or explicit denial of the Cartesian self, some thinkers insist that the problems in western subjectivity began much earlier with the Christian self, which dominated western world from over a
thousand years earlier than the Cartesian one. For example, Paglia (1999: 289-97) rather
starts with St. John than with Descartes, arguing that John got it all wrong in the Bible:
―Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image‖ (Exodus 20:4) and ―In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God‖ (John 1:1). For her in the beginning was nature, violent, chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable, which predates and stands in opposition to the ordered and structured world created by the word, law, and the book-centered culture of Judeo-Christianity. According to Paglia, the image, which is pagan and expressive of nature‘s complexity and violence, was
outlawed by Moses in favor of the word, and that‘s where our troubles began.
Freeman (2003; 2008) also attacks the same kind of Christian closure, but he rather focuses on the scientific and philosophical mind of classical Greece. He points out that it was in 475 BC when the Athenian philosopher Proclus made the last recorded astronomical observation in classical Greece, and regrets that it was not until the
sixteenth century that Copernicus set in hand the renewal of the tradition, inspired by the surviving works of Ptolemy. According to Freeman (2003: 313-28), a combination of three factors operated behind the closing of the Western mind: the attack on Greek philosophy by Paul who denounced it as ―empty logic‖; the adoption of Platonism by Christian theologians who assumed that Christian dogma could be found through the same process Plato had advocated and the dogma would have the same certainty as the Ideas; and finally the enforcement of orthodoxy by Roman emperors who were
desperate to keep good order with their theological legitimacy. Freeman (2008: 27-39) argues that, up to the Nicean Trinity in 381 AD, perspectives were wider: the leading theologians had read deeply the classics of pagan philosophy and were able to use their insights and terminology to extend the range of their thought. He takes an example of Basil of Caesarea, who insisted that Christians must first ―be conversant with poets, historians, and orators‖ before they progressed to Christian texts. But the ease with which these Christian intellectuals related to ―pagan‖ learning came to an end with the Creed; only those who subscribed to the formula could have churches and imperial patronage, and all other interpretations were declared heretical. Freeman sees that there had not been such a wide sweeping program of religious coercion since the attempt of the pharaoh Akhenaten who imposed his god Aten on his Egyptian subjects in the fourteenth century BC.
This Christian closure dominated Western mind for over a thousand years, only to meet two consequences: one from inside the religion, the Reformation; and the other from the wider circle of intellectual mind, the Enlightenment. It is widely agreed that
the Enlightenment spans the period from the sixteenth century with Francis Bacon, and then Descartes, to the eighteenth century of the French Revolution. The period covers developments as various as the origins of modern empirical science, the elaboration of universal ideals of political organization, the advent of industrial capitalism, and the birth of Protestantism. The Enlightenment ideals still underpin the present-day social and political institutions and their operations, as a justification of the way how a
―modern‖ subject makes a relationship with others and with the world. Yet the Enlightenment is not a single, unitary move; it is homeorrhectic, with full of
contradictions. For example, both the rationale for the modern democratic state and the ideology of its socialist opponent can be traced to decisively Enlightenment thinkers.
The situation with the human subjectivity is similar: not only that key developments in Enlightenment thought first posed the question of the subject as a free, autonomous and rational being, but there were also the seeds of radical attacks on this model, which have aimed either to replace it with a different model, or to abandon the whole idea of
subjectivity altogether. But one thing is clear: with the Enlightenment the question of a human subject and its relationship with the world has been untethered from the will of God, opening up a field of rigorous and persistent contention.
Inaugurating the modern narrative of a unitary, rational, and self-sufficient subject, Descartes splits up the older notion of ―conscience‖ into an emotional and a cognitive component, privileging the latter, and founding it in the cogito. Though the Latin word Cogitare, from which the term he uses is derived, includes as well the general idea of awareness or ―experience‖ as it is sometimes translated, it is obvious that Descartes prefers the conscious processes of thought over every other impulse or sensation as he writes his famous formula, Cogito ergo sum. Instead of the idea of the redemptive journey of the pilgrim in the course of which the Christian becomes worthy of salvation, Descartes‘ formula transforms the idea of journey into the progress of reason. But he does not completely abolish his Christian belief in his theory of rational subject, believing that human faculty of reason is guaranteed by God for the subject‘s own search for truth and emancipation. Still, his argument, which sees the ―I‖ as the origin of all knowledge, as the autonomous and self-sufficient being marks the beginning of a new understanding of human subjectivity.
On the other hand, Rousseau, a later Enlightenment thinker, straddles the strong rationalism of Enlightenment thought and the emphasis on feeling and sensibility that would arise in its wake in the Romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. His political thought, especially expressed in The Social Contract (1998;
c1762), argues for a rationalized, if not regimented, society under the authority of a despotic figure who embodies the popular will. It has even seen as a justification for modern totalitarianism. But his Confessions (2008; c1781) emphasizes the uniqueness and autonomy, and the absolute governing freedom of individual experience. The sense of originality and sufficiency of individuality is the key to this work, as he writes: ―I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself. Simply myself. ... I am made unlike any one I have ever met: I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the world. I may be no better, but at least I am different‖ (2008:17). He seems to think of the
individual as a total and inclusive phenomenon, a sort of dynamic unity. It seems that, in his later life, he does not derive his judgments from reading or from dialogue with other intellectuals, and nor from his own rationale; he contemplates, walking in the forest at Saint-Germain, withdrawing into nature and solitude, and his insight is produced by his immersion in the very natural, intuitive self he is praising—Rousseau the herbalist (Serres 1982b: 22).
While Descartes has committed himself to recover the Classical subjectivity which had been suppressed by the Christian closure, Rousseau seems to have devoted himself as well to the resumption of the Pagan subjectivity which had been under the same circumstance. But it is Rousseau the rationalist which has been acknowledged;
while another Rousseau, the herbalist, has been marginalized and survived in literature to be rediscovered only recently. The Cartesian relationality dominated Western philosophy; knowledge, morality, and society had to be formulated in terms of the subject—a consistent, self-identical and coherent entity, who should be always at the center. Kant further distanced the subject from divine intervention or design, and
redefined the purpose of the journey in terms of the coming to maturity of humanity as a whole, to make modernity a universal and universalizing project and the subject the agent of this project. This shift has been made even clearer with Hegel; the Hegelian phenomenology historicized the process by way of the working of the dialectic in which mind or consciousness becomes the object and subject of History, propelled by its own, immanent, telos. Western subject with Kant and Hegel underwent a path of triumph, marking the accomplishments of an imperialist modernity in alliance with capitalism, and transforming the whole world materially and culturally in the nineteenth century.
The project of modernity and of Enlightenment imagined that it could accomplish a civilizing mission, the goal of which was supposed to bring the law to all other peoples (Derrida 1997: 27).
But there has been the awareness of discontent or sadness at the heart of the Zeitgeist alongside this exorbitant ambition. This is evidenced in some of the reservations of radical Enlightenment thinkers like Diderot, the questioning of
subjectivity by German Romantic thinkers like Schelling and Schleiermacher, or in the meditations of Baudelaire and the critique of the foundations of modernity by Nietzsche.
From the second half of the nineteenth century, an interrogation is inaugurated of the foundations of the subject of modernity, with the critique of Cartesianism by Husserl, and developed later on by Heidegger, and by those who have been influenced by readings of their works. Heidegger (1978)‘s contribution to the present-day crisis of subjectivity, as it has been called, is to propose that the model of Cartesian subject is a superficial illusion perpetrated on us and its understanding of the subject chooses, more or less arbitrarily, one or other attribute of subjectivity as the transcendental truth of human life. The result is, therefore, that more fundamental issues, like the question of Being, had never been properly addressed. Heidegger sees subjectivity as an historical phase, a development in the unfolding of philosophy that must inevitably be suspended.
For him subjectivity is an ―event‖ in one‘s culture, not a natural or inevitable ―state.‖
The two schools of thought, psychoanalysis and Nietzsche (and Foucault), also have in common their separation from what considered to be the commonsense model of the subject inherited from the Enlightenment: the idea that a subject is possessed of a free and autonomous individuality that is unique to oneself, and that develops as part of one‘s spontaneous encounter with the world. Psychoanalysis sees that the subject is not born with an intact subjectivity; instead, our subjectivity is instilled in us as a result of our encounter with the bodies—specifically the gender—of those in our immediate family environment, usually our parents. For Freud the family politics of the Oedipal drama produce a subject, who is governed by the paternal phallus, the sign of authority and guarantee of meaning. Though psychoanalysis differentiates itself from
Cartesianism, arguing that the subjectivity is not pre-given and rational, it still attempts to explain the Truth of the subject, assuming that the world, as well as a subject, is a real thing with a fixed structure which operates in predictable patterns and therefore
quantifiable and knowable. On this premise, Lacan (1978: 55) translates Freud‘s model of subjectivity into the domain of structuralist linguistics, understanding that a human
being enters into subjectivity and language through a subjugation to the symbolic law of the father—the oedipal law, which demands the infant-child to submit to symbolic castration, to a loss of wholeness—the imaginary wholeness of the mirror stage. Instead of the Freudian split into the conscious and the unconscious, the subject is now shaped around a lack in being; the real is always already lost and only leaves traces of its loss as traumatic effects, and this lack constitutes the very condition of possibility of the symbolic, what will surface seemingly accidentally as an origin of subjectivity, identity, and meaning.
While psychoanalysis regards subjectivity as having a knowable structure, Nietzschean conception of it denies any real existence of itself. Nietzsche (2004) understands each human being as the embodiment of a quantum of force called ―will.‖
His ground-breaking idea is that subjectivity is not susceptible to final explanation in any sense because it is not a consistent and quantifiable entity or a stable thing whose limits we can know and whose structure we can map. Moreover, he insists that
subjectivity is not an ineffable one either, because it produces intensities, emotions, and values, which are so beautiful and unique that they bear witness to an ultimate,
irreplaceable and inexplicable individuality, which is dazzling yet self-contained.
Greatly influenced by this idea, Foucault (1995) sees that subjectivity has been invented by dominant systems of social organization; subjectivity is thus not the free and
spontaneous expression of our interior truth but the way we are led to think about ourselves so that we will police and present ourselves in the correct way—as not insane, criminal, undisciplined, unkempt, perverse or unpredictable. For Foucault the subject is the primary workroom of power, and his conception of policing process signifies the production of linguistic and institutional forms through which human beings define themselves and their relationships (1995: 88-92). Whereas Freud provides a method for investigating the internal workings of the psyche, Foucault seeks to show how the method itself is an ancient technique of self-fashioning or ―policing‖ that has over the centuries shaped the subject externally. Therefore, for Foucault (2001: 368-69) our human nature is not a hidden reality to be discovered through self-analysis as in Freud, but the aggregate of the forms we have chosen to provide public definitions of who we are.
In his late project on the ―technologies of the self‖ Foucault (1988) focuses on the way in which the individual participates in the policing process by monitoring his own behavior. In his study of the history of sexuality, Foucault (1998) emphasizes that
the policing of sexuality depends far more on techniques of self-control than did the policing of madness and criminality. He notices that it is not ―knowledge‖ of our sexuality that gives us power over ourselves as in Freud, but our will to establish power over our sexuality that incites our search for self-knowledge, as the people of Ancient Greece and Rome managed their subjectivity according to the ―ethics of pleasure‖
(1998: 239). In the self-policing process the self constantly problematizes its place in the world in relation to others and to inherited codes of behavior so as to produce itself endlessly as a response to this cultural and historical context. By monitoring his own behavior, the subject participates in the policing process, and it is what Foucault (1988) names ―the technologies of the self.‖ This ethical preoccupation with the responsible management of the self touches on politics on the one hand, and aesthetics on the other:
with its willingness to embrace the fictional and the fantastic, his idea of subjectivity as self-creation has provided a statement for a new, radical methodology of human
existence, and inspired not only those in academic fields, but also performance artists, radical fashion designers, and major cultural events like Gay and Lesbian festivals.
Foucault finds in his project of an experimental selfhood the way of forging a connection between aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Since there is no authentic or natural self that should be recovered or liberated, subjects are to undertake an aesthetic renewal of themselves by experimenting with the infinite possibilities of feeling and the artifices of identity. Interestingly, Foucault seems to rediscover some sympathy for the
Enlightenment project of critical self-consciousness, particularly as he finds it in Kant.
In his essay ―What is Enlightenment?‖ (1984) Foucault suggests that if subjects are really to deal with their situation in the modern world, they need to make themselves aware of the sorts of selfhood that are being constructed for them, all with the aim of
In his essay ―What is Enlightenment?‖ (1984) Foucault suggests that if subjects are really to deal with their situation in the modern world, they need to make themselves aware of the sorts of selfhood that are being constructed for them, all with the aim of