Re: How do you have a revolution without a subject?

hi asher,

> It seems that the point is not that there is no subject, but that there is
> no _stable_ subject -- meaning there is potential for action (agency) but
> that that agency is defined/influenced/constituted by power (in terms of
> Foucault). In the same sense, it seems that the revolution (or at least
the
> resistance) comes in part in terms of self-formation -- establishing the
> individual subject in terms of the self rather than in terms of
identity --
> in order to create revolutionary agency.

 sorry if i gave the impression that i thought anyone was saying the was no
subject -- clearly that is not so, rather, as you say, it is the
stability--and, therefore, the sovereignty--of the subject which is
challenged.

i'm intrigued by your distinction between "subject" and "self"... i can see
it's psychoanalytic heritage (conscious subject/unconscious self) but i
would see the subject as the only possible locus for agency within that
framework?  personally, i wouldn't even want to go that far (and posit an
unconscious self) ... but i assume (perhaps wrongly?) that your
differentiation of these terms rests on the idea of the unconscious as a
kind of true self [even if it is a libidinal materialist one!] as opposed to
a false subjectivity?  and that while the subject submits to the authority
of the reality principle, the wild and free unconscious kow-tows to no one,
i.e. is revolutionary?!  i realise i'm simplifying and collapsing different
discourses here, but, as i asked Sid Littlefield in my last post, doesn't
this kind of schema fall into a Romanticism of the self/subject??

and, lastly, if you take away this self/subject distinction, who is left to
'produce their own subjectivity' in a revolutionary action, so to speak?

dan h2o.