Introduction (2001)

I n t r o d u c t i o n P a u l A l l e n M i l l e r U n i v e r s i t y o f S o u t h C a r o l i n a The majority of the papers in this volume were first given as oral pre¬ sentations at the First Annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference, “Constructions of the Self: The Poetics of Subjec¬ tivity.” The volume itself is dedicated to the proposition that, to para¬ phrase Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born asubject, one becomes one, or more precisely one makes oneself and is made one. The poetics of subjec¬ tivity is not only an examination of the subject in poctr)', but also of the subject as afiction in the term’s etymological sense, that is to say as an arti¬ fact. The papers contained in this volume, like those presented at the con¬ ference, approach this topic from many different theoretical perspectives, with reference to avast range of historical periods, and in terms of awide variety of national, linguistic, and discursive traditions. But whether we speak of the dialogic interplay of concepts of soul and subject in Keats and Wilde, the maternal function and the construction of the female subject in early modern French narrative, the self-fashioning of the Russian peasant poet, the post-humanist subject of contemporary fiction, or wit and its re¬ lation to lyric consciousness, all the papers in this volume take two things as a x i o m a t i c . First, the subject is not natural. It is not agiven. It is aprocess. Thus all these papers, some more subject of the metanarrative of liberalism: what some of us in more confi¬ dent times used to refer to as the bourgeois subject. This not only has polit¬ ical and methodological consequences, but existential ones as well. The recognition that subjects arc made, that to cite the British rock group. Gang of Four, “Natural’s not in it,” is both liberating and shattering. It is liberating because the liberal subject has always been anormative and coer¬ cive model. It is for this reason that recent scholars have radically chal¬ lenged the whole concept of “the humanities,” with its implied relation¬ ship to anotional “humanism.” Humanism depends upon the image of a single, unified agent that lies behind all human actions. Such an ideology is not only indefensible theoretically, but politically repressive. The notion of auniversal subjective essence institutes amodel that casts those whose subjecti\-ities fail to adhere to that norm—for reasons of gender, race, class, sexual preference, or pure nonconformin'—as outcasts, pen’crts, or subhu¬ mans. The rejection of liberalism’s normative subject on this view is amo¬ ment of potential liberation, the moment where in Foucault’s vision w’c mo\e from the ideology of sexuality and of man to the utopia of bodies and pleasures (157). and some less explicitly, renounce the self-present 3 I N T E R T E X T S 4 Yet this same recognition is also shattering in its very power to sliow that consciousness is never fully master in its own house. Even in its most liberating vision of the self as apure product of self-fashioning, this struction of the posthuman posits amoment of radical division at the heart of being.The self that makes and the self that is made never quite coincide, and the very space of difference that allows the model of self-creation to function is also the place of determination, the locus in which the subject encounters the Real in the form of its own radical contingency. The loss of the unified subjective essence is not merely the liberation from the re¬ straints of ideology but it is also the moment when, to borrow the terminolog )' ofMcili Steele, the third person is encountered at the heart of the first (1-14). It is this recognition of the subject’s own constitutive otherness, of its necessary encounter with the alien in it most inner recesses, that all these papers stage...