This excerpt is the first half of the introductory essay for Balibar's Citizen Subject, which is published this month in English by Fordham University press.
Letter by Descartes to Christine, 3 November 1645, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1969), 4:333. Cited by Jean-Luc Marion, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 411.
Oeuvres de Descartes, 1: 145.
I am aware that is a matter of opposing them: but in order to oppose them directly, as the recto and verso, the permanence of a single question (of a single “opening”) must be supposed, beyond the question of the subjectus, which falls into the ashcan of the “history of being.”
Applying it to Kant himself if need be: for the fate of this problematic—by the very fact that the transcendental subject is a limit, even the limit as such, declared to be constitutive is to observe that there always remains some substance or some phenomenality in that it must be reduced.
As Nancy himself suggests in the considerations of his letter of invitation, from which I reproduce a key passage: “This question can be explained as follows: one of the major characteristics of contemporary thought is the putting into question of the instance of the ‘subject,’ according to the structure, the meaning, and the value subsumed under this term in modern thought from Descartes to Hegel, if not to Husserl. The inaugurating decisions of contemporary thought … have all involved putting subjectivity on trial. A widespread discourse of recent date proclaimed the subject’s simple liquidation. Everything seems, however, to point to the necessity, not of a ‘return to the subject’ … but on the contrary, of a move forward toward someone—some one—else in his place (this last expression is obviously a mere convenience: the ‘place’ could not be the same).Who would it be? How would s/he present him/herself? Can we name him/her? Is the question ‘who’ suitable? … In other words: If it is appropriate to assign something like a punctuality, a singularity, or a hereness (haecceitas) as the place of emission, reception, or transition (or affect, of action, of language, etc.), how would one designate its specificity? Or would the question need to be transformed—or is it in fact out of place to ask it?” Jean-Luc Nancy, Who Comes After the Subject?, 5.
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Politique tirée de des propres paroles de l’Écriture sainte, ed. Jacques Le Brun (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 53. Bossuet states: “All men are born subjects.” Descartes says: There are innate ideas, which God has always already planted in my soul, as seeds of truth, whose nature (that of being eternal truths) is contemporaneous with my nature (for God creates or conserves them at every moment just as he creates or conserves me), and which at bottom are entirely enveloped in the infinity of that envelops all my true ideas, beginning with the first: my thinking existence.
The Institutes of Gaius, trans. W. M. Gordon and O. F. Robinson (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd., 1988), §48, 45.
See Christian Bruschi, “Le droit de cité dans l’Antiquité: Un questionnement pour la citoyenneté aujourd’hui,” in La citoyenneté et les changements de structures sociales et nationales de la population française, ed. Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, 125–153 (n.p.: Edilig/Fondation Diderot, 1988).
Emmanuel Terray suggests to me that this is one of the reasons for Constantine’s rallying to Pauline Christianity (“All power comes from God”: see Epistle to the Romans).
On all of these points, see, for example, Walter Ullman, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), and A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965).
On all this, see Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194–1250, trans. E. O. Lorimer (New York: Ungar, 1957); The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); Selected Studies (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1965).
How does one get from the Roman servus to the medieval serf? Doubtless by a change in the “mode of production” (even though it is doubtless that, from the strict point of view of production, each of these terms corresponds to a single mode). But this change presupposes or implies that the “serf” also has an immortal soul included in the economy of salvation; this is why he is attached to the land rather than to the master.
Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République, vol. 1, §6 (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 114.
Ibid., 1:112.
See Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron, intro. Mladen Dolar (New York: Verso, 1998).
