This video lecture is part of the Identity and Selfhood course on Substack. You can find the reading list here. Links to readings and access to the full lectures as video and audio are provided to subscribers, with low-income and student learner discounts available on my homepage.
Who we are is not quite who we think we are. This insight is the starting point for a group of thinkers Paul Ricoeur has labeled “masters of suspicion”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. These three thinkers, in spite of major differences in methods, concerns, and commitments, all played crucial roles in what became known in twentieth-century as the “death of the subject.” The concepts of the subject and individual, so dear to modern philosophy, are treated by all of them as illusions that serve some purpose in collective and psychic life. For Nietzsche, the subject is a mere changeling of language. For Marx (and Engels!), the abstract individual is an artifact of capitalism. And for Freud, the ego is the projection of a surface rather than the truth of who we are.
In this lecture video, I address Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology, and Freud’s “The Ego and the Id.” I show why these thinkers have been considered contributors to the ‘death of the subject’ discourse and unpack the basic claims of these writings. Course subscribers get full access to the lecture plus readings.
As you read and watch the lecture (or listen! see below), consider:
Does decentering subjectivity amount to eliminating it, or merely give it a new status? If so, what might that status be?
How does the reactive feeling of ressentiment shape the idea of the self, and relate to what Nietzsche calls slave morality?
How does capitalism construct the reality and myth of the individual?
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.