ONLINE DOSSIER: NICK MANSFIELD »SUBJECTIVITY – THEORIES OF THE SELF FROM FREUD TO HARAWAY«

»'Subjectivity' refers, therefore, to an abstract or general principle that defies our separation into distinct selves and that encourages us to imagine that, or simply helps us to understand why, our interior lives inevitably seem to involve other people either as objects or need, desire and interest or as necessary sharers of common experience. In this way, the subject is always linked to something outside of it – an idea or principle or the society of other subjects. It is this linkage that the word 'subject' insists upon. Etymologically, to be subject means to be 'placed (or even thrown) under'. One is always subject to or of something. The word subject, therefore, proposes that the self is not a separate and isolated entity, but one that operates at the intersection of general truths and shared principles. It is the nature of these truths and principles, whether they determine or are determined by us as individuals – in short, the range of their power – that has dominated theory and debate.«