The Anthropocentric Subject

The Cartesian-Kantian anthropomorphic subject represents a state of continual immanence in terms of its indefinite and infinite possibilities. The linguistic turn takes an anthropocentric form that has been embedded in the Cartesian-Kantian metaphysics of presence. Wittgenstein, especially, takes language as an enactable rule-governed activity, thereby making it immanent to the ‘lived experiences’ of the users of language. Heidegger introduces a comprehensive embeddedness of being in language and viceversa, thereby assigning it a hermeneutical closure. In such anthropomorphic and anthropocentric moves, what is lost is the very ground of reality on which language must act. A project of recovery of the lost grounds between life and language cannot be completed without taking into account the ‘constitutive’ outside of language, which is the sovereignty of the subject that occupies an indeterminate space between lived reality/time and the time that remains. The time that remains marks what we are in the present. We are always in the midst of profound boredom, which is also projected beyond the present. Postsalvation, we are still in the time that remains between the experience of boredom and the experience of salvation. This Agambenian twist to the nature of subjectivity by an ontological return to a sense of time beyond the temporal allows slippages from subjecthood, as well as from desubjectivation, by shifting the centre of self-consciousness and identity to a state of being free from the metaphysical and ontological burden of bearing any biopolitical substance.

Once subjectivity and language are disentangled from each other, the question that we need to answer is: what comes after the subject as well as language? The answer can be merely ‘exploratory’ rather than ‘explanatory’.