LUC FERRY and ALAIN RENAUT
356
psychoanalytic lapsus-that is, as a disguised form of repression?
The systematic and dogmatic practice of genealogy, as this cari–
catural passage from Lyotard suggests, eventually drives one to
deny a
qualitative
difference between these two "discourses" that
we feel exists. We are confident that this difference will seem
more apparent only if it examined philosophically, if we seek out
the conditions under which certain acts or discourses can be sub–
ject to genealogical analysis, and under which conditions they
should be treated in terms of liberty and autonomy. This is possi–
ble only if we consider their authors, not simply as tortured
mechanisms, but also in a certain sense as subjects, as sources of
their own actions who deserve treatment, in Kant's words, "as
ends in themselves, and not as means only."
At the end of these various French trials of "the subject"
during the 1960s, we must now pose a question never really con–
fronted before by philosophy: how are we to conceive of "the
subject" while taking account of the discovery of the uncon–
scious? This reconsideration need not take place, as some of our
critics have charged, through a "restoration," or a return to the
"narcissism of consciousness," or the "exorbitant use of the
cog–
ito,"
or the fantasy of a "complete, or at least not structurally dis–
sociated, subject." In demonstrating the diversity of social and
psychological influences on man, the social sciences have legit–
imately cast doubt on the traditional idea of consciousness which
philosophy had for so long turned to good use. The Cartesian
cog–
ito
cannot be resuscitated, nor can we any longer consider all our
opinions, choices, and decisions as products of an autonomous
and sovereign "noumenal subject" taking itself to be outside his–
tory. The point is simply this: since everyone will agree that the
different discoveries of the unconscious cannot nor should not
drive us to a ruinous renouncement of the
ideal
of autonomy,
what sort of subject corresponds to this radically new situation?
The most grievous error committed by recent French philosophy
was to believe, with an incredible naivete, that after the social sci–
ences' discovery of the unconscious sciences, philosophy could
go one better only by finishing off the defunct subject, instead of
taking on the new and unavoidable task of thinking afresh.
Translated from the French
by
Mark Lilla
