Writing the Self in/after the Postmodern: Poppy and Heddy and Me

Abstract

A supposed "death of the subject" is a central tenet in the postmodern vocabulary of crisis, whether it be a dissolution of subjectivity by technology as in Jean Baudrillard, by consumer capitalism as in Fredric Jameson, or by a restructuring of gender relations as in Arthur Kroker. This essay, however, argues that the crisis may signal an expansion of certain epistemological, representational, and political positions available to women, as counter to postmodemism's subtext of loss. For the corpse is, of course, a particular version of subjectivity. When Foucault, among others, announced the death of "man" in The Order of Things, he was continuing a deconstruction of subjectivity begun by Nietzsche. Under attack is the Cartesian subject of bourgeois humanism - the unified, rational, coherent, and knowledgeable self, which is also assumed to be masculine. Nietzsche's Romantic philosophy which emphasises the irrational, and Freud's "discovery" of the unconscious seriously threatens the bourgeois conception of subjectivity.