THE QUESTION OF THE SUBJECT: FROM REFLEXIVITY TO SINGULARITY
The evolution of the understanding of the subject from its reflexive interpretations to the modern understanding of subjectivity as a singular and contingent event requires an analysis of their foundations. Reflexive and phenomenological concepts of subjectivity were based on the identity of a fact and a certain content of consciousness. However, the statement of the original temporality of subjectivity forces us to abandon such an understanding. Identity means the substantiation of the action of thinking in a certain logical form of the subject, but it itself presupposes the initial ontological difference between the action and its agent. The analysis of the subject reveals the affectation of the classical subject by the very question of the authorship of thought or the logical (grammatical) form of its constitution. The subject is not presupposed in advance, but exists inside a question about him or a practical act. Therefore, in its factuality, the subject exists as a certain event and contingent singularity, an event of difference within a certain situation that allows statements about it as the “beginning” of thinking or action. The singularity of a subject is not a certain coefficient of its identity, but turns out to be an integral of its differences. And this makes it impossible to describe it homogeneously, since it assumes the entire continuum of its virtual states. Therefore, the modern subject exists as an “amphibious subject”, a “fold”, a plural unity, a “shimmering being”. And the ontology of event-fulness is constructed not as a categorical-phenomenological, but as a metaphorical-topological, or virtual ontology.