Being Subjects - (Living Existentialism) by J Moufawad-Paul (Hardcover)

About the Book

The notion of the subject is so frequently used in theory and philosophy to the point that it has become opaque. Being Subjects not only provides a critical historiography of this notion--such as related topics of being and essence--but also argues for the subject's centrality in a radical politics.

Book Synopsis

The concept of the subject remains one of the most important and debated notions in social theory and philosophy. Whether it is adopted as a central notion of personhood or rejected as a product of ideology or fiction, its usage has been a theme in a variety of political and speculative thought. Unfortunately, the prevalence of the term has often rendered its meaning opaque.

Being Subjects examines the history of this notion from Descartes to the present and discusses its emergence as a philosophical category as well as its connection to related notions such as essence and being. Drawing from the tradition of Fanon's revolutionary existentialism and a historical materialist approach to thought, J. Moufawad-Paul argues that despite the rejection of the subject by thinkers such as Althusser and Foucault, thinking the subject remains a meaningful philosophical practice for a politics dedicated to radical social transformation. If we can think through the category of the subject, we can also think through the legacy of modernity which includes settler-colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. We can also think through a conception of transformative subjectivity and the path to a new personhood and collective agency beyond this legacy's weight of dead generations.

Review Quotes

Being Subjects clears ground for thinking a revolutionary subject by tracking modern subjectivity through its ideological entanglements and interrogating the reactionary thesis of the exhaustion of subject-as-freedom. Moufawad-Paul is a gadfly of and for the Left, essential reading for the way forward!

Being Subjects is a project of irruption and implosion--a simultaneity of proliferation and collapse that takes place at the presumed foundations of epistemology and archive. Moufawad-Paul is explicating while disarticulating a concept--"the subject"--that is arguably unparalleled as a taken for granted lexicon of humanist canon and, in fact, of "(human) being" itself. This book radically destabilizes academic and activist loyalties to critical, Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonialist iterations of political theory that rest on the assumptive coherence of history's hegemonic actors and insurgent agents alike. Herein is a scattering that refuses the promise of reassembly, because the creativity of being--human and otherwise--defies discipline and capture.

A brilliantly provocative insurgent philosophical intervention! Being Subjects: Preliminary Materials of the Person is an incredibly comprehensive deep dive into the question of human subjectivity. J. Moufawad-Paul challenges the reader with a refreshingly rigorous philosophical interrogation of the Subject driven by an emancipatory imperative towards ongoing class struggle unapologetically mediated by Black liberation discourse, anticolonial thought and critical theory. Unlike many contemporary thinkers who claim to represent the Radical imagination only to get lost in the liberal labyrinth of the normative gaze of established power, Moufawad-Paul meticulously follows through on several threads of modern philosophy that implicate our understanding of the Subject in relation to a radical politics of confrontation with the Minotaur of Empire.

About the Author

J. Moufawad-Paul is professor of philosophy at York University and is the author of Continuity and Rupture, The Communist Necessity, Politics in Command, and other books.