SUBJECTIVITY AND

IDENTITY

Plots of most novels and films

Bildung (apprenticeship, „fejlődés”) – the

protagonist searching for her selfhood

Hero: orphan, foundling (Fielding, Dickens)End of story: achieving selfhood (knowing who

you are)

Renaissance Centre, Detroit

The idea of “renaissance man”

Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things” (homo mensura)

- Harmonious individual of many talents - Leon Batista Alberti: “A man can do all things

if he wants”- Fully trained (cultivated) – role of education- Master of himself – master of the world

subjectivity in the film Renaissance Man

• Identity problems (double D-s and Rago)• Two castings

• Two approaches to identity/subjectivity: Bill vs army

• Humanist (individualist) vs collectivist• Identity as individual difference or as

belonging to a group

“This, above all, to thine own self be true” (Polonius) -- “Be all you can be” (Army poster)

• dummy in the classroom • Victory tower scene• Hamlet rap • sacrifice of Hobbs • trip to Canada: theatre

Henry V (on stage)“For there is none of you so mean and baseThat hath no noble lustre in your eyes...Follow your spirit; and, upon this chargeCry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’”

„Mert köztetek senki sem oly alantas,Hogy nemes fény ne égne a szemében...Előttetek a vad, kiáltsátok oda:‘Harryval Isten, Szent György, Anglia!’”

• The army is no longer the opposite of ‘Shakespeare’

• Solidarity • group identity helps everyone attain his/her

own identity • Exam: „You are not dumb. But I want you to

know that”

Henry V (Benitez in the rain)“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile This day shall gentle his condition:And gentlemen in England now a-bedShall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

„Mi kevesek, mi boldog kevesek,Mi testvérbanda mert aki ma vérét Ontja velem, testvérem lesz; akármiAlantas, helyzetét megnemesíti E mai nap; s majd sok úriember, Aki ágyban hever most Angliában, Átoknak érzi, hogy nem volt ma itt,És szégyennek, ha olyan férfi szól,Ki itt harcolt Crispin napján velünk.” (IV.iii, Mészöly Dezső ford.)

• Benitez’s performance: „you”→”us” • Examination: military event • Melvin: the soldier and the student survive • Army: grants identity through identification

(no family context)

Modern Western subjectivity

self, identity, in-dividual : a value in itself (sg to achieve, to work on)a problem in itself (sg to think about)• Thomas Reid (Scottish philosopher): “All

mankind place their personality in something that cannot be divided … A person is something indivisible… My personal identity implies the continued existence of the indivisible thing which I call myself”

The subject as the centre of Enlightenment

• Descartes: cogito ergo sum

• John Locke: identity = (1) self-reflection(2) Continuity in time

Individuality as a political value• “If it were felt that the free development of

individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being; that it is not only a coordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilization, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things; there would be no danger that liberty should be undervalued.”

• „Individuality is the same thing with development, and that it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings” (John Stuart Mill: On Liberty)

DECENTRING THE SUBJECT

• De-centring: (1) removal from the centre (2) losing one’s centre (forces outside and within)

• 1. Psychoanalysis (inside forces) • 2. Subjectivity and language (outside)• 3. Subjectivity, power, ideology • 4. biotechnology, cloning, posthumanism

PSYCHOANALYSIS(internal decentring)

• Clinical practice, therapy + theory

• Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan

Psychoanalysis 2• „What could be closer to me than my own self?”

(St. Augustine) • Psa: Part of what goes on in my mind is not

conscious• Symptoms, dreams: alien yet mine • I can’t control it; I can’t even know it • ‘mental’ vs. ‘conscious’

the UnconsciousThe mind: mysterious, dark place

Psychoanalysis 3: the subject

• Descartes: thinking subject, no past/history

• Psa: the birth and history of the subject• We all begin as babies with basic bodily and

psychic needs (food, attention, love) • Then we ‘acquire’ selfhood

The mirror stage (Jacques Lacan)

Psychoanalysis 4

• Jacques Lacan: the mirror stage (stade du miroir, tükörstádium)

• 6-18 months: uncertain, uncoordinated body (unfinished)

• Identification with an (imaginary) image of fullness:

• Iste ego sum (‘I am that’): split

Caravaggio: Narcissus („Iste ego sum”)

Psychoanalysis 5: the subject

the subject exists only in relation to the Other: I need the other to tell me what I am

Marx: “Paul is not born with a mirror, he needs Peter to tell him who he is”

Bakhtin: “It is only when my life is told to another person that I myself become its hero.”

Decentring the subject/2:Language and subjectivity

(the Humpty-Dumpty problem)

Subject and language• Words: repeatable →never completely mine • (don’t name my special position and needs)

• Hegel: „language is able to express only what is general. Thus, I cannot give voice to what is purely my opinion. In the same way, if I say I, I mean myself as an entity that excludes everybody else, yet, what I actually say, I, is everybody. I is everybody else, too.”

HumptyDumpty(in Lewis

Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass)

“My name is Alice, but —”‘It’s a stupid name enough!’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted

impatiently. ‘What does it mean?’‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.‘Of course it must,’ Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh:

‘my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.’

“‘I don’t know what you mean by glory,’ Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t —

till I tell you. I meant there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’

‘But glory doesn’t mean a nice knock-down argument,’ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make your words mean so many different things’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master that’s all’”

Language preexists us (a nyelvi megelőzöttség)

• When we appear, language is already there• Haheperrenesheb (Egypt): „I wish I had

sentences not yet known, unique sayings, brand new words never heard before, free of repetitions, phrases that have not come from my ancestors... For everything that has been said is but repetition, and nothing is said but that which has already been said”

“The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning, in Brussels”

(Marguerite Yourcenar: Dear Departed )

Anecdote of the Guayaki tribe

3. Decentring the subject/3: power, ideology, subjectivity

Little Red Riding-Hood (Charles Perrault)

She went to the bed and drew back the curtains. There lay her grandmother with her cap pulled far over her face, and looking very strange.

'Oh! grandmother,' she said, 'what big ears you have!''All the better to hear you with, my child,' was the reply.'But, grandmother, what big eyes you have!' she said.'All the better to see you with, my dear.''But, grandmother, what large hands you have!''All the better to hug you with.''Oh! but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!''All the better to eat you with!'And scarcely had the wolf said this, than with one bound he was

out of bed and swallowed up Red Riding Hood.When the wolf had appeased his appetite, he lay down again in

the bed, fell asleep and began to snore very loud.

Identity, identities• Person(a)– identity positions, subject positions (family, race, class, nation, religion, sex) Subjectivity: a set of identitiesWe construct ourselves, take up (imitate)

positions: parenst, friends, charactersDon Quijote, Madame BovaryWoody Allen’s Zelig: imitative subject

SUBJECT, subject positions

(1) Grammatical concept (‘alany’): agent,

master, initiator, centre (2) Sub-iectare: subjected being (‘alattvaló’) subjectivity: set of identities, identity positions

What is left?

unique, autonomous subject? the return of Odyssesus to Ithaca

Identity theft (the Martin Guerre case)

IDENTITY /1

(1) collective (identity with sg - sense of ‘us’) (2) defined in relation to or against the ‘other’

(us – them, Self – Other)

‘standard’ self (unmarked) Breyten Breytenbach (white South African poet): The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist

IDENTITY /2

(3) identity through timeNarratives of identity, self-stories“The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday,

June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning, in Brussels” (Marguerite Yourcenar: Dear Departed Childhood memories (the replicants in Blade Runner)Forgetting things (Cseres Tibor: Hideg napok)

(4) implicated in power and ideology (family, school, church etc.)

National identity/1

• a modern invention (18-19th cent.)• Nation: political category (citizens) • Reinventing themselves as natural, organic• Germany and C-E Europe: ‘tribal’ nationalism

(Blut und Boden)

20th cent: anti-colonial independence movements• resistance in national terms: Western import • Aztec, Inca culture mixed with nationalist rhetoric

(eg Indian Congress Party) Nations like Syria, Iraq, Libya

National identity/2

Symbols (flag, coat of arms, totemic animals) sites of memory narratives (histories, myths: need for origins) rituals heroes (and enemies) national characteristics (Goethe: Völkergeist)

National identity /3

inventing the past e.g. Scottish Highland myth: lowly barbarians –

subsequently romanticised by Walter Scott and others (kilt, tartan, clans)

Origins, uniqueness (chosen nation, manifest destiny), mission

the “glue” of imagined communities

Identity and ‘literature’

• Literature (also as school subject): production of identities

• Patriotic poetry • Nature poetry • Love poetry

Love poetry and gender

Lover: male – object: female Elizabeth Barrett Browning (19th cent)

Yet: Sappho (first Eur. love poet) oarystis (feminine mode of coy, playful lang)

Love poetry: wooing – before consummationMale poetry of yearning: originally homoerotic

Gender and sexual identity

SEX: male/female (biological) GENDER: masculine/feminine (social)

Freud: “Anatomy is destiny”Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born but rather

becomes a woman”

story of Iphis (Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory)

“The most erogenous part of my body is my belly button. I have the most perfect belly button. When I stick a finger in my belly button I feel a nerve in the centre of my body shoot up my spine. If 100 belly buttons were lined up against a wall I would definitely pick out which one was mine”

Identity/subjectivity as spectacle, performance