From the subject to agency (by way of the political)

Abstract

This paper wants to look into the back room of social theorisation of political action. We take as a starting point the impossibility of basing political action on modern Rationalism and Humanism's 'universal subject'. Nevertheless this paper tries to make compatible some critiques of Rationalism and Humanism, on the one hand, with, on the other hand, a version of some of the emancipatory promises of modernity. In order to think about politics, we will present two ways of broaching the tensions caused by the privileging of the subject in modernity. One will be focused on its radical politization, introducing the subject as a site for, and consequence of, political action itself. The other takes the notion of agency as the privileging of connections and movements over (id)entities to explain political action.