FAILURE AND SELF-INVENTION
The subject is anonymous because it has to 'live' without subjectivity. It can only be with itself whilst losing itself in the ocean of its transcendental namelessness. It is the subject of this immersion and it is the subject of its emergence, subject of self-invention without ground.The subject comports itself toward itself while it constitutes a contact zone with the exterior (Blanchot) by entering it. "For a human being to appear or come forth it is necessary that the forces in the human being come into contact with the quite peculiar forces of the exterior." What is crucial is the contact. One could speak of a touching of the untouchable which reaches its climax as soon as the subject without subjectivity enters the zone of indistinguishability — panic or original haste which causes the subject to strip off all certainties and precautions at the threshold to the exterior in a candid and reckless gesture of madness, in order to be nothing other than this feverish vector: the subject of subjectivization.
For subjectivization to be possible, the subject has to transgress the principle of identity, the law of 'I think', the power of reason. The maritime discourse of matter flooding the ego and the 'I think', however, does not bring about a subjectless subject, an Hegelian substance. Even though it sometimes appears that way, the thinking of the exterior is not a thinking beyond the subject. The attempt at such a thinking would be in vain and would drown in the abyss of mere silence. A thinking without a subject would no longer be thinking. It would be nothing other than the unattested wave motion of nothingness.
Personality, individuality, character are words whose meaning is too often exhausted in covering up a sub-subjective current (of the anonymity of an intoxication undermining identity or subjectivity, the stuttering and murmuring beneath language and its concepts). Subjectivization is the moment of making active contact (again) with the force and violence of this exterior, as Maurice Blanchot terms it, which dwells at the heart of the occidental logos. For the subject, far from being a principle of real self-evidence, swims in the midst of waters which hinder the proper formation of an island by flooding in and redefining its borders over and over again. Anonymity could designate the subject of this flooding, a subject without secure borders, without destination, without transcendental reality. "If there is a subject," says Deleuze in his portrait of Foucault, "then it is a subject without identity." The subject whose emergence we observe in Foucault's last books is a subject without any constitutive relationship with transcendental rules or laws which would tell it what it is or should be. It is a subject of a solitude accompanying every one of its actions. It can rely on nothing but this solitude which infinitely singularizes its being. The subject of contact with anonymity or the exterior is this absolute singularity. It is a singularity instead of being a subject in the sense of Kantian thinking. It does not profit from the universal auspices of a transcendental subjectivity.
The subject is always concerned with comporting itself in an active and simultaneously risky, assailable way toward the exterior without being swallowed or pulverized by it. For the exterior is, like the chaos of Deleuze and Guattari, a black hole. It is unsaturated matter which endangers all the subject's activities, its care for itself, its will to sovereignty, its will to self-assertion and self-testimony. The subject has to stand up to this chaos without denying it. It attempts to allow its truth to come into play, to fit it with a language, a general expression. It wants to put moments of warlike chaos into words without neutralizing its powers through the reductive violence of representation and universalization. It has to risk coming into the closest proximity with that which threatens it most of all.