This Devious Subject - about the future of this earthly life, my constructive failure to locate myself, and my being as a relationality of subjectivity, discourse and materiality

Abstract

Through articulating what I call my weave of understanding, in this thesis I aspire to come to a new understanding of the relation between materiality, discourse and ubjectivity as with my being composing a relationality that figures me a movement in and of the world. Inspired by Arendt’s concept of weaving in combination with Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony and what I call sympathetic reading as my method I interpret and entangle notions from Foucault, Butler, Spivak, Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, hooks, Bhabha and Barad into what I call my weave of understanding. Through my weaving and entangling of notions and concepts in these theories, I find them to in a polyphonic sense form a new resonance that enables me to a new understanding of these concepts as an entangled whole that in turn enables me to come to an understanding of ontological premises of my being in the world. In my theoretical weaving where I read notions from these theorists through each other, I see what happens in the meeting of discourse, subjectivity and materiality as I find these concepts in notions from the theorists. I come to an understanding of them as with my being in the world function as a relationality, or rather that my being in the world composes this relationality. The thesis begins and ends with the situation of the individual in the philosophical earthly collective that the climate crisis symbolically poses us as, and a suggestion of how this pacifies my action into a discrepancy with my knowledge of the effects of my acts and thus my responsibility in this situation. With the conviction that the individual needs to change its attitude and act in regard to the climate crisis, for me this poses questions of how my action come to be, what are the premises of my agency and desire. The body of the text that articulate my weave of understanding and explains my being as composing a relationality (of materiality, discourse and subjectivity), then enable an understanding of how change in the world happen through my being, and how the origin of my subjectivity and thus performative act, can be found also in this relationality that I compose. Apart from the three concepts that is its focus, my weaving and understanding of my being as this relationality evolves also into questions of agency, accountability, ethics, (the possibility of) freedom, reflexivity, togetherness, the subject, desire and creativity.