This chapter attempts to confront the issue of a subjectless poststructuralism.
Two of the main currents of this “movement” as they concern the subject correspond readily to the two best-known names, Derrida and Foucault.
Derrida, whom I make no attempt to treat extensively here, reduces the phenomenological or Enlightenment subject as the origin of speech/writing, substituting, in a parody of metaphysics, his own origin, difference--- an origin which erases itself yet retains the trace of the trace of the replaced subject and other origins.
Foucault in his middle career reproduces the contingent, shifting discourses and practices which have formed modern subjectivity--- practices whose origin cannot be ascribed to a master subject.
It is this line of desubjectification that I attempt to investigate here.