The Deconstruction Of Subject

Since ancient Greece, philosophers have begun to focus on people themselves,whether it’s a wide cross-section of the Protagoras, man is the measure of all things,or Socrates’“know yourself” and so on, all of these ideas consider people as a subject.Untill Descartes put up the concept that “I think therefore I am”, the people-centeredage of reason came into being. After that, subject has become a hot issue in themodern philosophy. After rational subjectivity of the people was uphold for a longtime, the concept of central position of people gradually increased to a crazy place.Until after the second world war, cruelty and killing began to let people reflect on thedisadvantages of rational subject, and some of the most obvious representative werethe late Heidegger’s thought, the Frankfurt school, structuralism and postmodernism,and so on. They have negated the subject from different perspectives, which hasstarted a storm of the criticism and deconstruction of subject in the world. Amongthem, French philosopher Foucault ascent the negation of the subject to anunprecedented height, and his thought of the subject carried out a complete digestionof the subject.As one of the representative figure of the postmodern philosopher of the20thcentury, Foucault’s ideas shifted from the philosophical research to the edges,madness, sex, crime, etc, by using his own unique knowledge archaeology andpedigree study method to solve the problem of irrational in detail. His theory of“knowledge” revealed that the history of thoughts is the history of “knowledge”transformation; his study of the birth of prison revealed the history of the discipliningof society; his thought of knowledge-power system made people who was shaped byits production and who didn’t know about it began to be aware of the constructivepower, and also let people rethink their survival plight. He put forward an astonishing view of “the death of man”---modern man is spatial, and it is a product of“civilization”. He ruthlessly revealed the consistent and universal truth and he thoughtthat it was the truth are secretly shaping people, or control the means. Foucault’ssubject theory aroused the people who were slumbering in a rational and scientifictruth to wake up. And let the subjectification of the people in the modern disciplinesystem reconsider their own survival plight bounded by knowledge-power.Foucault summed up for his research work:“my research topic is not power, butthe subject.” Based on the deconstruction of subject in Foucault’s thought, this papermainly hope to solve the problem from two aspects, one is how Foucault’s subjectwas dispelled? The second one is what solutions are put forward for thereconstruction of the subject, and whether the scheme is practical? On the first part,this paper will generalize the emergence and development of the subject and states thebirth of subject philosophy background and thoughts, and besides the birthbackground of the subject philosophy and thought. Then this paper starts from theperspective of characteristics of subject philosophy to reveal the theoretical dilemmabrought by the subject philosophy and survival predicament, and finally makes a briefsummary the subject origin of Foucault. On the second part, this paper will go on totalk about the answer the first question that how Foucault’s subject was dispelled. Itwill talk about this question from three aspects in this paper, the first one it will givesome explanation of the Foucault’s theoretical basis, the second is to analyze thesubject from Foucault’s knowledge-power system, the third is to analyze theproduction process of people’s subjectification and “the death of man” fromFoucault’s theory. The third part which is also the main part of this paper, tries to givethe answer of the second question. That is, the solution of Foucault’s program ofreconstructing the subject and limitation problem. What’s more, this paper alsoanalyzes the idea of Foucault’s “local struggle” and the “survival aesthetics” scheme,and his limitations in detail.