The notion of subject in Foucault and Viveiros de Castro: from enunciation to perspective

Abstract

This research has as its theme the notion of "subject". I will privilege two thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. That is because, since Nietzsche, the critique that denounces the "grammatical habit" implied in the presupposition of an "I" for the existence of thought ("there is thought"/ "I think") has the effect of inverting the constituent subject into constituted "subject". It is in this line that the discussion develops in Foucault's work, also linked to the question of language and body. The subject is dislocated to the plane of an effect of discursive relations, from what is designated in an open relationship of (2) "himself" to "himself" (the government of self). It is in this same discursive plane that Viveiros de Castro presents the notion of "pronominal-subject" that Amerindian perspectivism puts into play. In this concept, the "subject" is not the principle of enunciation, but, unlike Foucault, a pole designated ("agencied") from the point of view. Thus, the notion of the pronominal subject presented by the anthropological perspective seems to allow a radicalization of the subject matter through the inversion of the enunciative position of the subject.