Philosophy and Religion, Part 5a
“The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained”, cover graphic
The
Subject Lives
In the previous post we said that in the late 20th Century,
irrational Post-Modernism became the house philosophy of Imperialism. Some
declared the “Death of the Subject”, thereby denying the possibility of human
free will, or agency.
James
Heartfield’s 2002 book called “The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained” confronted
the Post-Modernists. Among other things, this book helped inspire the Johannesburg
Communist University that started in 2003. Heartfield kindly allowed the CU to
use extracts from the book. Some of these are contained in today’s main linked
document, below. The illustration above is from the cover of the book.
What Heartfield manages to do very excellently is to make clear the
nature of “Post-Modernism” by contrasting it polemically with the basic
question of philosophy, which is the relationship between the human Subject
(individual and collective) and the external, objective, material universe.
Post-modernism had flourished in the haze and half-light that was the
consequence of “Western” bourgeois anti-communism, hardly challenged, and veiled
in mystification and obfuscation.
Whereas outright fascism had promoted the “triumph of the will”, or in
other words pure subjectivism, post-modernism became a prophecy of impotence
and fatalism, also sometimes called determinism.
Heartfield showed that these trends (i.e. both pure objectivism and pure
subjectivism), though each appeared to be opposite to the other, yet both
amounted to the same thing, namely anti-humanism, which in our time is
anti-communism.
The human being exists, and can only exist, in the meeting place of
Subject and Object. This is the master dialectic. This is the site of
production.
The first three pages of this document are a very brilliant explanation
of the basis of society as it is in fact presently constructed around the
freely willing human Subject. The following fifteen pages comprise a somewhat
detailed account of the growth and the ramifications of post-modernism in the
second half of the 20th Century.
In the thirteen years that have passed since the publication of
Heartfield’s book, it appears that the former ascendancy of post-modernism in
the academy and in the intellectual community as a whole is now a thing of the
past, and that the free-willing human Subjected has re-asserted itself. This
coincides with the resurgence of Marxist thought and criticism in the world, of
which Heartfield’s book is an example.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Death of the Subject
Explained Selection, 2002, Heartfield, Part 1 and Part 2.
