Poststructuralist Agency

'Poststructuralist Agency discusses how poststructuralist subject is not merely a void, offering no subjectivity, no agency and thus no politics but rather offers all of this in a decentered and contingent form. Many books skirt around poststructuralism's positive formulations but Gavin Rae's book does the hard work of showing just how this actually happens.'
James R. Martel, San Francisco State University
Does the poststructuralist decentring of the foundational subject permit a coherent account of agency?

Gavin Rae offers us a new evaluation of poststructuralist thought. This involves a re-conception of the embodied subject as a continual process within and defined by ever-changing configurations of the social, the symbolic and the psychic.
He shows that the question of the subject is central for poststructuralist thinkers, that they are aware of the problematic status of agency that arises from their decentring of the subject and that they offer heterogeneous solutions to resolve it.

First, showing how this plays out in the thinking of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, Rae subsequently demonstrates that it is with those poststructuralists associated with and influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis that this issue most clearly comes to the fore. He goes on to reveal that the conceptual schema of Cornelius Castoriadis best explains how the founded subject is capable of agency.

Gavin Rae is Senior Visiting Research Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
Cover image: Torso (Figure with Pink Face)', Kazimir Malevich 1928-1932 © Heritage Images / Fine Art Images / akg-images

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