'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 (c) Heritage Images / Fine Art Images / akg-images Cover design: [EUP logo] [...] ISBN 978-1-4744-5935-8 Barcode
'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 (c) Heritage Images / Fine Art Images / akg-images Cover design: [EUP logo] [...] ISBN 978-1-4744-5935-8 Barcode
Über den Autor
Gavin Raeis Associate Professor in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. He is the current Co-Editor of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. His research interests lie in nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy, where he works at the intersection of socio-political philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, ontology, and ethics. Besides over sixty published articles and book chapters, he is the author of seven monographs, the most recent of which are Questioning Sexuality: From Psychoanalysis to Gender Theory and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and Poststructuralist Agency: The Subject in Twentieth-Century Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and the co-editor of six volumes, the most recent of which are Philosophy across Borders (Routledge, 2025--with Emma Ingala), Subjective Agency and Poststructuralism (Routledge, 2025--with Cillian Ó Fathaigh), and Transformation in Contemporary French Theory (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming--with Emma Ingala and Cillian Ó Fathaigh).
