Passion for the Human Subject

Each one of us has to be born "inter urinas et faeces", as St. Augustine so strikingly put it. More recently, Freud''s 1915 discovery of ''instincts'' - that is, ''drives'' - and their ''viscitudes'' leads us further to envision a human subjectivity that would have nothing mataphysical about it. The baby''s "feeling of himself" first arises in the midst of the earliest interactions with his parent...