From Subjectivity to Privacy and Back Again

THE “public”/”private” dichotomy is one of those “conceptual personae” described by Deleuze and Guattari with reference to Descartes, thus: Is there something else, in Descartes’s case, other than the created cogito and the presupposed image of thought? Actually there is something else, something mysterious, that appears from time to time or that shows through and seems to have a hazy existence halfway between concept and preconceptual plane, passing from one to the other. In the present case it is the Idiot [the particular private person in the Greek city-state]: who says “I” and sets up the cogito who also has the subjective presuppositions or lays out the plane. The Idiot is the private thinker, in contrast to the public teacher (the schoolman): the teacher refers constantly to taught concepts (man—rational animal), whereas the private thinker forms a concept with innate forces that everyone possesses on their own account by right (“I think”). Here is a very strange type of persona who wants to think, and who thinks for himself, by the “natural light.” The Idiot is a conceptual persona. . . . The role of conceptual personae is to show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations.1 I shall operate a so-called détournement2 on this notion of conceptual personae that Deleuze and Guattari would apply only to SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring 2002) From Subjectivity to Privacy and Back Again BY G. M. TAMÁS philosophical discourse; I shall treat ideas such as “ego,” the “I,” “individual,” and “private person” (a.k.a. “the Idiot”) as conceptual personae, conceptual characters or protagonists in a story (also in the sense of “elle a eu des histoires”). Law always had a problem linking the private individual characterized by finitude (mortality) to the permanence of society (individuals die but society is supposed to be immortal) and, at the same time, tying social arrangements to nature. Law can regulate people’s behavior and entitlements during their lifetime, but it is by no means obvious how can it rule over the transition between generations without major upheavals. Some traditional communities chose the method of periodic redistribution of land to avoid dangerous accumulations of wealth and power in specific families or other subgroups. This proved an exceedingly cumbersome custom since it was to be expected that such groups, as they accumulated social and economic advantage, might resist periodic redistribution with no regard to thrift, merit, or virtue. The successful method appeared to be inheritance law, which has shown how accumulated advantages can be passed on within certain carefully crafted limits from one generation to another, thereby circumventing political contestation and moral protest by the potentially disadvantaged at the sensitive moment when the possessor dies and his offspring is not yet in possession. This method insured legal and social immortality of possession associated to blood or “bloodline.” Law established the idea of legitimate issue in various ways (primogeniture is but one of these well-honed and time-honored devices), and so it managed to sidestep mortal finitude and still execute the relation between the abstraction of possession, control and rule, and live bodies, the ultimate guarantee of specification (individuation in Schopenhauer’s sense). If an impersonal and, therefore, it was to be hoped, indisputable mechanism could show who could or must inherit title and wealth and who could and must not, the blessing comprised within the conquests of one person could then be passed on to someone who did not person202 SOCIAL RESEARCH ally contribute to the creation of that blessing, so that someone else could not counterclaim some kind of moral right to those advantages (e.g., by invoking his or her share in amassing wealth or that he or she deserved a title through a heroic deed). The legal person or legal subject is a iunctim positioning of a biopolitical hypothesis and the social facts of ownership and privilege (“privilege” here meaning simply an entitlement specified for people or groups that is not necessarily unfair). “The Idiot”— the private person cut off from his or her civic aspect or dimension —partakes of the immortality of society by law adjudicating his or her continuity or even identity with his

Absolute (philosophy) · Aesthetics · Art · Cogito ergo sum · Epistemology · Humanities · Humanity · Idiot · Legislator · Literature · Persona · Political science · Presupposition · Sociology · Subjectivity · Theology · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

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