Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of ...

The cultural and philosophical baggage of the Renaissance inspired the doctrine of Humanism, which contributed to the issue of subjectivity through its categorical opposition to the Christian belief that human beings were no more than “miserable sinners” (Porter 1). This was substituted by the endorsement to the notion of man as “the apex of creation, the master of nature, the wonder of the world” (Porter 3). This conclusively andocentric principle prompts the subject to move from the bottom of the feudal pyramid to its very top or, rather, to dispose of pyramids altogether in order to build a world where the subject is made to occupy a central position, even if this means having to share the place with a somewhat blurred idea of god.

René Descartes may have started from the premise of the centrality of the individual when he proposed the conscious and rational self as the ultimate source of understanding, with his aforementioned cogito . In the popularised Cartesian economics, ‘man’ becomes unique in the universe, for he is equipped with a conscious mind which ultimately allows him to know every aspect of himself. No trace of the instinctive nature of human beings is to be found within this proposition. With Descartes, ‘man’ becomes, if anything, a rational creature, the origin of all meaning and coherence (Descartes 53–54).

Following Descartes, John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), describes the mind as a home that becomes gradually furnished with information, an interesting development in so far as, all of a sudden, the human being is able to build his rationality and therefore himself, so that he becomes not only “the producer but also the product of social development and the civilizing process” (Porter 4). Descartes’ impact is found not only in Lockeian philosophy; it became the basis of the Humanist discourse, which presumes subjectivity to be based on the predicament that somewhere within the subject exists a coherent and unified core, an ‘essence’ which is the origin of Truth, the source of rationality and the much-praised ‘common sense,’ still used to dismiss behaviours or attitudes which society at large may label as eccentric. Reason, through common sense, provides human beings with the key to discern right from wrong in a paradoxically instinctive manner. The success of such a theory lies primarily in the illusive access to the disreputable idea of Truth that it grants the individual.