Every being who says "I" to himself asserts himself towards the Other as absolutely different. Jürgen Habermas echoes this dialogical and "contradictory" aspect of subjectivity within his general theory of communicative competence: The system of personal pronouns enables every participant to assume incompatible roles simultaneously, namely that of the I and that of the You. The subject emerges as invariably dialogical: producer and produced, referrer and referred, subject and object, potential "I" and potential "you," contingent upon a variety of factors. There is, of course, an implicit dialectic to this concept, and not only in the most obvious way just as the "I" cannot be conceived outside of a dialogical situation-a context that necessarily includes a potential other, a "you"-so does it contain a tension between the grammatical subject of a sentence and the discoursing subject that produces it: both uttered and utterer. In his Problems in General Linguistics, for example, Emile Benveniste posits subjectivity, not as pre-existent to discourse nor as its origin, but rather as a function of it: "I is the individual who utters the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I" (218). As we all know, modern linguistics points out the dialectical construction of subjectivity as something inherent to language. to view any of these as autonomous and originary is to efface the ways in which the construct of the individual was emerging from competition between discourses and was being constituted within writing itself.
early modern culture produced subjects through a wide range of discourses and practices. the subject is constituted by multiple and often contradictory subject positions and thus is always only a provisionally fixed entity located at various sites within the general relations of production, systems of signification, and relations of power. This insightful study of the discursive construction of subjectivity provides the following notion that will serve as a fundamental assumption throughout this essay. One fine example of this concern is George Mariscal's Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture (1991).
THE MANY COMPLEX PROBLEMS surrounding the related concepts of identity and subjectivity continue to be the focus of much critical thought and have been very close to the center of debate in Spanish Golden-Age studies for more than thirty years.
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