The Rebirth of the Subject. Arendt and Badiou on the Human Being as Source of Change

Abstract

In the second half of the 20th century, the traditional notion of the human subject as source of thought and action came under critique by Foucault, Althusser, and others. Foucault called this critique “the death of the subject”. In this paper, I seek to show that we can find, occurring at the same time, the development of a conception of the human being as source of thought and action that withstands this “death”, namely Arendt’s theory of action and Badiou’s notion of subject. What unites these two thinkers is that they conceive the subject as plural (that is, composed of several individuals) and as constituted by a principle (that is, unified by a guiding idea).