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Le pour soi est ce qu'il n'est pas et n'est pas ce qu'il est.
[The self is what it is not and it is not what it is.]
Nous n' “avons” plus de sens parce que nous sommes nous-mêmes le sens, entièrement, sans réserve, infiniment, sans autre sens que “nous.”
[We do not “have” meaning anymore, because we ourselves are meaning—entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no meaning other than “us.”]
“The Subject” appears on the stage of philosophy together with sovereignty: “The Subject” as a subject to, subject of some kind of social power, the subject as a ward and a citizen. What makes the subject a subject in the sense that we mean it today, in modernity, is that at some point, this political subject gains what we may call a psychology. It becomes a self-aware, self-experiencing being rather than the purely political subject of sovereign power. It becomes an existent that makes sense of itself, has experience of itself, and is cognizant of its place in the world and vis-a-vis the multiplicity of others that surround him. It becomes meaningful as a self, meaningful to itself. And as it grows a psychology, it becomes socially and philosophically identified as self-identifying. One might say that this is the trajectory of the protagonist of civilization itself, or at least since civilization began coming up with stories about its inception, since our fateful encounter with the snake in the Garden of Eden and our consequent transgression towards knowledge