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My purpose in this paper is to offer a critical realist account of decentred subjectivity. Decentred subjectivity is a specific kind of volatile subjectity which has been valorised by various postmodern writers since the late 1960s on the grounds that decentredness represents an escape from the oppressive kind of fixity attempted by the totalising discourses of the European Enlightenment.2 Where the latter have been successfully instituted, subjects in a real state of uncentredness have apparently misperceived themselves as centred and this misperception has facilitated their manipulation or oppression. Therefore to aid in the decentring of the apparently centred subject is to engage in emancipatory politics. From this point of view, modernity is a state of illusory enlightenment in which subjects conceive of themselves as centred, originary, constitutive; postmodernity is a state of true enlightenment in which subjects become aware of this illusion and refuse to accept the false comforts of the Enlightenment metanarrative. Here decentredness as a state of radical groundlessness is held to be a constitutive or innate characteristic of human life. In what follows, I want to challenge this naturalising view by offering a critical realist analysis informed by a distinction between real human causal powers and the cultural conditions needed for their actualisation (Bhaskar).3 This analysis, which is intended to reveal both the historicocultural specificity and impoverishing effects of decentredness, is made possible through the articulation of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxian Marxism.
Arguments about decentredness and subjectivity have impinged on Marxism through the work of Althusser, in which we find an awareness of the theoretical and political importance of subjectivity and an attempt to theorise this through the articulation of psychoanalysis to Marxism (Althusser, Essays). Unfortunately, the development of this element of Althusser's work was underta