In following the moderns in the making of scientific knowledge, STS scholars have shown an interesting discrepancy between what scientists do in practice and what they say they do in theory. Indeed, scientific objectivity has been entirely reconfigured and reinterpreted in very different ways. In continuity with this endeavor, and because the definition of the object goes hand in hand with the definition of the subject, one of my obsessions has been to re-interrogate the definition of the knowing subject. If another definition of scientific objectivity emerges, and if science is socially or collectively and materially made—depending on our conception of the social—what does this do to our classical notion of the knowing subject? What does it do to the most powerful and operative myth of the modern: “the disincorporated brain”? And by extension, what does it do to our notions of the person, the individual genius, the rational actor, the psyche, and or subjectivity, to which this myth is anchored?

Hélène Mialet is a Scholar-in-Residence with The Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley 2013-2014. More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Respondent: Églantine Colon, Professor of French, UC Berkeley

Politics Beyond the Human: How to Think the Knowing Subject Anew?... | Helene Mialet | 4/2/2014

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) was established in 2013 by UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Sciences: Division of Arts and Humanities with a mission to support the programming and development of several dynamic interdisciplinary research units in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently CICI serves The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley, three programs led by a highly diverse community of 200 faculty, advisors, scholars and graduate students from nearly 30 campus departments and schools.