CFP: "The Subject in Question." PLI: THE WARWICK JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 20 (2008).

The deadline for submissions to volume 20: 'The Subject in Question', has been extended to the 30th of September. The call for papers is reposted in full below. Pli invites submissions for the next volume (Volume 20), which will be concerned with the philosophy of the subject, whether classical, critical, or transformative. "There never 'remains' anything of the subject, since he is to be created on each occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize knowledge and bend power." Gilles Deleuze, Foucault "A subject is not a result - any more than it is an origin." Alain Badiou, Being and Event "Any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the 'masculine'." Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman The notion of the subject is a staple of the history of philosophy. Whether deployed in discussions of knowledge, agency, or identity, it has possessed a distinguished place in determining philosophy's destiny. However, from Nietzsche, through structuralism, post-structuralism and beyond, this primacy of the subject, and even its very consistency, has been brought into question. The subject's access to truth has been questioned, its unitary agency has been fractured, and the very possibility of its origin has been cast into doubt. This is not to detail the differences (sexual, ethnic, and otherwise) that the subject, as universal and self-identical form, has been said to suppress. Even within the question of sexual difference there is controversy: some strive to de-problematise the divide between gender as nurture and sex as nature, others essentialise the biological body to unravel discrepancies in the ontological. In light of these questions, it is legitimate to ask: can the subject be renewed? Can it be reinvented, as witness to non-propositional truth, decentred locus of conflicting desires, or as embodied, visceral and inclusive of differences? Or, must we abandon the notion of the subject under the weight of these critiques? Or even, are both approaches missing the real power and insight of the classical accounts of the subject? In this issue we ask for answers to these questions. We particularly welcome papers on Butler, Irigaray, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Zizek, Badiou, Deleuze, the history of the subject from Descartes to Hegel, and the subject in the phenomenological tradition. Examples of topics that could be covered by papers are:- - Foucault, Butler and the Constitution of Subjectivity - The Embodied Subject - The Problems of the Subject-Object Distinction - Sexual Difference and Ontico-Ontological Distinction - The Subject, Agency and Desire - Badiou's Subject of Truth - Meillassoux's Critique of Correlationism - Psychoanalysis and the Cartesian Subject We also invite submissions covering other topics of interest for our Varia section, along with submissions for our Reviews section. Submissions, no longer than 8,000 words, should be sent in the form of a single hard copy, plus a copy on disk as a Word or RTF file. Alternatively, we accept submissions by email to: plijournal@googlemail.com. We only accept articles and will not review abstracts, nor should abstracts be included with full drafts. The deadline for submissions is 30th September 2008. Please refer to the "Notes for Contributors" on this website. Include an e-mail address if possible for future correspondence. Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy University of Warwick Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. Visit the journal homepage at http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/.