F. Jacques (1982), Difference and Subjectivity, Dialogue and Personal Identity, translated by Andrew Rothwell, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1991, ISBN 0-300-04830-0

This prize-winning book(Broquette-Gonin Prize of the AcadÈmie FranÁaise)  investigates the question of human subjectivity. In lucid prose, Francis Jacques shows that this question far from becoming outmoded or irrelevant, remains of central significance for philosophy and the social sciences. Jacques takes the issue with two commonly held philosophical views about the self: that the subjectivity really doesn't exist at all. And that the relationship between the subject and others is not not important. Jacques develops a new relational model of the subject.

Personal Identity, he says, is largely defined in the course of communication with others. And the self, or subject, must not only identify both parties to  the conversation ("you" and "me"), but also the absent third party ("him" or "her"). To critique the views with which he disagrees and to support his own argument, Jacques draws upon linguistics, literary criticism, thories of artificial intelligence, communication theory, psychoanalysis, and theology, applying rigorous logic to works as diverse as Walden and Alice in Wonderland.  A. R.

Preface to the english edition

While preparing the present edition, I felt that it would be useful to set down a number of remarks which would make the book more accessible to English-speaking readers. These remarks will relate principally to my chosen subject area, the nature of subjectivity today and its role in the future. But it will also discuss the appropriateness of this text as I see it from my position in France, in late 1990, as well as its place within the series of works of which it forms a part.

Several of my remarks will be int he form of caveats, relating to terms that might give rise to involuntary confusions and misreadings, the sort that an author prefers to clear up on the thresold of the work itself. As the book progresses, the reader will find his or her attention drawn to a number of questions that are here left unresolved, but which I have tried to answer in later publications. My main wish is to invite the reader to most cordially to examine what I am saying in a critical light, to watch out for the crucial conceptual distinctions as they emerge along the way, and to be aware at all times of the orders of reasons upon which, as always in the radical but informal discussion that we call philosophy, the sense of my arguments depends.

Today, in philosophy worldwide, we see subjectivity making a difficult return to the agenda. Difference and Subjectivity seeks to put forward a constructive solution to one of the major aporias that have emerged from the extreme and equally unacceptable ways of regarding the subject.  either the ego is held to be constitutive, even omnipotent, as in the phenomenology of Husserl and the various egological models constructed by his successors; or else it is seen as an empty form, a nonentity, as in the Sartrian vision of the self as an agency  of utter nothingness, or as in more recent poststructuralist  deconstructions of the subject.  Another way of expressing this dilemma is  is to say that we are obliged to choose between a humanistic valorization of human subjectivity and antihumanists efforts to undermine subjectivity by presenting it as simply a structural side effect of the play of signs.

My contention is that the subject does have a valid role after all, but only on condition that we reconceive it on a new basis. Difference and Subjectivity undertakes just such a radical process of reconception. I am not sure whether its title is well calculated to catch the attention of English-speaking philosophers, but in French at least it brings together in an intriguing way one term, "subjectivity", universally scorned and rejected, with another, "difference" which until recently was hailed as a cure-all, a fundamental value without which philosophical thought of any kind was impossible. However, the title was not meant simply as a gesture in the direction of a now-declining fashion. It accurately expresses my project in this book, which is to found a conception of subjectivity on relations between persons. The conventional field of subjectivity  is so full of traps that I found myself obliged to shift my ground entirely and begin from a different angle. this I did by treating the relation as a primordial reality, a reality which constitutes one of the very conditions of possibility  of meaning and which is prior even to I and you.

The book sets out from a premise that I demonstrated in an earlier work, that our self is a function of the communicative interaction which occurs in dialogue. This interaction takes place on the level of "utterance", a term that expresses the fact that what the speaking subject is saying depends on the interlocutonary context of communication. In Difference and Subjectivity this interaction is itself taken back to the originary  relation from which it is derived, a relation that links the "co-utterers" to each other in a dynamic way. Note that dialogue does not demand any real consensus, although some sort of simulated consensus, at least, is required even if one is to express one's disagreement without giving rise to misunderstandings.

My work since 1979, whether it be best referred to as a philosophy of dialogue, of relations, or of communication, has developed along that dual axes of continuity with the Kantian critical  tradition and openedd toward English-language analytical thought, refusing to sacrifice either approach to the other. My aim, in an age of multiple discourses and texts difficult to reconcile with each other, an age when it is no longer possible to rely on any preexisting universality or rational homology, has been to arrive at a new, relations-based concept of the transcendental. Mine is therefore a philosophy for the scientific age, an age in which problems of innovation in meaning and the textualisation of thought are, or will be in the near future, at the forefront of our concerns. But at the same time I am not averse to writing in a style, and involving the reader in a manner, typical of the French philosophical tradition.

In order for my position to be properly understood, let me set it briefly in the context of the other work I was publishing around the same time.

Dialogiques I (1979) sought to develop a theory of "being as speaking" (l'Ítre-dit) according to which the object of discourse, on a metatheoretical level at least, only becomes fully established through deliberate exchange with others. Around this central thesis I constructed a model of referential dialogue, that is dialogue in which the sharing of information allows the existence and identity of the referent to be determined (for example, the discussion between Oedipus and Jocasta over who caused the plague at Thebes). By linking dialogue in this way to the more familiar notion of reference, I was able to analyse the process of exchange between interlocutors by which new information is constituted. 

I introduced a non-monological conception of dialogue-something which, curiously enough, had not been done before in philosophy-derived from the basics concepts of dialogism and interlocution. One error, which goes back at least to Plato, constitutes an epistemological barrier to the understanding of dialogue that should not be underestimated. Far from expressing the essentially dialogical nature of thought, Plato in fact constructed the first monological model of speculative dialogue. It seems somewhat paradoxical that the philosophical significance of dialogue should have been undervalued for so long because non-dialogical conditions were being imposed on it.   

In defining dialogism as "the distribution of the message between two uttering agencies in present relation with each other", my aim was to contribute to the foundation of a pragmatics-based theory of language. I was able to introduce a number of key concepts, including co-reference, or the identification of the real by reference to the possible worlds pertaining to a shared propositional attitude, such as a belief or a piece of knowledge ; and back-reference, or the process by which interlocutors refer to themselves and offer themselves each to the other's understanding as the dialogue develops, using the same mode of assent by which they become conscious of themselves.

Because "satisfactory speach" functions in this way, the cooperative element can serve as a basis for divergence of view without necessarily overcoming the competitive element entirely. In putting together epistemic logic and game theory and adapting them to form a model of discursive strategy, ma intention was not only to articulate modalities  of statement and modalities of utterance, but also to accomodate and reconcile within a single overall conception of meaning a theory of truth in the tradition of Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson, and a theory of usage in the tradition of P. F. Strawson and H. P. Grice.

(...), Introduction, p. xi-xiv ....                                page  in construction ..to be continued..(march 2004)

Francis Jacques, 1990

Difference and Subjectivity, table of contents and  french presentation

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