We feel that questions about conditions of possibilities express the experience of impoverishment. Regarding action and agency, they ask what is left to do in the first place. It is the voice of the passive subject, which does not even utter speech-acts and gathers the meager items of its inventory — a tiny area in one’s brain that is not be subsumed under determinist forces. But the problem may lie elsewhere.
The subject has long been decentered. Theoretically, it’s been a while since this Cartesian kernel has had much use. But we might just now be precisely in its death throes. Splayed out across economic, biological, political, chemical, and social matrices, the network that is the subject has begun to feel and articulate its precise degree of decenteredness. An image of thought, long lying in preparation, beginning to be thought as we become dispersed within it. And it’s here precisely in its dispersion that something like a center emerges again, or at least a fragment enough to draw a line from.
Thought, as a vector, might not coincide with the shrinking cycles of agency. It might cut through the spheres that assign places and numbers. It might make us jump from our chairs in which we are determined to remain seated. But thought is not determined to do so. It loses its power when it starts asking questions, instead of doing what it does best — thinking through. And it is here that it uncovers its inherent wealth. So let us leap.