Subject Lessons
A Window into the work of Dr. Russell Sbriglia
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The following is an interview with Dr. Russell Sbriglia, an associate professor and Director of Undergraduate Literature Studies at Seton Hall University. His teaching focuses on American literature of the long 19th century (1776-1914), as well as literary and critical theory. He is also the editor of books Everything You Wanted to Know About Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek (2017) and Subject Lessons (2020) (which he discuss below).
Subject Lessons responds to the on-going “objectal turn” in contemporary humanities and social sciences, the essays in Subject Lessons present a sustained case for the continued importance — indeed, the indispensability — of the category of the subject for the future of materialist thought. Edited by Russel Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek, Subject Lessons contains contributions from Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan, and many others.
Throughout this video we discuss:
Dr. Sbriglia’s intellectual history:
studying American literature with a focus on Antebellum conservatism representing a form of communitarianism that is the polar opposite of contemporary conservative neoliberal individualism;
graduate studies encountering Žižek’s philosophy and being stopped dead in his tracks, gravitating towards his unique interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy
Starting his career as a professor focused on a deep dive into Žižek’s work and how it could be used in literature analysis
More recent work focused on the broader intellectual turn in the humanities to object-oriented metaphysics and away from the subject (e.g. New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Speculative Realism); this evacuation of the subject/leaving the subject behind troubled him due to his obsession with the role of subjectivity in literature (with specific reference to the way the subject appears in the work of Herman Melville)
Materialism and the Humanities
Throughout the 1980s there was a turn in the US and UK towards a new form of materialism, in US it was called “New Historicism” and in UK it was called “Cultural Materialism”, influenced by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser
These schools focused on language and discourse, e.g. Foucault suggested subjects were created/by-products of discourse/socio-historical epistemes; Althusser was informed by a more Marxist orientation, that the subject is an effect of a specific type of discourse called the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), i.e. you become a subject in being disciplined by a state apparatus
In reaction to these forms of materialism, more recent scholarship in the humanities has turned to what is most generally called “New Materialism”, which makes materialism more directly about matter, with a focus on ecological consciousness, systems and environments
All forms of materialism in these turns involve the same move in relation to subjectivity as such, i.e. dissolve the subject as rational, free, autonomous, self-directing; the subject is dissolved either through historical discourse, the Ideological State Apparatus, or (in New Materialism) the idea of “Vibrant Matter”, which suggests that matter is pushing back/exerting agency on us (it is not just “dead/inert”)
Deconstruction of the “Autonomous Bourgeois Monad/Ego/Individual”
All recent forms of materialism deconstruct the “Autonomous Bourgeois Monad/Ego/Individual” (the most commonly accepted notion of the subject in late capitalism)
The New Historicist/Cultural Materialist move did expand the philosophical/literary canon of thought in the emphasis on the subject as a by-product of ideology, but it leaves open the question of resistance (to ideology), since there is no subject to work with in this resistance
The New Materialist move opens paradoxes of stepping outside of subjectivity to attend to nature/matter, opening an ecological activist form of subjectivity (concerns with climate change, etc.) while simultaneously emphasising an ontology that critiques/questions human exceptionalism which has caused ecological catastrophe or the emergence of the Anthropocene
The Importance of the Split Subject/Subject of the Unconscious
Both forms of materialism have no interest in the idea of the subject as derived from psychoanalysis (split subjectivity, subject of the unconscious), and also German Idealism (Kant’s moral law as traumatic/foreign, Hegel’s cunning of reason)
In the Hegelo-Lacanian orientation subjectivity is not something we can deconstruct (via ideology or a return to matter), but a curse and burden (negativity) that we must tarry with
Notions of negativity and subjective destitution are hard to incorporate in institutional contexts (academia), emphasising that “freedom hurts”, and happiness is a “category of slaves” difficult to teach to young students (upsetting)
Subjectivity is the kernel of the inhuman within the human being itself, subjectivity is the excess in the gaze and voice, the “object which is the subject” “looking back at you” (“disorienting”; confronts you with the gap between who you are viewing it, and that extimate kernel staring back at you)
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Rich conversation with excellent questions! Curious what a deep dive on Moby Dick could yield since it lends itself so well to subjectivity.