Here I will very briefly treat Alain de Libera’s Le sujet de la passion (2021), which consists of his 2016 lectures at the College de France. The modern notion of a subject-agent, he has previously argued at length, has its origins not in Descartes but in Latin scholasticism. Here in part he takes the argument back further, to the Greek fathers of the Christian church and their speculations about the nature of Christ. He takes up the theme of a “decolonization” of the Middle Ages and of theology, which have been stigmatized since early modernity. As usual, he covers a vast territory that I will only sample.

He begins on a humorous note. “Sociopaths don’t yawn, we say. Or better, they do not know yawning by contagion. They do not suffer when they see someone else suffer. They do not know pity. Generally, they haven’t read Aristotle” (p. 12, my translation throughout). He recalls Aristotle’s numerous statements that action and passion reside in the patient, not the agent. 

He goes on to note how the 17th century writer Le Laboureur argued that French is superior to Latin, because its word order more explicitly refers every action to a subject. Le Laboureur claimed that “Cicero and all the Romans thought in French before they spoke in Latin” (p. 20). Bemusedly, de Libera points out that in the 20th century, Martin Heidegger claimed that French writers must do their thinking in German, because German is the naturally philosophical language.

“While the notion of subject-agent can appear as contradictory — it only has historical purchase once what I call the ‘chiasm of agency’, that is to say, the devolution of the functions and conditions of agency to the ‘subject’, has been realized –, the notion of subject-patient poses no problem: it is the sense that the word ‘subject’ originally had, otherwise said before the chiasm, the hypokeimenon–subjectum, which, we have seen many times, in Augustine as in Aristotle, designates a support or a substrate, … in short a bearer, a receptor of qualities or accidental properties.”

“This poses the problem of WHICH is the subject who suffers, then WHO is the subject who suffers, the passage from the WHICH to the WHO” (pp. 57-58).

“Is there a single subject of thought, of perception, and of emotions? Or: Who says ‘I’ in ‘I think’, ‘I perceive’, ‘I feel’?” (p. 59).

“Can we say ‘it suffers in me’, like we say, with Schelling, it thinks in me?… We can perhaps admit that I am not the subject of my thoughts or that there is in me a subject of my thoughts that is not a part of me, but indeed only something in me, aliquid in anima rather than aliquid animae — for example, the nous, the intellect called ‘possible’ or ‘patient’ in medieval philosophy — but can this hold good for suffering, can it hold good for passion, can it hold good for what we today call emotion? We can doubt this…. Passion implies the body, suffering implies the body, we say. Thought does not imply it” (pp. 59-60).

“I respond: for a dualist [such as Descartes], thought does not imply the body. But not everyone is a dualist. For an Aristotelian, for example, especially an Averroist, intellect has need of the body, because it has need of a furnisher of images. It has need of the body and its images not as a subject, but as an object. Cannot the same argument be made for passion, for suffering, for pain?” (p. 60).

“[I]s it not evident that if there is a subject of my passion, it can only be a subject-patient, and that the last can only be me, whatever thing or entity the term ‘me’ designates: body, or soul, or soul united with a body…?” (ibid).

Emphasizing how christological debates among theologians have affected common views of the human, he recalls the aim of what he previously called a deconstruction of the Heideggerian deconstruction of subjectivity, which among other things ignores this aspect. 

“The articulation between Passion — upper case — and passion — lower case is the central element of the archaeology of the subject of passion” (p. 66).

“The central element is the introduction of hypostatic union into anthropology, otherwise said, the intervention of the subject — of the hypostasis — in the relation soul-body, and indeed in the relation spirit-soul-body… which makes possible the emergence of the person as subject where not only actions, but also passions are susceptible to imputation” (p. 493).