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Few terms are more ubiquitous in the contemporary [[human]] [[science]]s than the "[[subject]]," and few are more elusive.
It is typically used in work deriving from 'continental philosophy', the [[psychoanalysis]] of [[Lacan]] and the [[Marxism]] of [[Althusser]], and from all those descriptions of [[decentringdecentering]] tha tdisplace the source of meaning away from the indiviudal (often described as the "Cartesian subject") and towards structures, impersonal or unconscious processes and [[ideology]].
For most theories of the [[subject]], the 'individual' is a product rather than a source of meaning.
The goal of much wiritng on the [[subject]] is to subvert that sense of immediate identity.
When [[Kristeva]], for instance, writes (1973) of 'un sujet en procEs'' she is playing on the double meaning of ''en procEs'': the [[subject]] is both invovled in or produced by a process, and on trial.
The inherent ambiguity of the term goes some way to explaining its popularity and productivity.
It is both a grammatical term ('the subject of a sentence') and a political-egal category ('a British subject'), and at once active ('subject of') and passive ('subject' or 'subjected to').
The term 'the subject' is not used in the [[phenomoneologyphenomenology]] of [[Sartre]] (who uses it only in critical discussions of [[structuralism]], e.g. 1966) or [[Merleau-Ponty]], but nor is it a standard expression in all forms of [[structuralism]]; [[Levi-Strauss]] very rarely employs it.
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