The fading of the subject and the reinvention of colective identities in the era of environmental complexity

Abstract

This text intends the deconstruction of the subject that derived in the methodological individualism of science and led to the objectification of nature in the construction of the rationality of modernity. The self-conscious subject, agent of the production of an objectified world is despoiled from its mythical original liberty to become an “effect-subject”. The subject becomes an object, configured and determined by the objective structures and the orders of rationality of modernity. Nor the transcendental subject of idealist philosophy nor the ecological self are illuminated agents of a reflexive modernity, capable of solving the environmental crisis. Subjects emancipate in the deconstruction of the rationality that has captured them and in the reinvention of their identities in the realm of environmental complexity. Beyond the hermeneutics of the self and inter-subjectivity based on communicative rationality, postmodern ethics has transposed individuality to its confrontation with otherness. The subject returns to being as a person. The individual self gives place to a we, to a collective cultural being. Facing economic globalization, identities are reinvented together with emergent environmental rights to reappropriate the common goods of humanity. Thus, new social actors emerge to construct a sustainable world guided by environmental rationality, mobilized by the dialogue of knowledges towards the heterogenesis of diversity, based on the ethics of otherness and the politics of difference.