New Research Network on "Knowledge Histories of the Unavailable Self"

The project asks about a fundamental figure of thought in the modern conception of the subject: the inaccessibility or opacity of a constitutive part of the self. In the history of psychology, this figure of thought has taken the form of the unconscious in a particularly prominent way, but this is by no means the only form. The opacity of the self thus has its own history. The project’s aim is to relate this history to similar figures in three fields of knowledge in which the subject can be conceived of as a collective: Sociology, Ethnology (Anthropology) and Cultural Studies. For in these fields too, subjects like, for example, human crowds are described that are similarly unable of fully governing themselves.

The project’s first premise is therefore that within the human sciences, the histories of individual subjects on the one hand, and collective subjects on the other are interconnected. It therefore aims to trace the interrelations of psychology with each of the three ‘collective sciences’. Between psychology and sociology, the question arises as to whether collective subjects can be described through psychological criteria, and what potentially causes their self-government to fail; psychology and anthropology share the question to which extent an earlier stage of civilization lives on in the psyche and what significance this has for ‘modern’ collectives; and finally, the interrelation of psychology and cultural studies implies the idea that collectives express themselves in a way they cannot account for, neither individually nor collectively.

The second central assumption is that this interrelation of knowledge fields does not only involve the abovementioned disciplines, but also literature. For the eclectic way in which literature deals with knowledge also means that it intensifies the interrelations of these fields. Moreover, literary texts can represent collective subjects in a way that foregrounds their experiential dimension, thus emphasizing their psychological implications, while also nuancing these in the same course. Therefore, this topic requires an approach that combines knowledge history with literary studies.

The project thus aims to show that, from the viewpoint of a history of knowledge, the figure of the inaccessible self represents a constant with many variations. The network will trace its historical formations and shifts and thus delineate a still unwritten part of the history of the subject.