The Subject as Hospitable Self-in-Loss

John Martis SJ (Pilgrim College, University of Divinity)

Can self-subjectivity be salvaged? Keeping in view St Augustine's De Trinitate and Confessiones, and the investigations of Jean-Luc Marion and Joeri Schrijvers, this paper argues that the Cartesian-Augustinian cogito cannot be disqualified as self-subject. Instead, it merits redescription as a self-in-loss, to account for the gesture/structure of hospitality corresponding to the clandestine cognitive inclusion of the other "within" apperception. Thereby, the other is found with the self, having been immemorially admitted, in an assimilation which nevertheless looks to recognition of the other as such.  This version of self-subjectivity, preserving a self-substantiality genuinely if clandestinely incorporative of other-incursion, addresses problems attending both the implicitly heterologous subjectivity associated with Marion's adonné (as "gifted other self") and the poststructuralist self-lost-as-other, neither of which effectively displace the notion of self-subjectivity.