The Subject of Citizenship

Abstract

Considerations of citizenship of whatever kind demand an idea of citizenship. There cannot be an idea of citizenship without an account of the subject of citizenship. This paper argues that the subject of citizenship is “the individual” considered as an integrated unit of organic and subjective life. It is this idea of the individual that is the referent for the idea of self-preservation in early modern civil philosophy. It is difficult to appreciate the significance of “self-preservation” without using the vantage point of post-Freudian accounts of the self to open it up. Citizenship concerns the status of the human being considered as a person (a self). Citizenship also denotes the public aspect of individualism as this is instituted and secured through the agency of the state (considered in its republican sense as the state subject to law).

Notes

¹ Here I think of this part of Hegel's preface to The Philosophy of Right: “The truth concerning right, ethics and the state is at any rate as old as its exposition in public laws and in public morality and religion. What more does this truth require, inasmuch as the thinking mind [Geist] is not content to possess it in this proximate manner? What it needs is to be comprehended as well, so that the content with is already rational in itself may also gain a rational form and thereby appear justified to free thinking. For such thinking does not stop at what is given, whether the latter is supported by the external positive authority of the state or of mutual agreement among human beings, or by the authority of inner feeling and the heart and by the testimony of the spirit which immediately concurs with this, but starts out from itself and thereby demands to know itself as united in its innermost being with the truth” (Hegel, 1991, p. 11).

² The distinction between awareness and consciousness is foundational to many practices of self-education such as Buddhism or the Feldenkrais method of somatic education. There is an interesting transcript of a conversation between the biophysicist Katchalsky and Moshe Feldenkrais that explores this distinction which contains this statement of Katchalsky (Ginsberg, 2006, p. 4) in summarizing the results of earlier conversation: “We accepted that what is true in knowledge are the concepts and the lawful correlations of concepts. But then you claimed that knowledge itself is not the same as awareness, not part of a [true] human reality. You spoke of Knowledge that is dead, for example, the knowledge that is buried in books. We can have a library full of knowledge but we cannot consider it as awareness. And so you brought as an example of this distinction, and I believe a good one, that I can come across this chair millions of times and I have an impression of it, and yet I don't have awareness. That is because if you ask me how many slats there are in the back of this chair, I may not be able to answer. On the other hand if I concentrate my mind to rebuild its image and then answer you as to how many slats comprise the back of the chair, we have another element, but a very important one. This element turns consciousness into awareness.”

³ I use “object” in the sense used by object relations theorist. For such a one as Bollas, it refers to any object that presents itself for use by the subject as an opportunity for the articulation of his or her sense of self. See, for example, this passage by Bollas (1989, p. 10): “The idiom that we are finds its expression through the choices and uses of objects that are available to it in the environment. If the mother knows her infant, if she senses his figural intentions, his gestures expressive of need and desire, she will provide objects (including herself) to serve as experiential elaborators of his personality potential. In this way, she assists the struggle to establish self.”

⁴ Melanie Klein is the post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinker who establishes the interrelationship of the instinctual and imaginative components of human imagination. In perhaps the definitive Kleinian view of “phantasy” (the mediation of the soma by the psyche) Susan Isaacs (1989, p. 83) declares: “Phantasy is (in the first instance) the mental corollary, the psychic representative, of instinct. There is no impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy”.

⁵ Winnicott does not elaborate much on either of these points. Regarding the second of these see Winnicott (1986, pp. 56–57) and consider this statement (Winnicott, 1971 [1991], p. 70) which is congruent with the view I offer in this paper: “One could suppose that before a certain era, say a thousand years ago, only a few people lived creatively … To explain this one would have to say that before a certain date it is possible that there was only very exceptionally a man or woman who achieved unit status in personal development. Before a certain date the vast millions of the world of human beings quite possibly never found or certainly soon lost at the end of infancy or childhood their sense of being individuals.”

⁶ I am indebted for this idea of the state as offering containment (in the psychoanalytic sense) for subjective experience to Paul Hoggett.

⁷ Locke (1967, p. 324, emphases in the original) follows the passage cited above with: “Whereby it is easie to discern who are, and who are not, in Political Society together. Those who are united into one Body, and have a common establish'd Law and Judicature to appeal to, with Authority to decide Controversies between them, and punish Offenders, are in Civil Society one with another: but those who have no such common Appeal, I mean on Earth, are still in the state of Nature, each being, where there is no other, Judge for himself, and Executioner; which is … the perfect state of Nature.”