Epilogue: Subjects, Objects, and Contemporary Theory

Abstract

Wanting to keep to the perspectives of early modern culture, I have largely resisted the temptation throughout this book to associate its findings with those of contemporary research on selfhood. An epilogue seems a good place briefly to yield to that temptation. Recent work in various fields — particularly psychoanalysis — has begun to move toward interpersonal models of the self, and I want to suggest some connections between some of that work and the early modern conceptions that the foregoing chapters have explored. Broadly speaking, two points of connection stand out: a sense of the priority of the interpersonal self and a concern for the ethics of selfhood — that is, for the way that different modes of selfhood are part of its interpersonal politics.