The Philosophical Tradition and the Paradox of the End of the Subject

Abstract

These reflections aim at analyzing the question of the end of subject from the Western philosophical tradition. Thus, after a brief historical introduction beginning from Plato and passing through Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, the text intends to examine the question of subject and subjectivity in the modern and, principally, in the contemporary philosophy: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. From the Freudian and Lacanian perspective, it will be taken more explicitly into consideration the problematic of the end of subject, which essentially expresses itself through the paradox of an internal exclusion. Therefore, the philosophical and psychological subject is revalued, reinterpreted and surpassed, but from and throughout the same symbolic universe, in which it moves itself and from which it paradoxically excludes itself.