Psychē : On the Sentient Subject

Abstract: This article advances a theory of the subject grounded in Aristotle’s conception of psychē (ἡ ψυχή, mistranslated as the soul) that corrects the depiction of ‘life’ as the purported foundation of the condemned biopolitical subject in Agamben’s figure of “bare life.” Neither bare nor reducible to human/nonhuman animal life, nor to plants, nor even to ‘animate’ beings at all, psychē anticipates the theorization of ‘thing power’ in contemporary new materialisms. As affective force expressed ‘in matter’ (ἔνυλοί), psychē’s active constitution in sensation (αἴσθησις, aesthēsis ) and the sensible (αἰσθητὰ, aesthēta ) acts as the great leveller of animals, plants, and things. The bustling collectivity found in Aristotle’s ‘sentient subject’ (τὸ αἰσθητικὸν, aesthētikon ) is alive because affective force ‘lives’ in things not otherwise thought to be ‘alive.’