Abstract

The merit of Breuer's book lies primarily in his locating Revolutionstheorie within the problematic of the search for the True Subject. Breuer's point of departure is Foucault's observation (following Nietzsche) that Man is a recent invention. Rather than assume humanity as the subject of a humanist history, we have to consider that “History might not be the history of a lost and regained origin as the ‘transcendental Narcissism’ of Western thought would have it; it may be without a center, without a goal, determined by systems, relations and combinations that unfold without being based on the functions of an original subject, and that further refuse all attempts at totalization.”