Editorial:

One of the most problematic issues today is the concept of  “self ”. The history of modern philosophy  has always been struggling between the ambition of  comprehending the objective reality of the universe ‘out there’ and  its indispensable anthropocentric bias ‘in here’. Indeed Western modern philosophy had been characterised by the primacy of the self as the rational  “subject”.  However, at the end of the twentieth century the disourse ended up just in the contrary :  in the “death of the subject” and in “the end of the self”. Philosophers seemed to have been aware more and more  that  reality is resistant to the human totalising system, and even worse, that the self itself is but the function of  the operation of  the very  systems, systems of discourse in particular.

Nevertheless,  what is often overlapping in such “death-of-the subject” discourse is the’identity’ and the ‘agency’ of the subject.  One is not to be confused with the other. The former might be the product of systems, the latter remains –to some extent- the producer. Melintas of this issue revisits again the concept of the ‘self’ in terms of its agency, personal history, virtual non-spatial product, capitalistic greed, genetic engineering and filmic image creation.

Editor.