REFUSING INDIVIDUALITY - HOW HUMAN-BEINGS ARE MADE INTO SUBJECTS

If we are to justify normative communication, we must contend with the question of ''why, other than as a response to force, should I accept those norms that are not of my own devising - especially in light of contemporary scholarship which claims that any warrants offered for th em are inextricably linked with systems of power?'' I respond to that question here through a critical appropriation of resources in the wor k of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. To counter what I see as a t endency toward individualism in Foucault and a tendency toward totaliz ation in Habermas, I supplement their accounts with a phenomenological description of the actual process by which human beings are made into subjects.