Postmodern Subjects
The thinking of Marx and Freud provided a point of departure for questioning the notion of a unitary, autonomous Subject, which for many thinkers in the Continental tradition is seen as the foundation of the liberal theory of the social contract. These thinkers opened up the way for the deconstruction of the subject as a core-concept of metaphysics.
Sigmund Freud's explorations of the unconscious mind added up to a wholesale indictment of Enlightenment notions of subjectivity.
Among the most radical re-thinkers of human self-consciousness was Heidegger, whose concept of Dasein or "Being-there" displaces traditional notions of the personal subject altogether.
Jacques Lacan, inspired by Heidegger and Saussure, built on Freud's psychoanalytic model of the subject, in which the "split subject" is constituted by a double bind: alienated from jouissance when he or she leaves the Real, enters into the Imaginary (during the mirror stage), and separates from the Other when he or she comes into the realm of language, difference, and demand in the Symbolic or the Name of the Father.
Thinkers such as Althusser, Foucault or Bourdieu theorize the subject as a social construction. According to Althusser, the "subject" is an ideological construction (more exactly, constructed by the "Ideological State Apparatuses"). One's subjectivity exists, "always already" and is discovered through the process of interpellation. Ideology inaugurates one into being a subject.
According to Foucault, it is the "effect" of power and "disciplines" (See Discipline and Punish: construction of the subject as student, soldier, "criminal", etc.).
Read more about this topic: Subject (philosophy)
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