Exploring sociomaterial mediations of human subjectivity

Auguste Rodin's bronze sculpture Le Penseur (The Thinker) from 1902 presented an image of Dante deep in thought, pondering The Divine Comedy. The naked sculpture emphasizes how Dante's heroic mind created this masterpiece independently, solely equipped with his bare human faculties, without instruments, without techniques, without social relations, even without clothing. In popular culture, the sculpture has come to symbolize the (gendered) subjectivity of genius, an autonomous, pure and purely individual (male) subject, an ideal worthy of emulation. In line with former volumes of Subjectivity (for example, Blackman et al, 2008), this special issue challenges such individualistic and mentalist visions of the human and contributes to a contextual understanding of human subjectivity.