Ja, subiekt Pisma...

I, the subject of Scripture... Homo literatus as a model of the European understanding of subjectivity as such: The article reconstructs the figure of homo literatus as a key matrix of the European understanding of subjectivity, arguing that “subjectivity as such” is inseparable from the historical practices of writing that enabled and shaped it. The author analyses the genealogical entanglement of Europeanness, textuality and subjectivity, beginning with the polysemy of the Aristotelian ὑποκείμενον as a site of inscription — a concept whose semantic oscillation between substrate, object and subject determined the long term trajectory of the metaphysics of presence. The article shows that European culture — from antiquity, through Christianity and the Renaissance, to modernity — consistently shaped human being through practices of reading, writing, commentary and written introspection, understanding being as that which can be inscribed (esse est inscribi). Homo literatus emerges as a product of grammatogenesis, during which a previously unknown dimension of inwardness, spirit, selfhood and the political ‘community of readers’ constituted by them comes into being.