58 Tahir Wood
the same subject is at one and the same time also a potential lord in search of a bondsman to
enslave, in a continual contest of capture and deception, prey and predation.
Here a convergence between the philosophy of the subject and the theory of semiosis
becomes very clear. Bourgeois subjectivity contains within itself the prior relationship of lord
and bondsman just as the symbolic order contains within itself the icon and the index of the
animal mind. Such is the nature of the spiritual-animal kingdom. Within the human
mind/spirit, the drama of natural history is re-enacted, but with this difference, that whereas
prey and predator tended to be of distinct species, the cunning subject is one who is always
both, always attempting to be predator and always trying to avoid being prey, and doing so by
reading the indexical signs. The subject who inhabits this morally ambivalent world is not
free; he is driven by his own personality and limited by his own personal situation. He is free
to pursue his own interests and to enjoy doing so only insofar as he is able successfully to
frustrate the freedom of another, who would do the same to him.^20
More specifically, he is unavoidably subject to certain semiotic dynamics that I will
describe as the ̳badge‘, the ̳stigma‘ and the ̳spoor‘. What I have in mind with the badge is
especially propositions such as ̳I am a democrat‘, ̳I am a lesbian‘, ̳I am a Christian‘, and so
on. They have the function of providing a guide from present discourse towards the
appropriate set of propositions in prior discourse, with the view to indicating how the speaker
is to be approached, in his or her own preferred way, and how his or her own present
discourse is henceforth to be interpreted, precisely by drawing on those propositions from
prior discourse (which are assumed to be known in common).
The stigma is essentially the same as the badge, but with the obvious difference that the
propositions expressed are not forms of approbation, and therefore are far more likely to be
expressed in the third (or second) person, rather than in the first as in the case of the badge.
̳He is a communist‘, ̳you are a snob‘, ̳they are all guilty by association‘, etc, might all be
examples of the stigma.
The spoor represents the actual work of the cunning subject. The cunning subject is the
one who, being alert to associations between one expression and others, makes judgments of
character, of opportunity, of danger, advantage, taste, political identity, etc., in the process of
evaluating the other‘s discourse, while making his or her own connections between present
and prior discourses (which are not necessarily shared with the interlocutor). One may say
that such judgments are made on the basis of a spoor, that is, a set of associations that are not
by any means made explicit in the discourse. The spoor is the trail that is followed by
̳instinct‘ by the businessman, the politician, the criminal, the detective. The cunning subject
is the one who must survive by the laws of the jungle, because despite the fact that the
̳jungle‘ in this case is the symbolic realm, it is in fact the animal kingdom of the spirit, and
the index continues to be its dominant mode of cognition as part of a struggle to master, rather
than be mastered.
The inverse of the cunning subject is the moral individual who must continue to live
according to the original ideal of the moral law even while positing a world from which it has
long withdrawn. So, in open opposition to the cynicism of the cunning subject, there emerges
the stoicism of the late moral subject, the one who must endure living in an alien world as an
unhappy consciousness or as a beautiful soul. This fate is melancholia. It implies an inability
(^20) Hegel (Shorter Logic, § 94): ―the man who flees is not yet free: in fleeing he is still conditioned by that from
which he flees.‖ And, one might add, the man who pursues is also not free, from his compulsion.