El sujeto que no se rinde

La persistencia del actor en la teoría social

Abstract

This article argues that twenty-first century social theory faces a problem none of its traditions has managed to resolve: the persistence of the fiction of the subject as the constitutive unit of sociological analysis. Through an examination of the most relevant traditions in contemporary social theory —microsociology, the Bourdieusian program, postcolonial thought, actor-network theory, and systems theory— the article documents the systematic pattern by which the subject returns even where attempts are made to expel it. It is argued that this persistence is not a correctable theoretical error but rather the result of a philosophical debt the discipline has carried since its founding: its constitutive link with Enlightenment humanism, which inscribed the subject into both the normative and cognitive infrastructure of sociology. Against this diagnosis, the article proposes that Luhmann's theory of social systems points toward the most fertile horizon for undertaking the pending task of abandoning that fiction, even if it has not completed it. Three cases —the historically efficacious individual, the transformative collective actor, and the moral subject— illustrate what new questions open up when the subject is displaced from the center of analysis and communication is placed as the constitutive operator of the social.