The first hour of the first lecture (January 6) was devoted to a reminder of the general problem and the main aim of the lecture: to "trace" the encounter between subjectivity and agencyin the history of philosophy. We thus revisited, in the order in which we had outlined them, the various pieces of the case investigated the previous year: in Nietzsche, first of all, the criticism of the "grammarian's syllogism" supposed to found the thesis that all action has an agent, then that of the "superstition of logicians": the articulation of the notions of subject, I and self; in Heidegger, with the Heideggerian interpretation of Descartes and the "sovereignty of the subject", the distinction between quiddity(Washeit) and "quissity"(Werheit), reality(Realität) and actual reality(Wirklichkeit), in the Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie - the lecture given in Marburg in the summer of 1927 - then in the 1934 Fribourg lecture on "Logic" and the history of being. We went on to recall some of Ricoeur's theses evoked in 2013-2014, some of which were Heideggerian, such as the distinction between the "what?" question and the "who?" question, culminating in Ricoeur's critique of the reduction of the problematic of action to an "ontology of the anonymous event" operated in contemporary philosophy. We were then able to return to the central theme: the relationship between the question of man and the question of the subject, established last year on the basis of Foucaultian's reading of theAlcibiades. To do this, we recalled the meaning and function of the distinction between attribution, ascription and imputation in Ricoeur, Strawson and Scheler, then, returning to the terrain of the history of philosophy from an archaeological point of view, we recalled some of the notions and structures put in place in the work onInventio subiecti: the "quadrangle of the thinking subject" and its avatars, marked by the "lengthening of the questionnaire" from the Middle Ages to Descartes, with particular emphasis on two epochal questions: "Is there a single subject of thought and will? "and "Who says I in 'I think' and 'I want'? This brought us up to speed, in other words, with the explicit theme of the 2014-2015 lecture: will and action.
The work began with a return to the notion of use (khrêsis), formulated and implemented in the Foucauldian schema of the "subject of khrêsis ". After a reminder of Philippians 2:13: it is God who works in man to will and to do, we laid the foundations for an archaeology of the "subject of use", by examining in detail what we called the "Syriac source": the theory of action and will in the De fide orthodoxa of John of Damascus († 749). Two conceptual structures or schemes were introduced and presented in the Damascene's Greek formulations and their medieval Latin translations by Burgundio of Pisa (1110-1193): the "quadrangle of agency", articulating action (ἐνέργεια), active (ἐνεργητικὸν), acted (ἐνέργημα), actant (ὁ ἐνεργῶν), and the "will quadrangle", mirror-articulating will (θέλησις), willed (θελητόν), volitional (θελητικόν), and willing (ὁ κεχρημένος τῇ θελήσει). We thus addressed the first formulation of the notions of voluntary subject: "the user of will", ὁ κεχρημένος τῇ θελήσει, and of subject of action: "the user of action" or "of operation", ὁ κεχρημένος τῇ ἐνεργείᾳ, "namely the hypostasis" (ἤτοι ἡ ὑπόστασις). We concluded with the distinction between object of will and subject of will in Jean de Damas, in other words, the difference, posited in Greek, between 'hupokeimenon' and 'hupostasis', a differencethat has remained unrecognized and a fortiori unexploited as such by historians of philosophy, psychology and ethics. This absence has been evoked from two angles: Heidegger, the "chiasmus of the subject" and the "oblivion of hypostasis", on the one hand; and the general ignorance of the relationship between anthropology and Christology in the history of the subject, on the other - two essential themes of the lecture, seen over the long term.
