The Courtier, the Dandy, and the Nomad: notes on subjectivation processes and Cultural History

Abstract

Thoughts over different subjectiving processes that have produced three conceptual characters along the cultural history. The 16th century coutier, the 19th century dandy and the contemporaneous nomad all result from historical changes in the notion of public and private, artifice and nature, exteriority and interiority, social rules and expontanety, appearance and essence that serves, mainly, to distress the lack of continuance in cultural behaviours that, at a first sight, would seem to be simple processes of history repetition. For beyond the historical characters, their approximation enables a reevaluation of how the contemporaneous culture places itself along some subjectivity historical changes, that is, then, faced less as a psychological data and more as result of political-historical-cultural processes.