The human subject has never been anything but a specter. The rift that divides it cuts through it from the very beginning by making it teeter on the cutting edge between presence and absence, infinity and finitude, ideality and reality. That man disappears “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea”, like Michel Foucault writes, means that this disappearance is the mode of his being, that he must resign himself to being the index of his own inexistence; yet an efficient inexistence, an agile and, if we may say so, an operative absence. We might also say that the subject, though impossible (as a full subject of consummate autonomy, self-transparency, etc.), nonetheless asserts, as this impossibility, a certain subject-status. For what is the subject if not the relation to its own impossibility?