Historical subject
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Historical subject is in itself an oxymoron. If, in philosophy, a subject deigns a non-historical presence, an eternal substance, then how could the subject be historicized without keeping this ahistorical, essential core of this subject on which change glides over?
Nietzsche's critique of the subject was based on the fact that substances didn't exist, as everything was composed of a multitude of lines of forces, cris-crossing to form temporary combinations, taking advantage over other ones, and thus being crystallized, for a moment, in the form of a conscience. Heidegger later traced the concept of subject (subjectum in Latin, which he traces to hupokeimenon in Greek, ύποκείμενον) to the core metaphysical concept of ousia (οΰσία, "substance"), demonstrating that it was simply not possible to just "historicize" the subject to "get rid" of him. The modern definition of subjectivity, according to Heidegger, recovered Kant's definition of the substance in the Critique of Pure Reason and Aristotle's definition of ousia in Metaphysics.
However, the term "historical subject" is sometimes used in a loose sense by Michel Foucault, in which case it is at the same time opposed to the eternal and transcendent subject of the juridic and philosophical discourse yet still naming it as an object. He then, in its stead, proposes a "historical and political discourse".
