To this point, I have charted the main trajectories through which a variety of poststructuralist thinkers have both decentred the subject from its longheld foundational role and attempted to reconstruct the subject from what results. While the first two chapters on Deleuze and Derrida focused primarily, although not exclusively, on the former issue, the latter has increasingly come to the fore, to rethink the subject in relation to social norms (Foucault and Butler) and/or language and embodiment (Butler, Lacan and Kristeva). While these show that the poststructuralist paradigm is far more sophisticated than typically appreciated with regard to this issue – the subject is not simply decentred, but is rethought as an embodied, socio-symbolic being – they are also linked to the question of agency. The various poststructuralists engaged with do not simply make the subject a determined effect of pre-subjective structures and processes, but insist that the decentred subject is capable of intentional agency; an argument that has given rise to a variety of innovative attempts to explain how this is possible. I have argued, however, that the various ‘solutions’ offered to resolve this issue have been, in some way, structurally problematic because the notion of agency offered is underdeveloped, inconsistent with other aspects of that proponent’s thought, or relies upon a conception of the subject that is too thin to permit such agency.

If the issue of poststructuralist agency is to be resolved, it seems that we need a thicker – meaning more substantial – conception of the subject to explain, situate and permit such agency. However, the subject cannot be too ‘thick’, otherwise we risk reinstantiating the ahistoric substance focus that is anathema to the poststructuralist affirmation of processes and flux. We are then left asking whether it is possible to develop, within the constraints of the poststructuralist paradigm – namely, its rejection of ahistoric, ontological substance – a conception of the subject that is 1) decentred, 2) thought in terms of fluxes and processes, 3) understood to be embodied and socially and symbolically embedded, and where the site or possibility of agency is 4) more coherently and thickly described and outlined.