Subjectivity refers to one's conscious and unconscious feelings, beliefs, and desires regarding experiences and relations to the world (i.e., to objects). Subjectivity addresses both individual experience and the shaping of those experiences’ meanings; thus, subjectivity is the ground on which identity is constructed. Subjectivity implies a degree of thought and self-awareness about identity, while allowing myriad unconscious constraints on our abilities to understand our own, or others’, identities.

Most contemporary philosophy of subjectivity is a reaction to Enlightenment thinking, ...