Interiority

Interiority can be understood as referring to those mental, affective, and biological processes that have conventionally been conceptualised as taking place ‘within’ the human subject. This notion has long been at the centre of major philosophical, religious, and political debates, many of which have focused upon the questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ certain parts of human experience are or should be understood as taking place inside the self. Given that these debates have tended to arise out of a broad opposition between ‘inherent’ and ‘contingent’ theories of interiority—that is, between those (‘inherent’) theories that see selfhood as relatively stable and possessed from birth, and those (‘contingent’) theories that see human subjectivity as relatively unstable and produced in relation to a matrix of variable sociohistorical factors—it ...