The practice of Citation and the End of the Bourgeois Epoch

In his autobiographical novel The Death of Descartes (1996), Radomir Konstantinović, as the first person son-narrator, reveals a phantasmal structure of the European humanistic tradition in which the practice of citation of great names and father figures is no longer a practice of subject constitution, but of subject cancellation. The paper explores the way in which the transition from the Law of the Father and the bourgeois epoch of masculinity towards the Sin of the Son and the post-humanist epoch of masculinity is announced and embodied in Konstantinovic’s novel.