If The Human Subject is not a rational and free agent, but located in society and therefore located by society’s values, attitudes, and ways of knowing and seeing, it follows that it is not fully in control of itself and must therefore endlessly question its intentions and actions. The problem with such self-scrutiny is clearly not that it results in a form of solipsism, but rather that the self cannot even claim to know herself and, in the absence of such certitude, is forced to doubt her motives and hence her agency. Even the idea that the rational subject is a free agent is the product of a particular cultural moment — that is, the European Enlightenment — and therefore yet more evidence of its embeddedness in society.

Understandably, the kind of skepticism attendant on the subject’s cultural implication is particularly acute and debilitating in oppressive societies where it is ethically imperative to resist tyranny actively. So, for instance, Albert Memmi argues that the leftist colonizer, who aspires to resist colonialism, is, in fact, implicated in the colonial system. The crucial point here is that colonial relations derive not from individual intention and action but preexist the arrival or birth of the individual:

Since the individual is deeply enmeshed in the oppressive society that she attempts to resist, she cannot not question the integrity of her actions.

The question of the implicated self who seeks to resist the oppressive social structures that, ironically, have structured her consciousness is omnipresent in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction of the apartheid period.