The Death of the Subject: Deconstruction of the Self in Art
Part I — Introduction
This essay explores the emergence of the ideas of the subject and its death in the arts and in the film Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman, U.S., 2008). It argues that Kaufman, through his protagonist Caden Cotard, presents a crucial segment of the philosophical and artistic dialectic surrounding the concepts of the subject and its demise. The film engages, whether consciously or intuitively, with the thought of Descartes, Fichte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Levinas, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Husserl, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. Moreover, Kaufman weaves into the film the controversial question of the place of artistic creation itself—subjective creation—through intertextual references to modernist art.
At first glance, this may seem impossible to visualize: an excess of ideas, too complex for a single essay of modest scope. It might even appear as if Kaufman himself seeks to condense the entire history of the “I,” drawn from fragments of philosophical and artistic thought, into a two-and-a-half-hour cinematic work. Such speculations become understandable after viewing the film and reading interviews with Kaufman. The goal of both Caden and Kaufman is, above all, self-knowledge—to discover authenticity and understand identity. From Socrates through Kant, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard to Sartre, philosophy has sought this same imperative: know thyself. The path to such self-recognition, however, is one of solitude, pain, and suffering—death—as the most fundamental experience of subjectivity. Whether the path runs through God or Spinoza’s nature, through the relation to the Other and his death (Levinas), through the structures of being (Heidegger), through creative instinct (Nietzsche), through absolute thought (“the absolute is subject”) as expressed in the life of consciousness—“nature receives within me consciousness of itself, but only insofar as it begins from my personal consciousness and proceeds to the consciousness of the universal by illumination”—that is, Caden’s idealist desire to construct an entire world out of his “free” thought—or through the subject as the boundary of its world (Wittgenstein), this entire adventure is embodied within Synecdoche, New York.
Kaufman has often stated his wish to fold all his philosophy of life and empirical knowledge into a single creative work. This is precisely what Caden attempts: assembling the whole—truth itself—out of its parts: thought, the real, object, subject, philosophy, history, memory, science. As Thomas Mann writes in Death in Venice, a work to which Kaufman alludes frequently: “Truth is that these things were piled up layer by layer, through long days of toil, out of hundreds upon hundreds of solitary inspirations; their excellence, both in quantity and in detail, came from one thing only: that their maker could stand for years beneath a single work.” In this spirit, the essay aims to trace the language of such creation and to gather it into a unified academic composition, speaking in the idiom of the thinkers and artworks it engages with—and quoting, when another’s phrasing says it better.
The subject, like the world itself, is a dialectic of life and death, destruction and creation. It seeks order and chaos simultaneously. Kaufman and Caden, as representatives of the human condition, are compelled to include both impulses in their art. To define a historical moment, one must define the identity of its human being. The modern world pushed this demand further: to define man, his identity, and his world, knowledge must be drawn both from above (metaphysics) and from below (physics), fusing inductive and deductive necessity. Thus, thought and consciousness construct for humanity the narrative of reality—its sociology, science, psychology, ideology, religion, and politics. Kaufman, echoing existential philosophy, attempts to return this definition to the core of human truth itself: self-definition.
“The apparent isolation of the modern artist from practical activities, the discrepancy between his archaic, individual handicraft and the collective, mechanical character of most modern production, do not necessarily mean that he is outside society or that his work is unaffected by social and economic changes.” —Meyer Schapiro. Like Kandinsky, who claimed that every artistic creation is the product of its era and cannot be repeated, Schapiro points to artistic style as a marker of time. Through the structure of visual forms, the sound of music, or the rhythm of poetry, one can trace the cultural and human process of a given age—its subjective and social movement alike. Kaufman, in this sense, seeks to expose Caden’s creative soul and its longing for truth before the audience, so that the viewer might remove his glasses and look at himself and his own reality. Caden becomes a synecdoche of the world itself. The artistic image of human life must, therefore, contain its very opposite. Sartre similarly insists that each era must bear its own doubts: only subjectivity imbued with the spirit of its time can approach reality authentically—whether through creative activity or through a critical dialectic of passivity and objectification.
In this way, as in Synecdoche, New York, every reference to an artwork is also a reference to sociology, anthropology, and the philosophy of humanity and its environment. This explains the necessity of even a brief survey of the representation of the subject within the artistic and philosophical movements of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. As in art, so in thought: through both artistic creation and intellectual conceptualization, one can come to understand the subject and the era that produces it.
Synecdoche, New York is Charlie Kaufman’s first film as a director. It tells the story of Caden Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), a New York theater director in his forties. Early in the film, his wife and daughter move to Berlin following the commercial success of her visual artworks. Soon after, Caden receives a “genius grant” from a municipal foundation, providing him the means to dedicate the rest of his life to a new theatrical production that he promises will be “something true.”
He builds an enormous theater within the city—an entire replica of New York—where most coordinates of time and space begin to collapse. Within this structure, Caden attempts to restage every episode of his own life and the lives of those around him, replaying each memory, recreating every relationship, and trying, through theater, to resurrect his subject.
From a postmodern perspective, after God, His philosophies, and the subject they sustained have all “died” within systems of representation—copy, simulacrum, idealization, subjectivization, and objectivization—Kaufman, through his protagonist, attempts to expose and dismantle these symbolic mechanisms. His work performs deconstructive gestures that reveal the alienation produced by the death of the subject: the collapse of metaphysical and philosophical grounding replaced by language games that now script the postmodern self.
These movements, alongside the plurality of truths—postmodern relativism and pluralism—propel the protagonist toward the impossible task of reviving his own real and his own truth. Failing that, he suffers the sublimated remedy of postmodern culture: the truth endlessly reproduced. These ideas resonate with postmodern thought, post-structuralism, neo-Marxism, and critical theory, and the essay will draw connections between Kaufman’s work and thinkers such as Horkheimer, Althusser, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Derrida.
Kaufman makes no attempt to conceal his familiarity with these ideas. Even the film’s title, Synecdoche, refers to a rhetorical figure meaning “a part that represents the whole.” Later in the film, Caden contemplates naming his production Simulacrum—a concept that traces back to Plato’s dialogues and reaches its postmodern form in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, meaning “a copy without an original.” These two terms alone plunge the viewer into a sea of representations, inductions, deductions, and metonymies that replicate and define the subject.
Through the language of cinema—and in dialogue with postmodern philosophy—Kaufman portrays the transformation of the modern subject. The self comes to know itself and its meaning through systems of signs and knowledge, through subjective action confronted with the objective frameworks that define it. The new form of subjugation arises within the spectacular imagery of postmodernity: the illusion of natural rights, once belonging to the “living subject,” now gives way to a “dead subject,” whose final breaths are sustained by ideologies, signifiers, signs, and objectivities that constitute him.
This reading may appear as if the analysis is forcing philosophical interpretation onto the film. Yet Kaufman provides textual evidence that justifies such an approach. The protagonist’s name, Caden Cotard, is not accidental: it references neurologist Jules Cotard, who identified Cotard’s Syndrome—a delusion in which a person believes they are dead. Beyond its clinical meaning, this delusion mirrors the philosophical condition of nihilism that Nietzsche warned against: the denial of life, the decomposition of meaning, and the decay of selfhood. Caden, who believes his body is failing and whose world dissolves, embodies precisely this condition.
It follows, then, that Kaufman employs this neurological metaphor to dramatize “the death of the subject”: a self that continues to function within the system while its immanence—its inner vitality—has already died. As Michel Foucault once observed, “the relationship between writing and death becomes visible in the disappearance of the author’s individual characteristics… the author’s presence is a play of signs, organized less by what they signify than by their very nature as signifiers.” Kaufman, too, stages this disappearance.
To understand “the death of the subject,” one must first define what a “living subject” is. The rational subject (rationalism), the ideal subject (idealism), and the existential subject (existentialism) are central to this discussion. The “modern subject,” as a cultural, artistic, and philosophical phenomenon of the Western world, will be examined only to illuminate the postmodern condition that follows its collapse.
Thus, this essay also engages with art and literature that reflect this transformation. Works such as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Joyce’s Ulysses, Balzac’s Cousin Pons, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot depict the modern subject confronting its dissolution. Alongside them stand Baudelaire’s decadence, Mann’s meditations on solitude and beauty (“Solitude brings to light what is original in us… yet also its opposite”), Gauguin’s neo-impressionism, Munch’s expressionism, Malevich’s avant-garde, and Picasso’s cubism—each representing different faces of the modern experience.
In tracing these movements, the essay draws upon artists’ own reflections on art and creation, seeking to grasp the dialectic that propelled the modern subject and its art—from the late Romanticism of German Idealism or, alternatively, the realism and impressionism of the early nineteenth century—toward the beginnings of postmodernity. The latter, in both thought and art, can be associated with Foucault’s post-structuralism and Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” while in the visual arts, the modernist impulse reaches its culmination and exhaustion in Pollock’s abstract expressionism.
In brief, this essay is divided into two sections. The first examines the concept of the subject and its death through Western art and philosophy; the second investigates how these ideas appear in Synecdoche, New York and in other works by Charlie Kaufman. Repetition will be inevitable throughout the text—especially in the second section—not as filler, but as demonstration. As Caden declares, “everything is everything.” Each insight contains within it a smaller one that justifies it—a structure reminiscent of Spinoza’s concept of adequate cause and of synecdoche itself.
Charlie Kaufman, born in New York in 1958, is a screenwriter and director for film, television, and theater. His most recognized works include Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and the stage play Hope Leaves the Theater (2005). Kaufman is renowned for his ability to embed philosophical and psychoanalytic questions within popular culture, much like René Magritte did through painting—a form of visual philosophy. He does not conceal his theoretical influences; on the contrary, he stages within his work the central dialectics of Western culture: logic, science, art, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology.
These philosophical problems converge in art, in the thinking and acting of his characters, where circumstances lead to praxis that captures the fatal conflicts between thought and reality. In this respect, Kaufman continues the tradition of thinkers such as Parmenides, Herder, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Camus, in whom philosophical dialogue occurs within artistic expression—within a poem, a narrative, a visual metaphor. For Kaufman, art is inseparable from humanity’s definition of itself. “The poet,” he once suggested, “is one whose pain and cry become beautiful music. Yet some perceive it only as beautiful music and not as a cry—they ask, give us more of your pain, because the cry was frightening, but the music is pleasant.”
In interviews, Kaufman has explained that his films aim to reflect the truth of human existence: its struggles, confusions, impermanence, and contradictions. Several of his films, including Synecdoche, New York, resonate with modernist modes of stream-of-consciousness and psychological realism. Within these modes, Kaufman offers an alternative to Hollywood’s industrial storytelling—its dramatized and falsified representations of human life. He opens fissures in the illusion, exposing what he calls the “dominant falsehood of representation.”
This realism, as he puts it, strives to create “work that may be romantic and comedic, but also true.” The protagonist of Synecdoche, New York seeks exactly this: what Kaufman himself seeks—the truth through introspection. The obstacle, however, lies within introspection itself. When the protagonist attempts to create solely from his own subjective world—detached from others and from reality—he discovers that this world is dead. Death becomes the only certainty, and the film’s central theme, “the death of the subject,” comes into focus.
This motif connects Synecdoche, New York to Kaufman’s other works, which share a modern reflexivity: the individual’s experience mirrors the outer world; the protagonist’s inner struggle becomes a portrait of the modern malaise. Kaufman’s narrative ambition is to render multiplicity—the postmodern perspectivism—through fragmentation, recursion, repetition, copying, and the microscopic detail of lived experience. Caden, for instance, attempts to stage every moment, every millimeter of life, in a play that lasts fifty years and is seen by no one but himself.
The film, therefore, can be read as an inquiry into the relationship between the subject and its copy—its death—between the truth of one’s inner life and the truth offered by external reality, between the genuine and the artificial, the image and language, art and politics, being and absence, the artist and the work. In this regard, one is reminded of Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1928). Unlike Magritte, Kaufman seems to call attention even more urgently to the power of the copy, of representation, in contemporary reality—a power capable of erasing truth and reassembling it to suit new structures of meaning.
In the process of directing his production, Caden—like postmodern reality itself—engages in acts of representation: image, simulacrum, sign, and copy. These attempts aim to awaken the subject and return it to the uncertain path of pursuing truth, to present the truth of one’s soul rather than the truth imposed by surroundings. Yet every image Kaufman creates in the film, like every image Caden creates within it, is an image of authority—layers of simulacra that conceal the real. This is Kaufman’s critical-theoretical dimension: he reveals the symbolic violence that accompanies the deconstruction of subject and object, the addiction to signs. His art is acutely aware of the spectacle’s power to solidify illusion into reality; still, it tries—unsuccessfully—to revive the subject through creation and self-transcendence.
Accordingly, while Synecdoche, New York serves as the central case of this essay, it is necessary to examine Kaufman’s broader body of work in order to trace the continuity of his philosophical vision. Alongside Synecdoche, New York, I draw on his other films—Being John Malkovich (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Adaptation (2002), and Human Nature (2001)—in which Kaufman wrote the screenplays. Across these works, he consistently explores consciousness and its human bearer, the melancholic condition of the creative individual, and the intersubjective and romantic relationships that point toward transcendence.
Each of these films places the private and personal against the collective, the psyche against capitalist fetishism and aesthetic consumption. In doing so, Kaufman dismantles the stereotypes of human relationships. Cinema, as a mechanical, simulacral, and spectacular medium, often distances reality by turning life into representation—what happens to the character happens not to me but to “them.” In Kaufman’s cinema, however, this boundary collapses. His goal is that the spectator experiences the narrative, not merely observes it—to experience life through the Other, echoing Levinas, Heidegger, and Husserl.
The approach of this essay is grounded in close readings of cinematic and artistic texts, intertwined with conceptual analysis informed by philosophy of art and postmodern theory. The key notions that shape this inquiry include truth, reality, certainty, modernism, capitalism, postmodernism, death, suffering, subject and object, experience and being, representation, copy, simulacrum, and image.
Given the vast landscape of Hollywood cinema, modern and postmodern art, and the complexity of Western thought, the aim here is not to construct a grand theoretical system nor to redefine the ontology, phenomenology, or epistemology of the contemporary human. Such ambitions would be impossible and unnecessary. Rather, the focus is to illuminate one distinctive narrative thread in a singular work of art—“the subject and its death” in Synecdoche, New York—and to reflect on how, through Kaufman’s cinematic imagination, the ancient question of selfhood continues to haunt modern consciousness.