The Subject and Other Subjects offers a theory about the differences among ethical, aesthetic, and political conceptions of identity. While ethics, aesthetics, and politics are frequently confused in both theory and practice, Tobin Siebers argues, they need to be understood as different ways of seeing the world.

He examines the concept of identity used by various theoretical schools and pinpoints the central stakes in recent arguments about art and pornography, abortion, cosmopolitanism, ethnocentrism, gender politics, the public sphere, racism, and victim's rights, showing why these arguments have been so ethically and politically unsatisfying. Along the way he uncovers how thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Clifford Geertz, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, J.

Hillis Miller, Richard Rorty, and Slavoj Zizek "cross the wires" among ethical, aesthetic, and political definitions of the self, at once exposing our basic assumptions about these definitions and beginning the work of reconceiving them.