當代台灣知識分子是一個矛盾而曖昧的群體。本文旨在探討他們如何在對權力中心的抵抗或依附的關係中建立某種主體性幻覺。令人困惑的問題包括：為什麼在台灣無畏反對獨裁的異議知識分子（比如陳映真和李敖）對大陸的另一個強權卻充滿友善甚至諂媚？本文剖析以陳映真為代表的現代知識分子型左派和以李敖為代表的前現代文人式自由主義，如何由於他們的美學保守主義而缺乏批判的全面性和複雜性，並認同了某種同質化的理念模式。本文試圖說明，自足的批判主體只可能是被「大他者」的符號秩序所規定和俘獲的幻覺主體。本文進一步討論了經由美學現代主義訓練的知識分子（比如龍應台和陳芳明）是否，或在多大程度上，有可能將多元、雜糅與反諷帶入文化政治思考，最終將批判的主體與主體的批判結合到一種異質立場的文化政治話語中。

Contemporary Taiwan intellectuals appear to be full of contradictions and ambiguities. This paper investigates how they establish an illusion of subjectivity in their resistant or compliant relationship with the central power. The puzzling questions include: Why do dissident intellectuals, such as Chen Ying-Zhen and Li Ao, offer friendship or even flattery to another hegemonic power in China? The paper analyzes how modern intellectual leftists, represented by Chen Ying-Zhen, and premodern-style liberal literati, represented by Li Ao, both abhorring literary modernism, lack critical complexities and aspire to homogeneous ideals, due to their aesthetic conservatism. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the presumably self-sufficient critical subject is doomed to be an illusory subject stipulated and captured by the symbolic order of the Lacanian big Other. The paper continues to discuss whether, or to what extent, such intellectuals as Lung Ying-Tai and Chen Fang-Ming, who have been trained in aesthetic modernism, may bring pluralized, hybridized and ironized subjectivity into culturo-political thinking, and combine the critical subject and the subjective (self-) critique into a culturo-political discourse with heterogeneous positions.