As Susan Hekman explains, "in the current debate between the modernist and postmodernist approaches to language and knowledge, the question of the subject has been a central theme. Modernism's adherence to the transcendental subject of the Cartesian and Kantian traditions is fundamental to its definition. The rational, autonomous, disembodied, and constituting subject of this tradition is the epistemological ground of the search for indubitable knowledge, the search that is the hallmark of modernity. It was this definition of the subject that separated modern philosophy from its premodern roots, and it is this same subject that separates modernity from its contemporary critics" (1098).