Reason’s Other in quotation marks

If examined side by side with other philosophical versions of modern split subjectivity, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy appears to propose a similar kind of tension. Here self-division is produced by the opposing impulses within the self to delineate and transgress its own boundaries, a tension that has been traditionally taken to dissolve the ego. Against these traditional readings, I will argue that the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian produces a self-contained and agonistic self that does not differ from the identities described by other modern theories of the subject. Following a similar pattern of internalizing a punishing other, Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, Freud’s ego in tension with the superego, and Althusser’s subject of ideological interpellation (among other modern philosophical versions of subjectivity) also emerge as divided, self-punishing subjects. Here I will read Nietzsche’s reflections on tragedy in order to explore how the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian ultimately reveals the untenability of the subject of representation, rendering reflexivity and identity ultimately incompatible. Yet is not this very incompatibility a requirement of identity? Could it not be the case that the split opened up in the subject by the untenability of representation functions to veil the fact that the identity that ultimately affirms the ego paradoxically consists in the inability to coincide with oneself?

Nietzsche’s representation of antiquity, protagonized by the deities of tragic art, Apollo and Dionysus, functions as a rhetorical device for staging the constitution of modern identity as enabled by the aesthetic reflexivity enacted in art. ¹ In this critique of modernity, a passionate reading of Attic tragedy provides Nietzsche with important clues to dramatize himself as a modern subject. ² His choice of tragedy to reflect on split subjectivity, driven by the expectation that tragedy naturally illuminates modernity, has important precursors and followers, as confirmed by the central role of Oedipus Rex and Antigone in the reflections on subjectivity by Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin, ³ by the seminal position of the Oedipus myth in Freudian psychoanalysis and by the return to Antigone effected by Heidegger and Lacan, as well as by more recent thinkers, such as Gillian Rose and Judith Butler. ⁵ Like the others, Nietzsche does not read Attic tragedy as a text or a spectacle. I would like to suggest, following Peter Sloterdijk’s rethinking of modernity via Nietzsche in Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, that instead of reading the tragic as text, Nietzsche dons different masks in order to embody the two opposing tendencies of a self-contained and agonic modern subject. In so doing he stages a drama of identity that exceeds (by virtue of its performative character) any simple depiction of his subject matter, Attic tragedy, its deities, tragic action. Nietzsche’s rehearsal of the clash between two different tendencies in the human self, and his reflection on the inconsistencies of its constitution as individual, has made some of modernity’s affirmative supporters – such as Weber and Habermas – fear for the fragile balance on which the modern edifice stands. ⁶ Here I argue that it is precisely dialectic tensions such as that between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, as well as the lack of self-coincidence they entail, that define and fuel modern autonomous subjectivities and politics.

The Birth of Tragedy conceives of the art of tragedy as a difficult compromise between the Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies in the human self. The coupling of these antagonistic tendencies, writes Nietzsche, ‘ultimately generate[s] an equally Dionysian and Apollonian form of art – Attic tragedy’. ⁷ Apollo appears as the origin of the ‘beautiful illusion of dream works’, reason, representation and the boundaries of the self (principium individuationis). By contrast, the Dionysian is associated with music, ecstasy and dissolution of the ego in communion with a primordial Oneness. While Attic tragedy succeeded in harmonizing these two opposing tendencies, argues Nietzsche, in modernity such harmony is disrupted by the preponderance of the Apollonian (reason, theory, individuality, self-knowledge, science) over the Dionysian (dissolution of self, music, non-representative arts, aesthetics). Through joyful descriptions of Dionysian ecstasy, Nietzsche underscores how intensely individuation and its requirement of rationality have repressed sensibility and compartmentalized experience. Yet despite his explicit emphasis on the modern preponderance of the Apollonian over the Dionysian, Nietzsche’s enthusiastic depiction of the Dionysian tendency to dissolve ego boundaries has worried affirmative philosophers of modernity. As Schulte-Sasse notes, in inciting the self’s unity with a universal oneness, the Dionysian dissolution of boundaries as enacted in The Birth of Tragedy has been considered as a threat because of its putative ability to break the difficult balance between the theoretical and the moral (Apollonian knowledge) and the aesthetic (Dionysian self-expression) that sustains modernity. Any apology of self-dissolution that assigns the aesthetic a space independent from reason would assist, writes Habermas, ‘in the self-unveiling of a decentered form of subjectivity freed from all the limits of cognition and purpose, from all the imperatives of usefulness and morality’. ⁸ Hence, reasons Schulte-Sasse, in order to preserve the equilibrium between theory and experience, unrestricted self-expression must be kept under control, ‘deferred to a delimited and relatively autonomous aesthetic realm’ whereby ‘the aesthetic as the Other of reason is made to eschew its radical otherness and turn itself into reason’s supplement’. ⁹ The potential threat of art has been subdued by restricting it to the role of soothing the theoretical soul with ‘metaphysical solace’. ¹⁰ As the counterpart of rationality art provides a field for self-expression that compensates for the agonic character of the principle of individuation on which science, legal systems and institutions are developed.

Let us explore Dionysian ecstasy in more detail in order to understand why, despite Nietzsche’s affirmation of the preponderance of the Apollonian in modern times, the power of the Dionysian is still perceived as a threat. Indeed, the Dionysus of the Bacchae would seem to manifest itself by inciting self-dissolution and erasing the boundaries between illusion and reality, thus ‘shattering’ (Nietzsche’s word [The Birth of Tragedy, p. 59]) our sense of identity as well as our symbolic social position, and precipitating us into an uncertain terrain. ¹¹ Donning the bearded mask of Dionysus, men and women become possessed by him in a communion with divine otherness, as Jean-Pierre Vernant explains. ¹² The point of Dionysian identification, writes Vernant in his own reading of the Bacchae,

… is to become other oneself, swinging into the gaze of the god or becoming assimilated to him through mimetic contagion. … Wiping out prohibitions, confusing categories, and disintegrating social frameworks, Dionysus introduces into the heart of human life an otherness so complete that it has the power, as does Gorgo, to propel its enemies toward horror, chaos, and death, just as it can also raise its devotees to a state of ecstasy, a full and joyous communion with the divine. ¹³

Under Dionysian possession both King Pentheus and the women of Thebes are ‘lost in an “in-between state”’; ‘they suffer a personality split’ between their normal state and either ecstasy or horror. ¹⁴ In Nietzsche’s interpretation, the absorption of the Greek spectator ‘into a satyr chorus’ has the effect of suspending individuation, a suspension he expresses in appealing terms: ‘[A]ll that separated man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity which led back into the heart of nature.’ ¹⁵ By equating culture, society and the state to ‘all that separated man from man’, Nietzsche seems to advocate a more primitive union with nature. He conveys this union and its subsequent awakening of ‘the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature’ ¹⁶ through various idyllic images.

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature, which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Freely, earth proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of prey of the rocks and desert approach. ¹⁷

The intoxication goes on: ‘Now the slave is a free man’; ‘In song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is in his way toward flying into the air, dancing’; ‘He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art’. ¹⁸ That so many readers of The Birth detect a prevalence of Dionysian dissolution over Apollo’s principius individuationis should therefore not come as a surprise, given the seductiveness of these descriptions. Nor should it seem surprising that Nietzsche’s claims about the Dionysian revelation of ‘authentic man’ and ‘an unvarnished expression of truth’ ¹⁹ have inspired essentialist interpretations that denigrate culture for repressing human intimate passions, passions they find conjured up by tragedy in their purest form. ²⁰

But even if Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy were considered to inflict a potential disruption on modern self-identity (a claim I interrogate below), such disruption could not come from the Dionysian tendency toward provoking ‘the shattering of the individual and his fusion with the original Oneness’, ²¹ ‘de-individuating’ him. ²² The fact is that neither in Euripides’ Bacchae nor in Nietzsche’s description of it does Dionysian dissolution of boundaries prevail over Apollonian serenity, reason and representation, as is commonly understood. Dionysian expression is tamed by the need to represent itself, and representation, always intrinsically Apollonian, is a symbolic operation. ²³ Perhaps this is why Nietzsche invites us to interpret tragedy as ‘a Dionysiac chorus which again and again discharges itself in Apollonian images’, ²⁴ as a containment of the Dionysian by Apollo that Sloterdijk eloquently describes as a ‘paroxysm set apart in Apollonian quotation marks’. ²⁵ Hence Nietzsche’s reaffirmation of the ultimate predominance of Apollo:

It is Apollo who tranquilizes the individual by drawing boundary lines and who, by enjoining again and again the practice of self-knowledge, reminds him of the holy, universal norms. But lest the Apollonian tendency freeze all form into Egyptian rigidity, and in attempting to prescribe its orbit to each particular wave inhibit the movement of the lake, the Dionysiac flood tide periodically destroys all the little circles in which the Apollonian will would confine Hellenism. ²⁶

Apollo is therefore the securer of identity in whose framework Dionysian ecstasy takes place. Rather than uprooting reason, individuality and self-identity, then, the Dionysian ‘flood tide’ contributes to Apollonian equilibrium by temporarily destroying Apollonian rigidity, so that the political and legal infrastructure of the city (as well as the divided subjectivity grounding it) can periodically overcome its limitations, assimilate its others and gather new strength.

The cult of Dionysus constitutes, in short, a ‘controlled trance’, ‘a form of social behavior’ ‘promoted to the status of public institution’ ²⁷ that fulfills the important political function of obligating what aspires to be identical to itself to confront and accommodate every otherness it encounters. Euripides’ Bacchae thus rehearses, according to Vernant, the danger run by a city that confines itself within its walls. ‘The victorious eruption of Dionysus’ on the tragic stage ‘is a sign that otherness is being given its place, with full honors, at the center of the social system.’ ²⁸ The two-week yearly Dionysian festivals offer a space for direct contact with demonic forces that promotes an enabling loss of control and unrepressed but safe self-expression under Apollo’s protection. What appears to celebrate the transgression of identity and the disruption of Apollonian rationality by Dionysiac frenzy, privileging what is other to the law, in fact contributes to a more successful functioning of civic boundaries and the subjectivities enabled by them. Subjectivity in its tragic and modern versions, based on self-division, is reinforced through its temporary shattering (or rather through the controlled illusion of its shattering), by representing itself at risk of imminent peril, in dialectic relation with its others.

What The Birth of Tragedy ultimately confirms is that identity depends on difference rather than on sameness. Thus, the Dionysian communion with other men and with nature in Oneness, achieved by means of an intoxication with strong sensual and sexual content, never represents a real dissolution of self in contact with a disruptive other, but rather a relation with the different which domesticates it into the similar or simply assimilates it to the self. Even in its ‘barbarian’ version, when still untamed by representation, ²⁹ the Dionysian as Other never interrupts the self. Therefore, the resistance that Nietzsche’s Birth may be said to introduce into modern subjectivity is not related to real dissolution (as certain defenders of modernity dread), to irruption of alterity, or to any ultimate risk of disindividuation. On the contrary, individuation is actually reinforced after the Dionysian festival ‘in Apollonian quotation marks’, because the latter fulfills the task of exorcizing disruptive impulses from daily life.

In fact, the confrontation of Apollo and Dionysus results in the assimilation of the Dionysian by Apollo, in a process that Sloterdijk significantly denominates a ‘clandestine doubling of the Apollonian’:

In truth, the polarity between Apollo and Dionysus is not a turbulent opposition that vacillates freely between the two extremes; we are dealing much more here with a stationary polarity that leads to a clandestine doubling of the Apollonian. The Apollonian Unified Subject makes certain, through the mechanism of the silently established axiom of balance, that the Dionysian Other never comes into play as itself, but only as the dialectical or symmetrical Other to the Unified Subject. An Apollonian principle governs the antagonism between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. … Apollo is, even within Nietzsche himself, the ruler in the antithetical relationship with his Other. ³⁰

This doubling of the Apollonian in the act of hosting its own confrontation with the Dionysian must have cost the Apollonian the illusion of autonomy and foundation. ³¹ Sloterdijk, who depicts Nietzsche as a ‘mime’ who in The Birth of Tragedy dramatizes himself in an act of thinking on stage, argues that now the young philologist-philosopher, reflecting on his own subjectivity, can acknowledge that ‘he himself is not a “One”, a Unified Subject, but rather a dual subject who dreams of being able to possess himself as one’. This duality translates into uneasy and distrustful thinking, characterized by a ‘fluctuation in reflection between the Apollonian and Dionysian dimensions of the mask’. ³² For the sake of achieving a certain harmony, each tendency in the human self experiences a loss in this containment or taming choreographed by Apollo, henceforth appearing not as itself, but rather in the place of its absent self.

Sloterdijk concludes that the disruption of the prevalent ways of understanding modern modes of social organization as Nietzsche envisions it in the Birth of Tragedy would not come from the Dionysian tendency towards dissolving identity, but rather from Nietzsche’s reflection on the impossibility of achieving a homogeneous subjectivity. A serene and complete representation of the modern subject is impossible because that subject is split by the twofold impulse towards fortifying and dissolving its boundaries. The desire of seamless identity, in other words, cannot be satisfied by definition. Rescuing art from the role of compensating for the deficiencies of theory to which modernity confines it, Nietzsche attributes to it the task of revealing that a unified subjectivity is an illusion. Art disrupts the modern conception of the unified autonomous subject precisely by reflecting its split nature as an impossibility for representation.

‘Thus,’ writes Sloterdijk, ‘Apollo is the calculating subject who enters into a daring game with his own dissolution. … The Apollonian suspected that he was at bottom only a Dionysian “phenomenon”, while the Dionysian saw through himself with the penetrating clairvoyancy of one who is reminded of his Apollonian castration.’ ³³ Far from a naïve conception of art’s ability to express the parts of the self excluded by theory, Nietzsche’s argument presupposes a complex concept of art in which the principle of representation (Apollonian), confronted with the alterity it needs to represent (Dionysian), perceives itself as existing only in order to perform that containment, that is, as the agent of a representation that must necessarily fail.

Representation is characterized, in other words, as already disrupted, as having a wound at its core, for in the reconciliation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in their ‘exchanges of gifts’, mimesis becomes aware of its inability to reflect reality as a whole. According to Nietzsche, the aesthetic representation of modernity, if seen as governed by the tension between Apollo and Dionysus, can no longer be considered to reflect a coherent and complete image of reality. But is this a real disruption, and is ‘wound’ an accurate term in this context? If the disruption were such, how could one imagine a reference point called ‘reality’, an idea of what it would be like, and the awareness of the insufficiency of any representation of it? Is not our imagination of a whole reality existing ‘out there’ defined in negative terms as that which we cannot comprehend? As Kant already made clear in his ‘Antinomy of Pure Reason’, reality is a subjective construction. ³⁴ Nietzsche writes: ‘The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of symbols.’ ³⁵ If we examine representation from the complex perspective opened up by tragedy, the fact that representation offers a symbolic image of reality instead of mirroring it, as Aristotle insists in the Poetics, does not constitute its failure, but rather an extraordinary achievement. To represent is to re-create or exceed that which is represented. According to Aristotle’s ‘mimesis praxeos’, artistic representation reconfigures the initial field of reference, proposing new meanings. ³⁶ So if representation is differential (is defined by oppositional relationships), if it not only succeeds when it fails, but also carries with itself a surplus of creativity (‘the world becomes more than it was’), are not these traits rather unlikely to produce a real break? Far from jeopardizing representation, its apparent insufficiencies define it. The question that remains open is whether what exceeds representation can signal itself in it.

At this point I would like to suggest that tragic art has the ability to exceed this dialectic of self and other that defines identity, for it does not offer any ultimate reconciliation, equilibrium, or end of the tragic, as one could have expected from its ‘Apollonian nature’. Not only does Dionysus not ‘ever come to announce a better fate in the beyond’ or ‘offer a soul access to immortality’. ³⁷ Strictly speaking, Dionysus himself never comes: he eludes representation, and is therefore absent from the tragedies. ³⁸ Mediating in the clash between self-dissolving irrational forces and individuating rationality – between the divine and the legal – is not within Apollo’s power, since Apollo himself participates in both. As Paul Ricoeur observes, Greek tragedy never ‘offered a genuine end of the tragic; it always proceeds by substituting some other religious schema and not by resolving the internal tensions that issue from the tragic schema itself’. ³⁹

Whether it becomes a religion of ‘divine possession’ – that is to say, penetration of the divine into the human – or a religion of ‘divine ecstasy’ – that is to say, escape from the human into the divine – religion in its Apollonian or Dionysiac form is not a resolution of the tragic. The authority of the Delphic oracle does indeed reassure, guide and in this sense pacify; Apollo was the great pacifier insofar as he was, through the intermediary of the oracle, the great counselor, the guarantor of the legislative activity of the great founders of laws; but Apollo is also the great master of ritual purifications, which means that his counsel, although it gives some security to the human word, does not heal the ‘tragic’ soul, since recourse to the old purifications is necessary after all. ⁴⁰

In attributing to Apollo the ‘drawing of boundary lines’, in presenting him as defender ‘of the holy, universal norms’, Nietzsche would seem to endow the god of Delphi with the ability to heal the tragic soul. But Apollo ultimately lacks that healing ability in spite of his integrity, for tragic defilement is incurable. ⁴¹ On the other hand, tragedy does not offer any ultimate redemption through Dionysus.

Rather than healing a split soul or promoting an irruption of alterity, Dionysus provides an outlet for anguish. Thus, continues Ricoeur, ‘his ecstasy relieves man of the weight of his responsibility by changing him into someone else. Dionysus … offers him an exaltation, a sort of sacred immoderation, by which he escapes from himself rather than becoming reconciled with himself.’ ⁴² Indeed, Greek drama depicts a rationality wounded by ambiguities and fissures, institutionalizing conflict. In energetically unleashing disruption, tragedy, itself one of the most important sources of philosophical illumination, introduces an irreconcilable tension at the very heart of the western philosophical tradition that situates its origin in tragedy and calls on it for support. Or perhaps it is because the modern split subject recognizes itself in the tragic protagonist that it has recourse to tragedy. ⁴³

If Apollonian energies ultimately prevail over Dionysian madness, why would defenders of modernity fear that Apollonian universality and reason may be threatened by self-dissolution? Does the fact that Dionysus momentarily confuses ‘the boundaries between illusion and reality’, conjuring up ‘the beyond in the here and now’, ⁴⁴ pose any further threat to modern reason, technology, politics? Yet if in the Dionysian festivals suspension of control took place only within a limited period of time; if, furthermore, Nietzsche describes modern subjectivity as the compromise between the conflicting tendencies in the ego towards reaffirming and dissolving its boundaries – a compromise he finds instantiated in the very Attic tragedy that in his youth he hoped to see reborn through Wagner’s music – could the distress provoked by Nietzsche’s text be related, rather, to the fact that Dionysus introduces on the tragic stage a space for the imaginary by making present and real what is absent and threatening? Is it the fact that artistic fiction was conceived in tragedy and through tragedy that modern critics of Nietzsche are trying to neutralize? Indeed, why would modernity locate the origin of autonomous agency in the very tragic setting in which such agency seems to be most radically denied?

Aristotle’s conception of catharsis notwithstanding, fiction does not emerge in tragedy as a source of purification or comfort. Instead of simply offering consolation, as art is often expected to do, tragic fiction stages the fractures in the divine and legal sources of authority, depicting an ambiguous and baffling conception of human agency. In the tragic institutionalization of conflict the rationalism, law and order that Apollo symbolizes are not exempt from a deep scrutiny that reveals a shifting legal justice which is ultimately inseparable from religion, as evidenced by its opaque terminology. ⁴⁵ Hence, when tragic characters try to take action, their initiative turns against them with fatal results. Aeschylus' Agamemnon debates between two undesirable alternatives, namely, to let his men die on a becalmed sea and fail in his duty to attack Troy, or to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. The protagonists of the Bacchae, in turn, do indeed confuse reality and illusion in an intoxication that culminates in the unwitting murder of the young king Pentheus at the hands of his mother Agave. The self-division of characters in the plays written by Aeschylus and Euripides, a self-division that is related not to psychology, but rather to the structure of the action, is produced by an unsettling indeterminacy as to the effectiveness of agency. Although Aristotle the practical critic might have had an inkling of agency’s ambiguity and constraints when he instituted tragic reversal as the main operation of the tragic plot in the Poetics, the philosopher writing the Nicomachean Ethics triumphantly declares the overcoming of agency's constraints and of the subsequent tensions that, significantly, still underlie modern subjectivities today. In this sense, Aristotle’s privileging of tragic fiction over history – of ‘things that may happen’ over ‘things that have happened’ – as a source of inspiration for the philosopher ⁴⁶ may be taken as a cautionary reminder for modern and contemporary thinkers alike: philosophy should not restrict itself to the possibilities dictated by reason alone, lest it miss the fact that modern versions of subjectivity rely intensely on an ambivalent origin of agency. ⁴⁷

The threat purportedly posed by tragedy when one looks to the actual plays may be related to the ways in which tragic art divides the characters, making them cooperate with necessity and turn against themselves. Yet this pattern is not unfamiliar to us, since it propels the self-division that inaugurates us as modern subjects. The choice between the Dionysian and the Apollonian is a false one, because individuation and dissolution are not, strictly speaking, different. The tension between them, governed by the need of symbolization, only reaffirms the same. In effect, Dionysian dissolution constitutes just the reverse side of individuation, it reaffirms the self by providing it with an outlet. However fallible, the subjectivity resulting from this tension is still a self-conscious subjectivity, a self-centered identity that misses and recovers itself by identifying every other.

In concluding, I would like to underscore the fact that Nietzsche’s account of tragedy is oblivious of the concrete tragic plays, with the possible exception of a few aspects depicted in the Bacchae. Although Nietzsche envisions art as a site of resistance to modern individuation, the impulse towards not representing unified images (a phenomenon that Nietzsche considers characteristic of modern aesthetic representation) is already at play in 5th-century-BC Athens. Greek tragedy already represents a non-unified image of the mythical and the legal, which are involved in a clash in which none prevails; of authority - both religious and legal - by rehearsing the inconsistencies within it; of the human self who, perceiving itself self-sufficient, introduces a resistance in superior causalities but fails, because it is not yet autonomous, and it might never be; and of the interrelated illusions of autonomy and agency. ⁴⁸ The question that arises is whether this tragic self, who has ceased to be a model to become a problem (according to Vernant), is any less self-sufficient than the modern subject.

If we concur with Sloterdijk’s argument in Thinker on Stage that The Birth of Tragedy is above all a dramaturgy in which Nietzsche the mime dramatizes the tragedy of the modern subject, we should end by asking whether Nietzsche is really acting on a tragic stage. Nietzsche’s dramaturgy is dialectical – even as it preserves the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian part of the mask – in a way in which tragedy, the art of impossible mediation, is not. A deeper parallel between tragic and modern subjectivities is suggested in the ambiguity of the tragic word, in the fissures in normative power, in the ambivalence of tragic characters as to the origin and possibility of their own agency. For do not the irreconcilable tensions that structure Attic tragedy configure also the modern social order that produces us as subjects? In his self-exploration of ‘the untenability of reflexive subjects’, ⁴⁹ an ‘intellectual psychodrama’ in which he dons ‘the double mask of the deities’, Sloterdijk’s Nietzsche, preoccupied with the problem of lacking his other, entirely ignores the alterity of the tragic text.

Since Nietzsche locates the possibility of resistance to modern identity precisely in the alterity of the aesthetic, it is particularly important to note his apparent lack of interest in the literary word, and therefore in the alterity of sense. According to Sloterdijk, in his self-dramatization, Nietzsche ‘has made of himself a genius of self-knowledge as self-accusation. … Whatever position the ego may assume, whatever “representation” of itself it may choose to offer, it will perpetually sense that the other side, the displaced aspect, is lacking.’ ⁵⁰ In its oscillation between the two halves of the mask, the subject must always lack ‘its Other’, because self-reflection and identity cannot occur simultaneously. Questioning the famous inscription on Apollo’s temple at Delphi (‘Know thyself’), as well as Descartes’ identification of thinking and being, Lacan writes: ‘“I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) … I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.’ ⁵¹ This dislocation between self-consciousness and identity, this inability to coincide with one’s thought (with ‘oneself’), is precisely what modern subjectivity is about. Perhaps the dialectic self-representation that constitutes modern subjectivities serves to conceal or evade the impact of an irreducible other, an event-other, even if by this is meant only the other of thought.