The Invention of the Self

despite believing myself to be an integrated self, I talk to myself as if I am composed of several ‘people’.

regardless of its content, the thinking process presupposes the identity of the thinker, and thereby imposes the parameters of selfhood on whatever it addresses.

to the extent that we are identified as a ‘self’, we are merely a performance of the possibilities latent in language.

on the one hand, thoughts are expressed on behalf of an integrated nameable self and, therefore, seem to be ‘my’ thoughts; on the other hand, the fact that they are spoken in words, which are designed to communicate between people, suggests a degree of internal fragmentation.

whatever the outcome of cultural conventions and conditioning may be, if we take the sense of self that is implicit in them to be an absolute and immortal truth, oblivious to the cultural contexts that give it substance and significance, we are likely to become as confused as we would be if we aspired to meet a fictional character from a film in th