(PDF) Identity & Ichlosigkeit

Identity and Ichlosigkeit: The Liberation of Life and Imagination from Narrative Rowan G. Tepper 12/28/2005 §Introductory Remarks§ By way of introduction, the following constitutes the result of a relentless obsession with the paradoxically ephemeral and tyrannical nature of personal identity, and the idea that self-narration might render these unceasing changes coherent and obviate the oppressive persistence of the past. By means of throughgoing reading and reflection it has become clear to me that while narrative may constitute a particular means of achieving this end, it is rarely successful, being itself a double-edged sword that more often than not leads to a Faustian bargain that exchanges liberation for constancy. I have found an exemplary instance of this pact in Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory, particularly where in Oneself as Another, he dismisses stories of Ichlosigkeit as narrating the impossibility of ethical self- constancy and thereby the impossibility of a self. I contend that the demand of self-constancy must be replaced, for it renders the self irreducibly heteronomous with respect to its narrative constitu- tion. Conversely, it is well nigh impossible to deny the power of narrative with respect to life and it is ill-advised to subject narration to Ricoeur's artificial constraints and commitments. Through a strategic appropriation of the space opened up by Ricoeur's theory of the self and by means of Gilles Deleuze's writings on individuation and the self, a foreword written by Georges Bataille for the belated publication of Blue of Noon, and Maurice Blanchot's short story The Madness of the Day, I hope to both unearth narrative's genuinely emancipatory dimension and discover the encompassing imaginative process to which narration belongs as a derivative form. This re-thinking of narrative and selfhood will, in the end, result in a more robust theory that is neither troubled by the moment of alienation inherent in selfhood, nor dependent upon a subjectivistic metaphysics that tends to- ward both the exclusion of conflicting narratives and its own elevation to the status of an immutable master narrative. In the last account, this refiguration will allow us to chart a course between the Scylla of metanarrative subjectivity and the Charybdis of alienation; one which cannot be “followed” by Ricoeur's theory without succumbing to one or the other. In the ensuing discussion I will make explicit the topology of the space in which selfhood is 1 of 14 constituted and refigured: the “gravitational space of threefold mimesis,”1 which in light of Ricoeur's subsequent work, turns out to be a specific region of the topological space implied by the triple di- alectics of the self. At the beating heart of this investigation lies the perennial question of philoso- phy, that is, the ontological status of the self through its modifications over time, and specifically with reference to Ricoeur, that of the desubstantialized identity of selfhood as ipse. §The Triple Dialectic of Selfhood in Abstract Space§ With respect to the foregoing question, the conclusion of the final volume of Time and Nar- rative serves to bring Ricoeur's theory of the textually mediated mimetic refiguration of narrative to bear on the question of selfhood and identity. The level of the individual and the question of identity had been largely neglected in these volumes but become the focus of Oneself as Another. In this transi- tional moment the centrality of these questions becomes apparent, for already the problem of conti- nuity of the self through change comes to the fore: But what is the basis for the permanence of this proper name? What justifies our taking the subject of action, so designated by his, her, or its proper name, as the same throughout a life that stretches from birth to death? The answer has to be narrative. To answer the question “Who?”... is to tell the story of a life. The story tells about the action of the 'who.' And the identity of this 'who’ therefore itself must be a narrative identity. Without recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antinomy with no solution..2 So far, so good; or so it seems. But already Ricoeur has short circuited the question with his focus on the self as the subject of action and the question “Who?” that takes one's proper name as his or her privileged designation. In so doing, the criticism leveled against him by Crispin Sartwell, that in introducing narrative idenity, “...there are no arguments here that are not more or less obvi- ously tendentious and question begging,”3 is prima facie accurate. Here, narration is indeed presup- posed and brought in as deus ex machina because, in order to answer the question “Who?” we are forced to take permanence and the proper name as a priori indices of an individual for whose muta- tions must be accounted. Consequently this can occur only in a story that guarantees the perma- nence of his or her identity. This insight regarding the centrality of identity-permanece is critical, for Ricoeur immediately continues: Either we must posit a subject identical with itself through... its different states... or... we must hold that this identical subject is nothing more than a substantialist illusion. This dilemma disappears if we substitute identity understood in the sense of being the same (idem), identity understood in the sense of oneself as self-same (ipse). The difference between idem and ipse is nothing more than the difference 1 Paul Ricoeur Time and Narrative Volume Three, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (1990: University of Chicago Press, Chicago), pg 4 2 Ibid, pg 246 3 Crispin Sartwell End of Story, (2000: SUNY Press, Albany), pg 47 2 of 14 between a substantial or formal identity and a narrative identity In order to retain the identity of a subject of action, Ricoeur is forced to desubstantialize identity. This desubstantialization is incomplete; and it changes little of substance, for the ontological status of “oneself as ipse” is unclear both here and in Oneself as Another. Thus it is no wonder that he will, in the latter work, ground ipseity in the grammar of action and passivity (subject and object), conse- quent to one's capacity to be both agent and patient with respect to one's own body and the actions of others. This evinces Ricoeur's dependence upon a largely discredited subject-object metaphysics that consequently implies that ipse is merely the figure of the self that is simultaneously subject and object, subjection and objection. Thus we must be suspicious of the supposed self-evidence of conceiving of the self merely as the subject or object of worldly action. Ricoeur continues to situate ipseity as the transcendental condition of possibility for the process of self-refiguration Unlike the abstract identity of the Same, this narrative identity... can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of one lifetime. The subject then appears both as a reader and the writer of its own life, as Proust would have it.... the story of a life continues to be refigured by all the... stories a subject tells about himself or herself. This refiguration makes this life into a cloth woven of stories told.4 Hence, for Ricoeur, ipseity is precisely the oscillation of the self between activity and passivity, writing and reading. He continues a few pages later: Narrative identity is not a stable and seamless identity. Just as it is possible to compose several plots on the subject of the same incidents, so it is always possible to weave different, even opposed, plots about our lives... Narrative identity continues to make and unmake itself...5 This fundamental structural instability in narrated selfhood is what necessitates abandoning the idem- identity of the Cartesian Cogito; for, over time the self of narrative identity clearly cannot be held to be the same in the sense of idem: it is constantly changing, refigured by the events of life and through their contemporary or retrospective emplotments. Expelling idem-identity from the privileged ground of the self, Ricouer merely transfers its foundational function into the concept of anchoring. This in fact constitutes a significant advance, in- sofar as the inscription of time as a “dated now” and place as a “localized here”6 designate a unique, irreplacible perspective. But according to Ricoeur, the I is also inscribed: ...by virtue of the illocutionary force of a particular speech-act – naming – onto the public list of prop- er names in accordance with the conventional rules that govern [their] attribution... what we call a birth certificate contains a triple inscription: [in accordance with convention] a proper name... a date... 4 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Vol. 3., pg 246 5 Ibid, pg 248-9 6 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Translated by Kathleen Blamey (1992: University of Chicago Press, Chicago), pg 53 3 of 14 a birthplace...7 The more or less permanent correspondence of the I and physical self thus constantly refers back to the αρχη of ones singular birth and its registration according to social convention. However, this correspondence already inheres in a temporal series of spatial inscriptions, which shows that this fi- nal inscription is the initial prescription of social identity. Therefore, in order to model the space of the self as such, we must restrict the function of anchoring to concrete spatial positions and the path it traces between its socially inscribed origin and terminus. At this point the unique path that is traced is the fundamental continuity of the self over time. This does not say aught of the dynamics of identity, for at any of these points selfhood and identity may be radically divergent with respect to any other point. This is where Ricoeur's tripartite dialectics: idem and ipse, Self and I, and self and other than self, can be seen to define a supplementary ab- stract space in which the self is plotted in its various permutations. It is in this space that narrative and threefold mimesis unfolds; and it is this space that reveals their insufficient and derivative na- ture. Ricoeur's dialectical triad dictates that this topological space has three axes, defined accord- ing to these dialectics. Let us here sketch these axes: the first axis corresponds to the dialectical op- position of the immediately posited subject (I) and the “self... implied reflexively”8; the second axis reflects the dialectic resulting from the “splitting of 'same' into the domains of idem and ipse”9 which, insofar as it applies equally to the I and the self, is correlative to the first in the strong sense, insofar as they co-determine identity and determine one another by way of this co-determination;10 the final axis of this space corresponds to the dialectic of selfhood and otherness (which includes all that is other than self) and is correlative in a less stringent sense yet is what ensures the continual circula- tion of identity within this space. Now imagine this dialectical space, the space into which identity is projected through narra- tive and other means, regions of which define the various permutations of identity. This topological construction lends form to the perpetual instability of identity, whether or not it is constituted through narrative; it permits us to study the dynamics of identity by means of tracing the mutations 7 Ibid, pg 54 8 Ibid, pg 17 9 Ibid, pg 16 10 In more mathematical terms, these two dialectics constitute a parametric equation descriptive of the position of iden- tity. The simplest form of such an equation would be: x + y = 1, where x and y are independent variables that indi- rectly determine one another. 4 of 14 of identity as trajectories and locations within this space. Ricoeur's claims amount to arguing that identity traces a circle of sorts, suspended between the poles in a zone in which they overlap: identity is within the space where ipse and idem, self and other and myself and I overlap. In this claim it is evi- dent, in light of our earlier discussion, that the self – other dialectic is both constitutive and regulative of identity. §Threefold Mimesis and the Telos§ Ricoeur argues that the circle of narrative and mimesis operates within this space, mimesis1 fully accounting for its basic regularity. Narrative prefiguration of the world populates this space with objects and determinate, teleologically oriented gradients of actions and practices. These stria- tions, possible trajectories of emplotted narrative identity, are established by virtue of “our compe- tence to utilize in a significant manner the conceptual network that structurally distinguishes the do- main of action,”11 and “in the symbolic resources of the practical field.”12 Mimesis1 operates to inter- nalize the socio-linguistic conceptual network of action in general (including agent/patient, motive/intent/goal) and the organization of particular practices consisting of: ... [a] series of nesting relations – hence relations of subordination of partial actions to global action – [which] is joined with the relations of coordination between systemic and teleological segments only to the extent that both sorts of connection are unified under the laws of meaning that make the work... a practice.13 Mimetic prefiguration thus establishes that the social sphere is constitutive of narrative identity and regulates its transformations. Insofar as emplotment operates according to practices and symbols, with their respective rules of meaning, narrative in this sense would result in a story that is immedi- ately intelligible to any member of the same society. The teleological level that is implicit in practices and the conceptual network of action comes to the fore in Ricoeur's discussion of mimesis2, by means of which: ...the configuration of the plot imposes the “sense of an ending” on the indefinite succession of inci- dents. I just spoke of the “end point” as the point from where the story can be seen as a whole. I may now add that it is in the act of retelling rather than in that of telling that this structural function of clo- sure can be discerned.14 Mimesis2 subordinates the teloi of manifold actions, practices and intentions to a narratively imposed telos, which Ricoeur insists must be posited in order for a narrative to be intelligible; for with refer- 11 Paul Ricoeur Time and Narrative: Volume One tranlsated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1984), pg 54 12 Ibid. pg 56 13 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pg 154 14 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume One, pg 67 5 of 14 ence to this end, configuration “transforms the succession of events into one meaningful whole which is the correlate of the act of assembling the events together and which makes the story fol- lowable.”15 In narration we are answerable to the demands of reception; to narrate is, for Ricoeur, to configure events, agents, intentions, etc. in such a way that although past, they can be seen leading through the present toward some telos, which renders the narrative “followable.” Narrative identity is precisely the self that teleologically refigures life events in terms of the configuration of past events and future aims; and most importantly, the self who can retell this story. In our topological model, configuration is the force exerted by and other-than-self which displaces identity from its pre-narrative course and its distracted pursuit of manifold teloi , indicating a singular telos and the appropriate practices for its pursuit. This is to say that configuration indicates a return to self along a line of practice whose determinacy is ensured by a drive toward closure and communicability. Refiguration of identity is then the result of this taking up of the telos of configura- tion and its accompanying practices as a project or program. Even though the force of the other can be exerted from manifold points and stabilizing identity and its changes, narrative identity can not rest as any particular identity. This restlessness is partially because there is no way to make one's story definitive, for the “figures of emplotment borrowed from fiction or history”16 empower imagination to always posit futher teloi upon outliving a narrative end. It is also due to the fecundity of experi- ence from which narration and imagination emerge. This begs the question of whether narrative, in this form, is the privileged place for the exhibition of the possibilities of identity and the world. §κατα τον τελοs§ The Self: Fragmented and Dispersed They insisted that I explain every act. And wherever a rationale could not be fashioned, I bore the stigmata of having failed to narrate, of having falsified my story. They enthroned perpetual guilt and instilled a moralizing compulsion to explain every action. The imperative to explain has been over- thrown but there remains still a sense of falling short. Every success rings hollow, while every short- coming resounds. I imagine a trial in which conviction is assured. I imagine myself as both defendant and prosecutor; the judge and jury: the idealized images of past lovers, whom I, in the past, had wronged. Absolution: Impossible - the future foreclosed; so this image proclaims. In my weaker moments I imagine that the life I lead is that of a fugitive from this most intimate of tri- bunals. I've absconded, yet no other choice remained. What traces have I left, aside from a path lit- tered with the detritus of discarded dreams? My despairing hope is that somewhere beneath the smol- dering rubble lies some fond memory; that is all one can wish of the past. 5 June, 2005 15 Ibid. 16 Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, pg 162 6 of 14 I wrote these lines in the final months of a time of profound alienation from the world of ac- tion. These lines exhibit the depths of dispossession and a failure of narrative with such poignancy that today I have difficulty conceiving myself as their author. I found myself betrayed by identity and by narrative; their attestation was empty while they had become instruments of my oppression. Through unceasing narrative explanation of my actions I had thereby refigured a part of myself in the internalization of my persecutory other. Thus I renounced both identity and narrative, in toto, and yet something remained. Voluntarily deprived of identity and the ability to narrate, I remained, as did imagination. The exigency of this image impelled me to record it in writing; writing that exhibits no action and no narrative and in which I found myself fractured into three identities: the self of imagi- nation, persecutor, and fugitive self. I did not lose myself; rather I witnessed my own fragmentation. I say witnessed because I did not create or configure this image; this image came upon me and I found mysef refigured in this writing, a mimetic representation of self-dispersion. I am compelled by this experience to assert that this fragmentation precedes the constitution of the self; the limits of narrative and identity reveal this and lay bare the unseen continuity of the desubstantialized self. Deleuze is firmly in my camp as regards the status of the self and the constitu- tion of identity. In Difference and Repetition, published seven years prior to The Rule of Metaphor, we al- most find a preemptive challenge to Ricoeur when we read: Artificial signs imply active syntheses - that is to say the passage from spontaneous imagination to the active faculties of reflective representation, memory and intelligence.17 The reflective capacity which is taken by Ricoeur as an a priori of selfhood as such is, in this view, a capability that is itself conditioned by imagination. Cornelius Castoriadis, too, is in absolute accord with Deleuze. In World in Fragments he writes: The absolute condition of possibility of reflection is the imagination. It is because the human being is imagination that it can posit as an “entity” something that is not so: its own process of thought. It is because imagination is unbridled that it can reflect... Reflectiveness presupposes that it is possible for the imagination to posit as existing that which is not.... to see double, to see oneself double, to see oneself while seeing oneself as other.18 In these views, imagination predates reflection as well as any activity, as such, including narration and interpretation. The imagination must thus operate where there is no self, as such. What figure of the individual exists on this plane? This figure is none other than that consist- 17 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pg 77 18 Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments, Edited and Translated by David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford Universi- ty Press, 1997), pg 157 7 of 14 ing of a spatio-temporal series of positions and events that serve to anchor the self. The pre-narra- tive self is first a multiplicity of selves, corresponding to a multiplicity of desires, driven by sponta- neous imagination: Drives are nothing more than bound excitations. At the level of each binding, an ego is formed in the Id; a passive, partial, larval, contemplative and contracting ego. 19 The passive egos were already integrations, but only local integrations, as mathematicians say; whereas the ac- tive self is an attempt at global integration.”20 The nature of these integrations constitutive of selves and the Self will finally yield a convincing non-narrative alternative to Ricoeur's reliance on character and self-constancy. It is not the Self that is endowed with the endurance of habit and character, nor is it that which perdures in change, but rather: ...the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self... the system of a dissolved self. There is a self wherever a furtive contraction has been established... drawing difference from repeti- tion functions somewhere.The self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification – this term designating precisely the difference drawn. Below the level of active syntheses [is] the domain of passive syntheses which constitute us, the domain of modifications, tropisms and little peculiarities.21 Selves thus do not even have states, as such, between which changes occur, but are rather “passive syntheses” - the integrations of these differences at specific times and places (local integrations). The active synthesis constitutive of the Self is brought about by the test of reality (otherness, as such), causing it “to be actively unified, to unite all its small composing and contemplative passive egos.”22 Composed thereby on the basis and persistance of these passive egos, the power of imagination re- mains primary, being the agent provocateur of the reality principle, and thus of each and every constitu- tive integration of the Self. If the self has thus been fragmented into multiplicities of both local selves and imagined Selves, each one consists of a series that is divergent from every other that produces a resistance to that which I am about to name “narrative reduction.” For: Each series tells a story: not different points of view on the same story... but completely distinct sto- ries which unfold simultaneously. The basic series are divergent... absolutely divergent in the sense that the point or horizon of convergence lies in a chaos or is constantly displaced within that chaos.23 However small the internal difference between the two series, the one story does not reproduce the oth- er, one does not serve as model for the other: rather resemblance and identity are only functional ef- 19 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pg. 97 20 Ibid, pg 98 21 Ibid, pg 79 22 Ibid, pg 99 23 Ibid, pg 123 8 of 14 fects of that difference which alone is originary within the system.24 Each and every minor self thus has a story to tell. Moreover, every perspective one may imagine with respect to one's life has, likewise, a story to tell. For Deleuze, it is not so much that identity is refigured in stories, but that refiguration consists in a shift of perspective between these co-original stories. This is possible, on the one hand, on the basis of the imaginative constitution of new Self and story, and, on the other hand, on the simultaneity and shared events of these divergent Selves and stories. §Continuity of Life and the Narrative Reduction§ There is always reduction involved wherever there is narrative or identity; wherever there is a telos or project there is an omission of the “irrelevant,” which at once subdues resistance to narra- tive and constitutes a source of its proliferation. Sartwell writes eloquently of this reduction: If my life were indeed a project, and hence narratable, and hence intelligible, I (or whomever is narrat- ing) would need, first of all, to elide or expunge or incorporate as barrier in the course of the narration of those portions of my life which are incompatible with my project or unrelated to it.... one thing that would need elision is precisely... my indifference... Narrative devotes itself to showing us what is sig- nificant, or what is important, or what is worth remembering... [everyday] things are omitted from the narrative as failing to signify; they don't lend me any meaning. And yet my life is actually lived among these objects... As I lose myself in the narrative reverie... my life consists of trying not to hit my shins [against these objects]. That is, my existence cannot be fully deferred; I cannot exist fully in the narrat- able realm of project and its paradoxical human time.25 The observation of what I will refer to as the “narrative reduction” forces us to concede that the provisionality of narrative is not among its virtues, but rather is a consequence of the degree to which experience exceeds our narrative ability. This means that the life whose story is told is, of ne- cessity, infinitely richer than any narrative that recounts its history; richer in content even if consid- ered prior to pluralization. When the active self self-narrates, its first operation is a twofold reduction: the reduction to the meaningful and, more importantly the elision of differences between series and stories, collaps- ing all active selves into one I. This reduction would not be possible but for some pre-narrative figure of continuity and identity. To make use of Ricoeur's descriptive apparatus and in light of our prior discussion, we may finally propose to replace his definition of ipse-identity with identity that is not self-constancy, but instead constituted by self-differentiation. This completes the desubstantializa- tion of identity attempted by Ricoeur, but now the question concerning identity is referred to indi- viduation. The question becomes: “In what way and on what ground does identity coincide with in- 24 Ibid, pg 125 25 Sartwell, pg 63-4 9 of 14 dividuality?” What is this but the continuity of a life taken in the sense of Deleuze's last essay Immanence: a Life..., that is, life that is not shackled by narrative colonization. However, beyond these inscriptions, a life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely ac- tualized in subjects and objects. The singularities and the events that constitute a life coexist with the accidents of the life that corre- sponds to it, but they are neither grouped nor divided in the same way. One is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life...26 Thus a life, its time and its events, is not the same as the determinate life given in narrative, or gener- ally in any metaphysics of the subject. It is a life that so resists and exceeds the grasp of narrative: is this not the necessary condition for the emergence of an I, selves, a self or a subject; a life consisting in many series of potentialities and virtualities, which are actualized in each instance in the emer- gence of a consciousness of subject and object? At last we can see that which narrative instantiates as a particular modality. In this broader view narrative identity is a selective actualization of an indeterminate life as a determinate, followable life-story that is also a suppression of competing stories. Identity consists in seeing life as a story. This seeing-as is characteristic of mimesis, metaphor, and thus also imagination. Insofar as narrative is utterly dependent upon imagination for its operation27 the imaginative short-circuit of narrative il- lustrated above either constitutes an alternative mode of identification or a more expansive descrip- tion of the identification process: the imaginative expression of the self in its obscured fragementary state or, inversely, the unification of carried out by imagination on the fragments of self that, in the worst case reduces differences, and at best harmonizes them. Only in a view such as this can we understand stories of Ichlosigkeit and the other possibilities of narrative discounted by Ricoeur, which are emphasized by Georges Bataille: stories that “have the power to confront a person with his fate”: A story that reveals the possibilities of life is not necessarily an appeal; but it does appeal to a moment of fury without which its author would remain blind to those possibilities, which are those of excess. 26 Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life...” in Pure Immanence, Translated by Anna Boyman, Introduction by John Rajch- man (New York: Zone Books, 2001), pg. 29-30 27 Narrative operates at a higher degree of imagination than might initially be supposed. Language itself, insofar as its origin is in metaphor is nothing but an ancient seeing-as that has lost its mimetic significance. The arangement of language into sentences and stories then involves another imaginative level in which the larger formal structure con- tains a more or less mimetic operation. Finally, meaning and identity require a final imaginative act: evaluation, inter- pretation, and refiguration, which require imaginative variation. See also the above citation from Castoriadis on the imagination and reflection. 10 of 14 Of this I am sure: only an intolerable, impossible ordeal can give an author the means of achieving that wide range of vision...28 This appeal finds its source in the “moment of self-dispossession essential to authentic selfhood,”29 the moment (in both senses of the word) in which the inadequation of narrative to the life is experi- enced, and more importantly expressed; when we know with certainty “that we are not everything”30 and that we exceed ourselves. In this moment, the surplus of life impinges upon us and everyday identity falls away into indetermination as we fall outside the sphere defined by Ricoeur as that of selfhood. Yet this moment of alienation is indispensible to selfhood, for without it we would never break free of our present selves and social context: we could never experience or express a possible world. This breakdown of narrative gives a point of inflection to the curve traced by identity in ab- stract space, liberating life from the compulsion to narrate and to fashion a social image of oneself. The moment about which I am speaking is however, to quote Deleuze “the moment at which the expressed has (for us) no existence apart from that which expresses it: the Other as the expression of a possible world”31 - the moment integral to the non-textual experience of possible worlds. §By Way of Conclusion: Ichlosigkeit§ In the foreword to Blue of Noon, Bataille lists stories that exemplify the moment of which he wrote: he cites The Trial, The Idiot, Remembrance of Things Past and Death Sentence. All of them, particu- larly the last, can be interpreted as narratives of Ichlosigkeit that offer, contra Ricoeur, a privileged window upon the self. Here, however, I will turn to a story written by Blanchot a decade following his friend’s death. We must, by way of conclusion, see whether the radical Ichlosigkeit displayed in The Madness of the Day can be adequately described in our model. What kind of self says: as nobody I was sovereign32 Am I stealing my place?33, I was... unable to explain myself fully and yet... I had seized the moment when the day... would begin hurrying to its end. Here it comes... the end is coming; something is happening, the end is beginning, I was seized with joy34 I distributed my blood, my innermost being among them, lent them the universe, gave them the day... I reduced myself to them. The whole of me passed in full view before them... [when] there was nothing more to see, they ceased to see me to...35I had lost the sense of the story36 28 Georges Bataille, “The Author's Foreword [1957]” to Blue of Noon, Translated by Harry Matthews (London, New York: Marion Boyars, 2002), pg 127 29 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pg 138 30 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Translated by Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), pg. xxxii 31 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pg 260-1 32 Maurice Blanchot, “The Madness of the Day”, Translated by Lydia Davis in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Barry- town, NY: Station Hill, 1999), pg 193 33 Ibid, pg 196 34 Ibid, pg 194 35 Ibid, pg 197 36 Ibid, pg 199 11 of 14 This narrative dispossession does not seem to indicate a loss of self or inability to narrate, but rather registers the absolute inadequation of narrative and life and the loss of social determinations of the self and the socially constituted everyday world. Ichlosigkeit then, is indeed an “essential moment of dispossession.” Ricoeur is not completely blind to this fact, but within his schema of ipse as self-constancy he cannot fully reconcile this moment because it indicates a lapse of constancy, a broken promise. Thus, he must coopt this moment as merely the negative image of the self, A self-deprived of the help of sameness... it may well be that the most dramatic transformations of personal identity pass through the crucible of this nothingness of identity... In these moments of ex- treme destitution, the empty response to the question “Who am I?” refers not to nullity but to the nakedness of the question itself...the narratives that recount the dissolution of the self can be consid- ered interpretive narratives with respect to what might be called an apophantic apprehension of the self..37 Self-apophansis is but one side of the coin. Narratives of self-dissolution constitute, more impor- tantly, an apophantic apprehension of life as it exceeds the stories we tell: life shows itself to the dis- possessed in its infinite supercession of all narration. This then displays and brings about the self's incipient fragmentation in a reversal of the narrative reduction. Whether forcibly integrated through narratively mediated imagination or through imagina- tion as such, the integration of the self recommences. In both cases, the capacity to view oneself as other is possible on the basis of imagination, as well as the subterranean selves of imagination. Inte- gration stabilizes identity, bringing it again under the sway of idem-identity and with it a decline in imagination and reflection. The attraction or repulsion exerted along the axis of the self and other continues even in solitude; and in suppressing certain possibilities of existence, otherness helps re- turn identity from its exile. The resumption of narration indicates the diminution and restriction of imagination and mimesis to the textual realm. However, imagination can always break free for: It is imagination which crosses domains, orders and levels, knocking down the partitions coextensive with the world, guiding out bodies and inspiring our souls, grasping the unity of mind and nature; a larval consciousness which moves endlessly from science to dream and back again.38 Imagination is the source of the self, a source independent of all teleology. In fidelity to life and the world imagination keeps open the divergent paths and selves out of which selfhood emerges. And by passing through the forbidden region of alienation in the abstract space formulated in accordance with Ricoeur's dialectics, imagination and self-dispossession thereby free us from the 37 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pg 166-7 38 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pg 220 12 of 14 ossification of identity into the fluidity of life. Founded upon the imagination, on possible selves and possible worlds, the integration constitutive of the self will always leave a remainder to serve as a re- minder of the possibilities foreclosed in each narrative and instantiation of the self. This remainder is that fracture line in the I at the intersection of the three dialectics by means of which we are open to others. This fracture is precisely untrammeled life and the expression of a possible world. In clos- ing, I can find no better words than a particularly eloquent passage toward the end of Difference and Repetition: It is not the other which is another I, but the I which is an other, a fractured I. There is no love which does not begin with the revelation of a possible world as such, a wound in the other which expresses it.39 39 Ibid, pg 261 13 of 14 Bibliography Georges Bataille, “The Author's Foreword [1957]” to Blue of Noon, Translated by Harry Matthews (London, New York: Marion Boyars, 2002) Inner Experience, Translated by Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988) Maurice Blanchot, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Translated by Lydia Davis and Others (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999) Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments, Edited and Translated by David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition, Translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) Pure Immanence, Translated by Anna Boyman, Introduction by John Rajchman (New York: Zone Books, 2001) Paul Ricoeur Oneself as Another, Translated by Kathleen Blamey (1992: University of Chicago Press, Chicago) The Rule of Metaphor, Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 1977) Time and Narrative: Volume One, Tranlsated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) Time and Narrative Volume Three, Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pel- lauer (1990: University of Chicago Press, Chicago) 14 of 14