Best read while listenting to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE89OeM5nmU
We justify ourselves before the court of ourselves. When we do so
it is by an address to an elite of one.
Yet we must pardon ourselves for our vanity. But then the problem with a pardon is - as Derrida would have it, 'it either forgives the unpardonable or it is not truly a pardon.'
Gelderen, A History of the English Reflexive Pronouns (1998) points out that the English expression ‘self’ itself is a modest term. In everyday, it is not even quite a word, but something that makes an ordinary object pronoun into a reflexive one: ‘her’ into ‘herself’, and ‘it’ into ‘itself’. The reflexive pronoun is used when the object of an action or attitude is the same as the subject of that action or attitude. ‘I respect myself for achieving that’, describes me not only as the respecter but the respected. Self is also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitudes, identifying the special case where the object is the same as the agent: such as, self-love, self-hatred, self-promotion, self-knowledge.
it is by an address to an elite of one.
Yet we must pardon ourselves for our vanity. But then the problem with a pardon is - as Derrida would have it, 'it either forgives the unpardonable or it is not truly a pardon.'
Gelderen, A History of the English Reflexive Pronouns (1998) points out that the English expression ‘self’ itself is a modest term. In everyday, it is not even quite a word, but something that makes an ordinary object pronoun into a reflexive one: ‘her’ into ‘herself’, and ‘it’ into ‘itself’. The reflexive pronoun is used when the object of an action or attitude is the same as the subject of that action or attitude. ‘I respect myself for achieving that’, describes me not only as the respecter but the respected. Self is also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitudes, identifying the special case where the object is the same as the agent: such as, self-love, self-hatred, self-promotion, self-knowledge.
However the phrase ‘the self’ often means more than this. In psychology it is often used for that set of attributes that a person attaches to himself or herself - the attributes that the person finds it difficult or impossible to imagine himself or herself without. The term ‘identity’ is also used in this sense. Typically, our gender is a part of our self or our identity; yet our profession or nationality may or may not be. Just because I do that job it does not tell you who the real me is. In philosophy, the self is the agent, the knower and the ultimate locus of personal identity. This self, is the identity which is at the bottom of every action, and involved in every bit of knowledge. ‘Subjectivity, self, me, I,’ are words consistently employed in language. Yet do these words convey their intended meaning. Or are such words and their associated concepts part of an overarching semantic paradox which we knowingly employ?
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