The Self and Its Shadows A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts

The Self and its Shadows is a book of multiply interrelated essays which explores the study of selfhood (subjectivity or personal identity), and more specifically of a variety of articulations (in philosophy, psychoanalysis and the arts) of the idea that selfhood is best conceived as a matter of non-self-identity. Philosophically, a sustained reading of the work of Nietzsche and Sartre is central to this project, although Wittgenstein is also fundamentalto its concerns. Within the arts, several essays examine various films whose themes intersect with those of the philosophers under study (including Hollywood melodramas, recent spy movies such as the Bournetrilogy and the latest incarnation of James Bond, and David Fincher's 'Benjamin Button'); Wagner's Ring cycle is a recurrent concern; and the novels of Kingsley Amis, J. M.Coetzee and David Foster Wallace are also prominent.