Self-Haunting: Gnosticism, Romanticism, Kierkegaard, Beckett and Ashbery

It has been fashionable to declare that there is no self.Certainly the notion of the unitary subject-a transcendent subject linked to the traditional religious idea of the immortal soul-has not had currency in academic discourse for a very long time, perhaps as much as a century and a half.The psychologically unified subject and the universal subject of shared experience are also things of the past.But is there nothing left of the experience of selfhood?For the self can disenchant itself. But what does the subject feel about itself once it begins to doubt its own integrity?How does it experience its own “decentering”? How does this “who” that is left define itself, for itself?For selfhood is an existential condition, and no matter how elusive the self is to itself, it does not and cannot wholly lose itself.This book analyzes how the Gnostics, the Romantics, Kierkegaard, Beckett, and Ashbery dramatize the self’s self-doubt and what follows.The shared theme of these works, disparate as t