SOME QUOTES RELATED TO THE FORTHCOMING 'Subject' SPECULECTURE

It has frequently been remarked by psychoanalysts that the period in which hysterics and patients with phobias and fixations formed the bulk of their clientele, starting in the classical period with Freud, has recently given way to a time when the main complaints centre around “ego loss”, or a sense of emptiness, flatness, futility, lack of purpose, or loss of self-esteem. (Taylor, Charles. 1989 Sources of the Self p.19)


Oblomov hmself is not sure he is a person. He thinks he may be a type, and that is what he is usually taken to be. Early in the novel he looks at his fabulously slovenly servant and thinks 'well, brother, you're more of an Oblamov than I am' - as if he has read the book and recognised himself. (Michael Wood's review of ‘Oblomov’ by Goncharov LRB August 2009 p. 8.)


Why write a play about St. Thomas More? [...] For this reason: A man takes an oath only when he wants to commit himself quite exceptionally to the statement, when he wants to make an identity between the truth of it and his own virtue; he offers himself as a guarantee. And it works. There is a special kind of shrug for a perjurer; we feel that the man has no self to commit, no guarantee to offer. Of course it’s much less effective now that for most of us the actual words of the oath are not much more than impressive mumbo-jumbo than it was when they made obvious sense; we would prefer most men to guarantee their statements with, say, cash rather than with themselves. We feel—we know—the self to be an equivocal commodity. There are fewer and fewer things which, as they say, we “cannot bring ourselves” to do. We can find almost no limits for ourselves other than the physical. (Robert Bolt)


What is a self? Is it the rings of experience that grow within the tree? Is it the soul begotten and not made in the womb, or the being nurtured in the world outside? Is t the narrator in one’s head, the teeming consciousness that keeps one sleepless at night or distracted during the day, brave in danger or paralysed in a crisis? Is it the source of that anger that flames spontaneously at slights to one’s honour, or the source of this honour in the first place? Is it in one’s capacity to love, forgive or endure, or in one’s desire to lead a moral life? Is it the will that governs everything one ever says or does, or something far bigger than that? (Laura Cumming A Face To The World –On Self Portraits p. 262)