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“... to wait for the scholar-critic William Taylor in 1797, and even he had his doubts. He disliked ‘self-biography’, coined the previous year by Isaac D’Israeli, because ‘it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have seemed pedantic.’ Pedantic or not, ‘autobiography’ was the one ...”

“... to understand aesthetic texts: through interpretation. Interpretation is itself a form of literary self-fashioning. Although the ingenious project of this book is to apply Nietzsche’s theory to Nietzsche himself, the book is considerably more than another example of the fine Nietzsche scholarship being produced by the generation of younger Anglophone ...”

“... London after the war his first stop was always the Rembrandt room in the National Gallery, to see Self-Portrait at the Age of 63. The portrait is dated 1669: Genet believed it was the last Rembrandt painted. (Not true, apparently.) He wrote a short essay called ‘Rembrandt’s Secret’ for L’Express in 1958, and in his unfailingly Manichaean way he wanted ...”

“... of State. They agreed that such raids could be justified only if there was a ‘necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation’ – and if nothing ‘unreasonable or excessive’ was done. Until the Caroline case, self-defence was a political justification ...”

“... who describes large forces or laws is also subject to them. This tactic of self-subsuming has worked for other writers, but in the hands of the young Merrill, in ‘The Broken Bowl’ for example, it produces verse that is impacted and evasive: The splinters rainbowing ruin on the floor Cut structures in the air, Mark off, like eyes or ...”

“... emancipatory framework, presupposing a dialectics of drives, repression and liberation. Sex was self-evidently a good thing, nature’s path to pleasure, individual fulfilment and biological fitness. But, such vulgar Freudian histories contended, Western civilisation – indeed, civilisation per se – had chosen to repress it. Why? To some extent, from ...”

“... if Nietzsche was only pretending to say something?’ The forgetability of umbrellas – as Will Self suggests in his ninth novel – tells us something about modernity. ‘When did the umbrella first become an article to be routinely forgotten rather than assiduously remembered?’ Self asks. ‘Surely, to begin ...”

“... one to realise that becoming a person is not the natural outcome of all childhoods, but an arduous self-invention which can go terribly wrong. Freud says that infants have no project for becoming a self at all. The infant is forced by separation from the breast, exclusion from the mother’s bed, the traumas of Oedipal ...”

“... The night-chandlers on their way to work, Fitting and outfitting, the wharfingers. I touch that Self in her skin. The water-rictus of the dawn ice That just touches the shores. My face felt clean as the flowers. The Self was also as I looked up An array on green shelves in that swaying tree. The metal moisture on a pool ...”

“... the relation of power and sexuality differently. The shift from subconscious social power to self-conscious sexual subjects is to be explained, not as an abrupt discontinuity in his thought, but, he says, as an extension of his general method of genealogy. Genealogy studies how we constitute ourselves as human subjects. So his first works on medicine and ...”

“... bequeathed as our lot a seemingly permanent condition of metaphysical sobriety and philosophical self-consciousness. Now there can be little doubt that the self-consciousness has been a gain, but even less doubt that the sobriety has gone too far. This victory of self-awareness over ...”

“... Before printing, actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the ...”

“... between the Theravada and Mahayana schools, between exoteric and esoteric forms, between non-self and moral responsibility, between freedom from illusion and freedom from suffering. Collins has written a scholarly study of Buddhism, without attempting to evaluate its central doctrines. His stated concern is a philosophical one, but he does not go beyond ...”

“... with pioneering the ‘essay’ genre, Montaigne’s Essais, as Rigolot sees them, are a shifty, self-incriminating punishment for transgression: with a ‘Sisyphus-like fate, they are doomed to become a body of endlessly rewritten texts.’ Why so? Because the ‘primal scene’ of the Essais was the death of Etienne De La Boétie, Montaigne’s Hallam. The ...”

“... flat ‘under false pretences’, yet that this was ‘not a lie, not entirely’. As the anxious, self-questioning, third-person, present-tense narrative takes hold, it is preoccupied with discovering ‘the real thing’ – in love, in writing, in national identity, in the self. Evidently, if this is an autobiography, it ...”