The Corpulence of Self-tracking: The Quantified Self, Derrida, and Writing in the Age of Digital Accountability

This essay questions current views on the Quantified Self Movement as a solipsistic form of self-knowledge by framing the latter within the neoliberal symbolic economy of the Other. In particular, this study discloses and provides an analysis of two salient characteristics: the subject’s drifting toward the incommensurable flow of nature that produces what I call a “corpulent” perception of time and the self-tracker’s sacrificial enjoyment propped by a secularized form of accountability. Lastly, the essay relates this type of symbolic obligation to Derrida’s idea of literature in secret, arguing that its theological foundation is what covertly sustains the drive to valorization that defines self-tracking and neoliberal digitality in general.