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94 six Transcendence, Heteronomy, and the Birth of the Responsible Self The shattered cogito: this could be the emblematic title of a tradition, one less continuous perhaps than that of the cogito, but one whose virulence culminates with Nietzsche, making him the privileged adversary of Descartes.1 In his Gifford Lectures, published as Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur makes it clear that he will not try to put this Humpty Dumpty back together again. He seeks rather to develop a ‘‘hermeneutics of the self [that] is placed at an equal distance from the apology of the cogito and from its overthrow . . . at an equal distance from the cogito exalted by Descartes and from the cogito that Nietzsche proclaimed forfeit’’ (OA 4 and 23). The ‘‘arduous detours’’ of this hermeneutics pass through a series of questions. ‘‘Who is speaking of what? Who does what? About whom and about what does one construct a narrative? Who is morally responsible for what? These are but so many different ways in which ‘who?’ is stated’’ (OA 19). It is a similar project that Cal Schrag undertakes in his Ryle Lectures, The Self after Postmodernity.2 He is quite specific about the nature of the cogito that has had such a great fall. It is ‘‘a sovereign and monarchical self, at once selfsuf ficient and self-assured, finding metaphysical comfort in a doctrine of an immutable and indivisible self-identity’’ (SAP 27). It is ‘‘a self-identical monad, mute and self-enclosed, changeless and secured prior to the events of speaking Transcendence, Heteronomy, and the Birth of the Responsible Self 95 . . . a fixed, underlying substratum . . . a prelinguistic, zero-point center of consciousness’’ (SAP 33). Like Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy,3 Schrag thinks that ‘‘a jettisoning of the self understood in these senses does not entail a jettisoning of every sense of self . . . a new self emerges, like the phoenix arising from its ashes’’ (SAP 9). And, like Ricoeur and Nancy, he thinks this new, emergent self, at once more plausible philosophically and more familiar experientially, is best understood in terms of Who questions rather than What questions, as if the self were a nature or an essence (SAP 4, 12–13). Schrag’s self is doubly emergent. It emerges theoretically in the aftermath of the critiques that have shattered the cogito. But it emerges experientially as well. The self’s identity is not a fact or a given prior to experience but a process worked out in experience (SAP 26, 37). It has a narrative character (SAP 19– 28). Its unity is a matter of convergence without coincidence, or, in Ricoeurean language, it is a matter of ipse identity rather than idem identity (SAP 33–35). In Rylean language, selfhood is a task word rather than an achievement word.4 In speaking of the self ‘‘after postmodernity,’’ Schrag might seem to suggest that he simply wants to leave postmodernity behind, that he simply identi- fies it with Nietzsche’s replacement of the cogito with the will to power in its amoral diversity. So we are not surprised to find a critique of Lyotard as giving too extreme an account of the dispersal of the self in the plurality of its language games (SAP 28–35) and of Foucault as reducing ethics to aesthetics (SAP 68–71). But Schrag finds Derrida to be in important respects an ally and quotes two passages as illuminating his own project. In one of them Derrida says, ‘‘I don’t destroy the subject. I situate it. That is to say, I believe that at a certain level both of experience and scientific discourse one cannot get along without the notion of the subject. It is a question of knowing where it comes from and how it functions.’’5 It is such a view of the self that Schrag articulates in terms of narrative convergence as a task rather than preestablished coincidence as a guarantee prior to experience. Derrida affirms the narrative concept of the self as the ‘‘common concept’’ of ‘‘autobiographical anamnesis’’ that ‘‘presupposes identification. And precisely not identity. No, an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures. Whatever the story of a return to oneself . . . no matter what an odyssey or bildungsroman it might be . . . it is always imagined that the one who writes should know how to say I.’’ It is just here that he radicalizes the concept of a narrative...

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