Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Demonic in the Self 61A number of scholars have felt the basic tenets in this demolition asuncomfortably pessimistic. Furthermore, the exposure of the self as fragmentaryand internally conflicting, in a sense, only reproduces the anomie ofpostmodern society on a theoretical level. 29 Marshall Berman has characterisedthe experience of the modern individual in his study All That Is SolidMelts Into Air (1982) as a tension between the infinite possibilities (for adventure,power, joy, growth) and the vortex of “perpetual disintegration andrenewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.” 30 Bermandifferentiates between the experiential reality of living in modernity, and theactual processes of modernisation that have produced the conditions for thisexperience – industrialisation, urban growth, mass communications and theworld market, for example. Literary modernism is an important area of ourculture where we can discuss, represent and witness different aspects of thisexperience, “attempt to find a way of living with continually dissolving realitiesand fluctuating boundaries.” 31The need for ways to positively reconstruct new versions of subjectivity,ones that would not be locked into the classic dualisms (soul/body, reason/emotion),has led into partial rehabilitations of the self. Paul Ricoeur’scareful formulations in his article “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” areilluminating:[The] subject is never given at the beginning. Or, if it were so given, itwould run the risk of reducing itself to a narcissistic ego, self-centred andavaricious – and it is just this from which literature can liberate us. Ourloss in the side of narcissism is our gain on the side of the narrative identity.In the place of an ego enchanted by itself, a self is born, taught by culturalsymbols, first among which are the stories received in the literarytradition. These stories give unity – not unity of substance but narrativewholeness. 32Even such moderate claims for the unifying capacities of art are proneto stir disagreement; the disintegration of identities, radical multiplicity andnarrative discontinuity are much more preferable goals for many. In JuliaKristeva’s thinking, for example, all attempts of establishing a regulated system,or unity are perceived as entangled with the symbolic order (and theLaw of the Father, in Lacanian terms); the semiotic (the bodily alternative)analysis as the third “wounding blow” to human “megalomania,” in the series precededby the wounds inflicted by Copernicus and Darwin.29 ‘Anomie’ signifies the modern social condition permeated by alienation, caused bythe disintegration of mutually accepted codes (originally by Emile Durkheim).30 Berman, 1982/1991, 15.31Frosh 1991, 16 (based on Berman 1982/1991, 16-33).32 Paul Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator” (1987; Ricoeur 1991, 437).This view of self as a narrative construction might be named as the “constructivist” position.See also Bernard Williams’s article “Imagination and the self” (Williams 1973/1991,26-45) which discusses the general distinction between imagining (activity displayed indifferent forms of narration) and visualising something, especially a self.