ABSTRACT
Everyone, after all, is born into solitary confinement and, like Kaspar and Scheherazade, manages to survive by conducting discourses with whoever else may be around. A life then becomes a discourse, and discourse itself has a life of its own, embedded though it may be in the lives of people. “The life of a human being does not consist merely in the sphere of goal-directed verbs. It does not consist merely of activities that have something for their object. I perceive something. I feel something. I imagine something. The life of a human being does not consist merely of all this and its like. All this, and its like, is the basis of the realm of It. But the realm of You has another basis,” wrote Buber (1970: 54), and for him, “Whoever says You stands in relation, in a dialogue” and “All actual life is an encounter” 1970: 62), and “In the beginning is the relation” (1970: 69). It is out of such meetings and relationships that a self emerges and is sustained—indeed lives. It is in such ongoing interactions that one makes contact with a world and meshes with others. In the course of these interactions, the self of each participant addresses the other and such discourses become the signifying medium in which the self occurs. Such a self is not just there, nor is it a being that is there. Rather, the self is variable and reflective, nuanced and shaded, and, as an object to itself and to others, scintillates and reverberates in varying waves and beats and is forever responsive to the signifying stimulation of the environs, people and things, the things people say, and the things that things say. The self needs this signifying culture in which to exist and thrive, and it is in it that it assumes its reality and exhibits its varying colors and shapes.
