ABSTRACT
Most interesting with respect to his autobiography are 'Emerald Uthwart' and 'Apollo in Picardy', Pater's last two imaginary portraits. In these texts, Walter Pater attacks not only the 'radical dualism' of G. W. F. Hegel's idealism, and thereby of his own 'reconsidered' aestheticism, but also the very autobiographical tendency which underwrites the restricted economy, the very possibility of the lesser reason's coming-to-self-consciousness. Pater's critical aim is at his own concept of 'subjective immortality' which he had made cardinal to his aestheticism in its most structural of Hegelian statements: the essay on 'Style'. Given that the consciousness can attain its self-consciousness through writing, according to Pater's semiology, the autobiographical in Pater corresponds exactly to his structural Hegelianism. To 'survive' in autobiography is a kind of 'perpetual suicide', both because it seeks to stabilize the 'I' in the autobiographical text, but also because, in the very act of writing, this self is destroyed by the workings of its own negativity.
