ABSTRACT
Self-reflection persistently shows up as the means of affirming—but also eventually of surpassing—the self in and through love. However, ambiguity remains endemic to the nature of self-reflection as anchored in—yet also as destabilizing—the self that is reflected and reflecting. Self-reflection opens upon an infinity that relativizes all determinate codes and worldly standards. Self-reflection is the means by which the subject first brings itself into being. Self-reflection emerges in modern thought and history as an awesome and mighty—but also destructive and tragic—technique for wielding power. Self-reflection could and should be an inexhaustible and indispensable resource for contemporary identity politics, as much as for the millenary Western civilization that those politics so relentlessly contest in our academies today. Thus, self-reflection points in some very different, even opposed directions on the terrain of our cultural heritage. Self-reflection can be a homogenizing mechanism that turns everything into the same—or it can be the means of opening the self toward radical otherness.
