ABSTRACT
Depending on who you believe, modernity is identified both with the making and the unmaking of the self. One story about modernity would identify it with the apprehension of the self’s autonomous self-grounding, the positive precipitate of the act of expelling all inauthenticity and error from the self. Only by such an act of autogenetic faith, it appears, can the self give rise to itself in the characteristically modern, modernist and, some would say, rather more than implicitly masculinist manner. But the very condition of such a bootstrap-lifting stunt is that there is, after all, nothing to guarantee the modern self-nothing, that is, except its abandonment, in the mode of reflection or of delirium, of all external guarantees. So, according to the other story, the absence or impotence of God, the Church, the king, tradition, makes the modern subject more liable to come apart at the seams than ever before. The very strength of the modern self is its weakness, just as its weakness is the ultimate source of its strength.
