ABSTRACT
The first five chapters of Personal Identity and Literature stress the social embedment of personal identity. Chapter 6, in contrast, takes up the degree to which the self is confined to a monadic, almost solipsistic loneliness. Of course, this isn’t a complete opposition; one is lonely precisely because one is also social. In connection with this focus on isolation, the chapter examines the minimal conditions for selfhood in embodied subjectivity. In this respect, it turns away not only from the social emphasis of prior chapters, but also from their attention to identity categories and practical capacities or even self-objectification—or, rather, it contrasts these more elaborated aspects of identity with their foundations in self-experience. In order to address these topics of isolation and subjectivity—specifically, embodied subjectivity—there is in this chapter an interpretation of Maurice Blanchot’s influential avant-garde novel, Thomas the Obscure. It is also argued that this fundamental self-experience cannot be eliminated by appeals to materialism, for it cannot be objectified without ceasing to be subjectivity, thus self-experience. On the other hand, this does not mean that anything exists other than matter.
