ABSTRACT
Thoroughgoing, unlimited self-reflection is required to look through all the constructions of self in order to see the self in relation to everything else, and thus to see things whole. Self-reflection deconstructs the self and opens it into the infinite apprehended in finite forms. By virtue of its proclivity for turning back on itself, language, whether lyrical or philosophical, taken to its ultimate consequences, tends to become a monadic whole, a specular, self-reflexive totality. By reflection, the objectivity of the world is made over—and is taken into—the self as a reflection of itself. However, it is important to realize that the failure of reference is not its suppression or erasure, but rather its reinscription in another, higher mode of self-transcending discourse. Especially the language of lyric concentrates and displays the self-reflexive structure. Self-reflection through imagination might equally discern no connection between things and feel only the eternal silence of infinite space that so frightened Pascal.
