Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory, The Critical Theory Institute, University of California, Irvine, Wednesday 12 February, 2003
In this lecture, I want to tell two stories concerning words. One is a public story, or better said and more reasonably, it is a fragment of a grand story concerning words which I think we would all agree lie at the heart of the so-called western philosophical culture, the so-called “personal pronouns” I and Me (therefore also the others), and the names self and own. The other is a private one, although it owes everything to the public institutions which have invited me to this country, it is the story of my journey into the English language, or a nice moment in it. And the point where these two stories interfere is a mistake, actually a rather big and naïve mistake. I made it because I was as presumptuous as to imagine that I was advanced enough in my understanding of some idiomatic properties of English, to be able to solve a riddle concerning the reasons why it was precisely in English, in the work of one of the greatest English-writing philosophers of the 17th century, that the relationship of the self and the own structuring the classical theory of “personal identity”, was invented. I made a mistake, I wrote and published (fortunately, in French…) something that is clearly wrong. But you learn from your mistakes, and I will be trying now to give to the presentation of this mistake and what I hope is its correction a form that could be of general interest – which is probably again very presumptuous.
But I should be more specific. Some years ago I had embarked on a project of translation and commentary of the chapter of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding called “Of Identity and Diversity” (II.27), which is often quoted as the chapter on “personal identity” and constantly referred to in philosophical and anthropological discussions as the standard exposition of the “classical” theory which makes the continuity or the “stream” of consciousness (therefore the intrinsic relationship, or the reciprocity, of consciousness and memory) the “criterion” of personal identity and carries this idea to its extreme consequences, metaphysical, psychological, and social. This is justified by the fact that the presentation of this criterion and the discussion of its implications is really the heart of the chapter, and by the fact that it forms something like an autonomous Essay within the Essay. Rather than deriving from previous developments in the book, it is providing a new foundation or formulating a posteriori a principle that clarifies the intentions of the whole book. This cannot be separated indeed from the fact that this chapter was written separately. It was added in the second edition (1694) to respond to violent critiques from the theologians who claimed that Locke’s conception of the mind, substituting the “empirical” or we would say today phenomenological description of the operations of reflection and the association of ideas to the metaphysical assumptions concerning the substance of the soul, would destroy the moral and religious notion of personal responsibility. And we know that Locke’s reply to these critiques, the so-called consciousness-theory of personal identity (and therefore also responsibility), immediately raised new objections, from Butler and Leibniz to Hume onwards, some more radically empiricist, others trying to resume the substantialist point of view, which until today have kept the philosophers extremely busy.
The reason however why I wanted to translate anew and comment on the text of Locke’s chapter was not directly associated with the argument concerning personal identity, but with an encounter of three orders of interests and concerns, which I still have. One has to do, precisely, with translations and limits to translations, or as we say in French intraduisibles, in this case the change from the French “moi” which was used by Descartes and Pascal to the English “self”, which became through the translation of Locke into French (made under his own guidance) “soi” or “soi-même”. I was working on this for my contribution to the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, a collective critical and encyclopaedic work which, I hope, will eventually come out this year. My second interest has to do with a classical issue in philosophical anthropology, with obvious political implications: the definition or identification of the “individual” as a Proprietor of his own Person which, again in Locke, but this time in the Second Treatise of Government (§§ 27, 44, etc.), replaces the traditional notion of being master of oneself (dominium sui) or living on one’s own right (sui iuris esse), to become the foundation of a contractual or equalitarian political order, in other terms the key notion of what Macpherson has called “the political theory of possessive individualism”. Finally, my third interest has to do with the genealogy of the modern concept of subjectivity and the concept of the subject itself. I was particularly focusing on the fact that, contrary to what many discussions for and against the primacy of the subject in the last fifty years have assumed, the issues of subjectivity and consciousness are not identical, not only today, because of the influence of psychoanalysis and other theories which insist that the subject is essentially unconscious, but already and perhaps more radically in the classical age, the very moment of the constitution of the metaphysics of subjectivity, as can be demonstrated by the fact that Descartes’ philosophy of the thinking subject has nothing to do either with the term or the notion of consciousness. And, again, it was Locke who appeared to have inaugurated, and actually invented, a conception of individual subjectivity which places it within the realm of consciousness and practically identifies it, as later in Kant, with the possibility of self-consciousness. It happened, then, that all my interests were converging towards the study of Locke, a philosopher whose importance I was not disputing, but of whom I must say I had a very academic and general knowledge.
But there was another reason that pushed me to become interested in the linguistic aspects of Locke’s philosophy, or better said to the importance of Locke’s working with and within language, perhaps with several languages, in the elaboration of his own philosophy, which in turn led me to endeavouring to partially remake the existing translation myself. It was the fact that the original 17th century French translator (Pierre Coste) had discussed himself in a fascinating way the impossible equivalence of certain English and French vocabularies, in particular in the case of three key terms: the English self, which he would propose to “translate” with the neologism “soi” or “soi-même” in order to mark the difference with the meaning of moi or le moi in French metaphysics; the English consciousness, a quasi-neologism in Locke’s text, that he would suggest to translate as con-science at the price of a possible confusion with conscience, which he tried to avoid through a trick, the use of a hyphen in the French spelling of the word; and the English uneasiness, which he would propose to translate as inquiétude (instead of malaise or malêtre), thus giving its linguistic basis to the great theme of “inquiétude” and “Unruhe” in 18th and 19th century literature and philosophy. So I could have the impression that the critical and philological work that I was trying to do was in fact not a secondary work of commentary on the classical texts, but a continuation of the very translinguistic process, or process of impossible translation that coincided with the history of philosophy itself.
Let me now try and explain to you as simply as possible how I understood the question of the intrinsic association of self and own in Locke’s text, and how I was lead to my mistake. I think that the best thing to do here is to literally quote from three crucial passages in the development of Locke’s argument where you will see, so I hope, that the two words self and own are closely associated, so that indeed the meaning that Locke wants to communicate, and in reality progressively creates or elaborates himself, directly depends on this close association. I should ask you also to bear in mind that the problem is presented to you by a French speaker, who does his best to directly read and understand in English, but also wants and needs to find French “equivalents” for the phrases that he is reading. And maybe, I wish I could convince you of that, this passage through equivalents in the neighbouring language (the one for example in which Locke would read the texts of his closest interlocutors, such as Descartes and Malebranche) is useful, perhaps indispensable, to properly understand and discuss the meaning of these English phrases. But in reality there is no equivalent, or no exact equivalent. Most of these phrases are literally untranslatable, intraduisibles, and this is due in particular to the semantic and syntactic properties of the terms self and own in English, as compared with their nearest counterparts in French, such as moi or soi in the first case, and propre and le propre in the second. And I will have to draw your attention to the spellings that are used by Locke, conforming to 17th century habits that today look a little archaic, but are still understandable, in particular the habit of spelling such expressions as myself, itself, him self or oneself as if made of two separate words : my self, etc., a spelling that allows Locke to consciously play on the double understanding of the expressions as pronouns or possessive expressions, literally or implicitly, such as my self (= the self that is mine, that is my own self, or simply that is my own), but also by analogy it self (= its self, the self that belongs to it, that is its own self, or that is its own). I will return to these grammatical subtleties, which I think are anything but external to the semantic and theoretical effects of Locke’s writing. And now let me give you some examples:
Essay on Human Understanding, Book II, chapter 27, § 14 (in the course of the discussion of the question whether different consciousnesses or memories in the same individual would make different persons or identities, and conversely one single consciousness or a continuity of memory from one to the other would make one single identical person of two men or individuals): “Let any one reflect upon himself, and conclude that he has in himself an immaterial spirit, which is that which thinks in him, and, in the constant change of his body keeps him the same: and is that which he calls himself: let him also suppose it to be the same soul that was in Nestor or Thersites, at the siege of Troy, (…), which it may have been, as well as it is now the soul of any other man: but he now having no consciousness of any of the actions either of Nestor or Thersites, does or can he conceive himself the same person with either of them? Can he be concerned in either of their actions? attribute them to himself, or think them his own, more than the actions of any other men that ever existed?”
Id., § 17 and 18 : “(17) Self is that conscious thinking thing (…) which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends. Thus every one finds that, whilst comprehended under that consciousness, the little finger is as much a part of himself as what is most so. Upon separation of this little finger, should this consciousness go along with the little finger, and leave the rest of the body, it is evident the little finger would be the person, the same person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body (…) That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing can join itself, makes the same person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else; and so attributes to itself, and owns all the actions of that thing, as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no further; as every one who reflects will perceive. (18) In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment; happiness and misery being that for which every one is concerned for himself, and not mattering what becomes of any substance, not joined to, or affected with that consciousness. For, as it is evident in the instance I gave but now, if the consciousness went along with the little finger when it was cut off, that would be the same self which was concerned for the whole body yesterday, as making part of itself, whose actions then it cannot but admit as its own now. Though, if the same body should still live, and immediately from the separation of the little finger have its own peculiar consciousness, whereof the little finger knew nothing, it would not at all be concerned for it, as a part of itself, or could own any of its actions, or have any of them imputed to him.”
Id., § 23-24 : “(…) So that self is not determined by identity or diversity of substance, which it cannot be sure of, but only by identity of consciousness. (24) Indeed it may conceive the substance whereof it is now made up to have existed formerly, united in the same conscious being: but, consciousness removed, that substance is no more it self, or makes no more a part of it, than any other substance; as is evident in the instance we have already given of a limb cut off (…) In like manner it will be in reference to any immaterial substance, which is void of that consciousness whereby I am my self to my self : if there be any part of its existence which I cannot upon recollection join with that present consciousness whereby I am now my self, it is, in that part of its existence, no more my self than any other immaterial being. For, whatsoever any substance has thought or done, which I cannot recollect, and by my consciousness make my own thought and action, it will no more belong to me, whether a part of me thought or did it, than if it had been thought or done by any other immaterial being anywhere existing.”
Id., § 26 : “Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Wherever a man finds what he calls himself, there, I think, another may say is the same person. It is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery. This personality extends it self beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness,– whereby it becomes concerned and accountable; owns and imputes to it self past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does the present. All which is founded in a concern for happiness, the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness; that which is conscious of pleasure and pain, desiring that that self that is conscious should be happy. And therefore whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in than if they had never been done (…)”
I apologize for these long quotations, but there is something material here that has to be heard, and shown. I hope that you agree with the following two suggestions. One, an essential part of the argument rests upon the idea that consciousness (or consciousness and memory) is the operator, or the system of mental operations, which “appropriates the self (or simply self , as a proper name) to itself”, where to “appropriate” at the same time means to identify with and to make a property, a separated or private ownership of, and where also itself should be heard as it(s) self, in a mirror construction. This becomes obvious when the idea is transposed at the first person (but the corresponding experience is by definition an experience in the first person): consciousness appropriates my self to my self. Second, an equally essential part of the meaning of the argument rests upon the use of the whole spectrum of uses and significations of the word own, which is both adjective (as in “my own thought and action”) and verb (to own), and again as a verb used equivocally as signifying either to acknowledge, to confess (in French avouer) or to possess, to be the owner of (in French posséder or avoir), or indeed both, because you cannot own something that is not your own, or the fact that you own something i.e. recognize that you are accountable for it eo ipso makes it your own, particularly in the case of actions, which we will see is the crux of the problem. As a consequence of these remarkable linguistic and theoretical operations depending on pure words, I was led, and I am led, to suggesting that the fundamental logic of this argument is a circularity where the ideas of identity and identification on one side, and of appropriation and the property or the propre on the other side continuously exchange their functions, and become virtually equivalent. So that what I can consider as me, myself, is my self, and “my” self is some “thing” that I own, or that I must own (confess) is mine, was done or thought by me, has become my own because I appropriated it to me by doing it or thinking it consciously. But to appropriate it to me is to appropriate/identify it to my self, to what is already properly mine and indiscernible from me because I appropriated it to me, etc. What is my own in the strong sense is myself/my self, and what is myself (or identical with me: you find in the text the compound adjective self-same, which Latin speakers would say combines the objective meaning of idem and the reflective meaning of ipse, bringing together the notions of sameness and selfhood) is my self, i.e. anything that is my own (possession) that I can own (confess), and only that… I thought that this was not only a linguistic curiosity, or a nice rhetorical use on the part of Locke of remarkable properties of the English language, but also a metaphysical fact or event, or better say a metaphysical language game, that had just the same importance as other well-known cases, such as in particular the syntactic properties of the Greek verb einai, eimi, esti, on, ousia, etc. for the constitution of the metaphysics of “being”, or the latent play on words in any use of the term “subject” because of its double Latin etymology, which combines a reference to the impersonal subiectum, the bearer or substratum of certain properties, with a reference to the personal subiectus, the individual who is subjected to the rule, authority or domination of another person. And I thought that I could ground on the discovery of this linguistic game, if not an explanation, at least an interpretation and a better understanding of the close relationship that exists in Locke and others between a problematic of the subject where consciousness becomes the criterion of personal identity and a political theory where the notion of citizenship becomes generalized, or better said universalized, because any individual ought to be considered a “proprietor of his/her own person” or a self-owning personality, and to the extent that he or she is such a proprietor (it seems, I must say, that “she” has more difficulties than “he”, but I leave this aside for the moment). And the reason for this close relationship, which indeed is an equivalence, would be precisely this metaphysics of appropriation or, as Derrida would say, propriation, whose linguistic expression but also linguistic anticipation is provided by the circularity of meanings between my self and my own, or the fact that you can explain self only by referring to own, and own only by referring to self. This I thought was the heart if not of Western ontology, as Macpherson has written, at least of Western or more precisely European psychological, moral, juridical, and political individualism.
But I was tempted to assert more, and once again this temptation was associated with a reading of an English text, a presumptuous reading I must say. I was tempted to assert that self and own, or if you prefer , my self and my own, the self and the own, were indeed one and the same. This would be both a speculative identity, and a very trivial, material identity, inscribed in the materiality of language, or rather of a specific idiom. In historicist terms, this amounted to explaining that Locke could give European individualism its metaphysical foundations because he was English and spoke English, because there was in English a “speculative” element represented by the synonymy of my self and my own, at least in some uses. It is always nice to discover, or imagine, that any language has its speculative elements, each time different, but with huge consequences, that this is not the privilege of Greek, or German. How was I led to this illusion, or simplification? I ask you to remember the formulations that I extracted from the Essay, they are sometimes indeed coming very close to this equivalence, but they never pure and simply exchange the expressions “my self” and “my own”, or they identify their meaning only implicitly and with the help of such mediations as “appropriation” or “concern” or “attribute” or “impute” etc. The evidence had to come from outside.
It happened that at the time I was working on this, I was also rereading the Diary of André Gide, don’t ask me why. You may know that Gide was very fond of English literature, had a good mastery of the English language, and played an important role indeed in the introduction and translation of contemporary English writers in France (such as Joseph Conrad). In his Diary you find quotations from poems in the original language, and I fell upon the following strophe from the poem by Robert Browning called By the Fire Side, which has become part of the collection “Men and Women”:
“My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?”
I must say that I was deeply moved by these verses, probably because I erroneously thought that the “age” of which it is a question here was the old age, the age into which I felt that I was entering now, or would soon be (and again I was probably fooled to understand it that way by the context in which André Gide quoted it, which in any case had to do with the problem of seeking an assurance against the uncertainty of one’s own identity, or self, in the recollection of memory). But above all I took it that the interpellation, represented here by the beginning of the strophe: “My own, confirm me!”, was a self-interpellation, a classical rhetorical move in which the poet lyrically addresses himself, or calls himself as a witness of his own life. And somehow, identifying with him, I would repeat: “My own, confirm me…”, believing that I was speaking to myself. But above all, and I recognize that this was not very serious, that it was much too fragile a basis for a scholarly interpretation, I thought (and wrote) that I had found an example where “My self” and “my own” in English are, i.e. mean one and the same. But actually as you all understand, because English is your mother tongue, this is not the case. As for myself, apart from some troubled reactions that I received from friends, which should have acted as warnings, I had to wait until I found the whole poem on the shelves of UCI’s Main Library, in Robert Browning’s Collected Works. And here is what I could read (allow me to take the time to read not only the following strophe, where the apostrophe “My own…” returns, but two or three others, not only because they are so beautiful, but because, while lifting any ambiguity even for a French reader, they introduce a speculative dimension, the dimension of the tension between unity and duality, or the fusion of the lovers into a mystic unity and the perhaps more disturbing emergence of the double who owns the identity of the subject):
“My own, confirm me! If I tread
This path back, is it not in pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, by its side,
Youth seems the waste instead?
My own, see where the years conduct!
At first, ‘twas something our two souls
Should mix as mists do; each is sucked
In each now: on, the new stream rolls,
Whatever rock obstruct.
Think, when our one soul understands
The great Word which makes all things new.
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?
Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!
But who could have expected this
When we two drew together first
Just for the obvious human bliss,
To satisfy life’s daily thirst
With a thing men seldom miss?”
Now quickly to remind you some facts about theses verses. First, of course, “my own” does not designate the poet himself, it designates his beloved wife, this is a love poem, a poem of bliss, dedicated by the young husband to his wife recalling their first encounter and their night of love under the Italian sky near an old chapel etc. etc. And the allusion to the old age, if it is there, is only an anticipation, as shown by a previous strophe which adds interesting variations on the theme of own and owning: “My perfect wife, my Leonor, / Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too, / Whom else could I dare look backward for, / With whom beside should I dare pursue / The path grey heads abhor ?” (we may remember also that this love story was soon interrupted by the premature death of his wife, but let’s not add pathos). Now playing the role of the French student a little longer, let me remark that, although the expression “my own” in such circumstances and relations is very common in English, only a presumptuous apprentice could ignore it, it remains very idiomatic. In French or German or Italian (which perhaps comes closest) you have similar expressions, but they never have quite the same simplicity, I am tempted to say the same brutality, the same brutal tenderness and closeness: such as mon trésor or mon chéri, which are deemed vulgar, or mon âme, mon Coeur, which are elevated and old fashioned, or Mein Schatz, or mio bene or caro mio bene, as in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. I will not embark on discussing whether English lovers are more possessive than others, and curb the language to express this possessive character of their feelings, which is also a way to make love the only true form of possession, but I will return to the construction of “personal identity” or “identity through consciousness” in Locke, and show that there can be a benefit in the detour provoked by my mistake. I mean that a benefit can be found in reading together Robert Browning’s poem and John Locke’s essay. This benefit has to do with a better understanding of the extremely subtle, and in a sense confusing, modality in which the question of duality is involved in this construction of the concept of identity.
Why is it subtle, and perhaps confusing? This is because in a sense it is simultaneously asserted at one level and denied at another one, asserted at the level of enunciation and denied at the level of the enunciated, or asserted at the level of the signifier and denied at the level of the signified. More precisely language continuously works with dualities that theory immediately blurs or nullifies. Language continuously duplicates a self, or a self who is owning and a self who is owned, and has to do it in order to name the poles, the moments of the process of identification described, whereas theory explains that the self is one and the same, “the same to itself” because it “owns itself” or is its “own self”. Let us not haste to declare that this tension falls under the accusation of “performative contradiction”, of if this is the case, let me suggest that the text really makes a productive use of the contradiction, i.e. it can be associated with several important aspects of the problem of personal identity that are practically taken into account by Locke himself, or he would not have produced such a complicated, lengthy, rhetorical and poetical argument in order to explain that we ought to judge of a person’s identity and therefore responsibility (be it before the Human tribunals or before the Tribunal of God in the Day of the Last Judgment) after the only criterion which the person herself can accept and verify (i.e. “own”), namely her own consciousness of having thought and acted in a certain manner. And if the text makes a productive use of the contradiction, that is of the fact that the unity of the self is divided or duplicated by the simple fact of naming it (and here the use of self as proper name becomes particularly interesting) while the theory demonstrates its identity, this is because the text of course is acutely aware of the fact that the whole meaning of the argument can be captured only if it is meant and reproduced in the first person (this is the only “Cartesian” element in this text, perhaps, but it is a powerful one). I speak about myself, therefore about my “self”, and therefore put it or him at a distance, nearly to become able to address or interpellate it (or him), but the content of this interpellation is self-identification, not a disowning but an owning of oneself, a discovery of what is not separable, not alienable from me, because it is me indeed – that is: my consciousness. The first person is a shifter (Roman Jacobson), it enacts the performative contradiction continuously, or it bridges the gap between enunciation and enunciated while displaying their difference.
This could be said in Lockean terms, and this is probably one of the most fascinating interpretive possibilities opened by the conceptual fabric of the Essay. We could say that, by pure and simply posing the identity of my self and my own, and above all by confirming this identity as an essential identity on the basis of a wrong linguistic argument, I actually blurred the element of uneasiness that characterises this unity, or affects it. The developments on uneasiness arise in another fantastic chapter of Book II of the Essay, chapter 21 “Of Power”, where, in a manner that is not so different from what we find in Spinoza for example, Locke explains that there is no consciousness that is not associated with desire and at the same time troubled and pushed by it towards ever new contents or ideas, so that the notion of a fixed or stable consciousness is a contradiction in terms, consciousness is by its very nature restless, it must escape itself towards new contents, or its identity is associated with a perpetual flow, change, “train of ideas”: the category which names this intrinsic association of consciousness and desire being precisely uneasiness. So I would suggest by recurring to Locke himself, although from another place, that what I had a tendency to blur and in the end ignore, by progressively identifying self and own, posing that the self is exactly the same thing as the own, what is owned by me inasmuch as I own it (speaking of thoughts, and actions), was the uneasiness of this relation, the fact that the identity or sameness of self and own does indeed exist, but only as an uneasy one. And it is all the more remarkable that Locke so to speak expressed this uneasiness not mainly in the form of an explicit thesis or theorem, but above all in the materiality and linguistic subtlety of his writing, which so to speak mimics the uneasy process of differentiation of the unity in order to produce identity, or the process of differed appropriation or ownership of the self, or the dialectical process of the production of a difference within self-consciousness that exists only in order to become suppressed and negated, the production of a vanishing difference.
But allow me to return for a second to Robert Browning’s poem. There is an element in this poem that indeed made all the difference with a pure and simple appropriation of identity, or one’s own identity, which I have apparently made no use of, although it was precisely the absent cause of my mistake: this is the element of sexual difference. My own is my wife, perhaps it could be also my husband, or more generally we would say today it is my partner. It is the other with whom I make one and the same precisely because we can never become identified, indiscernible, in other terms with whom I experience the uneasy relationship of identity and difference, not only because it is conflictual, but because the identification of what is shared, or what is the same, and of what is separated, or divorced, can never be established in a clearcut and stable manner. The name of this uneasy experience conventionally is “love”, but we know that love is anything but a simple thing, perhaps because in love there is precisely so much consciousness, associated with so much desire. In short, duality is neither unity nor multiplicity (remember again a linguistic hint: the Greeks had a grammatical category of the dual). Let us see, to conclude, if we can draw something for the understanding of the relation of self and own in Locke, from the fact that their “uneasy” relationship might refer, at least in an oblique way, to the sexual difference, or to the general fact that a unity haunted by its own scission, or reduplication, or the idea of a self striving at its appropriation of itself (himself, herself) or at becoming its own through the projection of doubles, however vanishing they will prove, must bear at least a metaphoric relationship with the sexual difference. Not so much perhaps, the difference among “sexes” or even “sexualities”, as if they were fixed terms already existing before the process, but rather again a differentiation whose definition would have a necessary relation to the experiences of sexuality. This will lead me to suggesting you another range of textual comparisons.
If I had time I would start here a discussion centred on the adventures of the idea of the “vanishing duality” of the phenomenon of consciousness after Locke, and as a consequence of Locke’s formulations. But this would be much too long, and in a sense you would not be very surprised, even if in the detail the various philosophical figures of the analysis of consciousness, or personal identity, or both, in terms of a unity of opposite aspects of the self which allow it to become its own, and the rhetorical or linguistic instruments that have to be implemented or invented in order to describe such a dialectic, are incredibly complex and diverse. There would be Hegel of course, and it is not by chance that I have been playing at times with a Hegelian terminology to suggest that already in Locke there is a passage from a point of view of appropriation as a fact, or a result, to the point of view of appropriation as process. What is particularly interesting in Hegel, in the way in which he describes the experience of consciousness as an experience of successive scissions and unifications or syntheses, where the self appears to itself alternatively in the form of “certainty” and “truth”, which are at the same time inseparable and incompatible, is indeed the fact that Hegel displays with an extraordinary force the ambivalence of the process of “appropriation”, which produces at the same time identification and de-identification, or dis-owning (in the Phenomenology of Mind). This can be explained, indeed, by the fact that in Hegel the “subject” of the process is no longer the individual self, neither is it a collective substantial self, but it is the problematic, precisely uneasy, relationship between the individual and the community or the general substance, that can be viewed and that can view itself as a “self”, an infinite process of identification through appropriation. However, what I find remarkable in Locke, when we compare his formulation with Hegel’s, or with others equally remarkable that I had thought of bringing in – such as Adam Smith’s construction of the “supposed impartial Spectator” as the internal or interiorised figure of the generic other produced by the effect of sympathy within the self : “I divide myself as it were, into two persons…”; or George Herbert Mead’s internal dialectic of the “self” as a tendencial opposition of “I” and “Me” where I become divided among personalities each of which represents a sharing or participating in a specific network of social communication - what is remarkable in Locke I repeat is the fact that precisely in his case the duality or dualism (if only the duality of the past self and the present self, or the owned and the owning, or the identified and the identifying self) without which the idea of appropriation could not be sustained, is essentially vanishing, it is not theorized, one might say fetishized, in the form of “instances” or “agencies” or “moments” in a dialectic of consciousness, it is rather simply indicated in its elusive and vanishing nature, in its nature of pure temporal or memorial flow, through the rhetoric of the discourse and its play on words.
Now this characteristic, which I call the subtlety of Locke, is compensated so to speak, or it has a counterpart, which is the emergence of duality in another form, which is fantastic indeed, and which I would suggest – at least through comparisons – ultimately has a “sexual” content, in the general sense. I am thinking here of the extraordinary developments on the division or fusion of personalities as a consequence of actual or imaginary divisions or fusions of consciousnesses (it is a remarkable stylistic trait of Locke that he allows himself to use the term consciousness in the plural), which historically place Locke somewhere in the way that leads from ancient speculations on the transmigration of souls and the reincarnations of dead persons to typically modern experimental considerations (which for all that are perhaps no less speculative) on “multiple personalities” and the so-called “multiple personality syndrome”. In fact I think that the whole problem of multiple personalities is a pure Lockean problem, whether authors admit with more or less qualifications, or refuse the idea that such a thing exists in the strong sense as a horizontal division of memory and time whereby one and the same physical individual becomes split into 2, 3, or more (up to 18) “personalities”, each of them “owning” her own experiences, her own memories, her own behavior towards others, calling herself by her own name, in short living her own life, with discontinuous transitions from one to another. Now let’s read the following passage in the Essay (II.27. 23), from which I had already extracted one phrase:
Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, Book II, chap. 27, § 23 : “Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person: the identity of substance will not do it; for whatever substance there is, however framed, without consciousness there is no person: and a carcass may be a person, as well as any sort of substance be so, without consciousness. Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night; and, on the other side, the same consciousness, acting by intervals, two distinct bodies: I ask, in the first case, whether the day and the night– man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato? And whether, in the second case, there would not be one person in two distinct bodies, as much as one man is the same in two distinct clothings? Nor is it at all material to say, that this same, and this distinct consciousness, in the cases above mentioned, is owing to the same and distinct immaterial substances, bringing it with them to those bodies; which, whether true or no, alters not the case: since it is evident the personal identity would equally be determined by the consciousness, whether that consciousness were annexed to some individual immaterial substance or no. For, granting that the thinking substance in man must be necessarily supposed immaterial, it is evident that immaterial thinking thing may sometimes part with its past consciousness, and be restored to it again: as appears in the forgetfulness men often have of their past actions; and the mind many times recovers the memory of a past consciousness, which it had lost for twenty years together. Make these intervals of memory and forgetfulness to take their turns regularly by day and night, and you have two persons with the same immaterial spirit, as much as in the former instance two persons with the same body. So that self is not determined by identity or diversity of substance, which it cannot be sure of, but only by identity of consciousness.”
In this passage we see clearly how the Lockean rejection of the old dualisms of body and soul or mind, through the radical use of the criterion of identical consciousness, with its internal uneasy or vanishing process of differentiation, directly conduces to the admission of another duality, which I called fantastic, or which becomes easily projected into the fantastic realm where the distinction of “personalities” or “identities” or “selves” coincides with a cosmic conflict between day and night, or the forces of the good and the forces of evil, whose origin and consequences are beyond human reach, and perhaps beyond human understanding.
This will become clearer if we recognize that Locke’s passage cannot be isolated, that it belongs to a tradition or forms a link in a chain, where the same question of the division of the self expressed in the form of a duality of consciousness or consciousnesses has received a full treatment. In my earlier commentary (John Locke. Identité et difference…, pp. 237-240) I suggested that this passage be compared, on the one hand, with a passage in Augustine’s Confessions, and on the other hand with the Novel or Short Story by Robert-Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde (published in 1886). Locke is half-way between them, somehow, but he is also at a distance. These are three stories of the conflict and the separation, possible or impossible, of the “Day-man” and the “Night-man”, who are acting along opposite moral values, and impersonating opposite principles, and, together with others that we might add, they cannot be unrelated.
Here is Augustine’s passage:
“iubes certe ut contineam a concupiscentia carnis et concupiscentia oculorum et ambitione saeculi. iussisti a concubitu et de ipso coniugio melius aliquid quam concessisti monuisti. et quoniam dedisti, factum est, et antequam dispensator sacramenti tui fierem. sed adhuc vivunt in memoria mea, de qua multa locutus sum, talium rerum imagines, quas ibi consuetudo mea fixit, et occursantur mihi vigilanti quidem carentes viribus, in somnis autem non solum usque ad delectationem sed etiam usque ad consensionem factumque simillimum. et tantum valet imaginis inlusio in anima mea in carne mea, ut dormienti falsa visa persuadeant quod vigilanti vera non possunt. numquid tunc ego non sum, domine deus meus? et tamen tantum interest inter me ipsum et me ipsum intra momentum quo hinc ad soporem transeo vel huc inde retranseo! ubi est tunc ratio qua talibus suggestionibus resistit vigilans et, si res ipsae ingerantur, inconcussus manet? numquid clauditur cum oculis? numquid sopitur cum sensibus corporis? et unde saepe etiam in somnis resistimus nostrique propositi memores atque in eo castissime permanentes nullum talibus inlecebris adhibemus adsensum? et tamen tantum interest ut, cum aliter accidit, evigilantes ad conscientiae requiem redeamus ipsaque distantia reperiamus nos non fecisse quod tamen in nobis quoquo modo factum esse doleamus. »
What seems to be important in the case of Augustine’s description of the involuntary emissions of seminal liquor provoked during the night by the visit of feminine figures returning from the luxurious past of the saint (incubae), is its contribution to the discussion of the extent to which a conversion, i.e. a turn from the love of one-self or self-love to the exclusive love of God, and therefore also the abandonment (subiectio) to the absolute power of God, determines a radical change of identity, the emergence of a new man. We know that Book 10 in the Confessions is entirely devoted to a complex discussion of the relationship between memory (memoria, which practically subsumes all the intellectual operations of the mind as well) and desire (concupiscentia) in the constitution of the moral personality, or the relationship of one with oneself.
What I find particularly interesting is the fact that Augustine, while he compares different modalities of desire from his own experience by telling the story of his own life, would make a difference between sexual desire and other forms of desires associated with pleasures that we have more difficulties to forget. While he asserts that sexual desire, at least in the form of the physical desire for the beauty and sensuality of other bodies, can be completely overcome or suppressed, and this is what he claims he has succeeded to achieve, the pleasure of eating and drinking, the pleasure of seeing beautiful landscapes and works of art, the pleasure of learning and discovering through the exercise of intellectual capacities, the pleasure of being morally right and so appreciated by others, are much more difficult to forget: they give rise to an infinite conflict, a struggle that is coextensive with life, where the “two men”, who are associated with “two loves” (human and divine), and belong to “two Cities” or two Worlds, this one and the Other, exist simultaneously and confront each other. Now this situation can be read in the other direction, as a consequence of the symptomatic accident that takes place during the night. Augustine is lead to ask the question: who is the subject of this involuntary pleasure for whom the traces of memory are in a sense more real than the real? Is that me, or is it not me? The two hypotheses are equally disturbing, and the uneasiness that they provoke should be related with the reflections of Augustine on the involuntary element which resides within the will itself and testifies for the presence of evil as a “sleeping” element that disturbs the inclination toward the good itself. But there is worse than that, since the only possible explanation for the persistence of a desire, and with the desire, a personality or a “man” who had been entirely suppressed, is that this desire or relationship with pleasure is preserved by God, it resides in the very same intimate place of the self as God and the truth itself, interior intimo meo, which appears to be the place of Otherness, or the place of the worrying ambivalence of love. The Night man is the remainder of ambivalence that prevents the love of God from reaching certainty, and keeps casting a doubt or a shadow over the intentions of God concerning His servant….
How about Stevenson now? The text is very complex, and there is certainly not one way to read it. First of all, it seems to me more than likely that Stevenson is permeated with Augustinian themes and literal reminiscences, not only of course the designation of the content of the last chapter as a “confession” of Jekyll’s. Second, I have no precise idea concerning possible reading of Locke by Stevenson, but it strikes me that, in a sense, the full story of Jekyll and Hyde is a passage from the second hypothesis proposed by Locke (one single mind or consciousness in two different bodies) to the first one (two different consciousnesses within one single body). This is also the reason why the story told by Stevenson is not exactly a “multiple personality” story, it is rather a play with this scientific imaginary, and a critical questioning about its meaning.
The crucial passage takes place when, in the course of his “confession”, Jekyll explains how he discovered that the second personality (he writes “the second self”) that he has created through the use of “transcendental” medicine, in order to exteriorise the “dual nature” of man, or to carry an experience of effective dissociation of the good man and the evil man, the Day-man and the Night-man, is no longer his “own”, that is emerges in an unpredictable manner as if by his own (evil) will, but in reality as a consequence of the blind forces of degeneracy or “bestiality” that have been released. This is truly the moment in which the “thing” created by Jekyll and in which he has projected or concentrated all his desires to be “himself”, free from the constraints of society (from what is called “the very pink of the proprieties”) becomes a “person”, because it becomes a monster, the master’s master (as the butler would explicitly declare in the novel). And this is the moment when in his confession Jekyll declares himself unable to identify with Hyde, or to say “I” when describing Hyde’s actions. But in reality, or “in the real”, not to say ‘in the thing” (except that this real is the real of a fiction, created by writing) , this is the moment when the two identities have become so inseparable that they cannot even be separated by death. Jekyll has to kill himself in order to kill Hyde (of course the play on words has been remarked among others by Masao Miyoshi, and it is a French-English play on words: the name says “Jekyll” or “Je kill”, I kill, or better I kill the “Je”, the I, or the otherness of the I). But this killing is so ambiguous that we cannot even know if it means absolute dissociation or ultimate identification, or who, exactly, will be “judged” after that. Unless we pure and simply take it as a perfect allegory of the death drive, Jekyll being clearly a melancholic figure. Witness the following passage:
“My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once observed that in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands) I set myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought to enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the
gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon. How was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped capture in the streets, how was I to make my way into his
presence? and how should I, an unknown and displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician to rifle the study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must follow became lighted up from end to end. (…) Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro about the streets of the city. He, I say—I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these two base passions raged within him like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself, skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares, counting the minutes that still divided him from midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.
(…) At all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him »
To conclude briefly: how shall we understand these variations? We can remark that both Augustine and Stevenson clearly describe a duality that has a sexual connotation, or more generally concerns the disturbing presence of otherness within every consciousness that seeks to identify itself with a “self”, or reach self identity, as a radical conflict which cannot be solved in ordinary life. One of them describes it in moral-theological terms, and the other in physiological-fantastic terms. In both cases the “end” is absolute disowning of the self, either in God, in the form of God’s love who installs himself in interiore homine to reveal a truth and embody an authority which is the condition for man’s salvation, or in the form of Death, the master’s master, which becomes also projected in the form of a being that is at the same time interior and exterior, myself and my monstrous desire to escape all identity, therefore also all accountability. Now we might say that what distinguishes Locke from these two extremes is the fact that the supreme principle in his case is neither God nor the Death, but something like life (and consciousness is clearly associated with life, or better it is the instrument of the elevation of life to the status of principle or value). But Locke is a really great philosopher, therefore also a writer: while carrying to the last consequences the project of defining the “self” not in terms of internal conflict, or as divided self, but in terms of progressive appropriation and tendencial identity of self and own, being oneself and having or possessing oneself, he cannot pure and simply ignore the fact that any identity includes otherness or has to be defined in terms of an intrinsic relationship to its other. But he separates two figures: one is the figure of uneasiness, the tension between self and own that keeps life and consciousness in a condition of perpetual move: we might say that this is the normal form of life, but we might also say that the normality of life is uneasy. The other figure is a limit form, or a form (and also a state) of exception, that takes place when normality is not only uneasy but mentally or morally impossible: it is the radical dissociation of personality and individuality, or the cleavage of the bodily and mental life. In a sense it is the truth of the first, because it shows that there is nothing natural in the identification of self and own, which is really a norm rather than a necessity, and reigns by virtue of a postulate.
Published 2006 in Bill Maurer and Gabrielle Schwab (eds.), Accelerating Possession. Global Futures and Personhood, Columbia University Press, New York
I quote from John LOCKE : An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Edited with an introduction by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford University Press 1975 (reprinted 1990). Among the commentaries see in particular : ALLISON Henry E.: "Locke's Theory of Personal Identity : a re-examination", in Locke on Human Understanding, Selected Essays edited by I.C. Tipton, Oxford University Press 1977 ; AYERS Michael: Locke, Epistemology and Ontology, "The Arguments of the Philosophers", Routledge, Londres 1991 ; CARUTH Cathy: Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions. Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1991 ; OLIVECRONA K.: "Locke's Theory of Appropriation", Philosophical Quarterly, 24/96, 1974 ; THIEL Udo: "Locke's Concept of Person", in BRANDT R. (ed.), John Locke. Symposium Wolfenbüttel 1979, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin-New York 1981 ; THIEL Udo (Hrsg.): John Locke. Essay über den menschlichen Verstand, Klassiker Auslegen, Band 6, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997.
Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, Editions du Seuil-Le Robert, Paris, forthcoming 2004.
Two Treatises of Government, A critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus criticus by Peter Laslett, Revised Edition, Cambridge University Press 1963. MACPHERSON Crawford Brough: The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes to Locke, Oxford University Press, 1962.
In what is arguably his most extraordinary and decisive philosophical essay, Jean-Paul Sartre had demonstrated this point from a phenomenological point of view (see « La transcendance de l’Ego » (1934/1939)), in Sartre, La transcendance de l’Ego et autres textes phénoménologiques, Textes introduits et annotés par V. de Coorebyter, Vrin éditeur, Paris 2003.
Identité et différence. Le chapitre II, xxvii de l'Essay concerning Human Understanding de Locke. L'invention de la conscience (traduction, introduction et commentaire par E. Balibar) , Editions du Seuil, Paris 1998.
It was invented by the Cambridge neo-platonist Ralph Cudworth, in his monumental work PRIVATE The True Intellectual System of the Universe, The First Part; Wherein All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and Its Impossibility Demonstrated, London 1678 (modern reprint by Thoemmes Press, Bristol, 1995).
See Jean Deprun, La philosophie de l'inquiétude en France au XVIIIe siècle, Librairie J. Vrin, Paris 1979.
On the metaphysical « consequences » of the properties of the Greek verb, see the classical essay by Emile Benveniste, « Catégories de pensée et catégories de langue », in Problèmes de linguistique générale, Gallimard, Paris 1966, pp. 63-74, and the critique by Jacques Derrida, « Le supplément de copule », in Marges de la philosophie, Les éditions de Minuit, Paris 1972, pp. 209-246. More recently Barbara Cassin has proposed a new understanding of the issue in her critical edition, translation and commentary of Parmenides’ Poem : Sur la nature ou sur l’étant, Parménide, La langue de l’être ?, traduction et commentaires par Barbara Cassin, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1998. On the double genealogy of the subject as subjectus and subjectum, cf. Etienne Balibar, « The subject », in UMBR(A), A Journal of the Unconscious, SUNY Buffalo, 2003, Ignorance of the Law, pp. 9 to 24.
See in particular Jacques Derrida’s Spurs : Nietzsche’s Styles, tr. Barbara Harlow (chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1979), 109-11 and 121-123. C.B. MacPherson, Democratic Theory : Essays in Retrieval (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1973), 24ff.
André Gide, Journal, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, p. 659.
Etienne Balibar, John Locke. Identité et différence…, cit., p. 252.
Robert Browning, « By the Fire Side », §§ XXV-XXIX, The Complete Works of Robert Browning, With Variant Readings and Annotations, Roma A. King, Jr. General Editor, Volume V, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, 1981, p. 205-206.
John Locke : An Essay concerning Human Understanding, cit., p. 233- 287 (the discussion of uneasiness begins on p. 251).
See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, With an Introduction by E. G. West, Liberty Classics, Indianapolis 1969, p. 247, 352, 371, etc. (Adam Smith calls the Impartial Spectator « the Man within the breast » of every man).
George H. Mead : Mind, Self, and Society from the standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, edited and with an introduction by Charles W. Morris, The University of Chicago Press, 1934, p. 135-226.
Mikkel BORCH-JACOBSEN: "Who's Who? Introducing Multiple Personality", in Joan Copjec (ed.), Supposing the Subject, Verso, London-New York 1994.
The Confessions of Augustine : An Electronic Edition, Text and Commentary by James J. O’Donnell © 1992, Book X, § 30.41. The translation by Edward B. Pusey (Harvard Classics, Collier & Son, New York 1909-1914) reads : « Verily Thou enjoinest me continency from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the world. Thou enjoinest continency from concubinage; and for wedlock itself, Thou hast counselled something better than what Thou hast permitted. And since Thou gavest it, it was done, even before I became a dispenser of Thy Sacrament. But there yet live in my memory (whereof I have much spoken) the images of such things as my ill custom there fixed; which haunt me, strengthless when I am awake: but in sleep, not only so as to give pleasure, but even to obtain assent, and what is very like reality. Yea, so far prevails the illusion of the image, in my soul and in my flesh, that, when asleep, false visions persuade to that which when waking, the true cannot. Am I not then myself, O Lord my God? And yet there is so much difference betwixt myself and myself, within that moment wherein I pass from waking to sleeping, or return from sleeping to waking! Where is reason then, which, awake, resisteth such suggestions? And should the things themselves be urged on it, it remaineth unshaken. Is it clasped up with the eyes? is it lulled asleep with the senses of the body? And whence is it that often even in sleep we resist, and mindful of our purpose, and abiding most chastely in it, yield no assent to such enticements? And yet so much difference there is, that when it happeneth otherwise, upon waking we return to peace of conscience: and by this very difference discover that we did not, what yet we be sorry that in some way it was done in us.”
I quote from Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, edfited by Martin A. Danahay, broadview literary texts, Peterborough, Ontario, 1999.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, cit., Chapter 10 : Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case, pp. 75-91.
« The Divided Self », in The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion, edited by Harry M. Geduld, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 1983, p. 104-105.