Interpretation – making sense of words, actions, events, images, institutions, and lives – is not an optional activity added to human existence. Human beings inhabit meaningful worlds already articulated by language, memory, custom, desire, power, practices and expectations. We interpret continually, and we are interpreted continually. The question of the self is therefore inseparable from the question of meaning: what is the being who says “I,” and how does that being become intelligible to itself and to others?
This course begins from a deliberately demanding proposition: a self is not first fully formed and subsequently interpreted. Interpretation participates in the coming-to-be, continuity, transformation, and sometimes dissolution of the self. Names, narratives, disciplines, practices of attention, social recognition, racial classifications, inherited metaphysical pictures, technologies, and acts of reading can disclose a self, but they can also organize, divide, constrain, or create one.
The course opens with Adam Curtis’s documentary series The Century of the Self, which offers a genealogy of the modern desiring subject and its commercial and political management. Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges and I” then condenses the same instability into a single page: the private person, the public author, the textual persona, and the speaker who cannot finally determine which of them is writing. From this opening, the course asks what kind of thing a self could be: substance, consciousness, soul, witness, person, relation, practice, narrative, event, illusion, or unfinished work.
The course is comparative without treating traditions as sealed civilizational blocks. Greek, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, modern European, African American, anticolonial, phenomenological, literary, and digital accounts are placed into sustained argument with one another. Plato and Foucault ask whether the self is known by introspection or formed through care. Al-Ghazālī and Ibn ʿArabī understand human inwardness through discipline, proportion, divine names, and perfected humanity. Avicenna asks whether self-awareness survives the suspension of bodily awareness. The Upaniṣads and Śaṅkara seek a rider, essence, or witness beneath change; Nāgasena, Vasubandhu, Garfield, and Ganeri challenge the need for any independent bearer at all. Du Bois and Fanon show how the self is divided and embodied through the gaze of a racialized world. Butler and Schechtman place selfhood within embodiment, social recognition, inherited norms, and opacity. Pessoa, Ganeri, and Bortolan ask whether the first person must be one, and whether writing and digital media express a prior self or participate in producing it.
The final week returns to Borges. Ernst Tugendhat, Jan Zwicky, and Renxiang Liu help articulate why the meaning of a person cannot be exhausted by explanation, reconstructed as the sum of discrete informational parts, or ordered instantaneously. The documentary Profile of a Writer: Jorge Luis Borges closes the course by presenting Borges as voice, body, memory, performance, reputation, an enigma to himself, and filmed object of interpretation. The course ends without a final definition of the self. It ends by asking what forms of attention, patience, judgment, and ethical restraint are required when another life – or one’s own – remains plural, temporal, and unfinished.
This is a rigorous reading and discussion seminar. It is not a therapeutic or confessional course. Students will not be asked to disclose private experiences. The object of reflection is the conceptual, literary, historical, and ethical problem of selfhood, approached through published texts, films, public figures, and carefully bounded phenomenological exercises.
