Chapter Three—
The Hole Called the Soul

I am the dark side of the moon; you know of my existence, but what you establish concerning the bright side is not valid for me. I am the remainder in the equation which does not come out even.
—Martin Buber

One aspect of the privation of existence that Michelstaedter did not appreciate as much as Rilke or Kandinsky is its complicity with everything that we conceive of as positive in life. It is Adriano Tilgher who first makes this point in his 1922 review of Persuasion and Rhetoric . Michelstaedter never understood, or never had the time to understand, in Tilgher's reading, that "what seems to be the deficiency, condemnation, and misery of man is also proof of his incorruptible and celestial essence." The sense that something necessary is conspicuously missing from life is itself evidence that this something "informs one's true being." It is an image of what "one has mysteriously fallen away from and to which one must return," or more simply put, an image of an intuited condition of totality and wholeness

outside of which everything else is only appearance and dream—[an intuition of wholeness] which instills in [a person's] soul the fecund disquietudes and healthy torments in which his nobility lies, and which saves him from the atomic and molecular dispersion of a life lived minute by minute, instant by instant, and which binds the unique instants of his life to one another, transforming them into moments in the development of a single energy. (Tilgher 1932:295–304)

In 1916 the philosopher Giovanni Gentile remarks much the same thing about evil, negativity, and pain: "The spirit's non-being," as he calls it, is undoubtedly the most painful aspect of human experience; but it is also what "spurs us on from task to task, and what has always been

recognized as the inner spring by which the mind progresses and lives" (Gentile 1916: 244).

By the time Tilgher wrote his review of Michelstaedter he had carefully studied Simmel's "The Metaphysics of Death." In essence he is applying the same perception as the German, to the effect that only the implicit recognition of death, deficiency, or negativity allows humans to posit values at all. Precisely because everyday life is "casual and fleeting," observes Simmel, we characterize some of its contents as universal, absolute, and lasting. We consider that not all dimensions of life have to share "the destiny of life's process; in this way alone the meaning of certain contents is stipulated as valid beyond life and death, independently of all flux and end" (Simmel 1910a: 34). The awareness of mortality compels us to abstract values from the senseless process.

The production of meaning in the face of fragile experience also gives rise to the idea of a basic and lasting self, irreducible to its historical experience. Among the values detached from physical and practical fluctuations of life is the concept of a unique, fundamental subject, affirming its own identity in the face of its scattered surroundings.

Similarly, Lukács associates the recognition of death with an "awakening of the soul to consciousness or self-consciousness." We experience something we call the soul, he notes in "The Metaphysics of Tragedy," in and through its historical limitations—and "only because and in so far as it is limited." The opposition between life and death from which Michelstaedter suffered, then, is the very thing that "extracts the soul's essential nature" and "gives to this essential nature the existence of an inner and only necessity" (Lukács 1910–11a: 161–162).^[1] Where the difference between life and death appears to be absolute, interiority and exteriority oppose each other as "the real and the unreal, the necessarily thought and the unthinkable and absurd." The experience of deficiency has its positive dimension after all. It is of a piece with the "longing of man for selfhood, the longing to transform the narrow peak of his

[1] On uses of the term soul in Lukács see Márkus 1983 and Elio Matassi, Il giovane Lukács: Saggio e sistema (Napoli: Guida, 1979), 44–45. A dialectical conception of negativity was already present in Lukács's The History and Development of Modern Drama, spurred by a reflection on the theories of Theodor Lipps. Tragic pain, writes Lipps, allows for "the flowering of a certain positive value of the personality. . . . In our feeling of compassion or sadness . . . is mixed a higher awareness of value, a higher enjoyment, rendered deeper by pain itself." Lukács comments: "We feel the value of something with greater intensity precisely in the moment of its decadence . . . a life acquires its own expression as it declines, in its ruin. . . . Tragedy renders the vital processes self-conscious" (Lukács 1911b: 64–65). This thought is intimately tied to Lukács's valorization of the "beautiful death."

existence into a wide plain with the path of his life winding across it [den Gipfel seines Daseins in eine Ebene des Lebenswege ], and his meaning into a daily reality" (Lukács 1910–11a: 161–162).

For Michelstaedter, the goal of such longing is self-certainty. In Simmel it is "pure self-determination," or the "being-itself-of-the-soul" (Simmel 1910a: 36). And yet there is a difference in the ways in which the two thinkers assess the goal. Where Simmel sees self-determination as an ideal that can only be realized in an imaginary or otherworldly realm, the young Lukács and Michelstaedter view it as a program to be accomplished on earth.^[2] The idea is born that persons must be fully self-determining here and now, translating their innermost being into action. They must actualize their souls in the contingent world, shaping their life in practice as much as in theory. It is a challenge that accompanies that dissonant and antithetical world in which "naked souls conduct a dialogue with naked destinies" (Lukács 1910–11a: 155). The investing of all hope in human subjectivity is not just a logical response to the deficiency of being: to many it is the only response.

Autoscopy

"When religion, science and morality are shaken [and] the external supports threaten to collapse," writes Vasily Kandinsky, "then man's gaze turns away from the external toward himself ." It turns to "materials and surroundings that give a free hand to the nonmaterial strivings and searchings of the thirsty soul" (Kandinsky 1909–11: 145 and 146). The soul becomes the only true seat of the real and must look at itself (autoscopy).

These materials and surroundings that give a free hand to the soul assume various shapes in 1910. They are the subjective excavations

[2] Although noting the relationship between Michelstaedter's "persuasion" and Simmel's "pure self-determination," Piero Pieri (1984: 110–111) overlooks Simmel's implication that this pure self-determination is not possible except in a life that is free from death; and that, of course, is not the view of Michelstaedter, who wishes persuasion to be actualized in concrete, historical practice. Ranke (1961) notes another apparent agreement between Michelstaedter and Simmel (though Ranke's explicit comparison is between the Italian and Heidegger): the fleeting admission in Michelstaedter (1958: 824–825) that all values are founded upon a recognition of death. But Ranke, too, fails to acknowledge that Michelstaedter's own values—being, identity, eternity, etc.—are thoroughly antihistorical, incapable of assuming concrete form. With Michelstaedter it is difficult to make the case that applies to Simmel and Heidegger and even Gentile (the latter being the subject of comparison in Arangio-Ruiz's study of 1954): that the deficiency of being serves a productive function in the everyday conduct of life. Like Weininger before him, Michelstaedter is led by the thought of negativity to dream of an absolutely opposite form of being, all plenitude, and categorically opposed to everyday practice.

of psychology, phenomenology, theosophy, and philosophical idealism. They are daring experiments in atonal music and pictorial abstraction, both seeking to convey spiritual possibility in perceptible form. The moment of this "turning" of which Kandinsky speaks is one where the political and technological world appears to reflect a distorted image of the inner life, in which works like The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge try to formulate new methods of seeing and understanding, new strategies for gathering more in consciousness than passive impressions of lifeless things. As the canvases of paintings become vehicles for feeling and intuition, portraits and self-portraits try to convey something internal to objective appearance. Schiele paints himself nude. Michelstaedter seeks a language for voiceless persuasion. Kandinsky and Kokoschka "paint pictures the objective theme of which is hardly more than an excuse . . . to express themselves as only the musician expressed himself until now." Schoenberg, the author of this statement, hopes that the freedom enjoyed by music can finally be shared by the visual arts—and that "those who demand a text, a subject matter, will soon stop demanding" (Schoenberg 1912a: 144–145). And yet there is still a text in this new expressionist art, and it is the self, more solitary and naked than ever in history.

In Kandinsky the words "spirit" and "soul" mean more than the respective natures of individual, historical beings. They refer to the "inner necessity" of an age, which comes to expression in art. But even in Kandinsky this necessity cannot discover its form unless it travels the route of human interiority. There is only one step between the theories of On the Spiritual in Art and the memorable distinction that Paul Kornfeld draws between expressionist and non-expressionist art: the first concerns itself with "souled man," the second with "psychological man."^[3] Psychological man, comments Walter Sokel, "is man seen from the outside, as an object of portrayal and scientific analysis. 'Souled man' is man felt from inside, in his ineffable uniqueness" (Sokel 1959: 52). In the analogous terms of Giovanni Gentile, the souled person is "the subject truly conceived as subject," not "reduced to one of the many finite objects contained in experience" (Gentile 1916: 5). The psychological person is the self-viewed-as-object, the souled person is the self-experienced-as-subject.

Alessandra Comini draws a similar distinction in her study of Schiele.

[3] Paul Kornfeld, "Der beseelte und der psychologische Mensch" (Souled and Psychological Man), Das junge Deutschland 1 (1918): 1–13.

The portraits of the young Austrian, she claims, are not interested in the external "façade" of a person but in the interior psyche, not in the "political, religious or economic man" of earlier art but in the "inner self." And in exploring such a subject, Schiele mirrors the collective quest of his time. The new hero of the expressionist generation—presented for the first time on stage in Oskar Kokoschka's Murderer, Hope of Women —is "Man-the-Self, transparent and painfully autobiographical" (Comini 1974: 1–2 and 5). The wish to penetrate essences "as though by X-ray" is shared by a host of Schiele's contemporaries, even if they do not agree on how to achieve this penetration.

An entire philosophical spectrum separates Kandinsky's abstract ramifications of the spirit from Schiele's graphic psychobiography. At one end lies the idea of a collective and perhaps even cosmic soul with which a sentient person might come into contact through art or thought. At the other lies the sense of a thoroughly historical and finite I, whether ego or id, libido or morality, male or female, or some such combination. Conceptions at the first end of the spectrum—theosophy, anthroposophy, occultism, even Jungian psychology—tend to emphasize the unity and continuity between living beings. Those at the other extreme stress the disjunctions. In 1910, however, the gradations along the spectrum are not that easy to distinguish. No theory entirely excludes another. The colors bleed into each other, offsetting categorical distinctions. Indeed, this uncertainty about the very modalities of spirit—this ontological "confusion," as it were—is immanent to the autoscopical turn, to a workshop of subjectivity simultaneously fueled by different elements, energies, and interests.

The object of the turn in Kandinsky is that "living spirit" of human experience which he believes to be the true content of art (Kandinsky 1912a: 250). In fact, only this content distinguishes the "necessary" new arts of his time from contemporaneous developments in the sciences and "unnecessary" arts.^[4] For Kandinsky the latter are rhetorical and formalistic in manner, offering a mere symbolism of the real. Their content, assuming they have one, is dictated in advance by the forms and the methods of articulation. For Kandinsky, by contrast, no form has relevance except insofar as it is "the external expression of inner content ." The true artist has no formal concern but one: the question "which form should I employ . . . to achieve the necessary expression of my inner

[4] On Kandinsky's ambivalence toward "formalist," avant-garde painting in Paris see his 1909–11: 151–152, 207–209.

experience" (Kandinsky 1912a: 237, 248). This is the new sense of "necessity" that is born in 1910, the new meaning that is given to a quality that philosophers had traditionally attributed to the realm of hard, objective fact. "To neither the joinings of human need between birth and the grave," writes Buber in 1913,

nor to the fate of all life that is scattered abroad in the world, nor to all the counterplay of the elements, nor even to the movement of the stars themselves, not to all these investigated and registered things may I grant the name of necessity, but only to the directed soul. (Buber 1913a: 57)

In this argument, everything outside the soul's direction, even what cannot be changed, has no necessary reason for having the form that it has. History and politics themselves are but the cluttered externals of an "unknown Inward which is the most living thing of all" (Buber 1909: 1). A similar distinction underlies Lukács's difference between the real and the unreal. The real is the "inner and only necessity of the soul," playing itself out in its "experience of itself" (Lukács 1916: 147). In an unreal epoch—where "no things, no houses, no exterior" still harbor any meaning, as Rilke notes in his study of Rodin—innerness comes into its own. And this innerness "is formless, inconceivable: it floats" (Rilke 1902–07: 240). The distinction of the art of his time is that it seeks "equivalents among the visible for the inwardly seen" (Rilke 1910: 76). The "inwardly seen" is more than what lies in the eye of the artist; it is what lies in the innerness of things themselves, and can never be illuminated by mere scientific descriptions. Schoenberg says much the same thing about his own paintings: "I never saw faces, but because I looked into people's eyes, only their 'gazes'. . . . A painter . . . grasps with one look the whole person—I, only his soul" (Schoenberg 1938: 237). But this soul is more than the whole person.

Franz Marc addresses the same issue from the position of the viewer. What struck him like a lightning bolt when he saw the NKVM exhibit in late 1910 was that the works of Kandinsky's group put art to a radically new purpose. The originality of their works lay in their "utterly spiritualized and dematerialized inwardness of feeling"—a feeling which "our fathers, the artists of the nineteenth century, never even attempted to achieve in a 'picture'" (Marc 1910b: 126). Within a month Marc is corresponding with fellow painter August Macke on the subject of color theory. In it both seek a means "to express oneself naively with art" (Macke and Marc 1964: 25; letter from Macke of early December, 1910). And to express oneself naively means to escape the rhetorical traps of the European artistic tradition, above all the notion that paint-

ing must mimic historical appearances. "We must feed our ideas and ideals," exclaims Marc, "with locusts and wild honey, and not with history" (Macke and Marc 1964: 40; letter of January 14, 1911). Instead of adhering to the picture of nature, artists should "annihilate" it, seeking "the powerful laws that rule beneath a beautiful appearance" (Marc, quoted by Vogt 1980: 81). Following their research in 1910–11, Marc and Macke come to agree that no form can be anything more than a cipher of these other more powerful laws: "Man expresses his life in forms," writes Macke. "Each form of art is an expression of his inner life. The exterior of the form of art is its interior" (Macke 1912: 85).

The strongest apology for this new, autoscopical art still lies with Schoenberg and Kandinsky, who learned even more from each other in this period than Marc and Macke. At its highest level, claims Schoenberg, art "is exclusively concerned with the representation of inner nature." It is "born of 'I must,' not 'I can.'" This is as true of music as of painting: "Every chord I put down corresponds to a necessity, to a necessity of my urge to expression" (Schoenberg 1911a: 18, 1911b: 365, 1911a: 417). "One must express oneself!" he exclaims to Kandinsky on January 24, 1911. "Express oneself directly ! Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive ." Two days later Kandinsky replies in agreement: "I am very pleased that you speak of self-perception. That is the root of the 'new' art"; there "the 'inner voice' alone should speak" (Schoenberg and Kandinsky 1984: 23 and 25).

Strong as this inward turn is in Germany and Austria, it is just as evident in Italy, where Boine, Slataper, and other members of La Voce cultivate a new aesthetics of the lyrical, autobiographical fragment. "So far," writes Giovanni Papini in 1911,

art has nearly always expressed the most common and most universal feelings and facts of men . . . descriptions of external things, on the basis of ordinary studies of consciousness. Now, as I see it, art should refer more to the interior, should interiorize itself more than it has done so far; it should start with the I and not with things, expressing spiritual realities more than material appearances. (Papini 1911: 107–108)

Was it not for the same reason that Virginia Woolf announced that human character changed "in or about December, 1910"?

All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.

Let us agree to place one of these changes [i.e., the change from the Edwardian novel to the Georgian writings of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence] about the year 1910. (Woolf 1924: 320–321)

By 1910, her essay argues, human nature had suffered an alienation from its sociopolitical conditions, requiring a tortured new language to find its voice. And if, when we move from Woolf's England to France, we do not see the inward turn quite so clearly, it may be because a magnetic gathering of bold and innovative artists in Paris kept aesthetic issues firmly focused on the new promises of formal invention. But even in France there were the André Gides and the Henri Bergsons, the Paul Claudels and the moralists of the Nouvelle Revue Française . A new sense of the primacy of the subject had pervaded Europe. Among the many reasons for these new arts of subjectivity there are three in the realm of ideas: the sociopolitical thinking of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the joint rise of philosophical egoism and idealism.

Qualitative Individualism

In 1908 Georg Simmel attempts to account for the new subjectivism of the century by reference to two inherited styles and concepts: the "quantitative" individualism of the eighteenth century and the "qualitative" individualism of the nineteenth (Simmel 1908: 527–545, 552–565, 568–570 and Simmel 1971: 268–274). Beneath the Enlightenment effort to liberate humans from the servitude of traditional political institutions, argues Simmel, lies the supposition that individuals are at bottom essentially the same. Different as they may seem to be on the surface, citizens of a state are all instances of a general rule. In the light of this rule varieties in lifestyle and interest are merely contingent, trivial, atomic reflections of a universal human order. This is why Simmel calls the individualism of this period "quantitative," saying that it essentially envisages the singleness rather than uniqueness of persons (Einzelheit, not Einzigkeit ).

In the following century things change. The belief that persons are monadic instantiations of a general essence gives way to an emphasis on their uniqueness. In German romanticism the individual is no longer primarily a political animal or an exemplum of universal humanity. The social rule is now a context against which persons stand out as irreducibly singular. Individuality comes to mean uniqueness, irreplaceability, "qualitative" incomparability with every other being, including one's most intimate friends and social groupings.

If the Enlightenment subordinates the individual to the universal principles of natural right and equality, the nineteenth century strives to accommodate society to individual deviations. No longer is it self-evident that the social domain can be justly and homogeneously organized, enabling the emergence of equal and comparable human beings. It appears rather to be fueled by differences, legitimated through competition and the division of labor. The principles at work in this qualitative individualism are not reason and necessity but freedom and will, not the actualities of history but the potentialities of subjective creativity.

The twentieth century inherits both species of individualism, complicating their implications in unforeseen ways. Qualitative, romantic individualism becomes even more radical, nurturing differences among human beings as never before. Simultaneously, however, the social and economic structures that appeared to serve the qualitative individualism come to appear as clandestine methods for quantifying individuals once again, reducing them to functions of abstract, objective rules. By the late nineteenth century a whole series of opponents of bourgeois culture—bohemians and dandies, advocates of the genius, the saint, and the criminal—strengthen their position; the pursuit of uniqueness rebels against the social structures in which it once hoped to achieve its actualization. Subjectivity becomes increasingly worried by the gap between theory and practice, between inner and outer worlds of human comportment. If this process begins in nineteenth-century disillusionment with the French Revolution, it comes to fruition in the early twentieth century, in what Lukács comes to call romantic anticapitalism: the association of individualism with internal, subjective freedom rather than with a concrete reorganization of socioeconomic activity. And this is when artists and philosophers take to bemoaning the deficiency of being, when political faith breaks down, and when individuality seems achievable only in conceptual and imaginative self-discipline.

Whether properly diagnosed or not, this development is exacerbated by another event: the growth of a metaphysics of egoism. Most of it can be traced to the influence of Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Nietzsche, who locate a lust for survival or power beneath the orderly progression of rational, scientific, and political logic, pitting every organism against its constraining external conditions. Whether it is called will to survival or will to power, self-assertion motivates all individuals and groups. People appear even more unequal than the romantics thought. Qualitative differences in resourcefulness and strength involve a type of constitutive alienation between every ego and the things outside it, whether

they be homeostatic material conditions or enabling social structures. Individualism appears to be the result of an agonistic process of individualization, the product of a contention with and within historical becoming. This is one dimension of the philosophical heritage underlying the theoretical developments of the turn of the century, including Freud's libidinal psychology and the fluctuant metaphysics of the Lebensphilosophen . It is also why Schoenberg can say, with all apparent ease, that an objective assessment of any historical condition "reveals the living personality poised for the struggle, in vigorous conflict with its environment" (Schoenberg 1911a: 412). Six years later William Butler Yeats elevates the struggle into a categorical opposition between Creative Will and the Body of Fate into which that will is thrown.^[5] In Michelstaedter the struggle takes the shape of a hankering for life—and more-than-life—which keeps creatures eternally distant from each present moment.

If ever there was a culmination of this qualitative individualism it lies in Persuasion and Rhetoric, the most eloquent account for why expressionism becomes so necessary in the early twentieth century. Impelled by its own inner desire, writes Michelstaedter; each creature "moves differently from things different from itself, different even itself from itself" (Michelstaedter 1910: 41). As long as a person is alive, the condition continues unabated: "he is here and the world there: two and not one. And as long as he is conscious of it, the world does not consist all in one point, but always in one thing and another, in a now and an after, in a more and a less . . . ta polla instead of the one."^[6] Individualism is not merely a goal, but a destiny. In this scenario no attempt to transcend one's difference can ward off failure:

if I jump into the sea, if I feel the wave on my body—where I am the sea is not; if I wish to go where the water is and to have it—the waves cleave before the man who swims; if I drink the seafoam, if I exult like a dolphin—if I drown—still I do not possess the sea: I am alone and different in the midst of the sea. (Michelstaedter 1910: 40–41)

The situation is even more fruitless in the company of one's fellows: "Neither kisses, nor embraces, nor any of the many demonstrations that love devises will ever succeed in making one person interpenetrate the

[5] W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 261. The work, writes Yeats, was conceived before the first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West was published (before 1918).

[6] Carlo Michelstaedter, "Critical Appendices" to Persuasion and Rhetoric (Appendix II, "Decadence") in Michelstaedter 1958: 192.

other; rather, they will remain eternally two, and each alone and different in front of the other" (Michelstaedter 1910: 41). These differences reach even into the innermost recesses of an individual self. And that, once again, is why people lament their solitude: "being with themselves they feel alone : they feel they are with nobody " (Michelstaedter 1910: 41). The inward turn is thus intimately tied to the perceived difference between an I and the company it keeps, between even its internal and external nature.

The condition in which a living personality is eternally poised for the struggle calls for unique new forms of expression. If art becomes more audacious than ever before it is because it appears to be the proper realm of activity for unique individuals—if not the activity by which individuals become unique. "He who really has principles," writes Schoenberg, "lives according to his own inclinations." It is no surprise that he defies all universal and quantitative "laws" (the law of four-part harmony, for instance) in deference to qualitative and individual ones. The artist is irresistibly drawn to precisely "what is not common usage " (Schoenberg 1911a: 413, 11). In a similar declaration of independence, Schiele contends that those people who are most "themselves" are necessarily at odds with industrious, law-abiding humanity. "To be oneself!—Oneself! . . . Oh, the lively living thing! . . . Oh—the perennial wearers of uniforms! . . . The living person is unique [Der Lebende ist einzig ]" (Nebehay 1979: 163–164). To say that the living are unique is also to say that only the unique are living—only those, like Schiele, who inhabit the fringes of conventional society. Normalcy, once again, is a mask of death. "The absolute duty of the new artist," he writes in 1909, is to find "in himself the ground on which to construct, without relying in any way on the past or tradition" (Nebehay 1979: 112). Agreeing with Schiele, Schoenberg, and Michelstaedter is also the young Lukács: "Only the individual," he writes in Aesthetic Culture, "only individuality pushed to its furthest limits, really exists" (Lukács 1913: 29; cited by Márkus 1983: 9).

Subjective Transcendence

This association of individuality with a higher degree of reality would not be possible without a third development that accompanies the notions of qualitative individualism and the vision of the world as a battleground of egos. We might call it the transcendentalization of the I. Not only is the I separate and different from all things around it; it also

underlies whatever we can say about them—everything we can perceive and value. The qualification of the I is now complete. Here the sense of a radical difference between ego and world joins a belief that the forms of historical life are contingent on how we see them—representations, in Schopenhauer's terms, of subjective will. Widely diffused in Europe by 1910, this essentially Kantian doctrine does not mean that empirical phenomena have no existence outside the ego; it just stresses that the features, the value, and ultimately the truth of these phenomena are consciously or unconsciously determined by the subject. They are functions of consciousness, feeling, desire, and interest.

Again it is Michelstaedter who exemplifies the position most radically. "If I am hungry, reality for me is no more than a set of more or less eatable things; if I am thirsty, reality is more or less liquid, and more or less drinkable." If I am neither hungry nor thirsty, nor in need of anything in particular, he adds, then all I can say is that "the world is a great set of grey things whose nature I do not know, though I certainly know that they have not been created to cheer me up" (Michelstaedter 1922: 85–86). No disinterested, universal, or objective knowledge can ever be achieved. Either things serve some practical interest or they have no meaning. The I determines the nature of all things. And art will inevitably mirror this situation, beginning with impressionism and building up to the subjective distortions and abstractions of expressionism.

Michelstaedter's position has many variants in the prewar years, especially those of Hans Vaihinger, Otto Weininger, the German neo-Kantians, and the British and Italian idealists. But the most sophisticated argument for the transcendence of the subject occurs in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In a work he had already begun in 1910 (Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, 1913) Husserl traces all phenomena and meanings in history to their source in the intentional nature of the mind. This mind, or consciousness, is not "a human Ego in the universal, existentially posited world, but exclusively a subject for which this world has being." In fact one could go so far as to say that "the transcendental Ego exists [ist ] absolutely in and for itself prior to all cosmic being (which first wins, in and through it, existential validity)" (Husserl 1913: 8). No aspect of existence is more real for Husserl than this invisible, theoretical recess of world-constituting subjectivity. All other things are of a "second order" of reality, a function of the structures in which they appear.

One also finds a transcendental theory of subjectivity in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Like Michelstaedter, Wittgenstein takes Scho-

penhauer's notion of the representational nature of the world—or the "propositional" nature of the world, as Wittgenstein calls it in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)—as the starting point for his reflections on the nature of intelligence and subjectivity. The subject, he writes in 1916, "is not a part of the world but a presupposition of its existence." Beneath the physical apparatus of the self lies an unspeakable I that feels, judges, and wills. This I, writes Wittgenstein, is "not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world." The human body, by contrast, is just "a part of the world among others, among beasts, plants, stones, etc." (Wittgenstein 1914–16: 79–80; notes of August 2, and September 2, 1916). Six years later, in his Tractatus, the second note becomes: "The philosophical I is not the man . . . but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world" (Wittgenstein 1922: #5.641).

Such a conception of subjectivity entails considerable distance from the practical, political, historical world. "What has history to do with me?" exclaims Wittgenstein. "Mine is the first and only world!" Even the physical, empirical ego "makes its appearance in philosophy through the world's being my world." That the world is my world originates even the inventions of culture: "Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion—science—and art. And this consciousness is life itself" (Wittgenstein 1914–16: 82, 80, and 79; notes of September 2, August 12, and August 1–2, 1916).^[7]

In Wittgenstein the transcendence of the subject means that all metaphysical and ethical questions—for example, the ultimate nature and value of reality, how one should behave within it, and so on—lie outside the realm of the knowable. They are the basis for knowledge, not its object. For another thinker of the time, however, the transcendence of the subject means that even the nature of action must be reassessed. Giovanni Gentile first introduced the principles of The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (1916) in a paper of 1912 called "The Act of Thinking as a Pure Act." Difficult as it is to condense Gentile's complex argument, its main steps are these: All historical reality "resolves" itself into the

[7] But both the style and the substance of these notes is indebted to Ueber die letzen Dinge by Weininger: "Culture is transcendental . . . . It is transcendentality that first furnishes culture [Erst die Transzendentalität schafft Kultur]" (Weininger 1904: 155). On the relations between Weininger and Wittgenstein see Janik 1985. On Weininger's impact on Italian thinking see Alberto Cavaglion, Otto Weininger in Italia (Roma: Carucci, 1982). On Weininger in general see Le Rider 1982 and 1993, who in the 1993 volume also has a useful exegesis of Simmel's qualitative and quantitative individualism.

subjectivity in which it is thought; it processes itself as subjectivity. As with Kandinsky, the two apparent components of experience—historical materialism and spirituality—stand in tense opposition. According to Gentile, "the spirit is the negation of Being" in the measure to which "it is precisely the non-being of Being." That is to say, spirituality battles the inertia of developed, material reality (Being) in an effort to actualize its latent potential (or non-being). The paradox of spiritual reality is that it "is in not being: it fulfills its real nature in so far as this is not already realized and is in process of realization" (Gentile 1916: 244). While spirit, in the ordinary conception of the word, is everything that matter is not, this "not" supplies the impetus for change, development, and progress. One actualizes spirit by negating particular aspects of the practice which that spirit itself has produced, by negating the "history" and the "nature" which appear to be the basis of the spirit but are really no more than its products. In the philosophy of pure act, historical becoming is the outcome of a spiritual battle against objectivity and "naturalism," or against that Being which is in truth the non-being of a spirit eternally becoming.

Gentile's idea of subjectivity is not solipsistic. Spirit does develop into objective reality; it lives in the effort to produce what is not in the present, but will be in the future—in the form of practical, concrete history. In this sense, Gentile's philosophy of the atto puro is analogous to Kandinsky's conception of spirituality as the motor drive of history, a movement "forwards and upwards." Moreover, it is in the interests of "pure objectivity" that Gentile's spiritual action militates against the sclerotic, contemporary forms of thought and act into which subjectivity is periodically reduced. "Man is man," he writes, "by denying, loathing to be what he is, and by turning his eyes to the ideal that he must realize. And were he to confuse this ideal with what he is already, he would acquiesce so perfectly in his condition that he would fall into the deep sleep of a stone." Against all present appeasement and acquiescence, then, Gentile advances a demeanor of "perpetual spiritual vigil." The inherent impulse of a person is "to go out from himself . . . 'to dissolve' and absorb himself into the ideal which is the object" (Gentile 1920: 106).

Can these notions of a transcendental ego and of a constitutive, ontological subject be reconciled with the bodily, psychological ego of paintings like Schiele's? With Kandinsky's sense of an inner necessity? How do they stand with Lukács's form-making "soul" or the Freudian psyche? Different though the conceptions are, they all belong to a single

chapter of thought. They all inherit and explore that Cartesian legacy of Western philosophy which mandates a turn away from an objective tradition (history, science, or fact) to subjectivity as the foundation of truth. Consolidated in particular ways by the quantitative and qualitative individualisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this Cartesian turn does not achieve its ultimate implications until human subjectivity is explicitly declared to be the sole hinge of action, morals, and understanding. And that is the conclusion of 1910. Even where no arguments are made about the spiritual transcendence of subjectivity, the I at this moment is still posited as the center of things. And in one way or another it is elevated to the status of a universal. Its uniqueness and unspeakability are the basis for everything that is divulged by speech.

Why, for example, does Schoenberg maintain that the artist's only significant activity is introspection and "absorption with his own nature"? Because this autoscopical activity is ultimately the means "to express: the nature of mankind" (Schoenberg 1911a: 412). The "souled," expressionist artist is not only a person but an instance of cosmic truth. What is really at work in introspection and self-absorption, for Schoenberg, is a demolition of the rhetorical acquisitions of finite, historical selves in order to restore the essence they share. Thus Schoenberg, too, ends up reconnecting subjective uniqueness with everything from which he had appeared to distinguish it: intractable materiality, other subjectivities, and historical destiny, for it contains their blueprint. In the words of Lukács, "the way of the soul is to strip away everything that is not truly part of oneself; to make the soul truly individual; yet what results transcends the purely individual" (Lukács 1913: 28).

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the philosophical principium individuationis becomes an avenue to quite the opposite—the overcoming of individuation, difference, and separation through a transpersonal unification of experience.^[8] "The entire world is nothing but my 'I' and my 'I' is nothing but the world," writes Julius Hart, one of the founders of Berlin's mystical circle of the Neue Gemeinschaft . "He who appreciates that he is the thing-in-itself has overcome time and space, and has become the universe; indeed eternity. His I has become the great axis about which infinity spins" (Hart 1901b: 40 and 1901a: 24). In 1909 Martin Buber describes the same seemingly egocentric condition

[8] On this paradoxical overcoming of the principle of individuation see Le Rider 1993 and Mendes-Flohr 1989. The same paradox is discussed by Sokel 1980 in reference to Rilke's Notebooks . For a thorough account of the flourishing of philosophies of subjectivity in German culture see Ascheim 1994: 51–84.

as all-unifying ecstasy. It is the "Inward" experiencing itself, achieving "the unity of the I, and in this unity the unity of I and world; no longer a 'content,' but what is infinitely more than any content" (Buber 1909: 2). In his remarks during the first conference of the German Society for Sociology a year later, Buber elaborates further: "In the intense exaltation of the self one establishes a relationship to the content of his soul, which he perceives as God" (Buber 1910a: 206).

This recuperation of the exterior in the interior, of the cosmos in the I, and of identity in difference traverses the entire spectrum of subjectivist thinking in 1910, whether it upholds the psychosomatic degradation of finite, historical persons or a world spirit which such complexes of mind and body might discover within themselves. In life philosophy, even the most fragmented acts of a purely physical person unfold as aspects of an overall process of vital development. In every case the subjectivist move of the prewar years appears to follow the same three steps: from the rejection of external, repressive, or "conventional" history to an interest in the innermost nature of the individual self, to a relocation of everything that matters in this nature. At the moment when the interior self appears to be the excluded topic of historical experience, it also comes to offer the transcendental "content" of that same experience, its only real basis and truth. Kandinsky's gaze in on oneself becomes the first act in a search for this self's proper language, a language that can be translated into history, articulating that self-presence of consciousness on which good actions and decisions are seen to rely.

Self-Possession

Michelstaedter describes the deplorable condition in which everything "moves differently from things different from itself" only to draw some conclusions: What a person really wants from all objects of desire, he claims, is

what is missing in himself: the possession of himself . . . . What he wants is given in himself, and wanting life he distances himself from himself: he does not know what he wants . His aim is not his aim, he does not know why he does what he does: his action is a form of passivity . (Michelstaedter 1910: 41)

On the surface the argument is structured as follows: (1) One desires only what one lacks; (2) since desire means reaching beyond oneself, what one lacks most in desire (or suppresses, or fails to appease) is one-

self; hence (3) what one desires in desire is self-completion, the wholeness and independence of a self-sufficient I. Whatever unavowed considerations may also be embedded in this argument, by claiming that in things we desire ourselves Michelstaedter addresses the primary concern that ensues upon the nihilistic recognition of the deficiency of being: how to recapture that which one has lost in the process of living—or perhaps never had: that soul which is "a stranger on earth," the "nothing" that eventually begins to think, and thinks: "I have an inner self of which I was ignorant." Once the mind no longer discovers identity, permanence, or value in outside things, it searches for the only identity that may have survived: the source of all values, the desiring I, the key to all other identities. If the experience of all historical things is at bottom just an experience of self, then possessing oneself means possessing the all.

Michelstaedter's sketches and paintings are almost all portraits. Rarely does a setting interfere with his anthropocentric focus. Similarly, his philosophy and poetry have no use for the historical attributes or contingencies that typically inform the experience of an I. For the I to be itself, everything must be necessary and nothing accidental. The absolute self "affirms itself absolutely in absolute value," not as a function of "more or less, before or after, if or maybe, in the throes of need" (Michelstaedter 1910: 94). Self-possession is the only true interest of this artist. And if the self is the real center of being, it must live accordingly. Empty as it may appear in its ordinary experience, it still has the task of transforming this negativity into positive terms. This "missing" or transcendent foundation of the universe must act out its own transcendence. Recognizing the ontological deficiency of life outside it, the self must make itself into that absolute, unshakable point of the world that it already is. It must recognize and embrace its solitude:

Whoever is for himself (menei ) needs nothing else to be for him (menoiauton ) in the future, but possesses everything in himself. "It will not take place, has been, or was / But simply is, in the present, today and now / And is simply eternity gathered and whole" (Petrarch). . . . Persuasion does not live in whoever does not live on himself alone . . . . Persuaded is he who has his life in himself: the naked soul in the Isles of the Blessed. (Michelstaedter 1910: 41–42)

The Isles of the Blessed are those of the Orphic myth discussed by Plato. According to the myth, before being able to pass true judgment on the souls of the dead, Zeus must first strip them of everything they have acquired in the course of their mortal existence: their clothes, their

Fig. 15.
Carlo Michelstaedter, Flying Figure,  no date, pencil. Courtesy Gorizia Civic Library, Gorizia.

body, and so on. He must see them exactly as what they are.^[9] Michelstaedter calls for this denuding operation in life itself, where the self will finally be exactly what it inherently is. The persuaded person lives as "the first and the last, and finds nothing that was done before him, nor does it avail him to believe that anything will be done after him . . . he must create himself and the world, which does not exist before him: he must be master and not slave in his house." The best example of such persuasion is Jesus Christ, one of those few who "saved himself by the fact that out of his mortal life he knew how to create the god: the individual" (Michelstaedter 1910: 73, 103–104). This is what it means to become oneself: in the nakedness of persuasive self-affirmation, to become the god-individual that one already is. Indeed, Michelstaedter could have borrowed the title of another work of 1910 to capture the theme of Persuasion and Rhetoric, Jules Romains's Manual of Deification . "The first way to become concentric to a god," writes Romains,

[9] Michelstaedter alludes to the same passage in Plato's Gorgias when stating, in a letter to his friend Enrico Mreule, that absolute judgments of value can be pronounced only if and when "the naked contemplates the naked." "Only the naked soul is free," he claims a few lines earlier. Both phrases are in Greek (Michelstaedter 1983: 362).

"is to stop up your eyes and ears, to suppress the universe. For the universe means your insistence on being who you are," or who you have so far believed you are (Romains 1910:63–64).^[10]

Indeed, Michelstaedter suppresses the universe more unsparingly than the most violent expressionists. To the persuaded person "the world must be a man who ever says 'no' to each of his acts, to each of his words, until he has filled the desert and illuminated the darkness on his own." One cannot discover what one is except by "making one's life always richer in negations" (Michelstaedter 1910: 84), to the point of recognizing that

the needs, the necessities, of life are not necessities . . . one cannot affirm oneself by affirming [the needs] that are given to him . . . by a contingency that is outside and prior to him: one cannot move differently from things that are because he needs them. (Michelstaedter 1910: 70)

To stand on his own, a person must first "make his own legs for walking—and make a path where there is no road" (Michelstaedter 1910: 73). While scholars are right to distinguish Michelstaedter from the most extreme philosopher of individualism, Max Stirner, few lines are more reminiscent than Stirner's "I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything" (Stirner 1845: 41).^[11]

Thus does objective nullity provide the foundation for plenitude. And subjective plenitude, in turn, restores the value of objective, historical being. While the search for oneself in things constantly transforms each empty moment into another, persuasive self-possession "makes time stand still." Every instant in a life of this sort "is a century in the life of

[10] Several other positions taken by this book strike chords in Michelstaedter: "La vérité? Elle est si prèS de vos yeux qu'ils ne la voient pas. Fermez vos yeux. Vous la sentirez avec vos paupières. / La vérité? Je vous assure qu'elle est chez vous, dans votre maison. / Ne sortez pas ce soir avant de l'avoir découverte [7–8]. . . . Vous dormirez entre des murs qui ne contiendront que vous. Le sommeil est à l'individu [12]. . . . Quand les dieux seront pleinement réels, les hommes n'auront plus de devoirs [58]. . . . Nous ne créons pas de dieux pour qu'il y ait une morale; nous voulons une morale pour qu'il y sit des dieux [59]. . . . Mais la naissance du moindre des dieux suffirait à la gloire de la terre [66]." Six years before Michelstaedter, Weininger had reached the same paradoxical conclusion: "Das realisierte Ich wäre Gott" (Weininger 1904: 104).

[11] Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own (1845), ed. John Carroll (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 41. Once again the intermediary between Michelstaedter and Stirner is Weininger: "Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all; he has the law in him, and so he himself is the law, and no mere changing caprice. . . . Nothing is superior to him, to the isolated absolute unity" (Weininger 1903: 162). On the subject of Michelstaedter and Stirner see Pieri 1989: 33–36 and 272–273; Bini 1992: 13, 15.

others—until one turns oneself into a flame and succeeds in consisting in the ultimate present." In this ultimate self-presence the individual "is everything," having, "in the possession of the world, the possession of himself—being one, himself and the world " (Michelstaedter 1910: 89, 82).

What is clear, however, from the very extremity of this rhetoric, clearer here than in any previous philosophy of subjectivity, is the obstacle that awaits this solution to the deficiency of being: This "actualization" of the pure, unadulterated subject abolishes that same subject from the confines of history, at least if we understand history as an interactive, temporal process. When the idea of the subject as the fundamentum inconcussum of all reality is taken to Michelstaedter's extreme, the I becomes detached from everything that can be experienced, understood, and spoken. In possessing itself, Michelstaedter's subject possesses none of the things with which history identifies it: its physical and social characteristics, its beliefs and actions, its finite perspectives and contexts. It is only the missing essence of its "accidents," too naked to step into the world. By insisting on being what it is "in itself," the I becomes the same nothing that it shunned in outside experience, not made into something, but abandoned to the greatest possible deficiency of being. "I know that I want and [that] I do not have what I want, " says the opening sentence of Persuasion and Rhetoric (Michelstaedter 1910: 39). Trakl, by the same logic, is forced to abandon the Erlebnislyrik, or the confessional lyric, by 1912. All that remains is negative knowledge. "What must I do?" Michelstaedter asks Nadia in a dialogue. "You know.—I do not know.—But you know that you are not doing it" (Michelstaedter 1988: 97).

Thus does the subjectivist tradition of Western philosophy come to its end. The Greek "Know thyself!" was based on a disparagement of objective self-evidence: The outer world was a deceptive and corrupting one; truth could only be discovered by turning inward and admitting to oneself what the world did not know. But when this project is taken to its extreme—or when the faith in outside knowledge is so broken that nothing appears to be real but the self—then one discovers that even this "self in itself" is nothing. It is nothing whatsoever outside of its objective relations. It is speechless and can attain no self-knowledge. Even if the I seems to achieve a type of mystical self-transformation at the height of persuasion, affirming the unspeakable reality of each of its historical experiences, it still loses its features. It dissolves into the arena of pure

objectivity, where all "essences" are momentary and fleeting appearances, and no subjects can be distinguished from objects. Here, too, the metaphysics of the subject is overcome (Harrison 1991; Cacciari 1992a; Perniola 1989).

Michelstaedter needs no critics to point out the impossibility of his ideal of persuasion. On the very page where he advocates knowing oneself he also admits that self-knowledge is a chimera, a "seeking with negative data." We lack the tools for the job. We only know—or would like to know—that the essence of such a self "should not be related to the irrationality of need " (Michelstaedter 1910: 85). Where knowledge is inevitably mediated by rhetoric and action by form, one can neither know nor become oneself. In his battle against philopsychia Michelstaedter despairs of the sense that the true being of all subjects and objects "cannot be defined in another way than by negating all the attributes of the will. . . . And even if my individuality points toward the absolute, I am always the negation of the absolute 'insofar as I want it.'" Thus ousia , or primal being, "remains outside of my consciousness and outside of my life" (Michelstaedter 1958: 803). In Persuasion and Rhetoric he acknowledged the impossibility of bridging the I and the All even more decisively than in this note: "I have never known the absolute; rather, I know it as one suffering from insomnia knows sleep, as one peering at the darkness knows light" (Michelstaedter 1910: 96). If persuasion means self-possession, the self is now impossible to characterize in positive terms. It is not equivalent to its needs, it is not what the mind says that it is, it is not the sum of its achievements or satisfactions. It is a mere dream of itself.

As Gentile recognized in the twenties, Michelstaedter's thinking undoes itself (Gentile 1922). It suffers the contradiction of the terms in which it operates (Cacciari 1992a; Bianco 1993). An effort to achieve form beyond form, its wedding of soul and experience joins an empty self to an empty present, both dissolved into a play of rhetorical appearance. The synthesis of I and world is an imaginary alternative to this only historical reality, this ubiquitous and omnipotent rhetoric, its pendant or mirror-image. Self-actualization is self-dissolution.

The marks of this dissolution are borne on every page of Persuasion and Rhetoric , beginning with its opening sentence: "I know that I am speaking because I am speaking, but that I will persuade no one; and this is dishonesty—but rhetoric anagcazeimetautadranbia [compels me to do it]" (Michelstaedter 1910: 35). The "rhetoric" that forces

Michelstaedter to speak dishonestly is not only the academic jargon that professors require of dissertations like his. It is also the conceptual vocabulary on which Michelstaedter himself relies, which makes him believe in an alternative to rhetoric, in the abolition of masks, deception, contingency, and appearance. It is rhetoric, and rhetoric alone, that makes Michelstaedter believe that his Parmenidean concepts of being, identity, and permanence have possible correlates in the historical world. It is rhetoric that seduces him into believing in persuasion. How lucid Michelstaedter might be about this paradox is hard to say. But it is clear to most of his readers that in his withering critique of rhetoric even the concept of persuasion is destroyed. Once one has understood that identity is an empty concept, or an illusion produced by historical and linguistic form, then the being and the self that one tries to distinguish from illusions also fall.

The breakdown of the I and its means of expression is just as apparent in Michelstaedter's dialogues and drawings, in his lyrical poems and paintings. Most of the drawings are caricatures, blending sympathy with aggression (Campailla 1980b; Bini 1992). These are not celebrations of an I. Rather, they bring as stern a judgment to bear on their subjects as do the critiques of Persuasion and Rhetoric . Just as the critiques push their arguments to the margins of self-parody, so the drawings turn satirical. However much Michelstaedter wanted to believe in self-determination, what he offers in his drawings are pictures of unaccomplished and rhetorical selves, trapped in conditions they cannot control. True, a handful of works do depict self-knowing, ecstatic, or seemingly self-possessed individuals (fig. 17). But what they convey most strongly is the preternatural strain of the effort, offering images of selves imbued with pain, wrinkled and frowning from the pressures of their voiceless suffering. The forces they battle are the same ones that Michelstaedter's dissertation and caricatures deride: the social, biological, and moral laws of rhetoric from which none can escape.

Michelstaedter's pictures of solitary human beings bear witness to an insuperable contest between unspeakable essence and clichéd appearance. His typical modes of articulation—including caricature, satire, and parody—are perversions of form, distortions of form's own distortion. They are critical rather than constructive procedures, strategies for speaking when speech is imperiled. They expose rather than reveal a subject, presenting it as divided and contradictory. It is the stage of a drama where, in Buber's words, "understanding and misunderstanding

Fig. 16.
Carlo Michelstaedter,  The Great Caricature , 1908(?), watercolor and pencil. Courtesy 
Gorizia Civic Library, Gorizia.

Fig. 17.
Carlo Michelstaedter, Revelation , 1906, oil. Courtesy Gorizia Civic Library, Gorizia.

are interwoven" (1925: 63). The duplicity informs each of Michelstaedter's art forms. His lyrical poems are extraordinarily cerebral, too conceptual in nature to stand as pure records of feeling. The axiomatic arguments of his thesis are filtered through emotions that frequently border on hallucination. Even his last and surest refuge—the I of his

Fig. 18.
Carlo Michelstaedter, Self-Portrait of 1908, watercolor and pencil. Courtesy Gorizia Civic
Library, Gorizia.

own self-portraits—comes to suffer dissolution, as the final depictions transform even their maker into "another person, a stranget he too a member of the petty community of evil" (Campailla 1980b: 144).

Michelstaedtet the heroic nihilist, performs the last concerted effort in the West to ground all experience and value in a place where they cannot grow. A similar itinerary is followed by others in his time, who are bent on the same end but who discover in the process that the project cannot succeed. Kandinsky, Kokoschka, and Schiele wish to uncover some hidden and essential dimension of subjectivity; they critique the arbitrary traits in which it is materially or historically cloaked. But even they end up affirming not the autonomy of self, but the autonomy of the materials out of which it is built.

Pictures of Soul

The inward gaze has its pictorial awakening in the work of Vincent van Gogh and Edward Munch. Not that artists had never taken a hard look at the self before, but few had attempted to penetrate its invisible, unspeakable uniqueness, despoiling it of connections to the external, operative world. What assumes form in van Gogh and Munch is the spiritual "aura," as it were, of the individual, qualitatively different self, its voiceless fears and aspirations, its struggle against forces bearing down upon it. The same thing occurs in the Urschrei, or primordial scream, of later expressionist poets: the first impetus for their labor is an encounter with anxiety. And its most celebrated example is Munch's The Scream .

The face of Munch's howling man on a bridge is almost bereft of features. His eyes and mouths are holes, as though nature had made these organs of perception and articulation dysfunctional out of malice. The man cups the ears of his hairless head with his hands, trying to block out the piercing sounds of the swirling, circumambient universe. Wandering away from dark, retreating figures impervious to this clash of abstract forces, he is witness to a nightmare outside himself. Internal though it be, his anguish is caused by cosmic pressure. If there is anything about this depiction that can be tied to debates about the "rights of the fetus," as some claimed when the painting was stolen during the winter Olympics in Norway, it is the suggestion that the actual life of this man is an abortion, and that he would have willingly refused such an indignity had he known, in the womb, what awaited him. The man is screaming about the monstrosity of the so-called right to life.

Munch's later Self-Portrait with a Cigarette (1895) shows a rigid man isolated from his background, facing a bright light illuminating his dazed and unseeing face. He has been caught by surprise; his startled and silent eyes show the passivity of an objectified subject. The smoke rising from his cigarette blends into the obscure and hazy background, while his torso fades away at the bottom of the frame; both reinforce the insubstantial, apparitional nature of the life in question. Something previously unseen comes into view in this apparitional life: an unfamiliar and impenetrable spirit that never developed out of it, now exposed to a light to whose warmth the subject is unaccustomed, like a creature of the shadows that he casts. His attempt to appear dignified in evening wear only makes the illuminated stress more clear.

In 1908 Munch suffers nervous collapse. During his treatment he paints a portrait of his doctor Daniel Jacobson (fig. 20). Everything in

Fig. 19.
Edvard Munch, The Scream, © 1895, woodcut. Courtesy Munch Museum, Oslo.

this portrait conspires to convey an impression of the internal energy of the doctor: the towering, full-length view; the bursts of orange, green, red, and brown; the ethereal, dynamic movements of the space that he occupies with his arms akimbo. Whether these distortions of nature emanate from the doctor or are projected by the suffering patient's vision, the drama is an internal one. The resources of Munch's art are all geared

Fig. 20.
Edvard Munch,  Portrait of Dr. Daniel Jacobsen,  1909, oil. Courtesy Munch Museum, Oslo.

toward uncovering what does not appear on the natural, objective surface of things, or what appears despite this surface.

The bridge between Munch and expressionist portraiture of 1910 is built by the artists who went by that name: Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl, who announce the formation of the Brücke (Bridge) on June 7, 1905. Nourished on readings of Nietzsche and the vitalist philosophers, these young Germans make the pictorialization of the élan vital a programmatic objective. They associate much of this vitality with creative, libidinal energy, with sexuality, dance, and human communion. To express these spontaneous forces they emulate the "primitive," "elemental," and "instinctive" techniques of tribal art. By 1912 the exuberance of human subjectivity finds form not only in nudes but also in paintings of circus performers, artists at work, and music hail revelers. At the same time, the artists of the Brücke produce dramatic woodcuts of solitary faces, of figures set against metropolitan or natural contexts, many of them heroes and saints. In their view the "new human being" to whom they wished to provide a bridge would henceforth rely on the most intense, direct, and immediate forms of expression. "We claim as our own," writes Kirchner in a program of 1906, "everyone who reproduces directly and without falsification whatever it is that drives him to create" (Dube 1990: 21). Here the gaze in on oneself is intimately tied to ethical and aesthetic liberation. As the years go by, however, this liberation proves increasingly agonizing, leading to religious self-questioning on the part of the artists and, in the case of Kirchner, to suicide.

The generation of the Brücke was influenced not only by Munch and van Gogh but by the French Fauvists and Jugendstil, whose most interesting pictorial results lay in the work of Gustave Klimt. With their stunning blend of atomism, eroticism, and symbolism, Klimt's portraits always show links between figures and something that transcends them, whether it be mortality, languishing sexuality, an intricate, unreal surrounding, or the unwritten rules of social decorum. In the context of the towering influence of Klimt, it is ironic that the beginnings of Austrian, rather than German, expressionism are announced by an artist who refused to let his paintings be hung in the same room as the works of the master: Richard Gerstl.

Gerstl was a brilliant young artist who might have been more acclaimed had he not burned so many paintings before taking his life at the age of twenty-five. It all occurred at the end of 1908, after Gerstl had eloped with Schoenberg's wife, Mathilde. When Anton Webern

convinced Mathilde to return to her husband, Gerstl positioned himself in front of his atelier mirror, tightened a noose around his neck, and plunged a butcher knife into his chest. The importance of Gerstl lies largely with the emotional range and intensity of his portraits. One of them, notes Whitford (1981: 51), may be the first nude self-portrait since the sketch by Albrecht Dürer of 1503. Another shows the painter laughing at the spectator in demonic defiance. Both paintings glorify the subject as a shameless rebel. Whether their interest lies in self-analysis, however, or in parodying an image others might have of this self is hard to say. In either case the self-consciousness is ill at ease, inviting the audience to reflect on the mystery of a secret it is not disclosing. The true object of Gerstl's ironic laugh may be the futility of the hope of getting to the bottom of the self in question; for most of his portraits are of people who seem, like wraiths, "to be attempting to re-materialize in a world they have long since left" (Whitford 1981: 55). Indeed, in the Group Portrait of the Schoenberg family, Gerstl's brushstrokes and colors on the faces are so thick that "the identities of the subjects are all but obliterated" (Kallir 1984: 51). The members of this family lack the distinctive features by which we recognize persons. The self is Gerstl's subject, but it has become a conundrum.^[12]

The two painters who do the most with the lead of Gerstl are Schiele and Oskar Kokoscha. Here, what is only implicit in van Gogh and Munch—though overexplicit in postwar expressionist painting—becomes a whole story: the dramatic efforts of a subject to come to expression. The drama is as clear in their portraits as in their self-portraits. In fact, at a certain point one cannot even distinguish between the two types of self in question. By his own confession, Kokoschka took to painting portraits in order to overcome "self-alienation" (Kokoschka 1974: 36–37). What he sought in ostensible representations of others was actually self-knowledge. The explanation for how the distinction between I and other is blurred by his art is addressed by his 1912 lecture on an issue that he calls das Bewusstsein der Gesichte : the consciousness of visions, or the imaginative apprehension of a face, where seer and seen are both subsumed in an act of seeing. The vision, countenance, or face (for Gesicht is simultaneously all three) is not simply a depiction of some "consciousness" or knowledge; it is an appearance that motivates consciousness. It is neither an objective image nor an artist's subjective im-

[12] On Gerstl's art, life, and relation to Schoenberg see Breicha 1991 and 1993; Kallir 1992; Schröder 1993.

pression, but a "stream" of understanding in which subjects and objects first receive their forms.^[13] Consciousness of vision, claims Kokoschka's elusive essay, reproduces the functions of an oil lamp: the artist is a wick sucking up the oil provided by the aspects of others and then bursting into a flame of imagination. Consciousness of vision is not the form of an appearance, but consciousness of the form, or of appearance itself, a type of self-perception of that "nature, Gesicht, life" without which things have no form at all (Kokoschka 1912: 12). Vision-consciousness is Kokoschka's counterpart to the art of inner necessity in Kandinsky and the art of persuasion in Michelstaedter.^[14] The "self" of which it speaks is one that has always already transcended itself.

Two works from 1909–1910 offer results of this consciousness of vision. One is a portrait of the architect Adolph Loos, the other of Herwarth Walden. Both faces are highlighted in a manner reminiscent of Munch's self-portrait of 1895, composed of jagged, almost animated layers of matter. The left eyes are surrounded by large rings of darker flesh, suggesting either an external bruise or the emanation of some energy deep inside the body. As frequently occurs in Kokoschka, the eyes speak of great spiritual distance from this body, a vision-consciousness transcending the medium through which it works. The distorted features of these two subjects—abstracted from every natural setting—not only suggest the oppression of consciousness by physical forces; they also suggest its rebellion against its palpable shapes (pictorially speaking: volume, line, color, gesture, and expression). What Schoenberg called the inborn and instinctive dimensions of the I, which have never

[13] If "two selves" are fused in Kokoschka's portraits one must also recognize a third—that of the person observing the painting, especially where its subject stares straight into his or her eyes, as occurs so often in expressionist portraits. These paintings interpolate the subjectivities of not only their sitters but also their viewers, as though asking, "Who are you to be shocked by the countenance you see? And what of your own case? Have you ever questioned your own self-vision?"

[14] In a defensive statement twenty years after the fact, Schoenberg upholds the "complete independence" of his paintings from those of Kokoschka, Gerstl, and Kandinsky (Schoenberg 1938). In the process he also sheds light on the distinctions within their conceptual vocabularies. Schoenberg recalls that he named his own paintings of 1910 "gazes" (Blicke ); Kandinsky later called them "visions" (Visionen ); Kokoschka spoke of his own paintings in terms of Gesicht (a word central also to Trakl; see Williams 1991: 153). Kokoschka's image of the artist as an oil lamp, fueled by a "superabundance of life," finds another link in Michelstaedter. On the title page of Persuasion and Rhetoric (which frequently describes persuasion as a process of transfiguring things into flames) Michelstaedter draws a lamp overflowing with oil. Next to a similar drawing in the margins of one of his books, he comments: "The lamp goes out because of lack of oil / I extinguished myself out of overflowing superbundance" (Michelstaedter 1975: 140–141). On Kokoschka's consciousness of vision, see Schorske 1981: 339–344. On Schoenberg's "gazes" see the essays in Schoenberg 1991b.

Fig. 21.
Oskar Kokoschka,  Portrait of the Architect Adolf Loos,  1909, oil. Courtesy Bildarchiv 
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

found adequate expression in history, can only lacerate the appearances they physically inherit. This laceration is even more severe in Kokoschka's self-portraits, particularly the poster for Der Sturm of 1910 (fig. 23). If the aim of Kokoschka's art is to overcome self-alienation, the cure lies in taking the disease to its extreme. The autoscopical self confesses to its own mutilation, its victimization, its inability to discover a true source of persuasion. At the same time this self has also left its body. In consciousness of vision, its eyes are outside; it exists in subjective transcendence. None of the "three selves" involved in the process of vision—the artist, the sitter, the viewer—is constituted except through this transcendent activity of seeing. No ontology of the I can be represented.

Schiele's portraits reveal a comparable search for an identity that cannot be portrayed. If people who commissioned their portraits from the young Austrian were frequently offended by the results (Otto Wagner was one), it had to do with the fact that they did not recognize themselves in the forms they were given. Like Kokoschka, Schiele exaggerated their features, making them look older or more pained than they

Fig. 22.
Oskar Kokoschka,  Portrait of Herwarth Walden,  1910, oil. Courtesy Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

were. In 1910 and 1911 he isolates his subjects from natural and imaginative settings. The atmospheric backgrounds of Gerstl, Kokoschka, and Max Oppenheim disappear, leaving only an emptiness from which the subject stands sharply out, sometimes isolated by the shielding margin of a halo. The "expressive solid inserted into a void" (Comini 1974:

Fig. 23.
Oskar Kokoschka, Self-Portrait  (Poster for Der Sturm ), 1910, lithograph poster. Courtesy Robert Gore Rifkind Collection, Beverly Hills.

77) becomes an icon of pure subjectivity, a subjectivity as independent in Schiele as it is in Michelstaedter. Moreover, as with Kokoschka, such encounters between "naked souls and naked destiny" are just strategies for Schiele to make his own self-encounter.

In 1910 he adds two other kinds of compositions to the subjective analyses of others: female nudes and self-portraits. Beginning with secret paintings of his younger sister Gerti, Schiele's nudes eventually include a whole repertoire of females, many prepubescent. Concurrent to the nudes, Schiele turns increasingly to depicting himself—scowling, screaming, gesticulating, naked, masturbating, and finally inviting or fending off death. While Schiele sometimes attaches allegorical depth to these self-representations, calling them The Lyric Poet, The Prophet, and so on, this is an attempt to ennoble or universalize the findings of what is primarily an exercise in self-perception. Whatever their names, all subjects are Schiele.

In these examinations of the only true topic of human experience—the nature of the solitary, subjective, desiring I—Schiele attains the peak of his art. The nakedness of his own body in his self-portraits suggests that the "erotic" female nudes are not an entirely separate issue: The effort to strip the other of clothes and the willingness to expose oneself are aspects of a single quest for the naked self. By penetrating the defenses of another, one attempts to penetrate one's own. The reflection on eros leads inevitably to a reflection on the I that is its source. In Schiele everything comes back to the desiring subject, to the narcissistic, onanistic seat of all shimmering interests of self. "I am for myself," he writes in his "Self-Portrait" of 1910, "and for those to whom my thirsty, drunken craving to be free gives everything, and also for all, for I love—I also love all. I am the noblest of the noble" (Schiele 1921: 19; Nebehay 1979: 142). In his self-portraits, the noblest of the noble gives all that he knows of himself to the world.

The most sensational of these offerings is the writhing, paralytic, agonized figure of the Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing . On the surface the most striking thing about this self-portrait is its absolute refusal to let anything stand in the way of complete and pure self-perception. The self has decided that it must see how it looks naked, with no added distractions in front of the mirror. Like Zeus and his souls in the Isles of the Blessed, it has stripped off its "acquired characteristics" and confronted the reality that remains: a desperately feeling and thinking body, a self-confined self exposed to the world. Autoscopy could hardly prove more

Fig. 24.
Egon Schiele,  Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing,  1910, pencil, watercolor, and 
gouache. Courtesy Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

troubling than it is in the portrait. Here the literally and painfully naked self is the only frame of reference for human experience, tortured against the void of a bad and empty infinity. The umbilicum, its original source of nourishment, is a hole. We, the ostensibly dispensable audience, are made privy to the delirium of he who looks too hard at himself, finding no selfsame person but only the actor of his role.

As though to reinforce the intent of these self-portraits, Schiele embarks in the same year on a series of "self-seer" compositions in which

Fig. 25.
Egon Schiele, The Self-Seers I,  1910, oil. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.

the topic is explicitly the self that looks at itself. More specifically, there are two selves in the paintings, each looking at the other in a mirror and yielding the plural Self-Seers of the title. The self has broken apart. In Self-Seers I we have two identical and easily recognizable Schieles, both naked, one kneeling behind the other and leaning out his head to observe the reflection of the other—or of himself in the company of his intimate other—in the mirror. The faces, bodies, and postures of each are nearly identical. One is the perceiving self, the other the self perceived. And the self perceived—the image contemplated in the mirror and committed to canvas, the I that is seen and known—is gripped by theatrical tension and subjective defiance. The implicit role of the mirror in this double portrait makes the existential connotations of such

self-reflection clear: The subject is caught in a narcissistic circle of interest that has no other outside it. The I communes with the I, a puppet-like entity that it seeks to prop up and bring into obeyance.

If self-knowledge or self-possession is the objective of this type of autoscopy, it fails as much here as in Michelstaedter. The seemingly closed circle of the self is broken even before it is drawn—broken in order to be drawn. Si duo idem faciunt non est idem, Michelstaedter writes: "if two make one, it is not one" (Michelstaedter 1983: 423). The effort to know oneself is hindered by the self-splitting by which it is enabled. Self-knowledge, like self-expression, is a double mediation of appearance, a double rhetoric of form, a seeing that is twice removed, a seeing of seeing. And this is, of course, an impossible dialectic. There is also the presence of the audience, for whom this self-view is performed. Positioned as the reflecting mirror, the audience is the mediating element that validates the "other" which the autoscopy seeks to exclude.

That self-mastery does not succeed in Schiele is suggested not only by the brutalization of the two aspects of the self in the subsequent self-seer portraits, but also by Schiele's permanent failure to represent a fully dignified, self-possessed subjectivity in his portraits. As the years progress (and there are only eight before Schiele dies of the Spanish fever in 1918), he moves beyond the self to depict landscapes and human relations. But never does the historical, empirical self come under the domination of an ideal, transcendent one. Instead, it remains hounded by the same impersonal forces it hoped to put to its purposes: artifice, libido, mortality, dumb feeling. The effort to discover self-rule ends in the way it began—in a scream, not addressed to the world, as in Munch, so much as to the self this world has abandoned.

Do Schoenberg and Kandinsky follow similar patterns? While advocating adventures in self-absorption which lead one to express "the nature of mankind," Schoenberg gives us the Red Gaze : a vision of subjectivity as sheer fright. He gives us encounters with that hypothetical situation in which the individual "is alone in the desert and must create everything by himself." He gives us the self-portrait of the Blue Rider Exhibition in 1912: the backside view of a slight, bald man walking wearily away from the frame. Above all he gives us the harmonies of dissonance—correlates, in Adorno's view, of a "lonely subjectivity which withdraws into itself," where voyaging home means entering "a vitreous no-man's-land in whose crystalline-lifeless air the seemingly transcendent subject . . . finds himself again on an imaginary plane" (Adorno 1985: 142). Coupled with his ontology of individual solitude, the frag-

mentations and contractions of free atonal music entail a reduction of the self into virtual silence (a silence which literally follows this phase of Schoenberg's music, not broken until he formulates the principles of serial composition nearly ten years later). That which is "inborn, instinctive," and literally unconscious cannot be conceived or grasped in a common, universal language. Schoenberg's ostensibly subjectivist art thus issues into an impersonal aesthetic. "Think what self-denial it takes to express oneself with such brevity," says Schoenberg of Webern's breathlessly short Six Bagatelles for String Quartet :

Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel with a single gesture, or a (person's) happiness with a single deep breath: such concentration is only to be found where there is a corresponding lack of self-pity. (Schoenberg 1992)

If this is an art of self-expression (and in Schoenberg's view it does intend to be), it is one that arises out of a virtual bereavement of language, aesthetics, and rhetoric. While Schoenberg views each of his compositions as "a self-portrait which should be presumed to bear a close resemblance to its creator" (Fleisher 1989: 22), the art to which this endeavor leads leaves no self behind. It issues into the very opposite of self-expression, a situation where

no Ego oversees and directs the operations of transformation and organization—no Subject who . . . might comprehend and dominate the [musical] material. . . . Where there is no Thing there cannot even be a Subject. (Cacciari 1982: 156)

The inevitable consequence of the quest for self-expression is the dissolution of subjectivity into pure composition, into a "necessary" form of rhetoric with neither everyday nor metaphysical cogency.

A similar process can be traced in the artist who most explicitly defends the value of the inward turn. After dividing experience into the two antithetical categories of spirit and matter, content and form, intention and expression, Kandinsky recommends that art devote itself to the first set of terms (of which form, material, and so on, are only the instruments). But this conception of art already transcends an aesthetics of the subject, at least if subjectivity is associated with the emotional or historical constitution of a living human being. Kandinsky has no use for psychological or physiological approaches to the self. This, indeed, is the basis for his criticism of the paintings of Kokoschka, Schoenberg, and the Brücke, which in his view used art for predominantly confessional purposes. The true content of art, Kandinsky writes, is "the

emotion in the soul of the artist" (Kandinsky 1910b: 87). And yet, this emotion is not the feeling of a person in a particular situation. Rather, it is a transpersonal "mood" in which all people can participate (Kandinsky 1914b: 403). "The birth of a work of art," he claims elsewhere, "is of cosmic character. The originator of the work is thus [not a particular artist but] the spirit. Thus, the work exists in abstracto prior to that embodiment which makes it accessible to the human senses" (Kandinsky 1914a: 394). If a work exists prior to its embodiment in form, its content transcends any given form of nature or historical experience. "As long as the soul remains joined to the body, it can as a rule only receive vibrations via the medium of the senses" (Kandinsky 1910b: 87); but in Kandinsky this soul is precisely what is not represented by the body—or by material and existential facts, by objective logic and philosophy, by historical and rhetorical form. The "true subject" is as transcendent here as the I in Husserl and Wittgenstein. It is not "in" the world; it is something that marks its borders, not a constituted form but an act of formal constitution, an "intention" exceeding expression.

The final nature of the I dissolves into something beyond the reach of all language and form. Its only form is one that it creates, and until it does so, this I or spirit can only be described in negative terms. "I do not want to paint states of mind. I do not want to paint coloristically or uncoloristically. . . . I do not want to show the future its path" (Kandinsky 1914a: 400). The absolute I is nothing that can be named before its forms have been invented. What lies beyond form can only be expressed by a form that is purified of empirical content: by shapes that are not representative, by unique new signs, by aesthetic surfaces not endowed with preestablished meanings. If the inner content of human experience is expressed by a form that is not recognizable (not "picturing" an entity or experience we can already conceive), the content is fully etherealized—no longer self but soul.

It is hard enough to experience spirit in everyday life, much less in the forms most proper to it: "The spirit is often concealed within matter to such an extent that few people are generally capable of perceiving it. Indeed, there are many people who are incapable of seeing the spirit even when incorporated in a spiritual form" (Kandinsky 1912a: 235). It is the second sentence that is crucial, for it suggests that there is such a spiritual form, an art of pure composition, of autonomous rhetoric without any criterion of evaluation. In practical terms, it takes an already cultivated audience to distinguish the "content" of a Kandinsky from the mere "formal exercises" of other types of painting. How can

the viewer tell whether a work embodies spiritual content or not? "Only its author can fully assess the caliber of a work of art" (Kandinsky 1910b: 87). An artistic procedure "is only and exclusively good, properly speaking, if it has come of its own accord" (Kandinsky 1914a: 394). But no such judgment can be confidently made by someone outside the creative process. Indeed, as many conservative critics of art have charged throughout our century, objective criteria for the "aesthetically good" are in a very real sense made obsolete by the work of Kandinsky and Schoenberg. Such criteria can only be re-created by each work anew, each on its own individual terms. No work can be properly read until and unless its hidden, internal mechanisms are discovered.

After Schoenberg and Kandinsky, the aesthetic validity of a work no longer lies in any self-evident subject—for here such a subject is no longer self-evident, and does not even exist before the work—but only in the communicative lines that it establishes with its audience, in the relationship that it instills between audience and artist. And this changes the very notion of a work's "inner necessity." Now this necessity is present only where "the vibration in the soul of the artist [finds] a material form, a means of expression, which is capable of being picked up by the receiver" (Kandinsky 1910b: 87). The choice of colors, forms, and subject matter in painting "can only be based on the principle of purposefully touching the human soul . This basic tenet we shall call the principle of internal necessity " (Kandinsky 1909–11: 160; cf. 165 and 169). The innerness or content of art thus lies outside it, in the activity it engenders in human beings, in the manner of Buber's moments of "heightened experience," where no subject confronts an object, but rather a significant occurrence absorbs them both in its flow. By pursuing a spirituality that can withstand the deficiency of being, Kandinsky abolishes the subject standing over and against the object in at least three ways: He makes it fully abstract (i.e., not reducible to a concrete, historical self); he dissolves its content into form; and he notes that even this form cannot be understood as a "sign" for a content, but only as the medium of a hermeneutical activity in which that content occurs . Less than anyone else can the artist say "I."

Thus Schoenberg and Kandinsky duplicate the path of Schiele, Kokoschka, and Michelstaedter. The soul, not the self, is their true subject of interest and knowledge. Yet this most "intrinsic" of realities, this "noumenon" contrasted with all phenomena, is no longer intrinsic or self-contained. The gaze inward yields nothing but the process of gazing, not focused on any fixed subject or object.

After these prewar attempts to give form to soul, the very notion of the soul is lost. It naturally and inevitably erases itself, living on, at best, as a name for its absence, as an announcement of the definitive impossibility of possessing a language for what is most real.^[15] Innerness, subjectivity, persuasion, individualism, and the self—by dint of the effort to discover their nature (or to accomplish the goal of Western humanism)—lose their meaning. After the expressionists, artists no longer even believe in self-constituting realms of subjectivity. Futurism, imagism, dadaism, and surrealism—not to mention the emotional outcries of postwar expressionism and irrational new arts of the id—wittingly or unwittingly espouse the end of the I as "the measure of all things." All this replicates the catastrophe of collective and historical self-determination in the Great War of 1914. Believing that their action was self-determining, the warring powers discovered instead that the selves and the passions they were serving were almost totally at the mercy of outside forces. Bent on controlling its own destiny, each national or ethnic group was forced to recognize that such destiny was a thoroughly contextual matter. The world of victors and vanquished alike was one in which Michelstaedter's principles of dependent, rhetorical, and correlative existence were more real and intractable than all self-governing dreams.

The great pathos of prewar expressionist art thus lies in its pursuing a Western ideal to the point where it collapses in exhaustion. As Kandinsky puts it, "the seeds of the struggle toward . . . inner nature . . . obey the words of Socrates: 'Know thyself!'" (Kandinsky 1909–11: 153). The ideal of self-expression appears predicated upon the possibility of self-knowledge, but this, in turn, relies on a belief in the self. One can

[15] The most eloquent postwar descriptions of this unliving "center" of subjective experience are achieved (in negative terms) by Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities . Having established that every person has at least nine selves or characters (national, sexual, unconscious, etc.), the narrator of the novel concludes that "every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled." The true essence of a person, or the only innerness that is not contingent, now appears to be this empty space (or better, this illusion of an empty space). "Whether one is at rest or in motion, what matters is not what lies ahead, what one sees, hears, wants, takes, masters. . . . Something is not quite in balance, and a person presses forward, like a tightrope walker, in order not to sway and fall. And as he presses on through life and leaves lived life behind, the life ahead and the life already lived form a wall, and his path in the end resembles the path of a woodworm: no matter how it corkscrews forward or even backward, it always leaves an empty space behind it. And this horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space behind the fullness of everything, this half that is always missing even when everything is a whole, this is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul" (Musil 1930–40: vol. 1, chaps. 8 and 45).

express oneself only if one (a) possesses such a self, (b) is properly attuned to it, and (c) gives it a convincing form. In the period separating Socrates from twentieth-century vitalism these principles encounter no absolutely insuperable obstacles. The problems arise when everything appears to hinge on these principles and them alone. At the height of its cultural appeal, self-expression begins to look like an ideal but unreal plan. There no longer exists any measure for the "measure of all things." Subjectivity, the only true content of objective experlence, proves to be the ultimate bastion of otherness, the absolutely self-alienated object. The ideal of self-expression leads directly to suicide.

But in this death begin ethics and aesthetics.