Jonathan Lang

Language, Writing and Self: Quine and the Absence of Self and Sartre and the Presence of Self Jonathan Lang

The project is an inquiry into the thesis that all writing, including philosophical writing, involves a confessional aspect that cannot be dissociated from what is written. The question framing the inquiry is: "how is a discourse on the self possible?" The thesis that the act of writing is one of authorial self-construction, and that it is, whether desired or not, a mode of discourse on the self has its roots in the latter Wittgenstein, and in Sartre, Foucault and Nietzsche. Nietzsche made popular the idea that life is literature, and we are its authors regardless of whether we are 'supermen' or ordinary persons. Developments in Poststructualism and Postmodernism made light of the self; it's an effect of language and of little consequence, or so they claimed. Against the tide, I undertook to show the folly of such positions. I have shown that the construction of the authorial self is accomplished in the activity of writing and that writing may be understood as confessional. Author, text and world are simultaneous constructions traceable in the author's style of writing. Quine's style excludes the self & Sartre's makes self-referential discourse possible.