Phenomenology and the self's measure: studies in subjectivity

The philosophical tradition has long understood subjectivity solely in reference to the self's place within the world and the powers of intentional transcendence which open it. Nowhere is this presupposition more apparent than in the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Despite the precise differences among their respective philosophies of transcendence, each understands the self as little else than that which opens the exteriority of a world and is thereby exhausted and determined by it. Against this prevailing assumption that the self is a 'being-in-the-world', I contend that the essence of subjectivity instead consists in the unworldly interiority of lifeâs affective self-revelation. The studies that follow accordingly investigate five related aspects of subjectivity: the irreducibility of the self's individuality to society; the blow of vanity that reveals this inwardness; the resultant life that marshals and in turn deploys it; the power of the work of art to express it; and finally the promise of immortality that sustains it.