".. I too have a pronounced capacity for metamorphosising myself, which no one notices. How often must I have imitated Max. Yesterday evening on the way home, if I had seen myself from the outside I should have taken myself for Tucholsky. The alien being must be in me, then, so distinctly and invisible as the hidden object in a picture puzzle, when, too, one would not find anything if one did not know that it is there."
K., diaries, 30th Sept. 1911.
A dimension of ourselves forever escapes us like the reverse of the mirror. K.'s parable of the man with a hole cut in the back of his skull so that all can see in but him.
The self, shot through with forms, gestures borrowed from the Other, or staging its being for the other, like Sartre's Flaubert (see previous). Suddenly aware, like K., of being already colonised by this Other, compromised, outside oneself in the image that others have of you, right from the begining. Right from the onset, when language, foreign, enters the soul, infiltrates and partitions the body's plenitude, introduces absence; arises, indeed, only through the need to call back what is absent, to refer to what is absent, in terms borrowed from the Other. But the awareness that this 'I' which resists the Other, which seems to escape it albeit by a hair's breadth, comes after it, a necessary mirage and our most precious possession.