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I've grown so lonesome thinking … thinking of you …
- From the film Pink Narcissus , by James Bidgood
Cathrine Bjørnholt Michaelsen's recent monograph, Remains of a Self: Solitude in the Aftermath of Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction, is a carefully composed testament to the legacy of the historical interpenetration of deconstruction and psychoanalysis that erupted in France in the 1960s and 1970s. Taking up the problematic of the Western concept of ‘the self’ - and the role ‘solitude’ plays within this concept - Michaelsen draws on an impressive constellation of interlocutors associated with both continental philosophy and psychoanalysis (Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Catharine Malabou - with Heidegger, Nietzsche and Freud as privileged references) in an effort to demonstrate that all of these thinkers, despite their many differences, help move ‘the self’ towards a deconstruction. Such a deconstruction would displace ‘the self’, conceived of as proper, primary and self-same, towards ‘a self’ that perpetually loses itself by virtue of a conditioning exposure to the otherness that supports this self's survival. The goal of Michaelsen's project is thus to ‘interrogate different contexts, experiences, and situations in which the subject or the self begins to tremble, vacillate, and deconstruct themselves [sic], thus exposing the destabilizing otherness already roaming the foundation of these constructions’ (p. 4).
As such, Remains of a Self faithfully treads well-worn paths. It will not be a surprise to readers of deconstruction and psychoanalysis that the self, identity and subjectivity are the primary targets of critical intervention. The extended glosses that are intended to reconstruct past discussions, while necessary and elucidating, might try the patience of readers already familiar with the literature. Likewise, the cast of thinkers this work brings into view fe