they regard hyperreflexivity as beloning to the 'prodromes' (early symptoms) of what they describe in general as 'self-disorders'

We can find this contributive factor and its disturbing existential impact illustrated in countless places in the works of Wallace, Eggers and Foer, often as a leitmotiv, as a quest for meaning.

The fourth influence Gidden lists, is 'the prevalence of mediated experience'.

For Sartre, the consequence of consciousness existing as nothingness is that human being has two aspects: transcendence and facticity. As nothingness, the human being is characterized by 'transcendence,' the freedom to 'transcend' all the determinations of his existence: 'the condition on which human reality'--by which Sartre means being-for-itself--'can deny all or part of the world is that human reality carry nothingness within itself as the nothing which separates its present from all its past'. To which Sartre adds: 'the for-itself is perpetually determining itself not to be.' At any moment, man is free to distance himself from, to transcend what he is (which means: what he has been until now), and choose new attachments. This transcendence does not just manifest itself at a particular moment; it is the continuous process that characterizes conscious being: 'consciousness continually experiences itself as the nihilation of its past being'.

Yet, observes Sartre, the for-itself 'is', in spite of this constant nihilation. He explains: 'It is in so far as there is something in it something of which it is not the foundation--its presence to the world'. A human being always finds himself in a factual situation, with a factual past; he is born in a certain country, raised in a certain family, environment and culture, with a certain education. Sartre calls this situatedness 'facticity'. It is on the basis of this facticity that we can say that being-for-itself 'is', exists. It does so, however, without ever coinciding with this facticity: as 'transcendence', the human being can always distance himself from the facticities that situate him; he 'transcends' them, does not fully coincide with them, is able to relate to and distance himself from them. For example, I am not a Dutchman in the same way that a stone is a stone. I am Dutch, but at the same time I do not completely coincide with my being-Dutch. I am more than my nationality, if only because I am conscious of that nationality, and therefore already at a certain distance to it; I am always free to be more than what I am at a certain moment.

[...] Catalano formulates it as follows: 'the self is a product and not an a priori principle of activity'.

But what is the 'I', then, if it is not an immanent structure of consciousness itself?

Despite the specificity of Sartre's view of consciousness, it fits the general existentialist view of the individual having to become a self, instead of having a self as some sort of inner core. For example, Kierkegaard--as we will see further on in this study--describes the self in similar terms.

In a talk that he gave on Franz Kafka, a writer who is also an important representative of the existentialist tradition, Wallace formulates an almost identical view of the self. Wallace remarks that in our present age it is a common mistake to think 'that a self is something you just have.' According to Wallace, we should acknowledge the central insight of existentialism, 'that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home' (Wallace also explicitly compares Kafka to Kierkegaard in this respect). And in this context Wallace's statement, 'Although of course you end up becoming yourself' (which became the title of David Lipsky's 300-page 'road trip' interview with Wallace from which it is derived), has a strong existentialist ring to it, asserting the need to become yourself. Also, the Sartrean view that the self arises outside consciousness, that consciousness has to be directed towards the world in order to discover the self, fits Wallace's (in this respect quite Sartrean) credo - mentioned in the Introduction--that consciousness needs to be facing outward and not be bent-inwards.

In reflective objectification consciousness is turned into a thing, but because consciousness is a nothingness that cannot be determined as a thing-like essence, the objectification of consciousness will always remain strained. It causes an insoluble tension, because it tries to determine something that can never by fully determined. Therefore, Sartre calls self-reflective objectification 'a perpetually deceptive mirage': it goes against the freedom (transcendence) that consciousness 'is'. It is in this context that Sartre states: 'myself-as-object' is an 'uneasiness'. Elsewhere, he uses the more well-known term 'alienation': objectification is an alientation from myself, an 'alienation of my own possibilities'.

Sartre offers the example of looking through a keyhole: 'I am alone and on the level of a non-thetic self-consciousness [...]'

Sass describes solipsism as a state of mind in which 'the whole of reality, including the external world and other persons, is [regarded as] but a representation appearing to a single individual self'.