A self is a history and ecology of drives and desires whose details are immovable but utterly contingent. It is a potency of exercise that has evolved along the thread of inchoate presence passing through vastly complex cosmic and cultural formations. Every self can be thought of as the posing of a question, general in outline, distinctive in detail, that has arisen in this medium. The self takes all this personally, that is part of its most general and impersonal nature, and in developing its awareness it comes into opposition with the recognition that all its terms of reference are externally derived. The self is a wrestling with everything that enables it to be. The checks and resonances with which it strives to actualise itself link it fatally to its historicity. In so far as this mean that it must deeply doubt itself, just so does it touch on a strange certainty, a maddening centrality that resides in the heart of its vertiginous peripherality.