What you perceive as the words are already meanings, just as the word 'word' is not a thing but an idea, as much as the experience of looking at a word written down is already foreclosed, and no different from looking at your own body or that of another. It is madness to seek your self in this since you can only go where the meanings direct, but you can arrive at the mad necessity of such a madness, at the impossibility of giving up on the impossible. Acting deliberately you can only arrive at the absurdity of acting deliberately, because the notion of an exit from this hall of mirrors is an integral part of the hall of mirrors. All of your attempts fall short, hardly even begin, but if they were more ardently pursued, more intelligently planned, that would make no difference. It's not the instance, it's the type. In fact the predicament you find yourself in is precisely a function of the surplus subjectivity engendered by the operation of a certain intelligence. It is to be in a region where the predicament of subjectivity is the norm, a historical and cultural habitation inevitably producing versions of this same belief in a present and absent self and all the ways of structuring it. Every gesture you make, based on the most private and unique instance of signification is entirely generic, infinitely proliferating and indiscernible, plural prior to any counting. Searching for the self is searching for the unique which is hallucinated by what is in essence plural without number.