What it feels like to x, as the characterisation of consciousness, or for there to be something that it feels like etc., implies a response to a question. There is only something of this kind in response to being asked about it. An unanswerable question certainly but needing to be asked all the same. You imagine someone asking it of you or simply asking yourself. Nothing feels like anything until you stop to notice and silently question, interrogate, and hence there is a self which is precisely the responding to being elicited. And so no consciousness without a self, not a permanent or continuous self necessarily but that response to being summoned. The situation of consciousness as an interspace, a relationality. A purely private self is an impossibility except insofar as it is a turning away from one relation towards another.