Empirically your identity is defined by a hierarchic web of connections, but when you imagine yourself in another time and place you shed these as easily as a suit of clothes. The identity-in-reflection is a novelistic self, one whose relation to circumstances is as contingent and problematic as that of a fictional character. Not exactly a formal degree-zero individual, but one who journeys through experience towards a more or less failed autonomy. All the forces experienced through connection are merely felt and not seen, they form no part of your condition of possibility.