The Object of Representation vs. the Subject of Representation

All of which we are conscious is a representation. As Pascal noted, there is no necessary link between a representation of an object and the actual thing being represented, whether the object be in the outer world or our inner self.

And yet human beings produce representations of the world and their selves: they are subjects of representations. This subject, producer of a representation, does not necessarily coincide with self that a representation represents.

In interpreting a painting, for example, we try to determine which real "objects" in real outside world or inner self a representation refers to. Does the realist painting, "The Ladies of the Village Giving Alms" represent a real outer world -- real people, a real place, a real social situation in the middle of the nineteenth century? Does the expressionist painting, "The Cry," represent ("express") the real inner self of the artist, a self that includes the emotion of fear which we "see" in the painting?

But the above pictorial representations do not give us the real outer and inner worlds themselves; it gives only representations of the outside "world" and the inner "self." And these representations of world and self are artificial constructs. The painter constructs artificial representations of world and self. Similarly, we the viewers construct representations of objects – world and self -- while viewing the painting and after viewing it and we often imagine falsely that these representations coincide with the real world and real self of the painter.

If the self that a representation constructs did objectively represent with painter (the subject who produces the painting), then the self constructed by the representation and the subject who produces the representation would indeed coincide. But do we our conscious representations know our self or only a part of the self or only the self we want to see?

Descartes and some Romantics believe we can consciously represent our real selves. Descartes believes we represent the self rationally, "I think, therefore I am," while certain Romantics believe that we express the self emotionally ("I project my emotions, therefore I am"?).

But Pascal, Nietzsche, and Freud -- and much modern thought -- argue that we cannot represent the self consciously. The "self" that we consciously represent to ourselves and to others is always only a part, or even an purely imaginary part, of the complex conscious and unconscious whole that constitutes our self or selves. We are always partially other than we think and always more complex than we think.

The"self" (of the artist, author, represented) that is constructed by a representation thus does not necessarily represent the real subject who produced the painting. Indeed, the real self is always other than the represented self. It is this otherness of the subject that Maupassant’s narrator discovers in "The Horla."