Abstract

The dissertation researches the conditions of possibility of representation both in terms of original theoretical considerations of the nature of the mathematical and the function of projection inspired by Martin Heidegger and through close readings of some of his and other representative literary, philosophical, and critical French and German texts on the topic ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. ;The thesis demonstrates that representation of objects is not grounded in a principle of likeness such as resemblance or structural analogy between an object and its representation, but is conditional upon self-representation. This self-representation posits and thereby founds itself through an act of self-projection which realizes what it throws forth at the same time. At the basis of self-representation is therefore a unity which is not one, which, rather, is constituted by duplicity: the duplicity of thing and movement, as in a top, whose spinning on the spot lets it appear as an object. This duplicity or doubleness unfolds into a threeness, for the projection, as a prescription and its enactment, that is, its self-reflexive repetition in the same place, also generates a third, which is nothing but the duplicity of the first two--the connection between them. This third necessarily inheres in the form of duplicity which has created it. ;This principle of a projection which is both ec-static and self-contained is enacted in the Cartesian cogito, which initiates the age of the world as picture. As Heidegger shows, the epistemological subject in modernity likewise only becomes possible on the basis of self-representation. The question of what has priority, the subject or representation, is thus wrongly posed--it is self-representation which precedes both. ;Close readings and, at times, critiques, of Heidegger's What is a Thing? and "The Age of the World Picture" , Michel Foucault's theory of representation as--faultily--derived from the Logic of Port-Royal , and Klopstock's poetics of "Darstellung" each develop different facets of the thesis on self-representation