Although the whole genre of self-portraiture may strike the casual observer as an extremely narcissistic exercise on the part of the artist, it does in fact reveal something of the concrete universality of the self and its fragmentary nature. The self is not some kind  of totalitarian “wholeness,” it’s not a Supreme Meaning that stands over and against our historic individuality. Quite the contrary. It is in its fragmentary nature that I become myself in my historic situation.