Abstract

This paper elucidates some aspects of the relationship between self-consciousness and self-portraiture. It starts from Sartre's analysis of the experience of our own body and from the supposed dependence of our own self-consciousness on the intervention of the other. Making use of Derrida's reflections in Mémoires d'aveugle and Joseph L. Koerner's reading of German Renaissance self-portraiture, the author describes Dürer's Munich self-portrait and some of Rembrandt's late self-portraits. Dürer's painting is understood as an attempt to close the circle of self-reflection, while trying to include the other in his scenario of representation of himself as a kind of divine and timeless entity. Rembrandt's late self-portraits in contrast serve to show another possibility of selfrepresentation: a form of self-awareness and self-affirmation in the face of human finitude and the effects of time on human beings