The ‘I’ as Construct

Another splendid footnote from Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation:

In this sense where there is an ‘I’, the identity of a self, ‘God is not dead’. This is also why Nietzsche’s decisive contestation has to do with ‘consciousness’ or the identity of the ‘I’. Consider this text drawn from Nietzsche’s unpublished writings, cited by G. Colli and M. Moniari in the Cahiers de Royamont no. 6 (Paris: Minuit, 1967), devoted to Nietzsche: ‘I rather take the I itself as a construct of thought, of the same order as ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individual’, ‘goal’, ‘number’, thus as a regulative fiction thanks to which one introduces a sort of constancy, and therefore a sort of ‘intelligibility’ into a world of becoming. Faith in grammar, in the linguistic subject and in the object, has up to the present held metaphyics under its yoke: I teach that one must renounce this faith’.