The sense of who or what "I am," which we may call the principle of (personal) identity, has a troubled relationship with the logic of identity and epistemology. The term "personal identity" fluctuates between hard and soft meanings: essentialist connotations and social constructivist qualifiers.¹ It can mean that which is given or that which is made, it can refer to self-discovery or self-invention, and it can suggest a self who may or may not be recognized by other selves. Personal identity may be thought of as an extension of, or synonymous with, self-identity, and self-identity may be phrased in terms of the unity of consciousness, a stream of consciousness, a capacity to produce continuity in life history, numerical identity through time, or a loose cohesion of (personal) experiences. It is said to depend on continuity of psychology, consciousness, soul, substance, biological organism, or none of the above. The idea of subject identity can suggest a psychodynamic model of "identifying with" and a politics of being "identified as x" either by oneself or someone else. The "deconstruction" of the concept of subject identity is declared to be one of the great motifs of contemporary philosophical work, especially from France, taking off from the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.²