(Grant Skelton turns in this review of the new album by the Swiss band Necroblation.)

“Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.”  – Søren Kierkegaard, “The Sickness Unto Death”

To ask about the exact nature and essence of “the self” would yield answers too numerous to count. Freudian psychology might label the id as the true self. A psychic apparatus driven by whim and avarice, whose only goal is the satiety of its desires. Continue reading »