Self-Dissolution as Sensory Regime
From Pirandello and Hesse to the Hyper-Aesthetic Performance Subject
Luigi Pirandello’s One, No One and One Hundred Thousand presents Vitangelo Moscarda as a man who lives a comfortable and protected life, made possible by the wealth he inherited from his father. His stable sense of self collapses after a seemingly trivial remark by his wife: she tells him that his nose tilts slightly to the right. This comment destabilizes Moscarda’s identity, forcing him to confront a disturbing realization that the image he has of himself does not coincide with how others perceive him. From that moment on, Moscarda becomes obsessed with the multiplicity of selves produced through others’ gazes.
Similarly, in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the protagonist grows up in a loving, safe, privileged, and respected Brahmin household. Siddhartha lacks nothing: comfort, education, social status, and spiritual admiration surround him. Yet this very fullness becomes a limitation. Dissatisfied with inherited knowledge, he leaves home to experience the world directly. Through this journey, Siddhartha gradually realizes that the world is permeated by suffering, impermanence, and pain.
While Moscarda releases the gaze directed at himself, Siddhartha learns to open his eyes to the world. Both narratives stage a crisis of selfhood, but from opposite directions. Moscarda turns inward, dissecting the self until it dissolves into fragments, whereas Siddhartha turns outward, expanding his sense of self until it merges with the flow of life. In this sense, both characters undergo a dissolution of the self yet the conditions that make these dissolutions possible are deeply gendered and classed.
Neither Moscarda nor Siddhartha is a woman, and both come from wealthy, protected families. This privilege is not incidental; it is foundational. If Moscarda had a sister with the same tilted nose, she would likely have realized this discrepancy long before anyone pointed it out. A woman’s body is constantly scrutinized, corrected, and evaluated. She does not need a philosophical shock to become aware of how she is seen; the gaze reaches her from childhood.
Likewise, if Siddhartha had a sister, her awakening to suffering would not begin with abstract spiritual dissatisfaction. Pain would announce itself much earlier through menstruation, bodily vulnerability, fear, and restriction. Leaving home would not signify spiritual freedom but existential danger. The possibility of rape or murder would not be an idea but a concrete risk shaping every movement. What Siddhartha experiences as an elective journey toward enlightenment would, for a woman, be an encounter with violence structured into everyday life.
This brings us to the problem of perspective and collectivity. How people look at us and how we look at others is not symmetrical. The concept of “we” is particularly unstable when applied to the self. “We” and “they” shift according to context, power, and belonging, while “I” and “you” appear grammatically fixed but are never socially neutral. In Turkish, the word for “other,” öteki, derives from öte, meaning “beyond.” Öteki thus signifies what lies beyond one’s territory, beyond one’s comprehension, beyond the borders of the familiar self.
Seen from this perspective, the philosophical crises of Moscarda and Siddhartha reveal not only the instability of identity but also the limits of universalism in existential and spiritual narratives. The “self” that dissolves in these texts is never a neutral self; it is a protected one. What appears as a metaphysical problem is inseparable from material and gendered conditions of life.Today, the destabilization of the self is less an episodic shock than a continuous social condition ,one produced and maintained by economic and technological regimes.
Byung-Chul Han argues that the neoliberal subject is no longer the obedient subject of the disciplinary society, but the performance subject (Leistungssubjekt). This subject is not coerced by external prohibitions; instead, it is driven by internalized imperatives of productivity, optimization, and self-improvement. Power no longer operates through repression but through positivity. Commands are replaced by motivation, and exploitation is internalized as self-exploitation. The injunction “you can” quietly transforms into “you must.”
However, Han’s analysis of the performance subject focuses primarily on psychic exhaustion, depression, and burnout. What remains under-theorized is the sensory dimension of this regime. This is where the concept of the hyper-aesthetic (or hypersensory) self becomes crucial—not as an alternative to the performance subject, but as its sensory infrastructure.
The hyper-aesthetic self is not merely a subject who “feels too much.” It is a subject whose sensory thresholds have collapsed under neoliberal conditions of constant stimulation. Permanent connectivity, continuous visibility, and the demand for immediate responsiveness place the nervous system in a state of chronic excitation. In this sense, hyper-aestheticization is the embodied consequence of performance logic. The subject does not burn out only because it works too much, but because it perceives too much.
Unlike Moscarda’s attempt to escape the gaze of others or Siddhartha’s deliberate opening toward the world, the performance subject has no access to distance. Digital transparency, speed, and circulation abolish distance altogether. The subject becomes excessively close to itself, to others, and to the world. The hyper-aesthetic self emerges precisely from this condition of enforced proximity: a self without filters, unable to regulate what enters perception.
This marks a critical shift. The performance subject appears free, entrepreneurial, and self-directed. The hyper-aesthetic self, however, reveals the bodily cost of this apparent freedom. Sensory overload transforms self-relation itself into a performance. Even rest must be productive; even pain must be processed, narrated, optimized, and shared. The self is no longer a stable interiority but a constantly stimulated interface.
At this point, the gendered dimension of hyper-aestheticization becomes unavoidable. Han’s performance subject implicitly assumes a neutral body. Yet women’s bodies are subjected to hyper-aestheticization earlier and more intensely. The constant gaze, the management of threat, affective labor, care work, and aesthetic regulation all deepen the performance imperative at the level of sensation. Women are not only required to do more; they are required to feel more and regulate that feeling.
From this perspective, the figure that emerges is the hyper-aesthetic performance subject: a subject that not only exploits itself but is forced to remain continuously perceptive, continuously affected, continuously responsive. Exhaustion here is not merely psychological; it is neurological and corporeal.
This allows for a broader theoretical claim: neoliberal violence operates, as Han suggests, through a regime of positivity but this regime is sustained by hyper-aestheticization. Performance intensifies through the senses. The dissolution of the self is no longer a philosophical crisis or a spiritual quest; it becomes a permanent state of sensory over-stimulation.