The purpose of this last chapter is to explore something of the dynamic set of tensions at the heart of Valéry's self-science: the problematic relationship between Self and Other. Neither of these terms is unequivocal or transparent. We might say that the object of Valéry's lifelong quest is to possess clearly the sense of the first. The sense of the second term is variable (it is a category word): the ‘Other’ means the non-self insofar as it acquires importance for the self relationally, whether object or person, external to the subject's own universe of consciousness or, most interestingly, as we shall see, intrinsic to it (the self experienced as other).

In its purest form, Valéry's ‘self-science’ is a declaration of autonomy, a dismissal of other selves:

The adventure of Valéry's Narcissus is dominated by the marvelling discovery of the mirroring power of human consciousness, taken as ‘source’ of identity and selfhood. When set beside the protagonist's central desire for self-apprehension, self-seizure and self-coincidence, the lovers' all-too-human dreams of a communion-in-alterity seem remote and irrelevant. The only interiority to which there is immediate access is one's own; the most immediate, the most perfectible, other-reciprocity available, therefore – or so it seems – is with oneself.