The ‘death of character’ idea started out as a spark of insight ignited in alternative theaters and fanned by the various poststructuralist ‘deaths’ announced in the late 1970s and 1980s (of Man, the Author, the Subject, the Work, the Book), but another important tributary came from my own readings in Buddhism. I was especially interested in the correspondence between the poststructuralist emptying out of the subject and the Buddhist idea of anata or ‘no-self,’ the denial of a continuous self that is a corollary of the Buddha’s precept that all human suffering arises from the grasping for an illusory permanence.

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