Hitchcock is occasionally self-dismissive in a way that seems self-blind.
One thinks particularly of the magnificent delivery of the description of Jocasta's suicide and Oedipus's self-blinding.
Sontag may still reject Freud, but the authors of both "Oedipus" and the Oedipus complex knew that the flight from self, from home, is futile, and only results in the obsessive repetition of the same self-blinding, self-revealing gestures.
The messenger who reports Oedipus's self-blinding might well have summarized the play with "All ills that there are names for, all are here".
Outsiders can't tell the difference between snobbery and delicacy; between acquisition and self-fashioning; between cynical hypocrisy and quixotic self-blinding, a poignant desire to see one's own limited world as the best place it could possibly be.
Here, Hamlet is a kind of anti-Oedipus: whereas the latter moves ragefully from ignorance to knowledge (and his insight requires the loss of his sight in an act of self-blinding), the great Dane knows the score from the get-go.
But then, Shoemaker suggests, it seems that she is indistinguishable from normal people in thought and behavior and hence not self-blind.
A self-blind creature could still gain "third person" knowledge of the mental states in question, through observing her own behavior, reading textbooks, and the like.
(Thus, strict self/other parity accounts of self-knowledge of the sort described in Section 2.1 are accounts according to which one is self-blind in Shoemaker's sense).
A rational creature with ordinary mental states like pains and beliefs, and possessing concepts of pain and belief, might be "self-blind": that is, unable to recognize its own thoughts and sensations.
