The phrase "affirm itself" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing the idea of something confirming or validating its own existence or value.
Example: "In times of uncertainty, the organization must find ways to affirm itself and its mission."
Alternatives: "validate itself" or "assert its identity".
In the centuries since French celebrities began washing up on its shores, Russia has used them to affirm itself as a center of European culture, as well as to poke its finger in the eye of Western nations.
However, at this stage we have at best a very primitive precursor of the self and it can only be said to affirm itself.
No culture should be imposed in order to marginalize another to the point that the latter needs to go great lengths to affirm itself to former.
At the same time, in the concrete reality of Christianity, Europe remains open to an always living source of new inspiration.... Patriotism as a virtue is part of the right attitude to everything, and in the moral order... not a single nation can prosper at the expense of others; it cannot positively affirm itself to the detriment or the disadvantage of others.
"It is not that Islam poses a problem in the sense that it is a dangerous religion, but in as far as it wants to affirm itself as a religion of the Republic," reads some of the quotes from the controversial book.
The Godfather is a temptation of Christ for Nietzschean times – when the Don is dead, will-to-power affirms itself as a "yes!" to criminal life.
It only "affirms" itself in that it puts its will into the world as its appetites and desires respond to sensible objects and in this its unarticulated objective is to possess the thing it desires.
From primitive appetites which involve a precursor self that affirms itself through its desires we arrive at a variety of types of actions and of objects of volition and different relations between the self and the objects.
Furthermore, where Hegel takes the work of the negative to be dialectic's driving power, Deleuze declares that difference is thinkable only as repetition repeating itself (as in Nietzsche's eternal return), where difference affirms itself in eternally differing from itself.
Either Europe speaks up, affirming itself and demonstrating that the European project still has a future, in which case the British partisans of union will see their position strengthened; or it falls silent, allowing doubt and discouragement to creep in and, by its inertia, sending the signal that it's now every man for himself.
In the context of the 21st century global politics -- as the Chinese renaissance affirms itself as the world's major factor of change -- the apprehension it generates around China and beyond, in the West, has to be defeated before it induces the follies of confrontation.
