One side can hurt -- even defeat -- the other, but only by losing itself.
It is hard to tell whether Alarm Will Sound is finding itself or losing itself, but it may be a bit of both.
Yet fiction loses its special power if it seeks to instruct or clarify, rather than losing itself in ambiguity or what the philosopher Richard Rorty called contingency and irony.
After nearly losing itself in the ether, the third-movement "Solo" goes softly mad, with the first violin in heated monologue while the violin and cello slide eerily, and the second violin plucks quietly and mercilessly.
Though occasionally losing itself in reverence toward a slew of musical titans, the movie best serves its prolific subject when attending to the music itself and the breathless enthusiasms of its performers.
The complaint that Britain is losing itself is the classic whinge of an expat - no more serious than that - but there comes a time when you can't listen to music made by someone whose views you find repugnant.
One senses the seeds of Hitchcock's late masterpiece "Marnie" in this study of the sexual allure of criminality, but in its present form (it was cut to 114 minutes from 132 after previews) the film doesn't coalesce, losing itself in multiple points of view that cloud the issues more than they deepen them.
Through sketches of a panoply of American characters — hustlers and power grabbers, lobbyists and public servants, zany serial entrepreneurs and Wall Street occupiers, masters of the universe and socially awkward technology wizards — Mr. Packer depicts a country losing itself under the pressure of two distinct but related forces.
For him, freedom is the dislocation of consciousness from its object, the fundamental "nihilation" or negation by means of which consciousness can grasp its object without losing itself in it: to be conscious of something is to be conscious of not being it, a "not" that arises in the very structure of consciousness as being for-itself.
GJ: I will always love New York despite the way it seems to be losing itself at times to the world of money.
One can only conclude that whoever thought this was a fine idea must be a devotee of Bertold Brecht who famously sought to establish Verfremdungseffekt -- the distancing and alienation of the audience from the character being portrayed, with the deliberate intent of preventing the audience from losing itself emotionally in the performance.
