Attractiveness is for the world of mere entertainment; art requires self-negation, suffering, sacrifice.
And then there was his inability to comprehend the despair and self-negation he inflicted on others.
That self-negation is what she sought from the project: she immersed herself in Selma the way Selma surrenders to fate.
"Compressing his feelings into a few zones of color," Rosenberg wrote, "he was at once dramatist, actor, and audience of his self-negation".
West, whose pen name was based on one of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's female characters, was similarly interested in female self-negation.
Who are you?" It's painful to encounter such drastic self-negation in any form, let alone to imagine the difficulty it posed for Dickinson, whose chosen genre, lyric poetry, requires the cultivation of a strong individual voice.
The price of his ubiquity seems to have been a sort of self-negation, his reduction to a persona – that of the cartoon millionaire, or as Singer puts it "an opera-buffa parody of wealth".
The response is less self-destruction, more self-negation: apparent in the lyrics of Silk, in which Rowsell's protagonist tells us "my loving kills me slowly", and clear just from the titles of Turn To Dust and Your Love's Whore.
(Winston provides an obtrusive caption for these moments in an 11 o'clock song about a roller coaster that includes the lyrics, "You paid your money, took the ride, but missed the view".) The appealing Ms. Kritzer (a standout in "Legally Blonde") and Mr. Cavenaugh sink with grace into the show's dominant tone of self-negation.
They did not present pretty pictures and Avedon himself reacted with characteristic self-negation: "I strongly voice my emotions in my photographs... this is a composite portrait of the power elite, but I feel nothing at all for the majority of these people".
Nishida calls this mutual self-negation "inverse correspondence" (gyakutaiō).
