Burns's poem is a call for greater self-awareness and objectivity, a desire that we can view our affectations and pretensions from a distance. The congregation has gained this at the expense of the woman with the louse in her hair. They have gained a little greater insight into their selves by their look at an ‘other’, the haughty woman, whose lack of self-awareness causes their mirth. In this chapter I examine the film Under the Skin (Glazer 2013) which performs a meditation on selves, others and other-selves in its depiction of an alien predator in the form of a human female who begins to explore its (her) potential to adopt a human, and female, consciousness with fatal consequences. I will begin by exploring Hegel's work on self-consciousness and his dialectic on self and other which, I argue, is one level to read the film's narrative concern as outlined above.

In his definitive work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel advanced the problem of consciousness as outlined by René Descartes, whose famous appropriation ‘I think therefore I am’ proposed to solve the problem of epistemology by asserting that mind and matter were separate entities. In this sense human consciousness was independent from the materiality of the human body; it arrived from a greater power. As discussed by Pippin (2010), this led to the problem of how these two distinct entities interacted with one another, which was elaborated upon by Immanuel Kant's description of the subject– object relationship. Kant developed a theory of self-consciousness which argued that in order to bridge the subject–object divide, an awareness of the self as a subject was crucial to apprehending a material object that was distinct from the self.