Self-consciousness is supposed to manifest its independence to the other by displaying its readiness to give its life. This can, however, be done only by actually risking and eventually giving it. The selfconscious subject is consequently driven to live dangerously, to look for a situation where its life is exposed to the risk of dying, or to put it in radical terms, to actively search for death. It is its own death it is after, not so much the death of the other – the other being, s it were, a mere instrument of its suicide.