What happens in Shakespeare with money and poverty, with the poor laws and the beginning of credit, happens also with the self and the reflection on the self and its actions. The mechanism of combustion that representation undergoes permeates the questions of knowledge, of our partaking in humanity: the self with its reflections in the deeds, in consciousness, in the perception of time; value and its reflections in the affects, in human relations, the constitution of one's life in wealth or in poverty; the act and its rays in the imagination, again in consciousness, its shadows in guilt, its more or less adequate knowledge; the substance and its shadows; money and the beginning of an ontology of debt and credit.