Kant defines the concept of ‘totality’ – one of the twelve categories of understanding – as the combination of unity and plurality. It is one of the ‘ancestral concepts of pure understanding’ (Kant 1998: 215) that we bring to the world, making it the object of a ‘possible experience’ and thereby, one might say, humanising it. It constitutes one of the fundamental building blocks out of which we construct our experience of reality. To remove the concept of ‘totality’ from our mental apparatus would alter our experience of the world in such a way that it would no longer be recognisable as human. Along with such ideas as ‘causality’ and ‘substance’, it forms an integral part of the mental apparatus that makes our experience of the world what it is. In more immediate experiential terms, however, the senses and ways in which we apprehend the world – or do not apprehend the world – as a totality are the object of endless negotiations. Psychoanalysis has perhaps revealed this most forcefully, by bringing to light the fragility of the integrity of the ego, of its sense of unity and hence of the unity of the world it apprehends. The experiences of the schizophrenic oscillate between what one might describe as a terrifying excess of ‘coherence’ (any event, even the most anodyne event, may become a sign and be used to construct a delusional narrative) and an excess of incoherence (a world of shattered identities).