"However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the 'simplest' acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading--the acts which relate men to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, their 'absences of works'" --Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, 15-16.
The most dramatic and difficult trial of all is the [re-]discovery of reading and writing as modes of production. Producing what? The world and the self (the public and the private) as constituted by language. The deep irony of this productive activity is that the private self, insofar as it is constituted by language, makes itself available for public scrutiny. Public and private are not antonyms: privacy is, in actuality, a form of limited publicity. To the extent that it exists, it exists in the form of a secret. But every secret is potentially sharable. So privacy is a fragile thing: provisional in nature and always at risk of public exposure.
To "disclose" the self is to articulate it; to articulate the self is to invent it. When John Adams declared, "Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write," he invited his audience to the most dramatic and difficult trial of all: the self-invention that ensues when one accepts language's challenge to "go public."
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