This chapter suggests that the self facing its extinction may make particularly concerted, wild, mad reactions to the impending nothingness of its identity, in late work of a new, unbound creativity. There have, over the ages, been artists in all sorts of media who have had the capacity for self-reinvention late in their careers—often involving a whole new manner, a “late style” that is often their principal claim to greatness in the eyes of posterity. The chapter then assesses the relation of self-reinvention to self-dissolution. In the limiting circumstances of self-dissolution come such phenomena as Beethoven's late quartets—which, in his by then total deafness, he could not hear—or Matisse's late cutouts—these being a return to the art and techne of childhood at a point where he could no longer wield the paintbrush, in which one can find the brilliant invention of a new “period” in his work in response to necessity.