This example is similar to the Scheme expression "((lambda(x)(x x)) (lambda(x)(x x)))", which is expanded to itself by beta reduction, and so its evaluation loops indefinitely despite the lack of explicit looping constructs.
If we had used a pronoun for this, we could have written something like "this sentence makes quite a statement."
It seems silly to go through this trouble when pronouns will suffice (and when they make more sense to the casual reader), but in systems of mathematical logic, there is generally no analog of the pronoun.
It is somewhat surprising, in fact, that self-reference can be achieved at all in these systems.
Indirect self-reference was studied in great depth by W. V. Quine (after whom the operation above is named), and occupies a central place in the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.