Abstract
The youth dies, lost in the lovelorn contemplation of his own reflection in the water’s surface. He exhales his despair at being unable to reach this ‘shadow of a reflected image’, namely, his own face.1 Then, according to the poem: ‘O utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem!’ A literal translation of which might be: ‘Oh! that I am not able to separate myself from our body.’ ote that the text says ‘our body’ rather than ‘my body.’n other words, Narcissus addressed his own image as though it were another person with whom he nevertheless shared the same body. In so doing, he established the indissociable, indestructible, bond between body and image.
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Notes
‘repercussae... imaginis umbra...’ Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1985 edn, Warminster: Aris and Phillips, Book III, verse 434, p. 110.
The verb insto (the present participle of instans), derives from sto. See Ernoult and Meiller, Dictionnaire étym. de la langue latine, 1979, Paris: Klincksieck, p. 653.
‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’, in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, 1977, London: Tavistock, pp. 1–8.
This notion returns us to the long history of the theme of the book of nature. A classic passage from Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 1907, London: Kegan Paul, at pp. 284–97.
This term returns us both to the idea of gathering together, conserving, and to that of suppression or abolition. It plays a very important role in the development of Hegelian thought on negativity and the dialectic. See the remarks of Hyppolite, the translator of The Phenomenology of Spirit into French (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, I, pp. 19-20); and also A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel 1968, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 554–9.
J. Derrida addresses the question of Narcissism and specularity in terms of the problematic of Aufhebung in Margins of Philosophy, 1982, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, at pp. 283–8.
ICar, je m’aime!... o reflet ironique de Moi! O mes baisers! lancés à la calme fontaine... Faut-il ma vie à ton amour, o spectre cher?] Valéry, in one of the versions of ‘Narcisse parle’ [Narcissus speaks], in Oeuvres, I, 1957, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 1558–9.
Le Désir politique de Dieu, 1988, Paris: Fayard, at p. 132.
From a poem of Emmanuel Swedenborg, reprinted in J.L. Borges and O. Ferrari, Ultimes dialogues, 1988, Paris: Zoé/Aube, p. 85.
Louis Marin, ‘Figurabilité du visuel: la Véronique ou la question du portrait à Port-Royal’, 1987, 35 Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 51–65.
See Emile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, II, pp. 267–72
See the general discussion in J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 1978, London: Tavistock.
The story is related in M. Tardieu, Les Paysages reliques. Routes et haltes syriénnes d’Isidore à Simplicius, 1990, Paris-Louvain: Peeters, p. 12.
‘Revelation and Anihilation’, in G. Trakl, Crépuscule et déclin, 1990, Paris: Gallimard at p. 210.
Arthur Rimbaud, in a letter to G. Izambard (May 1871): ‘It is false to say: I think; one ought to say I am thought. — Excuse this play of words. I am an other. Too bad for the wood that turns out to be a violin, and laughs at the unconscious ones who quibble over things of which they are completely ignorant’. Oeuvre-Vie, 1991, Paris: Aléa, pp. 183–4.
K. Schipper, Le Corps taoiste. Corps physique — corps social, 1982, Paris: Fayard, pp. 137ff.
F. de Saussure, A Course in General Linguistics, 1966, London: Peter Owen.
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© 1997 Peter Goodrich
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Goodrich, P. (1997). Introduction to the Theory of the Image: Narcissus and the Other in the Mirror. In: Goodrich, P. (eds) Law and the Unconscious. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25974-8_10
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