The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-love

The Right to Narcissism

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeArmitt, Pleshette, 1967–

    The right to narcissism : a case for an im-possible self-love / Pleshette DeArmitt. — First edition.

            pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8232-5443-9 (cloth : alk. paper) —

    ISBN 978-0-8232-5444-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    1. Narcissism. I. Title.

    BF575.N35D4 2014

    128—dc23

2013015248

Printed in the United States of America

16   15   14      5   4   3   2   1

First edition

for Kas,

my traveling companion

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Right to Narcissism?

PART I. Rousseau: The Passions of Narcissus

Introduction: Another Morality Tale?

1.    Man’s Double Birth

2.    Regarding Self-Love Anew

PART II. Kristeva: The Rebirth of Narcissus

Introduction: Self-Love—Beyond Sin, Symptoms, and Sublime Values

3.    Reconceiving Freud’s Narcissus

4.    Transference, or Amorous Dynamics

PART III. Derrida: The Mourning of Narcissus

Introduction: The Very Concept of Narcissism

5.    The Eye of Narcissus

6.    The Ear of Echo

Afterword. Narcissism—By What Right?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

During the writing of this book, which spanned more years than I anticipated, I experienced, like Narcissus, death and (re)birth, mourning and renewal. This work is intellectually and affectively shaped by the untimely loss of each of my parents and the joyous arrival of the ardent Seraphine Pari, allowing me to think through the limits and expansiveness of narcissism, as well as narcissism’s inextricable relationship to love of the other.

While writing this book, I enjoyed the friendship and support of colleagues, friends, and family who, directly and indirectly, contributed to this project coming to fruition. I would like to express my gratitude to those colleagues in the field who invited me to share my work in speech and in print, as well as to those who provided important feedback, encouragement, and friendship: Tina Chanter, Crina Gschwandtner, Martin Hägglund, Leonard Lawlor, Dawne McCance, Elizabeth Rottenberg, Alan Schrift, and Ewa Ziarek. I am especially grateful to Elissa Marder and Kelly Oliver for the intellectual and emotional generosity each has shown me over the last few years. Michael Naas, a dear friend and mentor, has without a doubt profoundly marked the course of my thinking and writing, for which I am deeply appreciative.

I greatly benefitted from the Professional Development Assignment (2010–11) granted to me by the University of Memphis, which enabled me to make important strides in completing my manuscript. I am thankful to my colleagues and graduate students in the Philosophy Department at Memphis for their helpful feedback on early versions of chapters that were presented in our Research in Progress series. I am also grateful to the graduate students in my Rousseau seminar on the passions for their careful and challenging engagement with the material, which sharpened my own interpretations. Finally, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my chair, Deborah Tollefsen, for her support during the completion of this work and for making the Memphis Philosophy Department a more family-friendly environment.

I would like to express my deep appreciation to my editor, Helen Tartar, for her generous support of my manuscript, and to Tom Lay, for his tremendous care and efficiency in assisting this first-time book author. I also would like to thank Juliann Barbato for her judicious and skillful copy editing, and Eric Newman for his patient help in the publication of this work.

I am truly grateful to Billy Zane for kindly granting me permission to use his elegant and spare portrayal of Echo and Narcissus on the cover of my book.

For their energy, joie de vivre, and friendship, I am indebted to Justine Malle and Joanne Molina. Finally, I thank my family, Sally and Jerry Aron, Manouchehr and Mastaneh Saghafi, Dara Saghafi and Yoli Rodriquez, for their love and support over the years. The memory of my mother, Dolores DeArmitt, accompanied me during the writing of this book.

Early versions of a few sections of the book were previously published. I am grateful to the presses for granting me permission to republish them here in revised form. An abbreviated version of Chapter 3 first appeared as On the Border between Abjection and the Third: The (Re)Birth of Narcissus in the Works of Julia Kristeva in Between Revolt and Affect: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Ziarek (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). A section of Chapter 5 was first published as The Impossible Incorporation of Narcissus: Mourning and Narcissism in Derrida in Philosophy Today, 44, Supplement, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (2000): 84–90. A version of Chapter 6 previously appeared as Resonances of Echo: A Derridean Allegory in Mosaic 41, no. 3 (2009): 89–100.

The Right to Narcissism

Introduction: The Right to Narcissism?

The right to narcissism must be rehabilitated, it needs the time and the means. [Le droit au narcissisme doit être rehabilité, il y faut le temps et les moyens.]

—Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection

The right to narcissism? Any claim to a right to narcissism would raise more than a few eyebrows. Is not narcissism problematic enough, but to call for its legitimation, to openly declare, as Derrida does in the above epigraph, that narcissism should be rehabilitated, as if it has ever been neglected and fallen into disrepair?¹ Have not our contemporary philosophers, cultural theorists, theologians, and even literary scholars spilled much ink over the pervasive egoism of our time and, with it, the troubling disregard for the other—each and every other? Have not ethical discourses proliferated as correctives to this seemingly intractable problem? In fact, is not Derrida one of those who has addressed this very problem and done so in the most trenchant manner by exposing that the whole of the Western tradition is fueled by a powerful narcissistic fantasy of self-return, whether it goes by the name presence, auto-affection, phallogocentrism, or, most recently, sovereignty? What, then, are we to make of Derrida’s seemingly anomalous positive invocation of narcissism and his provocative appeal to rehabilitate the right to it?

This book was inspired by and takes up Derrida’s challenge to radically rethink the concept of narcissism and, thus, begins the work of rehabilitating this notion by patiently reexamining the terms and figures that have been associated with it. In the three parts that follow, we will sketch out the adventures of self-love in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida—three great thinkers of narcissism. Each, in his or her own idiom and context, profoundly grapples with the complexity of what has been gathered under the terms self-love (amor sui, amour de soi, amour-propre) and its younger relative narcissism, which only entered our vocabulary in the late nineteenth century and belongs to a medicalized discourse, specifically that of psychoanalysis and psychiatry.²

Of course, one might counter that each of these thinkers has so persuasively charted out the profound moral, psychological, political, and even metaphysical violence that is wrought as a consequence of the workings of narcissism that a deconstruction of this notion would be virtually impossible or, at the very least, undesirable. We will make the case, admittedly an unconventional and perhaps an unpopular one, that a rethinking and reinscription of narcissism is not only possible but also vitally necessary in order to address the very problems of what is commonly associated with the term narcissism—solipsism, egoism, ipseity, in other words, a pathological self-return, a phantasmatic circularity that dreams of self-enclosure and unleashes a cruel violence on both the other and the self. Indeed, not one of these thinkers would deny that what has been called narcissism (or, in the case of Rousseau, amour-propre) is of the utmost concern and, as described above, must be condemned in no uncertain terms.

However, if we could claim that there is a single lesson concerning narcissism to be learned from these thinkers, it would be that, as Derrida writes in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say … , [n]arcissism has no contrary, no other side, no beyond, and love for the other, respect for the other, self-denial in favor of the other do not interrupt any narcissistic movement.³ If this is the case, and we will contend that it is, then one cannot simply deny or dispense with narcissism, one cannot occupy a position of non-narcissism, and to attempt to occupy such a position would even be perilous. For a naïve notion of narcissism—that is, one that believes that this term merely designates a moral failing or a pathology that can be condemned, corrected, cured, or simply denied—reduces narcissism to a mere state or condition that afflicts an already constituted subject and thus fails to truly reckon with the structures of narcissism. If life is lived, as these thinkers show, in accordance with originary narcissism, then the movement and structures of life itself and with it the self and other must be radically rethought. Thus, before we take the time to acquire the means to rehabilitate narcissism by unfolding Rousseau, Kristeva, and Derrida’s extensive and nuanced meditations on the subject, often interpreting their accounts through and with the insights of psychoanalysis, we will begin with three scenes in which a certain right to narcissism is claimed. The following scenes will seem to suggest that these thinkers, in fact, cannot provide us with the resources to rework narcissism but rather offer us only unequivocal critiques and condemnations of such a dangerous auto-affection. It will be the burden of this book to show otherwise.

ROUSSEAU AND THE RIGHT TO REGARD, OR THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY

Rousseau famously opens Part II of the Second Discourse by dramatically depicting the moment that society, and with it inequality, is inaugurated among men.⁴

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to the impostor. (SD 170/OC III:164)

This transformative scene, which stands in stark relief to the static and relatively peaceful state of nature that preceded it, does not arise, however, out of nowhere but is prepared for by numerous changes in man’s existence and character.⁵ For the idea of property, a concept that requires a notion of one’s own and a belief in possessing the right to it, depending as it does on many prior ideas which could only arise successively, did not take shape all at once in man’s mind (SD 170/OC III:164). Rather, Rousseau argues that a great distance in human history had to be traversed, industry and enlightenment acquired, before humans would enter civil society with all its attendant problems (SD 170/OC III:164). In his analyses of the sea shifts that humankind undergoes in the course of historical development, Rousseau often cover[s] multitudes of Centuries in a flash (SD 173/OC III:167). However, let us linger on a few of those moments in which man’s self-regard and the way that he views others is transformed.

In his natural state, Rousseau tells us, [m]an’s first sentiment was that of his existence, his first care that of his preservation (SD 170/OC III:164).⁶ In this premoral state, primitive man was guided by two wholly natural principles: self-love (amour de soi), or an innate concern for one’s own well-being, and compassion (pitié), or an instinctual aversion to the suffering of other sentient beings. Thus, savage man, prior to the birth of reflection in him, was solitary and benign. Yet, circumstances—terrain, climate, seasons, and interactions with animals and other humans—altered his natural mode of existence and hence his very nature.

It was first man’s competition with animals for the fruits of nature and his need to protect himself from the ferocity of those beasts which threatened his life that brought about a decisive change in his constitution. In his repeated interactions with animals, man began to discern differences between them, those of size, shape, velocity, temperament, and so on. By attending to these differences, a form of reflection that developed almost automatically, what Rousseau calls "a mechanical prudence [une prudence machinale], was produced in man (SD 171/OC III:165). Despite the rudimentary and mechanistic nature of this reflection, man had begun to separate himself from animals, as this new enlightenment that resulted from this development increased his superiority over the other animals" (SD 171/OC III:165).

The nascent ability to distinguish between qualities and relations allowed man to put this knowledge to work for his profit: "He learned to set traps for [animals], he tricked them in a thousand ways, and […] in time he became the master [le maître] of those that could be of service to him and the scourge of those that could harm him (SD 171/OC III:165–66). Man’s newly developed intellectual abilities, specifically the emergence of a kind of cunning intelligence, allowed him to master and menace those who were his superior physically. From mere mechanical reflection, from which he learned to discriminate between differences of relation (fast/slow, strong/weak, etc.), man’s eyes were opened to a new type of relation—superior/inferior. Although it was prudence that moved man to compare himself with his fellow animals, pride was its result. Rousseau describes man’s new regard for himself as follows:

That is how his first look at himself [le premier regard qu’il porta sur lui-même] aroused the first movement of pride in him; that is how, while he was as yet scarcely able to discriminate ranks, and considered himself in the first rank as a species [au premier par son espèce], he was from afar preparing to claim first rank as an individual [il se préparoit de loin à y prétendre par son individu]." (SD 172/OC III:166)

Rousseau portrays man’s first look at himself vis-à-vis other animals as the cause of the first movement of pride in his heart. This species pride, which made man claim for himself first place among animals, laid the foundations for his entry into the social world of men and served as a template for his future claims to be ranked first among his kind.

Some distance must still be traversed to arrive at the right to regard that, on Rousseau’s account, will be the source of inequality and vice (SD 175/OC III:169). While primitive man came to regard himself as master of the animal world, man qua man (i.e., as a social being) was still unknown to him. With time, he began to comprehend the actions and motivations of his own species. "Taught by experience that love of well-being [l’amour du bien-être] is the sole spring of human actions, he acquired the ability to differentiate the occasions when common interest should make him count on the help of his kind, and the even rarer occasions when competition should make him suspicious of them" (SD 172/OC III:166). Despite this emerging ability to identify with his own kind, man’s linguistic capacities, Rousseau tells us, were scarcely more advanced than those of animals, and as such his interactions with other men remained presocial.

It was not until the period of a first revolution, during which families and communal dwellings were established, that a sort of property arose and with it discord (SD 173/OC III:167). Rousseau’s text, however, does not allow us to attribute the degeneration of man’s nature to the formation of property per se. Rather, the mind and the heart [must] grow active before property as such can become a source of inequality and strife (SD 175/OC III:169). This new arrangement, where the social takes root, created the conditions in which new ideas and sentiments could take shape, which, in Rousseau’s narrative, irrevocably alters human nature.

Living in proximity to one another and enjoying newfound leisure, individuals had occasion to attend to different objects and to make comparisons between men, as their ancestors had first done with animals (SD 175/OC III:169). This attention to differences of kind and relation gave rise to new ideas—those of merit and of beauty which produce sentiments of preference (SD 175/OC III:169). Indeed, each began to regard the other anew, with eyes that are opened to the social for the first time.

Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself [Chacun commença à regarder les autres et à vouloir être regardé soi-même], and public esteem acquired a value. The one who sang and danced the best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded [le plus consideré] and this was the first step at once toward inequality and vice; from these preferences arose vanity [la vanité] and contempt on one hand, shame and envy on the other.⁷ (SD 175/OC III:169–70, emphasis mine)

This new regard for others, which assesses and ranks qualities, which gives preference to some and not to others, in turn gave rise to the desire to be regarded and esteemed. For, Rousseau writes, "[a]s soon as men had begun to appreciate one another and the idea of regard had taken shape in their mind (l’idée de la considération fut formée dans leurs esprit), everyone claimed a right to it (chacun prétendit y avoir droit)" (SD 175/OC III:170).

Rousseau skillfully links the formation of the idea of regard with the claim to the right to be (well) regarded. In fact, one might legitimately argue that the right to property as such is nothing but an extension of this earlier demand or claim to narcissism—that is, to the right to be ranked first as a species and then as an individual. Is it not precisely the awakening of the right to regard in The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that gives rise to vanity