The Impossible Incorporation of Narcissus

Abstract

What a scene it was! One quite unlike any other, yet like so many before and so many after it. It was the evening of February 26, 1996, at the grand and historic Odeon Theater in Paris. The events of this singular evening were given the title, "Portrait of a Philosopher: Jacques Derrida."1 Derrida was invited by a group of students and professors from the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis) to attend and to participate in an evening that was devoted to portraying him in sketches and in speech. The drama at the Odeon Theater unfolded as follows: two actors, one male, one female, read passages from multiple texts by Jacques Derrida, including Memoirs of the Blind, Circumfession, and Glas. As he listened to his words and his voice pass through the voices of others, he was observed by the audience, as well as by the two artists, one male, Thierry Briault, one female, Monique Stobienia, who had previously rendered well over a dozen portraits of him. The series of portraits of Derrida exhibited that evening, surrounding Derrida on the stage of the Odeon theater, exemplified the strange logic of the self-portrait. Derrida, in gazing at his own image or, more correctly, images, was able to see the other seeing him see. To add to the hyper-narcissistic nature of the evening, Jacques Derrida was not only in attendance-appearing on stage, showing and exposing himself like a blind Narcissus-but was also a respondent, responding to readings and commentaries of his own texts and to the portraits sketched of his own image. One could say that he assisted or had a hand in creating all these portraits, all these "self-portraits." To this scene of Derrida en abyme and, perhaps more broadly, to the ubiquitous "presence" of Jacques Derrida, the person who shows up at all those conferences, as well as to the image and proper name that is on and in all those books, so many that one can no longer count them, a lone voice, no doubt speaking for so many others, objected. At the Odeon Theater, in front of Jacques Derrida, this voice protested: "What now, they read his texts, they exhibit his portrait fourteen or eighteen times, you cannot even count how many times ... and what's more he shows up. He appears to participate [assister] in all of this. If he were really polite, he would just disappear" (POR 8). This other who speaks, who objects, who looks at and accuses Jacques Derrida of narcissism is the other in Derrida, the other to whom he publicly gives voice on the stage, before the gazes of so many. Both on this stage and in his writing, Derrida tries to respond to this voice and gaze that charge him with narcissism, in other words, charge him with indecently showing or exposing himself. Derrida does not, however, attempt to save himself, to emerge unscathed, safe and sound, from this charge of narcissism. To make matters worse, he not only refuses to deny his own narcissism but also refuses to denounce narcissism in general. What Derrida does denounce, in no uncertain terms, on the stage of the Odeon Theater, before the eyes of the other, so many others, is the naive denunciation of narcissism: "In many of my texts," Derrida says to the audience, "the question of narcissism comes back and I try to denounce precisely the naivete of denouncing narcissism" (POR 17). Let us now leave the stage at the Odeon Theater and turn to these texts where the question of narcissism comes on the scene. In Specters of Marx, Derrida goes as far as to say that "the very concept of narcissism [and its] aporias are ... the explicit theme of deconstruction."2 Even more boldly, in The Right of Inspection, a commentary on a series of photographs that puts into question who is looking and who is being looked at, Derrida calls for a new way of conceiving of narcissism and for its eventual rehabilitation. There Derrida writes, "One will never have understood anything about the love of the other, of you, of the other as such, you understand, without a new understanding of narcissism, a new 'patience,' a new passion for narcissism. …