A Mighty Narcissism

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Abstract

A decade after Derrida’s departure, might we now, amongst friends, admit that Jacques Derrida was a mighty narcissist? Perhaps this has been obvious all along to many, admirers and detractors alike, so much so that it could be banal to say that Derrida was a narcissist— a mighty one. In fact, Derrida had no antipathy to the term and even appropriated the ‘label’, as we say today, aligning himself with or putting himself on the side of Narcissus. In H.C. for Life, That is To Say. . . , a book-long homage to his dear friend, Derrida writes: ‘Apart from myself, will I dare say that I know nobody who is more impossibly narcissistic than Helene Cixous, in her-life-her-works? I could say that, apart from myself’ (HC, 115). Whether he playfully referred to himself on screen as ‘a little Narcissus’ or ‘an old Narcissus’, whether he spoke as Narcissus to Echo in his theoretical works, or whether he denounced the naive denunciation of narcissism, Derrida put the figure of Narcissus and himself as Narcissus back on the scene. One might wonder why he did so, since this taking of sides— the side of Narcissus, the side of narcissism, which ‘has no contrary, no other side, no beyond’ (HC, 115)—would seem philosophically and professionally ill advised. There is no need to rehearse here the well-known objections (solipsism and megalomania, inability to love, the conflation of seeming with being, etc.) to this over-determined figure, which has cast a very long shadow over Western subjectivity. Derrida, perhaps more than others, keenly understood the perils of this figure.