Constructing one’s self as an object of knowledge is mortiferous
Evidence
The story of Narcissus is framed, then, in the value-coding or gendering of affect in a spectacular dynamics of transgression and reward. For Narcissus himself, we remember Tiresias’s famous line: He will live as long as he does not know himself. He can instantiate, in the kind of reading I am proposing, the construction of the self as an object of knowledge. (It is perhaps in the recognition of this mortiferous autoerotic model of selfknowledge that Rousseau made Narcisse the artist.) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1480
Categorization
- QUESTION: Tiresias’s line — ‘live as long as he does not know himself’ — is a striking inversion of the Socratic/Self-Knowledge imperative, worth chasing against the strategic-essentialism problem of whether ironic self-definition requires a certain non-knowing.
- XREF: Directly relevant to my core question: whether holding an identity strategically demands not-knowing-it-as-essential — Tiresias’s mortiferous self-knowledge dooms the one who learns his own reflection. — connects to: Full self-knowledge is bound up with death for Narcissus; Psychoanalytic self-knowledge requires treating oneself as an external object; Perceiving one’s own body as an object converts its lived possibilities into dead-possibilities (+5 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: Self-knowledge conceived as killing the self is a paradigm-nudging inversion of the entire Enlightenment ‘know thyself’ program.
Broader Connections
- Psychoanalytic self-knowledge requires treating oneself as an external object
#exemplifies(0.92) - Any attempt at sincere self-knowledge covertly turns oneself into a thing
#corroborates(0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 306 - Self-consciousness need not posit the self as an object
#qualifies(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 10 - Articulating thoughts leads to self-discovery and meaning.
#contradicts(0.80) — Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos, 831 - Perceiving one’s own body as an object converts its lived possibilities into dead-possibilities
#exemplifies(0.78)