Full self-knowledge is bound up with death for Narcissus

Evidence

There is a moment of exquisite anguish before the boy can describe his predicament: et placet, et video; sed quod videoque placetque, I non tamen invenio (M, 154, lines 446-47) (It pleases, and I see it; but I cannot reach what I see and what pleases). In his description, it is clearly knowledge of the division in identity that kills and inscribes him in nature. He points and declares, iste ego sum: “I am that… I now know my image… I have what I desire. Strange prayer for a lover, I would that what I love were absent… Death is not serious for me for in death I will leave my sorrow” (M, 156, lines 463-71). — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1481 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Cerebral auto-affection is the biological, logical, and affective process by which finitude is constituted within the living core of subjectivity without ever being able to become the knowledge of a subject. The cerebral self represents itself without presenting itself. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 1038 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Self-recognition of identity division is what kills Narcissus and fixes him in nature — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1481; The cerebral self constitutes mortality internally without achieving self-knowledge — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 1038; Constructing one’s self as an object of knowledge is mortiferous — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1480 (+2 more)

Related

• Self-recognition of identity division is what kills Narcissus and fixes him in nature (similarity 0.89)
• Constructing one’s self as an object of knowledge is mortiferous (similarity 0.89)
• The cerebral self constitutes mortality internally without achieving self-knowledge (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Self-recognition of identity division is what kills Narcissus and fixes him in nature #expands (0.88) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1481
• Constructing one’s self as an object of knowledge is mortiferous #corroborates (0.85) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1480
• The cerebral self constitutes mortality internally without achieving self-knowledge #corroborates (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 1038
• Death converts the for-itself into an in-itself that only others can interpret #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1259
• Psychoanalytic self-knowledge requires treating oneself as an external object #exemplifies (0.78)