Reading Narcissus-Echo as passage rather than stall founds ethics in everyday exchange

Evidence

Our reading proposes a shifting of the stakes. For us Narcissus is not necessarily a stalling of/in the self where there should be a passageway to others or the Other. There is access to the founding dilemma of ethics if we read the Narcissus-Echo pair as an icon (or, more accurately, a graph) of the passage, crossed easily and imperfectly in the exchange of everyday life, and authoritatively in the production of theory on all levels of civil and military enterprise. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1549

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes the Imaginary/Symbolic progression that Spivak elsewhere contests — relevant to her anti-teleological reading of identity formation, and intersects with the strategic-essentialism motif as identity held non-literally in relation to a symbolic circuit.