ABSTRACT
THE IMAGE OF NARCISSUS In the last of the fragments of the The Writing of the Disaster headed, between parentheses and in the interrogative, ‘(A primal scene?)’, Maurice Blanchot proposes a reinterpretation of the myth of Narcissus. He suggests that the aspect of the myth that Ovid forgets is that Narcissus does not recognize himself, but rather falls in love with the image which ‘exerts the attraction of the void, and of death in its falsity’.1 It is not, for Blanchot, that Narcissus is closed up in his reflection, but rather that ‘he lacks, by decree (you shall not see yourself), that reflected presence-identity, the self-same-the basis upon which a living relation with life, which is other, can be ventured.’ It is for this reason that the voice of Echo ‘gives him nothing other to love’.2 What Narcissus sees, without recognizing it, is ‘the nonliving, eternal part’, namely that in him which is death. If, in the myth, ‘the prohibition upon seeing sounds once more’, it is because Narcissus, lost speechless in presence and therefore unable to respond to the other, misrecognizes that withdrawing point at the heart of appearances where death and alterity coincide.
