ABSTRACT
Dante’s program of redeeming Narcissus is not without powerful precedents for a positive valuation of narcissistic love particularly in Neoplatonic tradition. Dante’s reversal of Narcissus’s error in Paradiso III.16–21 puts us on guard against underestimating the power of images for mediating and revealing the real world. Plotinus, in effect, transforms Platonic ideality into speculative interiority. Julia Kristeva elucidates Plotinus’s “magisterial synthesis” of narcissistic autoerotic love of one’s own image with the Platonic quest for ideal beauty. In fact, Narcissus opens up the world of imagination as mirroring one’s own reality, the sphere of phantasy, of speculative fiction. The most important lesson of Dante’s Paradiso for our purposes is that self-reflexivity paradoxically renders possible an orientation outward toward the radically Other—and this means, an orientation also “upward” toward a divine Source—or “downward” toward a divine Ground. The paradigm of self-reflection, understood through such a logic, has widespread influence throughout Western tradition.
