ABSTRACT
The now Freudian-inflected myth of Narcissus, as interpreted and developed by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, is the subject of this chapter, which makes the argument that education does not have to rely on social repression, nor its concomitant psychic repressions. Moving beyond the strictures of primary and secondary narcissism, Blanchot and Derrida introduce a third form of narcissism, what Pleshette DeArmitt calls a ‘narcissism of the other,’ that inaugurates a self, or non-stable subject, through relation to the other. Conditioned by différance, this form of educational relation is active in all relations between individuals, again illustrating the breadth of educational experience in excess of that which is commonly conceived within the limits of thought and practice.
