I am you, if I am: Notes for a Phenomenology
of Narcissism
Domietta Torlasco
I. I CAN ONLY FEEL THAT WHICH TOUCHES ME
Light is a skin. I rub my eyes against the other. It is as if I
had eyes instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my eyes. My vision
trembles with desire.
There is a fundamental narcissism of all vision.
Several passages in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished, posthumously published book, The Visible and the Invisible,
trace for us the contours of a new erotics of vision. The prose is open and fluid, and yet constantly turning upon itself,
in a movement of internal articulation that diffuses oppositions by coiling
over or interweaving their terms. The sentences unfurl as if in a sort of
vibrant, pulsating calmness (this calmness, however, is not composure):
Thus since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still
himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for
the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things,
such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things,
my activity is equally passivity—which is the second and more profound sense of
the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the other sees it, the contour of
a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within
it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated through the
phantom, so the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer
know which sees and which is seen.1
The desire at work in Merleau-Ponty’s prose is the same desire that binds us to
the visible world. Like the language interrogating it, vision incessantly folds
upon itself, defining a circle without permanent closure or stable center.
Indeed, vision comes into being as this folding or rolling back of the visible
upon itself—as a reversibility between the seer and the seen which is, in a
novel and eccentric sense, a relationship of narcissistic desire.
Vision is at this stage a
kind of touch, a “palpation with the look,” and Bergman’s supple luminosity is
for me the cipher of a distance born at the core of proximity. In its glow, her
face possesses the density of velvet and its power of attraction is such that
my eyes feel as if they were layers of the same fabric. They discover themselves
capable of seeing “by confusion” rather than appropriation, which also means:
capable of being seen in return, of receiving—by a sort of “folding back or invagination” of the visible—the other side of the look
they project. It is easier, Merleau-Ponty suggests, to comprehend this
elusive dynamics when we consider touch, and the fact that it is in one and the
same movement that my right hand touches my left hand and is touched by it. As
the body can touch only because it is also tangible, the body can only see
because it is also visible—because it is embedded in the general visibility
which Merleau-Ponty calls
flesh. Neither mind nor matter, the flesh is an “element,” in the sense that
water, air, earth, and fire were elements for the pre-Socratic philosophers:
not things in themselves but “rhizomata,” the roots
of all things. Being the stuff of which all visibles are made, the flesh itself is endowed with a paradoxical reflexivity, which
characterizes every visible and which our body remarkably exemplifies: the
reversibility between the seer and the seen, the
touching and the touched.
Vision occurs in the
encounter or friction between these “two lips,” the sensing and sensible leaves
of which each visible is made (the deux lèvres that anticipate, but also exceed, Luce Irigaray’s image of the two lips touching each
other). This intimacy, however, is not coincidence: “it is time to emphasize
that it is a reversibility always imminent and never
realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand
touching things, but I never reach coincidence.”2 Narcissism
emerges as a style of visibility that, while radically blurring the opposition
between subject and object, activity and passivity, inside and outside, does
not collapse its terms. In the texture of the flesh, reversibility is always
ahead and always behind, inhabiting a time in excess of the simple present: not
a lost possibility but the guarantee of our openness to the world, to “visions
past and visions to come.” Like Barthes’ discreetly rebellious spectator in
“Upon Leaving the Movie Theatre,” I do not need to choose between a
narcissistic body and a perverse body, yet for the reason that I possess,
indeed “I am,” both at once. Narcissism is of an irreducibly perverse nature.
II. FOLDING PLAYS WITH DEATH
What pleasure wants is the
site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the
subject in the midst of bliss.
I am you, if I am.
Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm is thus the name for
desire’s enigmatic labor, the perpetual coming together and splitting apart of
the seer and the seen through which vision is formed. Merleau-Ponty insists on the inerasable character of this
divergence—there would be no vision without the separation (écart)
that doubles every return to the self with dispossession, every recollection
with dispersal. And yet a language of loss is strikingly absent from his prose,
as if the tightly woven fabric of the flesh had the ultimate capacity to absorb
or transform “the powers of death into poetic productivity.” The gaping open of
the chiasm seems to be other than a tear; a folding that not only resists but
also challenges the semantics of cutting. Is the erotics of the fold impermeable to injury and
oblivion?
In the “Working Notes” to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty speaks not of loss
but of disappearance, of forgetting as “disarticulation” of perception.
Visibility is ultimately bound to differentiation and the slipping away of the
visible, its breaking up, constitutes part and parcel of its internal
articulation. There is vision because there is intertwining of the visible and
the invisible, because every visible joins in a double texture of which the
visible and the invisible are like the obverse and the reverse. Yet, the
invisible is not the opposite of the visible but its “secret counterpart” and,
like “the finger of the glove that is turned inside out,”3 can
be accessed each time one sees or touches the obverse side. So that even the
perception of the natural world, what we call the “here and now,” is always
secretly animated by the phantom of other times and other places (the “excess
of life” about which writes Lou
Andreas-Salomé): “the present, the visible counts so much for me and has an
absolute prestige for me only by reason of this immense latent content of the
past, the future, and the elsewhere, which it announces and which it conceals.”4
Montage itself, the editing
“cut” (the difference between and within frames) could be thought as an
instance of this perceptual folding. Less an incision
than a torsion or turning around of the visible, the editing cut does not erase
but hides the visible, folding it over into its invisible counterpart. What is
removed is thus also preserved, committed to latency, and in principle
available for further disclosure. Yet, certain reversals seem to produce too
deep a distance, a disappearance which is closer to the loss, rather than the
fading, of sight. As if the time of the folding, its rhythm, its velocity or
slowness could transform the fold into a tear, a laceration that splits more
than it can regenerate, causing the visible to vanish as if swallowed by an
inaccessible depth. And often, as Barthes suggests, our pleasure resides in
this very fault line, this rift which crosses and disperses me as I see.
If I prefer thinking of
montage and its libidinal play in terms of folds, creases, pleats (rather than
edges, cuts, seams), it is not to cover over violence or loss but to indicate
that its modalities are not, so to speak, clear-cut. There is something
drastic, a once-and-for-all quality in the language of cutting (and also a
certain implication of instantaneity: only suturing takes time). Instead, when
you lose by folding, and are folded in, you are never done. Folding thrives on
repetition. (One does not need cuts to expose the layers: the skin is already
marked, by furrows, wrinkles, pores, the skin as membrane of life and death,
organ of breathing, and producer of dust. What is supposed to protect us from
the world, to separate the inside from the outside, has already been turned
inside out, and folded upon, an indefinite number of times.)
(So maybe folding is the play of death.)
III. DIGITAL SALOME
Red is the color of blood.
Red is the color of pain.
Red is the color of violence.
Red is the color of danger.
Red is the color of blushing.
Red is the color of jealousy.
Red is the color of
reproaches.
Red is the color of
retention.
Red is the color of
resentments.
The scene could hardly be more charged: Dorothy Malone dancing
herself into a frenzy beside a burning fireplace, her
bedroom filled with perfume bottles and exotic objects, while her father
collapses on the marble staircase of their mansion. As if her last sexual
escapade had turned his profound disappointment into deadly exhaustion. By the
end of the film, her alcoholic brother, heir to the family fortune, will also
be dead and Malone will find herself at her father’s executive desk, wearing a
grey suit and holding in her hands the miniature replica of an oil tower.
Behind her shoulders, like an uncanny double, there hangs a portrait of her
father, sitting at the same desk and displaying the same conspicuous token of
privilege. Written on the Windcloses upon this image of female
empowerment, this deviant repetition of the model, and I have always enjoyed
Malone’s ambiguous sensual composure. Yet the scene of the red dance, played
back over and against itself, secretes the uncertain promise (or threat) of
other orders.
Folding a film, whether literally or metaphorically, calls forth
the depth of its surface. This mysterious depth, which Merleau-Ponty has named flesh, is of time as it is of perception:
“past and present are…each enveloping-enveloped—and that itself is the flesh.”5 The
intertwining of the visible and the invisible is also an intertwining of
present and past, an interweaving of temporal dimensions that are neither
autonomous nor coincident. By letting images touch each other, by loosening or
disjoining the lock between them and their invisible counterpart, re-folding
brings about a perturbation in the visible that is also a disturbance in the
order of time. Indeed, it is time that I see at the edges of Malone’s vaporous
gown, where the red becomes a little more solid, obstinately pushing against
the border of the fabric. Time traverses me as I lose sense of my
chronology.
Again in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes that a
certain visible—for instance a certain red—is not a thing which I either see or
do not see, but the opening, within the field of my vision, of a myriad of
connections. This red is interlocked with other invisible reds, with other
colors I have once seen or imagined; it is part of a certain “constellation” of
reds. Of a simple red dress, he writes:
A
punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tile of roof tops,
the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in
Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which
includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and
advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms.
And its red is literally not the same as it appears in one constellation or in
the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or
that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the
gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on
the Champs-Élysées.6
Sentence after sentence, his prose traces a spiral that attracts
us to its center while also leading us away from it, a circle capable of
simultaneously expanding and contracting. How close am I to Malone’s red gown?
and to Louise Bourgeois’s red rooms (Parents and Child),
Kim Novak’s red hair inVertigo, and also to
the red of characters that were never invented as such, that never made it to
the screen, or that were relegated to the background. To characters whose story
could have been told otherwise. Or to no character at all, in the dramatic
sense—to figures, shapes, or stains.
While latent, the invisible or past is not preformed. It is not
simply there such as it was. If, in Malebranche’s words, “I can only feel that
which touches me,” the tactility from which I emerge—the invisible, the flesh
of time—is not set once and for all but (passively and performatively) rearticulated through the touch which it
solicits or initiates. Unfolding, refolding makes visible a past that was never
present, a time that, creatively rediscovered through the winding of
perception, can allow for the release of forgotten or previously unimaginable
futures. The erotics of the flesh is for me an erotics of potentiality.
(The red dance is dedicated to Loie Fuller.)
Domietta Torlasco works at the intersection of film theory and practice and is currently an
Assistant Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Northwestern
University. Her book, The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis,
Italian Film (Stanford University Press, 2008) interrogates the image
of the “crime scene” and the radical revision it undergoes in postwar Italian
cinema. Her film, Antigone’s Noir (U.S.,
2009, 25 min., DV), which re-envisions classic film noir with the help of
scenes shot in contemporary settings, documentary photographs, and footage from
public archives, has played at the Gene Siskel Film
Center in Chicago and the Block Cinema in Evanston.
Notes
1 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible
and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), 139. Unless otherwise noted, the
interspersed quotes are taken from the chapter “The Intertwining—The Chiasm.”
(130-155).
2 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible
and the Invisible, 147.
3 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible
and the Invisible, 263
4 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible
and the Invisible, 114.
5 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible
and the Invisible, 268.
6 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 132.