Narcissism

Thumbing through a tattered album, bounded by an ivory silk cover and pink lace, I love nothing more than look through my oldest photo album of childhood pictures. I do it just to revisit the moments in which I had the greatest, as Fitzgerald would say, “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”, and I think it is the same “ruthless promiscuity of [children’s] attention” that Bersani points to that I often find myself trying to rekindle. His analogy follows a logical train of thought that if a child’s curiosity is not monogamous, why should relationships, and our way of thinking for that matter? And while I cannot imagine a world without the familial securities grounded within institutions such as monogamy and marriage, Bersani presents a compelling case.

But as he challenges to step back, or out, and to think in a “nonbiological, perhaps even nonpsychological way”, I found it difficult grappling with the vision of a world without such subjectivities. It is one thing to transcend the established institutions and its prejudices, such as the ideal of marriage, but to do so also has some unsettling implications. By uprooting the model of a monogamous couple and denouncing the psychoanalytic tendency to create differences “between the self and world”, we must also probe and question the idea of an identity, and how we construe that sense of self. Depicting a world in which terms like “couple”, “marriage”, and identifications by gender,race or class would lead to problems, Bersani calls for a sense of depersonalization, of both sexuality and identity, and it is this fluidity that I cannot entirely grasp yet. On the surface this type of “nonidentitarian” community without a (concrete) means to describe a sense of self would seem to embody an amorphous “sameness” that would ultimately be immobilizing. So while it is indeed quite a convincing notion that monogamy leads to “the arrested deployment of desire’s appetites and curiosities”, it is strange to think of eliminating the things that label us as different, especially the things I would hope to hold onto, such as culture and language. Yet at the same time, I don’t believe Bersani cared so much to eliminate those differences as much as he wanted to lift the violence and negative stigmas associated with those distinctions. Still, it leads me to question the possibility of whether a world like that can really exist. So while I still can’t fully comprehend it, his idea of “limitless narcissism” or the “self-shattering notion” put me in a wholly different, utopian way of thinking; he says -- “I am interested in a pleasure in losing of dissolving the self that is in no way equated with loss, but comes rather through rediscovering the self outside the self. It is a kind of spatial anonymous narcissism.”