The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-love

by Pleshette Dearmitt

This book aims to wrest the concept of narcissism from its common and pejorative meanings― egoism and vanity―by revealing its complexity and importance. DeArmitt undertakes the work of rehabilitating “narcissism” by patiently reexamining the terms and figures that have been associated with it, especially in the writings of Rousseau, Kristeva, and Derrida.

These thinkers are known for incisively exposing a certain (traditional) narcissism that has been operative in Western thought and culture and for revealing the violence it has wrought― from the dangers of amour-propre and the pathology of a collective “one’s own” to the phantasm of the sovereign One. Nonetheless, each of these thinkers denounces the naive denunciation of “narcissism,” as the dangers of a non-negotiation with narcissism are more perilous. By rethinking “narcissism” as a complex structure of self-relation through the Other, the book reveals the necessity of an im-possible self-love.

Genres: Philosophy

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Jeff Vandegrift]

Prof. Ellie Anderson was asked "if you could write a paper with one deceased philosopher, who would it be and what would the title be?". Her title was fuzzy, but the colleague she picked was Pleshette Dearmitt and she mentioned this book in the same breadth.

I believe this book to be quite a bit over my head and do not plan to read it, but if I was a "real" Philosopher (vs the armchair-philosopher I am) I'd at least start it.

[sophie esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

The speaking being is a wounded being, his speech wells up out of an aching for love.

the mouth the main organ of amorous longing

A unique coalescence between different thinkers—Freud, Kristeva, Derrida—on the subject of not only narcissism, but love—of the self, of the other, of the mother…How often is narcissism an internalization of the sexualized Oedipal triad? Or a primal hand to arrange the self, love, hatred, and our senses? How often is narcissism a sin, a symptom, a structure—a lie?

It imagines narcissism as a ‘disorder’ but also a psychological structure into which we all fall when we fall in love or out of love; when we hate the other and ourselves.

Also offers an interesting literary perspective which draws attention to the myth of Narcissus, noting the oral and auditory significance of narcissistic interactions, dynamics, and phenomena.

An often-beautiful delivery of ideas. Will read again.

Therefore, while under the sway of love and caught up in the lover’s discourse, the “I,” which is paradoxically both expanded and annihilated as other, never speaks of his love. For, the temporality of love as transference…is a sort of “nontime,” “both instant and eternity” that simultaneously "fulfills me [and] abolishes me" …