Searching for Personality in a Sea of Identities

by John Milbank

Narcissus, having spurned the love of the nymph Echo, falls in love with the beauty of his own unrecognised reflection, seeks to embrace it, and drowns. 

It is easy to see this ancient fable as a simple moral warning against excessive self-love and its eventual perils. But that would be to miss the two vital details which I have just narrated in the briefest possible compass. Narcissus has refused the obsessively mimetic and he is lured not by fondness for his own mirror-image, like a Dorian Gray, but precisely by his failure to recognise that image in the seemingly alien medium of fluid nature. 

If we should rightly, in the longterm wake of Christopher Lasch, identify modern capitalist culture as pathologically narcissistic, then it is important to bear these details in mind: the first concerns a kind of opposite error to that of narcissism, and the second a paradox at the core of narcissism itself. 

The nymphomaniac doom of only being able to copy in order to flatter suggests a hollowness of the self which many cultures may encourage, especially in women. 

Yet in refusing mimesis altogether and significantly rejecting any sexual exchange of attributes (in the way that lovers fondly echo each other with teasing difference) Narcissus has opted for a rival emptiness which swaps loneliness for actual death. If we take on nothing from the other, we are not left with our authentic self, but with a black hole, because any substantive character is derived from the example of parents, mentors, fictions and friends. Every personal charisma is a matter of ultimately derived habit, a consistent difference of repetition, but a repetition just the same. 

In our time, however, Narcissus is married to Echo in a false alliance. The assumption of specifically liberal culture is that we are all to be taken as pure individuals, with no ascribed or assumed character other than mental freedom and a seeking of bodily satisfaction. In consequence, the valuing of the individual as ultimate involves a total indifference as to the content of this ultimacy, either in general or in particular. The sacred individual is not in fact a substantive person, but rather a kind of psychic atom, an empty bubble or diaphanous monad, such that every social atom is, as far as society is concerned, the same.

Therefore, in the name of valuing the individual and of treating every individual fairly and equally, absolutely everything that could compose her personal difference must actually be suppressed.