Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Song of Songs, Narcissus, and Lacan's "Mirror Stage"

Song of Songs:

2. Song of Songs portrays two passionate lovers who revel in the emotional and physical pleasures of human intimacy. Fundamentally, this text may be viewed as erotic but aesthetically this text can be viewed as informally educational in context.
    Questions that come to mind include: What originated the erotic contour throughout this ext? How is the eroticism maintained? Was there a contrast between Love and Lust?

Narcissus:

4. It would be assumed that narcissus falls in Love with himself but as the text reads, he is in love with the shadow of his reflection. Infatuated by what he sees, Narcissus does not realize that what he sees does not exist.
    On page 85, in the second paragraph, the narrator digresses to his own thoughts about not only Narcissus' situation but the idea of being "in love." It reads, "The thing you are seeing does not exist: only turn aside and you will lose what you love. What you see is but the shadow cast by your reflection; in itself it is nothing. It comes with you, and lasts while you are there' it will go when you go, if go you can.
   If I could interpret the thought I would so as such, "In the case of Love, what you are seeing does not exist. What you see is the shadow cast by your own desire, in itself it is nothing. You only want what you can not obtain but what you can not obtain has no limits. You know not what you want. What you desire comes with you, and lasts while you are there; it will go when you go, if you can go. If you can let go of your desire to love, the desire of Love will let go of you.

Lacan:

5. From what I could grasp, The Mirror Stage does serve as the psychoanalytical rewriting of the Narcissus myth. There were a couple of references that supported this idea however there was one that in particular that captured the theme of the Narcissus myth.
   "The function of the mirror stage thus turns out, in my view, to be a particular case of the function of images, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality..."
   This view of the mirror stage encompasses the dilemma that Narcissus faced, a relationship between reality and an organism, Love and Desire.





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