Narcissism By Proxy

narcissism by proxy

translated from the fragmentary journals of the 18th. Century Dutch physician Robels Almanssonn


…it is too easy to call her vain or narcissistic, it’s too imprecise—narcissism implies that she’s made the necessary distinction between how she sees herself and how others see her, and that her eternal preference is her own image—but this isn’t the case, and in considering her we should not make the common mistake of confusing narcissism with its polar opposite—in other words, she’s never bothered to formulate a self-image, her only concern is for how she might most advantageously be seen by the other, the other for her being always and only male—she can only see herself as the other sees her, so if this is a narcissism it’s the narcissism of displacement, or narcissism by proxy—the way she conducts herself, there’s never a single moment of risk, of refusing to look at herself the way men do, of deliberately leaving men’s expectations unfulfilled, or of utterly forgetting about men for a moment—she cannot risk that, because the sole definitive perspective she has of herself is in fact the male perspective—she doesn’t want to be her own object, she only wants approval, to be the slavish infantilized object of men—[section damaged or missing] …she never risks looking at herself as herself—she never stakes out any subjectivity—she’s unable to individuate herself because, again, no stand-alone self has been formulated, there’s only an object in need of male definition, not an individual arguing for her own particular desirability—or a self-defined person taking the risk of being undesirable, unsexy, unglamorous—while she’s not of course a whore as defined by the trade, she is there only to please the other, to gain male approval, never mind the narrowness of the pleasure she gives—there’s nothing enduringly erotic about someone who is desperate to please—she is common, she is the kind of commoner that keeps insisting that she’s extraordinary—perhaps the only thing that’s extraordinary about her is her unerring commonness, or the commerciality of all her attempts at transgression—[section damaged or missing] …whatever her flaws, her shortcomings, her tantrums, there’s always a ready phalanx of opportunistic men to feign interest for a taste—she doesn’t understand that true sovereignty, or true individuality, is defined by the impossibility of an audience, that the degree to which one is without an audience is the measure of one’s success in the struggle toward individuality […]