Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly: The Modern Religion of Conscience

Three Disfiguring the Soul

t h r e e Disfiguring the Soul The glass chose to reflect only what he saw Which was enough for his purpose: his image Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle. The time of day or the density of the light Adhering to the face keeps it Lively and intact in a recurring wave Of arrival. The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest? The surface Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases Significantly; that is, enough to make the point That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept In suspension, unable to advance much farther Than your look as it intercepts the picture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The soul has to stay where it is, Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane, The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind, Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay Posing in this place. It must move As little as possible. This is what the portrait says. But there is in that gaze a combination Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful In its restraint that one cannot look for long. The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts, Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention. — j o h n a s h b e r y , ‘‘Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror’’ Parmigianino’s sixteenth-century painting Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (Figure 5) is the subject of John Ashbery’s poem. In this portion, Ashbery 93 94 Disfiguring the Soul Figure 5: Parmigianino, Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (ca. 1524). (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.) portrays vividly the sequestering effect of reflection. To the mirrored gaze, he notes, everything is surface. Just as nothing exists for this gaze that is not surface, so also there are no words that adequately depict this surface. Hence, the dilemma: there is only the peculiar slant of language to affirm what this surface is or is not. If we transpose Ashbery’s observation about the portrait to the unhoused intellect in the modern religion of conscience, it helps us to take note of a peculiar feature of this particular subject. Like Parmigianino’s painted reflection, this subject’s fate is to be a captive of its own form of attending. I am going to argue that there is a distinctive sense in which this is so. To reach this end, however, I will need to do some provisional conceptual spadework. To locate the point I want to discuss, we Disfiguring the Soul 95 need to take three steps. The first narrows the scope of my remarks to the necessity of some form of self-knowledge in reflection; the second narrows it even further to the way in which this form functions as a rule of figuration. The third step leads to the recognition that the rule of figuration performs as an agent of disfiguration, which effaces the soul. The Form of Attending I begin by noting that my point—that the subject’s fate is to be captive of its own form of attending—could amount to little more than the truism that we all see things from our own perspective. To make my point something other than vacuous, I need to fill in the details about the form of attending that holds the subject of the modern religion of conscience. In this form of attending, the subject claims to derive its identity directly from its spontaneous self-awareness. Standing behind the subject’s claim is the formal assumption that the ‘I’ gives itself to the other (the object) and then encounters itself in the objectified form (as specular other). It is not difficult to visualize this. We can readily imagine ourselves looking into a mirror and encountering an image that reflects to us our identity as attenders. But this way of conceptualizing what we see is misleading. The identity of the subject comes not directly from itself, but from its reflection (its specular other). Moreover, we could scarcely know that what we see is ourselves unless we already knew who we are. Chasing down this well-known circularity is not, however, what I have in mind...