Eyes and hands / Echo and Narcissus
Derrida belgeselinden iki bölüm.
Let me think... To go back to what were saying earlier about seeing and touching, about seeing and speaking, and seeng and touching...
Instead of getting enmeshed in a profound meditation on sight wich I've written about and discussed at length elsewhere.
What interests me about the eyes is that they are the part of the body that doesn't age.
In other words, if one looks for one's childhood across all the signs of aging in the body the deterioration of musculature.
the whitening of the hair, changes in height and weight, one can find one's childhood in the look of the eyes.
And what's striking about this is that a man of my age keep the exact same eyes that he had a child.
Hegel says that the eyes are the outer manifestation of the soul.
Through the eyes, the inner soul presents itself to the outside.
But I translate this though as follows:
That one's act of looking has no age.
One's eyes are the same all of one's life.
And I'll say something related to this about the subject of hands.
In a book I just published, I spoke a lot about hands.
I'm very interested in the hands of philosophers.
I've written a text on the hands of Heidegger, which also references the hands of Kant, Husserl...
So the hands of philosophers interest me a lot, and what they say about hands, and the privilege that's given to this part of the body.
Keeping in mind that there's a history of the hand, the evolution of man, what we call the hominization of the animal,
occurs via the transformation of the hand.
I think that it's not the body of the hand that stays the same, the hand changes from childhood to old age.
It is the eyes and hands that are the sites of recognition, the signs through which one identifies the other.
***To return to the question of narcissism, they are, paradoxically, the parts that we see the last easily.
We can look in a mirror and see ourselves and have a reasonably accurate sense of what we look like.
But it's very difficult to have an image of our own act of looking or to have a true image of our own hands as they are moving.
It's the other who knows what our hands and eyes are like.
These-how do you say- these gestures of the hands, are seen better by the Other than myself.
++++++ I'll try now to answer your question about the story of Echo and Narcissus.
If one focuses on the treatment of the image and not on the love story in the myth of Echo and Narcissus one sees the myth as about the relationship between specular image and voice
between sigh and voice between light and speech, between the reflection and the mirror.
Speech is what's taking place here right now.
There's a mirror.
I'm speaking.
There's a camera.
You pose a question, I repeat it.
So I'm acting as both Narcissus and Echo at one and the same time.
And what's extraordinary in this scene, which I've examined in my seminars, is the moment when Echo traps Narcissus in a certain way.
Echo, cursed by the jealous gods, was never allowed to speak for herself, and was only allowed to repeat the ends of other's phrases.
But Echo, in her loving and infinite cleverness, arranges it so that in repeating the last syllables of the words of Narcissus,
she speaks in such a way that the words become her own.
In a certain way, she appropriates his language.
In repeating the language of another, she signs her own love.
In repeating she responds to him.
In repeating, she communicates with him.
She speaks her own name by just repeating his words.
And as always with speech, one is blind.
To speak is to not see.
So all speech is to some extend blind.
And at base, Echo blindly but quite lucidly corresponds to Narcissus.
It's a story of love, after all.
She corresponds to Narcissus who is also blind, because Narcissus realizes that he can only see himself,
that it's only his own image he is seeing in the water.
To see only oneself is a form of blindness.
One sees nothing else.
And it's because of this that Narcissus cries.
He cries, and in a way, he dies from not being able to see anyone else.
Echo and Narcissus then are two blind people who love each other.
Now how do two blind people love each other?
That's the question.
Let me think... To go back to what were saying earlier about seeing and touching, about seeing and speaking, and seeng and touching...
Instead of getting enmeshed in a profound meditation on sight wich I've written about and discussed at length elsewhere.
What interests me about the eyes is that they are the part of the body that doesn't age.
In other words, if one looks for one's childhood across all the signs of aging in the body the deterioration of musculature.
the whitening of the hair, changes in height and weight, one can find one's childhood in the look of the eyes.
And what's striking about this is that a man of my age keep the exact same eyes that he had a child.
Hegel says that the eyes are the outer manifestation of the soul.
Through the eyes, the inner soul presents itself to the outside.
But I translate this though as follows:
That one's act of looking has no age.
One's eyes are the same all of one's life.
And I'll say something related to this about the subject of hands.
In a book I just published, I spoke a lot about hands.
I'm very interested in the hands of philosophers.
I've written a text on the hands of Heidegger, which also references the hands of Kant, Husserl...
So the hands of philosophers interest me a lot, and what they say about hands, and the privilege that's given to this part of the body.
Keeping in mind that there's a history of the hand, the evolution of man, what we call the hominization of the animal,
occurs via the transformation of the hand.
I think that it's not the body of the hand that stays the same, the hand changes from childhood to old age.
It is the eyes and hands that are the sites of recognition, the signs through which one identifies the other.
***To return to the question of narcissism, they are, paradoxically, the parts that we see the last easily.
We can look in a mirror and see ourselves and have a reasonably accurate sense of what we look like.
But it's very difficult to have an image of our own act of looking or to have a true image of our own hands as they are moving.
It's the other who knows what our hands and eyes are like.
These-how do you say- these gestures of the hands, are seen better by the Other than myself.
++++++ I'll try now to answer your question about the story of Echo and Narcissus.
If one focuses on the treatment of the image and not on the love story in the myth of Echo and Narcissus one sees the myth as about the relationship between specular image and voice
between sigh and voice between light and speech, between the reflection and the mirror.
Speech is what's taking place here right now.
There's a mirror.
I'm speaking.
There's a camera.
You pose a question, I repeat it.
So I'm acting as both Narcissus and Echo at one and the same time.
And what's extraordinary in this scene, which I've examined in my seminars, is the moment when Echo traps Narcissus in a certain way.
Echo, cursed by the jealous gods, was never allowed to speak for herself, and was only allowed to repeat the ends of other's phrases.
But Echo, in her loving and infinite cleverness, arranges it so that in repeating the last syllables of the words of Narcissus,
she speaks in such a way that the words become her own.
In a certain way, she appropriates his language.
In repeating the language of another, she signs her own love.
In repeating she responds to him.
In repeating, she communicates with him.
She speaks her own name by just repeating his words.
And as always with speech, one is blind.
To speak is to not see.
So all speech is to some extend blind.
And at base, Echo blindly but quite lucidly corresponds to Narcissus.
It's a story of love, after all.
She corresponds to Narcissus who is also blind, because Narcissus realizes that he can only see himself,
that it's only his own image he is seeing in the water.
To see only oneself is a form of blindness.
One sees nothing else.
And it's because of this that Narcissus cries.
He cries, and in a way, he dies from not being able to see anyone else.
Echo and Narcissus then are two blind people who love each other.
Now how do two blind people love each other?
That's the question.
Yazar: Meme-Dini, Tarih: Pazartesi, Temmuz 17, 2006.
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