NeoNarcissism: Claude Cahun’s “Disavowals”

Resumen

This essay examines references to the figure of Narcissus and the issue of mirroring in Claude Cahun’s AVEUX NON AVENUS, 1930. In doing so, I elaborate Cahun’s proposal of “Neo-Narcissism” and its relationship to subject formation. I explore how Cahun’s rewriting of symbolist myths of Narcissus and her rethinking of contemporary ideas about the relationships between narcissism, idealization, subjectivity and sexuality (in sexology, psychology, aestheticism and popular imagery) led her to an alternative conception of identity and interpersonal relationships and their connections to mirroring and representation. Emerging from the same intellectual soil as the surrealists, Jacques Lacan and Joan Riviere, Cahun’s explorations of the mirroring of self through literature and photography emphasized not the imprisonment of self by the projected ideal image, but an embrace of the partiality of self and the possibility of inter-subjectivity which she hoped might lead to the subject’s potential liberation.