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Article Excerpt
An allegorical metonymy [...] says something other than what it says
and manifests the other [allos]. --Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man Echo thus lets be heard [laisse alors entendre] by who-ever wants to hear it, by whoever might love hearing it, something other than what she seems to be saying. --Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason
In the 1989 interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, '"Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject," Derrida suggests that it would be possible "to reconstruct a discourse around a subject that would not be pre-deconstructive, around a subject that would no longer include a figure of mastery of self, of adequation to self, center and origin of the world [...], but which would define the subject rather as a finite experience of non-identity to self, as the underivable interpellation insomuch as it comes from the other, from the trace of the other, with all the paradoxes or the aporia of being-before-the-law" (266). If one were to attempt such a feat--to reconstruct a non-pre-deconstructive discourse about the "subject"--it would be necessary to return to the scene, where the "self," the "ipse," the "I," is inaugurated. As I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere ("The Impossible Incorporation of Narcissus"), Derrida locates the coming to be of any "self" within the paradoxical logic of narcissism, which is inextricably bound up with an experience of mourning. Derrida's Narcissus, condemned as he is to blindness, must mourn not only the other whom he can never wholly appropriate but also his own autonomy. Yet, like a blind man feeling his way in the dark, he will ceaselessly attempt to sketch his own portrait, to trace his own image. And, even though each gesture of narcissistic reappropriation is destined to fail, such gestures must be attempted, time and again, if there is to be any relation to the other, any love, any hospitality.
This "all-powerful logic of narcissism," which is staged and enacted as an "experience of the gaze," finds a parallel in the experience of voice in the figure of Echo (Derrida, Touching 291). On the final page of "By Force of Mourning" an essay dedicated to the thought of Louis Marin, Derrida links the gaze with voice, Narcissus with Echo, as two modes of and two names for self-relation. "One knows," Derrida writes, "that the relation to oneself, that Narcissus himself, gazes at himself only from the gaze of the other, and precedes himself, answering only for himself, only from the resonance of Echo"(164).If Narcissus is to hear himself speak, if he is to answer for himself, ironically he will have to do so through the "resonance of Echo." Before we can speak of Narcissus and "his" voice, it is necessary first to listen closely to Derrida's allegory of Echo.
Since the appearance of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Echo has been heard incessantly miming, repeating, and sending back the words of Narcissus. And, with insistence, Derrida returns to the famous scene between Narcissus and Echo, repeating their story, time and again, as if he will say something new by echoing the poet's words. As we well recall, Echo was condemned by divine interdiction to reduplicate only a deformed or deficient discourse of the same. Thus it can be argued that Echo is nothing but voice, yet has no voice of her own, and that she is simply a reflecting surface for Narcissus, yet has no image herself. Echo, perhaps the paradigmatic figure of "woman," is but a mere resonance of man and seems to be truly an impossible figure. Why, then, does Derrida, in a number of his later texts and interviews, most notably Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy, The Work of Mourning, and Pregnances: Lavis de Colette Deble, as well as in the movie Derrida, recall and call upon the figure of Echo?
This essay gives Derrida's rereading of the figure of Echo a fair hearing and, in listening to him recount Echo's story, attempts to allow her to speak again and otherwise. And, in once again revisiting Ovid's myth of Echo and Narcissus, the essay attempts to articulate a Derridean notion of the "self," while remaining mindful that "if one wants to reconstruct a concept of the subject 'after deconstruction,' [...] one has to shape a logic and a topic that are rather powerful, supple, articulated, and that therefore can be disarticulated" (Derrida, "Eating" 321). Thus, I try to demonstrate that in Derrida's figure of Echo one finds such a supple logic and topic of the "subject," which can be both articulated and disarticulated. In order to do this, one must journey through an exploration of voice as a process of iteration and ex-appropriation, which must always take the form of, and gain its force from, a loving affirmation.
When retelling this all-too-well-known myth, Derrida stresses Echo's singular condition: having been punished by a jealous goddess, she is bound by a divine prohibition that deprives her of the ability to initiate speech. This inescapable "sovereign injunction," which marks Echo's situation, is her law (Rogues xii). This law also dictates that when Echo hears the words of others, she will be unable to hold her tongue and remain silent. Thus, she will be compelled to repeat the final words or syllables that fall upon her ears. It...
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