NARCISSTIC FAILURE
The subject of experience, of freedom, of responsibility and of the exterior is a subject of its passions. It is a subject of affects, currents, waves and intensities, subject of love and an uncertain quivering. It lives an enormous and violent emotion that startles and disturbs it.The subject touches what overtaxes it; it is shaken by an excess of contact. It moves along its own borders. It ambles at the limit of total loss.
The subjectivity of this subject includes the experience of complete dispossessedness. The subject of experience experiences its own ontological poverty, its substantial homelessness which at the same time is the hallmark of its opening toward what is indeterminate and still undecided.
It is therefore necessary to distinguish this subject from the subject of narcissism, of snivelling self-accusation and maudlin interiority. This subject does not want to be a subject; it wants to be the object of circumstances, of alien affects. The subject of narcissism is the subject of sensitive self-enclosure, the subject of the imaginary. It flees from the resistances and imponderabilities of reality. To avoid failing in reality, it withdraws from the dimension of reality. It wants to dwell in its own world removed from reality. The narcissistic world is the universe of appearance, of illusion and defensive lies. It subdivides itself into the realm of mere dreams and the order of naked facts. Both 'idealists' and 'realists' are in equal measure subjects of an illusion that opposes the real.
The subject of experience is distinguished from the subject of dream and from the subject of facts by the circumstance that it surrenders the fortress of interiority and leaves it in order to encounter what is new in contact with the exterior or the real, an encounter which does not leave its shape unchanged. Experience as such will always have been the event of a certain broaching, touching and injury.
Whereas the narcissistic subject makes its vulnerability into the measure of self-enclosure of its identity to prevent or to repress factual injury, the subject of experience is exposed to the facticity of pain itself without becoming passive when faced with pain. The subject of pain must raise itself above pain without palliating or denying it. It is the subject of love, of passionate contact with the untouchable. It loses and constitutes itself through this contact. This is the contact with that which cannot be contacted, the event of radical self-expropriation in which the subject constitutes itself through self-exhaustion. The subject of love is the subject of a certain failure, of a turning, of katastrophé, as the Greeks say, into the madness of self-loss.
To love means to become mad, to move out into the desert of valid instability and to affirm this change from the oasis of reason into the desert of unreason as its truth, as a propriating eventuation of truth.
The moment of katastrophé, of turning, of madness, etc, is the moment of its sovereign receptivity and affirmation by the subject of love who recognizes itself in its constitutive derangement. To be able to love, it requires the courage to derangement. It requires this minimum of consistency to affirm itself as the self of derangement and to risk itself as self through this affirmation so as to bring itself into play as a subject that loves.
The madness of love does not reside in the subject's return into substance, into the uniformity of matter. The subject does not float in the diffuseness of water which it denounces as an indifferent element and the origin of its self-erection. It has to be more than some kind of animal. As long as we understand what Georges Bataille says about animals, that they are "water in water".