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8 L. & Critique 3 (1997)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq8 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique Vol.VIII no.1 [19971 INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF THE IMAGE: NARCISSUS AND THE OTHER IN THE MIRROR* by PIERRE LEGENDRE** translated by PETER GOODRICH*** and ALAIN POTTAGE**** I. The Subject and the Instance of Representation The youth dies, lost in the lovelorn contemplation of his own reflection in the water's surface. He exhales his despair at being unable to reach this shadow of a reflected image, namely, his own face.1 Then, according to the poem: O utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem!. A literal translation of which might be: Oh! that I am not able to separate myself from our body. Note that the text says our body rather than my body. In other words, Narcissus addressed his own image as though it were another person with whom he nevertheless shared the same body. In so doing, he established the indissociable, indestructible, bond between body and image. The modern mind is so thoroughly attuned to the calculative sciences that it is difficult to accept that the body is made present for the subject by means of an image. Even if this is accepted, it is difficult to take the further step of admitting that the status of the body is thereby modified, that in its translation by representation the body loses its status as a biological object and becomes something fictional. In other words, the body is not the body. Its construction has been transposed into the domain of the image; the body which we inhabit is indissociable from the grip of the image. * Translated from Dieu au mirroir: Etude sur 'institution des images, Legons III (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 41-88, with the kind permission of the publisher. ** Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Section des Sciences Religieuses (Paris). *** Department of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K. **** Department of Law, London School of Economics, U.K. 1 repercussae ... imaginis umbra , Ovid, Metamorphoses (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1985 ed.), Book III, verse 434, 110.

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