Narcissism (n.) gets desire backwards: desire never seeks what resembles it but what it imagines most irreducibly other — and the more it seeks difference, the more it stumbles on the same.
Narcissism (n.) and submission to the other do not trade off, as Freud thought; they feed each other — the more egoistic you become, the more morbidly altruistic.
Narcissism (n.) exerts a pull on those who have given up part of their own: hence the charm of the child, the cat, the great beast of prey, the great criminal and the humorist.
Narcissism (n.) draws us as if we envied others a blissful state of mind, an unassailable position we ourselves abandoned long ago.
Narcissism (n.) must be feigned in a world without objective criteria: each person has to advertise his desire for himself as subtly as he can, so that others will copy so appetizing a desire.
Narcissism (n.) is for Freud a curiosity worth one or two stars in the Michelin of psychoanalysis — worth a detour, not a trip — because he will not see in it desire's real lost object.
Narcissism (n.) is the mirage the model raises when it resists our imitation — a metaphysical ghost that desire keeps returning to bruise itself against.
Narcissism (n.) is what object love really desires, and object love is what narcissism does not desire — and so feels poor beside it.
Narcissism (n.) did not degrade into a banal everyday word at the hands of the vulgar herd; as Americans use it, it means exactly what Freud meant.
Narcissism (n.) is what we accuse the people we desire of, to reassure ourselves that their indifference is their illness, not our small interest in their eyes — as one once accused a woman of coquetry.