Abstract
In digital culture, individuals increasingly rely on visual self-representation to affirm identity; this image-mediated narcissism often intensifies rather than alleviates their anxiety and insecurity. Despite endless production and editing of personal images, self-satisfaction remains unreachable. This tension is typically attributed to the externalization of subjectivity into visual form–a process estranging the self from its lived experience. Psychoanalytic interpretations trace it to the mirrored formation of the “ideal ego,” which entails a misrecognition between the specular image and the subject of vision. However, such accounts remain confined within representationalist assumptions that overlook the generative structure of image experience. This paper develops Merleau-Ponty’s latent phenomenology of the image to address this limitation. Beginning with his analysis of “mirror experience,” the argument traces through “mirror phenomena” and “the reversibility of the flesh,” culminating in an ontological understanding of “image experience.” Within this framework, the image is neither a copy nor a symbolic referent, but a sensuous event–an intertwining of perception and the world–through which meaning emerges via ambiguous spatio-temporal genesis. Thus, this reframes the image as an event of genesis rather than “narcissistic projection,” challenging the Platonic mimesis. Ultimately, this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s account of the image allows for a co-institutional mode of narcissism: one grounded not in affirming the self via a fantasized specular projection, but in an affective co-birth with the world. This framework displaces image-induced anxiety by grounding visibility in embodied participation, opening onto a more authentic mode of self-affection–one mediated by the image as an event of non-fantasized self-love.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Phenomenology of Image, Narcissism, Merleau-Ponty, Specular Identification, Visual Ontology
