Introduction:
Now I shall speak of things that transform, of new beings emerging from the old. O Ovid, you who crafted the story of change, grant me the voice to recount the ever-shifting tale of the world, from its dawn to this very moment.
Reappropriating Derrida’s remark in Signature Event Context (1982, p. 318), I write, “the structural possibility of separating being from its referent or signified, the arbitrary mapping between form and new meaning, seems to turn every mark detached from its supposed origin, as seen in the transformation of the tale of Echo and Narcissus,” to emphasize their counter-symbolic difference as two metaconcepts in constellation.
This can be seen as a practice of “conceptual mimesis (Borgdorff, 2012),” reflecting the characteristic feature of Echo, who can only speak (or write) through the selection and repetition of what she hears (or reads), thereby generating ‘knowledge for others’. In this context, I anticipate that this relay of fragmented reason from different sources can generate unexpected ‘truth’ through reading—as Spivak pointed out, Echo’s reward of difference is manifested in the line “fly from me” after Narcissus asks, “why do you fly from me?” Her failure to act intentionally between question and answer, as well as, the interrogative and imperative, generates a warning or the possibility of an alternative future in the context of Narcissus’s death—a figure of mortiferous auto-eroticism.
The ‘truth’ of this version of Metamorphoses, Echoing Cosmic Narcissism, in the form of insufficient writing, will emerge through the active reading (imagination) of readers. Please read from the top left to the bottom right.