Emma Watson
Photo: Action Press / Rex / Shutterstock
Photo: Action Press / Rex / Shutterstock
As members of the Hollywood set are amongst the most self-absorbed, self-obsessed, and self-indulgent individuals in the world, it came as no surprise to hear Emma Watson speak in an interview with Vogue about self-partnering [click here to read online].
Of course, such a single-positive proposition is really nothing very new: we could trace out a long and fascinating history of self-partnering from Narcissus to Jerry Seinfeld; "Now I know what I've been looking for all these years - myself. I've been waiting for me to come along. And now I've swept myself off my feet!"*
Of course, such a single-positive proposition is really nothing very new: we could trace out a long and fascinating history of self-partnering from Narcissus to Jerry Seinfeld; "Now I know what I've been looking for all these years - myself. I've been waiting for me to come along. And now I've swept myself off my feet!"*
And although some people seem to react with hostility to the idea, there's really nothing to get angry or judgemental about. In fact, I would encourage people to be happy for Ms Watson - particularly as she seems to be so content with the arrangement.
Ultimately, self-partnering is better than sitting around moping like Bridget Jones, or complaining about not having met your soulmate - that special someone who will complete you as a human being (as if Aristophanes's amorous fantasy was anything other than that).**
I also agree with Foucault that care for others shouldn't be put before the care of oneself; that the latter is ethically prior due to the fact that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior. ***
The only problem comes when you grow tired of the arrangement and seek a conscious uncoupling; i.e., a releasing of oneself from oneself - 'cos breaking up is hard to do (comma, comma, down dooby doo down down).
Ultimately, self-partnering is better than sitting around moping like Bridget Jones, or complaining about not having met your soulmate - that special someone who will complete you as a human being (as if Aristophanes's amorous fantasy was anything other than that).**
I also agree with Foucault that care for others shouldn't be put before the care of oneself; that the latter is ethically prior due to the fact that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior. ***
The only problem comes when you grow tired of the arrangement and seek a conscious uncoupling; i.e., a releasing of oneself from oneself - 'cos breaking up is hard to do (comma, comma, down dooby doo down down).
Notes
*Dialogue from Seinfeld, 'The Invitations', (S7/E22, 1999), written by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, episode dir. Andy Ackerman. Click here to watch a clip on YouTube.
** Plato, The Symposium, ed. M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, trans. M. C. Howatson, (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
*** Michel Foucault, 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and Others, (The New Press, 1997).
Readers who enjoyed this post will probably find an earlier one on sologamy also of interest: click here.
Does it have to be a polarised choice between narcissistic 'self-partnering' and pursuing one's idealised/Platonic 'other half'? Companionship, or love itself, is a many-splendoured thing, one presumes, with many shades, complexities and intimacies.
ReplyDeleteAs a mostly autonomous (and bearably happy enough) single man, I'm glad for Ms Watson if, presumably, she enjoys asking herself about her day when she comes in at night, enquiring of herself if her bum looks big in this or that and pleasuring her own bits under the duvet (as Woody Allen famously put it, at least masturbation is sex with someone you love). Even if being with the wrong person is worse (and most people ARE wrong in some way or other and leave one compromised or half-crazy in the end), to really bear one's solitude isn't easy, however, and may well make one a bit madder and/or more inhuman in the other direction than one might otherwise be. Either way, it's not easy interpreting your own dreams, inspecting moles on the back of your neck or putting your head on your own shoulder, as much as one gets to please oneself.
While I'm not sure if the blogger's supposed sympathy with Foucault's anti-Christian posture on this topic coheres clearly with his current form of life as a voluntary carer - it's easy enough to 'agree with' anything and anyone, but we mostly don't (and probably shouldn't) live by ideals - I do think narcissism, and even self-obsession, has a positive and even crucial value, inseparable as it is from artistic creativity. For Eliot, for instance, talking to oneself was the 'first voice' of poetry. And we can always consider getting hitched to a rock like Tracey Emin if the world deprives us of a mate. (My father says she must have been stoned at the time . . .)
Thanks S - I don't know who's the wittiest; you, Woody Allen, or your father.
DeleteI think Foucault's ethics to do with the care of the self - derived from Ancient Greek authors - might better be thought of as pre- rather than anti-Christian.
I agree entirely about the philosophical importance of narcissism (Marcuse famously thought it had emancipatory potential, allowing as it does for a different experience of being).
Thanks for these brief responses, Stephen.
ReplyDeleteCan any 20C philosopher (writing post 'death of God') be rightly said to be 'pre-Christian', whatever s/he harks back to and/or the strain of their idealism?
I'd like to follow up on that Marcuse allusion (? presumably linked to a Marxist agenda of less interest to me, however), and believe that Derrida also wrote positively of narcissism somewhere if any Torpedophile can helpfully supply the reference.
Zarathustra speaks of the "sound, healthy selfishness that issues from the exalted body" that rejoices in its own feeling of power. It is in such sensual happiness that a new type of virtue (beyond good and evil) is to be discovered.
DeleteI think Marcuse builds more upon this than upon his Marxist reading of Freud in his work on narcissism. Arguing, for example, that such joy is beyond any immature autoeroticism and may possibly contain "the germ of a new reality principle" upon which, perhaps, a new social order might be founded.
See 'Eros and Civilization' ...