Double Trouble The Doppelgnger From Romanticism To Postmodernism

i
Double Trouble
The double, doppelgänger, is mostly understood as a peculiar

figure that emerged in nineteenth-century Romantic and gothic
literature. Far from being a merely esoteric entity, however, this
book argues that the double, although it mostly goes unnoticed,
is a widespread phenomenon that has significant influence on
our lives. It is an inherent key element of human subjectivity
whose functions, forms, and effects have not yet gained the ser-
ious consideration they merit.
Drawing on literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and
combining a personal story with theoretical interventions,
Double Trouble develops a novel understanding of the double
and human subjectivity in the last two centuries. It begins
with the singular and narcissistic double of Romanticism
and gradually moves to the multiple doubles implicated by
Postmodernism. The double is what defies unicity and opens up
the subject to multiplicity. Consequently, it gradually emerges
as a bridge between the I and the Other, identity and difference,
philosophy and literature, theory and praxis.
Eran Dorfman is Associate Professor and Head of the Department

of Literature at Tel Aviv University, and a former Directeur de
programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris.
He is the author of Foundations of the Everyday: Shock,
Deferral, Repetition (Rowman & Littlefield International,
2014); Learning to See the World Anew: Merleau-Ponty Facing
the Lacanian Mirror (Phaenomenologica series, Springer, 2007,
in French); and the co-editor of Sexuality and Psychoanalysis:
Philosophical Criticisms (Leuven University Press, 2010).
ii
Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
California and the Melancholic American Identity in

Joan Didion’s Novels
Exiled from Eden
Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice
Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the

Modern Novel
Marta Puxan-Oliva
Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art

Frances Restuccia
Conceptualisation and Exposition

A Theory of Character Construction
Lina Varotsi
Knots
Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Double Trouble
The Doppelgänger from Romanticism to Postmodernism
Eran Dorfman
Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning

Wieland Schwanebeck
For more information about this series, please visit:

www.routledge.com/literature/series/LITCRITANDCULT
iii
Double Trouble
The Doppelgänger from
Romanticism to Postmodernism
Eran Dorfman
iv
First published 2020

by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Eran Dorfman to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dorfman, Eran, author.
Title: Double trouble : the doppelgänger from
romanticism to postmodernism / Eran Dorfman.
Other titles: Doppelgänger from romanticism to postmodernism
Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Literary criticism and cultural theory |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019050180 |
ISBN 9780367441449 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003007920 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Doppelgängers. | Doubles in literature. |
Split self in literature. | Other (Philosophy) in literature. |
Difference (Philosophy) | Identity (Psychology) |
Psychoanalysis and literature. Classification:
LCC PN56.D67 D6775 2020 | DDC 809/.927–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050180
ISBN: 978-0-367-44144-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00792-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
v
In memory of my father,
Baruch Moshe Dorfman
(1945–2016)
vi
vi
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 The Double That Takes My Breath Away 11
2 The Shadow’s Gaze 47
3 The Double’s Lesson of Love 88
4 Islands of Doubles 133
Epilogue: “It’s Not Me, It’s You”: From the

Personal to the Collective Double 171
Bibliography 193
Index 202
vi
Acknowledgments
This book is the fruit of a collective effort. For more than

three years I met on a weekly basis with my incredibly tal-
ented research assistants to discuss the theme of the double.
Without this privileged collaboration, the book would not have
received its present form, and this for essential reasons. The
double, I propose, is what defies one’s uniqueness, paving the
way to inner and outer multiplicity. Accordingly, the double is
not a personal invention, reflecting one’s narcissism in the form
of writing. The double is rather a bridge between me and the
Other, and in the course of this work I was honored to find ways
into five concrete Others who helped me to bypass numerous
obstacles, and to whom I am infinitely indebted: Hod Halevi,
Eviatar Kopenhagen, Marina Mayorski, Guy Shapira, and
Maya Shvalbo. This book is also theirs.
Philipp Weber read the manuscript and contributed signifi-
cantly to its accuracy. Duane Davis, Uri Eran, Tal Giladi, Arik
Glasner, Martin Hershenzon, and Paul North read parts of the
book and made some helpful suggestions.
Throughout the years I have been lucky enough to discuss
various topics related to the double with the following inspiring
persons: Yochai Ataria, Nadav Avruch, Georg W. Bertram, Aïm
Deüelle Lüski, Eyal Dotan, Lea Dovev, Joshua Durban, Eran
Eizenhamer, Amir Eshel, Jonathan Gold, Hélène L’Heuillet,
Amir Harash, Dani Issler, Michèle Kahan, Adam Kaplan, Hagi
Kenaan, Boaz M. Levin, Elissa Marder, Elise Marrou, Iris
Milner, Amir Naveh, Daniel Oksenberg, Tchelet Ram, Maurice
Samuels, Galili Shahar, and Philippe Van Haute. Special thanks
go to Liran Razinsky, who initiated me into the secret of the
double. I also discussed this theme in various seminars I gave at
xi
newgenprepdf
Acknowledgments ix
Tel Aviv University, in which I received precious feedback from

my committed students.
I am grateful to Pamela J. Bruton, whose attentive copyediting
contributed significantly to the clarity and fluidity of the text.
Lastly, I thank Jennifer Abbott from Routledge for the imme-
diate confidence she expressed in this book, and Mitchell
Manners for the smooth collaboration during the production
process.
This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation
(Grant Nos. 732/14, 872/17).
x
1
Introduction
Some people came to tell me I had a double hanging out there

in the world. This news overwhelmed me so much that without
further ado I ordered the informers to get this double and kill it.
After they left, I was relieved for a while, knowing the problem
was about to be solved, but all of a sudden I felt a burning
regret, understanding what a horrible mistake I had made. In
the first rush of emotion I had considered my double as my
enemy, but now I realized how much I actually needed him.
For he was not my foe but my friend: my true friend, my true
me –he who, unnoticed, had always docilely accompanied me.
How could I have treated him with such ungrateful cruelty?
Infinite sadness took hold of me, together with the deep desire
to undo the crime –but how? Profoundly shaken and perplexed
I woke up. It was only a dream. But I felt it was much more than
that. For many years I tried to elude this dream, this murderous
desire combined with intimate affection toward my double, but
now it’s time I listen to it. Who is this double? And what is it in
my double –in me –that provokes such contradictory feelings?
This book is an attempt to retrieve and understand the
double –my double, but also the double as a central figure in
human life. The double, doppelgänger, is usually understood as
a peculiar figure that emerged in nineteenth-century Romantic
and gothic literature, reappearing time and again in books, films,
and other cultural manifestations. Far from being a merely eso-
teric entity, however, in this book I argue that the double is a
widespread phenomenon that has significant influence on our
lives although it mostly goes unnoticed. It is an inherent key
element of human subjectivity whose functions, forms, and
effects have not yet gained the serious consideration they merit.
2
2 Introduction
Although my dream dates back more than 20 years, I have

come to investigate the double almost accidently. I was
writing a book about the everyday as the repetitive structure
of life,1 inquiring how repetition can be other than dull and
repressive. To sketch such a possibility I discussed a series
of images by the artist Cindy Sherman. Sherman is known
for photographing herself under different identities, staging
repetitive figures and scenes that are both banal and eventful,
familiar and strange. Her work fascinated me in its refusal to
choose between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and yet it
was only later that I understood the deeper motive for my fas-
cination: these images were all doubles of each other, doubles
of an absent original, namely, Sherman herself. The repetition
in time, which was the theme of my book, suddenly betrayed
its intimate link with repetition in space, the repetition of the
double.
Thereafter I continued to work on temporality, but I repeat-
edly ended up encountering doubles. These doubles, however,
were very different from Sherman’s playful figures, since they
were, rather, split from each other and consequently became
powerless and miserable. I began to realize that the crucial thing
about the double, which may also be the solution to my dream,
is to reconcile it with the pretentious original. These two are
actually doubles of each other, and the question is how to make
them complement rather than contradict and fight each other.
The figure of the double suddenly became an object of urgent
inquiry, and I plunged into the vast literary and theoretical
works on the double, as well as the numerous films that feature
doubles. But I couldn’t find a way to organize these materials
into a book.
After more than a year of research, the answer came from an
unexpected and painful event: my father suddenly fell ill with
cancer and soon thereafter died. I saw his brutal death as a sign,
and when a few months later I was invited to give a paper at
a conference about breathlessness, I knew I had to write about
the lack of air from which my father finally died. This lack of
air was not incidental: the double is often described as stran-
gling the original, preventing him or her from living, and I had a
strong feeling that starting from this aspect of the double would
3
Introduction 3
lead me to the right path not only to understand the double but
also how to make friends with it.
Things started to become clearer, but I still needed to find
the exact relationship between the personal and the theoretical
aspects of this work. The double comes to challenge any attempt
at full control and clear boundaries between the inside and the
outside, the I and the not-I. As such, it cannot be captured by
orthodox academic writing that attempts to constrain it with
well-defined concepts. I therefore decided to double the book
itself, with each chapter beginning with a personal story and an
original analysis of a literary work, followed by a theoretical
intervention. In this way I tried to give the double its appro-
priate treatment, since it is neither a purely irrational force nor
an academically rationalized figure. Rather, the double moves
between these poles, defying their exclusivity but also, if applied
correctly, connecting them to each other.
This book is therefore a personal and intellectual quest for

what I call multiple identity, namely, an identity that accepts
the double as an integral part of itself. Why, then, multiple and
not double identity? The answer is that the double is never a
singular entity. Although it may appear so initially, the double is
not simply an alter ego, a similar Other with which I somehow
need to cope. The double is much more and much less than
that. It incarnates the inevitable remainder and opaque element
of singular subjectivity and stable self-identity, connecting them
to other beings and identities. The double is what defies unicity
and opens up the subject to multiplicity, since it reveals that the
boundaries between I and world, I and Other, I and me, are far
from being clear.2 This book proposes moving beyond the initial
repulsion the double provokes to allow a better understanding
of one’s inner and outer multiplicity.
Indeed, in Romantic and gothic literature the double often
took the form of a more or less exact copy of the self, and in my
dream, too, I found I had a double. But this is already a form of
defense, a desperate attempt to declare that one is the original
and that the double is merely a double, namely, a pretender that
needs to clear the stage. This is the most superficial form of the
double, but the double can also take other shapes and forms, and
4
4 Introduction
I trace them in the following pages and discover other possibil-

ities to confront and live with one’s double(s).
One of the aims of this book is to broaden the common
understanding of the double without losing its specificity.
Every chapter will therefore focus on a different form and
function of the double while linking it to others. My purpose,
however, is not to provide a catalogue of doubles but to pre-
sent a movement, gradually progressing from the “one” to the
“many,” that is, from a dual relationship with one’s double to
a complex relationship with one’s inner and outer multipli-
city. Thus, the first two chapters focus on nineteenth-century
stories from the doppelgänger tradition in which the protag-
onist fatally encounters an intimidating double; whereas the
next two chapters present more contemporary works with mul-
tiple doubles that, rather than threaten the “original,” transform
it and extend its boundaries.
In this way I hope to conserve a notion of the subject, on the
one hand, while introducing multiplicity into it, on the other.
Subjectivity has traditionally been conceived of as autonomous
and self-identical. Poststructuralist theories that seek to “over-
come” the subject challenge this conception, while phenomeno-
logical and psychoanalytic theories have defended it, although
they stress the interdependence between subject and world. The
figure of the double serves as an intermediary between these
conflicting demands, allowing us to salvage a notion of sub-
jectivity while revealing its inherent multiplicity. The double
defies the uniqueness and singularity of the subject, but it is
also attached to the subject as one of its variants –otherwise, it
would not be a double. The double is therefore an intermediary
not only between the one and the many but also between the-
ories that seem to contradict each other.
To respect the nature of the double and its resistance to theory,

I will not provide in this introduction a detailed survey of the
vast existing literature on the theme.3 Rather, I will refer to it
sporadically throughout this book according to the relevant
aspects discussed in the chapters. However, some methodo-
logical remarks should be made here. The main fields that have
studied the double are psychoanalysis, literary theory, cultural
5
Introduction 5
studies, and film studies. I propose, though, that the double is a

latent key concept in philosophy as well, often disguised under
different names such as alter ego or simply Other. The present
book draws on these various theories and methodologies in an
attempt to constitute an interdisciplinary conceptual frame-
work for understanding the double and the nature of subject-
ivity. Rather than imposing a unified and fixed account on the
various forms of the double, I propose to follow the organic
development of the double in its different guises and moments:
from its simplest advent as a threatening specter to the complex
array of doubles that secretly underlies human life.
This movement from the one to the many is also the movement
from Romanticism to Postmodernism. As mentioned earlier, the
first two chapters of this book will focus on stories from the
Romantic tradition whereas the following two chapters will
evolve from novels that can be characterized as postmodern.
I do not pretend to give a full historical account of the double
in literature from the nineteenth century onward; rather, in
each chapter I will draw on one literary work which embodies
a crucial aspect of the double. Certainly, my conceptualization
takes into account the historical and social circumstances of the
double, especially in the second and fourth chapters. However,
the development of this book is more thematic than historical,
and this is due to the very nature of the double. The double
defies linear time and forces us to recall the circular time of
ancient cultures. In many respects, the postmodern double with
which I end the book reconnects us to the premodern double,
finally coming full circle in all the meanings of the term.
The first chapter begins with the story of my father’s death
from a lack of air, a lack that I characterize as no less mental than
physical. Something or someone blocked his breath: an interior
double. I investigate this double through Guy de Maupassant’s
short story “The Horla” (1887), about a man who faces a mys-
terious creature that takes over his breath, his willpower, and
finally his life. I claim that this creature is a negative double,
whose purpose is to defy the protagonist’s rejection of alterity.
The negative double is an invisible and dark entity, in contrast
to the positive double, which is visible and has concrete traits.
However, these two types of double complement each other,
6
6 Introduction
both stemming from the endeavor to deny alterity, lack, and

self-fragmentation.
To understand this denial, I focus on the notion of narcissism,
drawing on psychoanalysis and, in particular, Freud, Rank,
Lacan, and Klein. Rather than simple self-love, narcissism is
a struggle to withdraw libido from the dangerous outside and
direct it back to oneself. This necessitates a split of oneself into
two, as happened to Narcissus, who fell so madly in love with
his mirror image that he jumped into the water to unite with
it in death. The double is the result of an interior split, which
is, however, a structural element of subjectivity. The question
is how to process this split such that the destructive forces it
involves will not take over. Whereas the double arises initially
from a narcissistic struggle, it can also become a bridge to the
Other through a work of intersubjective symbolization. This
work of symbolization is the role of psychoanalysis but also of
literature and any form of writing, including the present book.
In the second chapter I further pursue the idea of the double
as an intermediary between the I and the Other, focusing on
the question of the gaze as moving between light and darkness.
I analyze “The Shadow” (1847), a fairy tale by Hans Christian
Andersen about a learned man who sends his shadow to
observe a mysterious woman in a house across the street. The
shadow enters the house but returns only many years later, in
the form of a rich gentleman. He tells the learned man that
the woman he saw was none other than Poetry, from whom
the shadow learned the secret of the gaze. The shadow uses
it, however, to blackmail people and gain their money and
respect, whereas the learned man refuses the gaze of others
and looks only for essence. I claim that the conflict between
the man and his shadow signifies a split between essence and
appearance, that is, two forms of sight. The result of the split
is the gradual transformation of the learned man himself into
a shadow.
I draw on Hegel’s dialectic of Lord and Bondsman and
Sartre’s theory of the gaze to show that a duplication of the
self is an intrinsic aspect of human subjectivity. The Lord and
the Bondsman incarnate internal elements of the self that have
been split and now need to be reintegrated. This is possible
7
Introduction 7
through extending the enclosing limits of the subject toward

an external entity, which, in the story, is embodied by Poetry.
Poetry encompasses both the realm of image and the realm
of essence and as such can serve as a bridge not only between
internal elements within oneself but also between the I and the
Other, subject and world.
I further develop this bridging option through the theories
of Levinas and Kristeva. Levinas sees the subject as rooted in
primordial and anonymous existence (the il y a), while aiming at
self-transcendence through an encounter with the Other. I claim
that these poles –pure anonymity and pure alterity –converge
in the feminine figure of Poetry. This figure is better understood
in light of Kristeva’s notions of the semiotic and the abject.
Poetry is revealed as radical otherness, at the same time that it
incarnates anonymous drives that transgress the clear bound-
aries between the I and the not-I.
In the third chapter I make a step into the twentieth century,
moving from the notion of a split self to an active process of
self-doubling. This process, I claim, is necessary in order to over-
come narcissism and access love. I analyze Marguerite Duras’s
novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964), about a young woman
who is brutally abandoned by her fiancé. After ten years of mon-
otonous and arid life, she suddenly finds her fiancé’s double,
who in turn falls in love with her. Rather than wishing to realize
this old/new love in a conventional way, she asks him to main-
tain his affair with another woman and allow her to watch
them from a distance. A fascinating web of doubles is gradually
created, bringing the notion of multiple identity to the edge of
madness.
I examine this array of doubles through Kierkegaard’s notion
of shadow-existence, a primordial and playful field of pos-
sibilities that should be activated in later life to allow one to
truly love another person. The love affair actualizes a concrete
possibility, a particular lover, but it simultaneously connects
it to all other possibilities that mark its alternative doubles.
For Kierkegaard, to love a man or a woman is to love mul-
tiple doubles encompassed in one’s lover and in oneself. It is
this combination of the one and the many that allows a true
relationship with the Other. I further develop this idea in light
8
8 Introduction
of Nietzsche’s notion of the Eternal Return and Freud’s con-

ceptualization of the death drive, and I end the chapter with a
discussion on multiplicity in Deleuze.
The double can serve as a bridge to otherness, maintaining
the balance between the one and the many. It is, however, diffi-
cult to achieve this balance, and in the fourth chapter I discuss
this difficulty, situating it in contemporary historical and social
circumstances. I propose a reading of Michel Houellebecq’s
novel The Possibility of an Island (2005), whose protagonist,
Daniel1, laments his selfish personality and his inability to love.
This inability, moreover, is perpetuated by a series of clones who
live in a dystopic world. The novel thus brings us back to the
problem of narcissism and the denial of otherness, but it also
presents a series of doubles. This series is the key to overcoming
narcissism, and indeed, it is finally Daniel25 who manages to
exit his self-imprisonment and regain love by giving up his pre-
tension to unicity.
I thus interpret the novel as a quest for an island that would
nonetheless be populated, a self that would recognize its inner
and outer multiplicity. I draw on Baudrillard and Agamben to
examine this possibility in light of the contemporary social and
economic environment and finally turn to a modern version of
Robinson Crusoe by Michel Tournier, entitled Friday (1967).
This Robinson chooses to remain on the island even when a
ship comes to rescue him, since he understands that the island is
not –that he is not –only one.
To conclude the book, I consider the significance of the
double in an age of identity politics. The double unveils the
interdependency not only between me and the Other but also
between different social and political groups. The personal
drama of love and hate provoked by the double can serve
as a model to understand the broader convolutions in which
peoples and social groups are enmeshed. I consider the bilat-
eral complex relationship that binds together Israelis and
Palestinians. These two peoples are actually doubles of each
other, and I use Sartre’s text Anti-Semite and Jew, as well as
Girard’s theory of the surrogate victim, to show that rival
groups need each other to define themselves, yet they refuse to
admit that this is so.
9
Introduction 9
To explore the possibility of individuals and groups admit-

ting their interdependence, I end the book with a discussion of
Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. Freud claims that Moses was
not Hebrew but Egyptian and that moreover he was assassinated
by the Hebrew people and replaced by a double with an iden-
tical name. Freud bases Judaism and monotheism upon dupli-
cation and violence, but a closer reading in the text reveals that
this duplication and violence also characterize Freud’s own
circumstances in 1938. Freud thus presents himself as a double
of Moses, undermining the unicity and authority of the father
of monotheism. Yet something much more precious is achieved:
namely, Moses’s ability to survive through his doubles. And
with Moses it is also Freud himself who is granted the gift of
survival given by his doubles. Freud ends his life encompassing
Egyptian, Jewish, and Christian doubles, apparently foes of
each other but secretly inseparable friends, guaranteeing him
love and immortality.
Notes
1 Eran Dorfman, Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral,
Repetition (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014).
2 To a large extent I adopt Dimitris Vardoulakis’s proposal that the
double carries with it an ontology of resistance to presence; but
whereas his endeavor is to uncover this ontology, subjecting both
literature and psychoanalysis to philosophy, my approach to the
double is closer to that of Carl F. Keppler. Thus, the double, both
in literature and in real life, initiates one into the secret of multi-
plicity, revealing the interdependency between the I and the not-
I. This initiation, however, is a long and painstaking process that
cannot be summarized or replaced by a well-defined ontology. See
Dimitris Vardoulakis, The Doppelganger: Literature’s Philosophy
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Carl F. Keppler,
The Literature of the Second Self (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1972).
3 The secondary literature on the doppelgänger is rather vast and
goes in different directions. Following are the major works I refer
to in this book: Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study,
trans. Harry Tucker Jr. (1925; London: Maresfield Library, 1989);
Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge: Bowes
& Bowes, 1949); Marianne Wain, “The Double in Romantic
Narrative: A Preliminary Study,” Germanic Review 36, no. 4 (1961):
01
10 Introduction
257–268; Claire Rosenfield, “The Shadow Within: The Conscious

and Unconscious Use of the Double,” Daedalus 92, no. 2 (1963):
326–344; Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the
Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press,
1969); Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in
Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970); Keppler,
Literature of the Second Self; Clément Rosset, The Real and Its
Double, trans. Chris Turner (1976; Chicago: Seagull Books, 2012);
Clifford Hallam,“The Double as Incomplete Self: Toward a Definition
of Doppelgänger,” in Fearful Symmetry: Doubles and Doubling in
Literature and Film. Papers from the Fifth Annual Florida State
University Conference on Literature and Film, ed. Eugene Crook
(Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1981), 1–31; Karl Miller,
Doubles: Studies in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985); John Herdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1990); Gordon E. Slethaug, The
Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction (Carbondale,
Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993); Andrew J. Webber,
The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996); Friedrich Kittler, “Romanticism –
Psychoanalysis –Film: A History of the Double,” in Literature
Media: Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G+B
Arts, 1997), 85–100; Vardoulakis, Doppelganger.
1
1 he Double That Takes My

T
Breath Away
“I have no air”: my father kept pronouncing these words over

and over again for more than two hours, sometimes murmuring
and sometimes shouting them out. Only three weeks earlier he
had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and that morning
he was hospitalized because of severe weakness. Toward the
evening he suddenly started to feel stifled, and no matter how
much oxygen he was given, his breathlessness only further
persisted. The doctor finally took me and my sister aside and
told us that the only way to ease our father’s suffering was to
give him a morphine inhalation, the side effect of which would
be, however, a further suppression of respiration. Devastated by
our father’s cries for help we agreed to this procedure, and one
hour later we witnessed with tears our father’s last breath –a
peaceful one at last.
“I have no air” were therefore my father’s last words, which
haunted me for months and which I will never forget. But I felt
that beyond their immediate expression of an urgent need,
they also contained a secret message, a testimony but also a
will, articulated through a heartbreaking lament. Rather than
expose here my father’s biography, I wish to better understand
his strange and difficult testimony. Why didn’t he have air? The
clue, I suggest, is a certain link between physical breathless-
ness –having no air –and mental breathlessness, an idea that
I will try to elucidate.
Breathing is first of all an engagement with the environ-
ment, taking air in and letting it out in a constant exchange.
Second, it is passive and automatic, not necessitating one’s
intervention. Third, breathing is mostly invisible, and in normal
conditions I don’t see the air I inhale and exhale. These three
21
12 The Double That Takes My Breath Away
features –exchange with the outside, passivity, invisibility –

make breath something much less trivial than it might at first
seem. Breath can be considered as a quasi-passive and invisible
diaphragm, a threshold between the inside and the outside, with
all the problematics such a condition involves. In this sense,
breath may become a focal point for investigating one’s identity:
who breathes? But also: what is breathed, inhaled, and exhaled?
These questions link breath with the figure of the double, which
stands, too, at the threshold of the I and the not-I. Both breath
and the double challenge and transgress the clear boundaries of
the subject, yet both remain invisible until something goes awry:
breathlessness in the first case and the appearance of a threatening
double in the second. In the same way that breath quietly takes
place and announces itself only when there is a problem, so we
secretly have doubles that show themselves during times of emer-
gency, yet often in a distorted way.
The double flourished in nineteenth-century Romantic and
gothic literature for reasons on which I will elaborate in the next
chapter. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is suffi-
cient to note that the double was used to represent an undesired
element or trait of the protagonist, such as immorality, greed,
or sexual desire. This element is projected outside onto an
external figure, which is identical or attached to the protagonist
(mirror image, shadow, etc.). But this figure, the double, grad-
ually takes over and finally destroys the protagonist through
a last-moment introjection, in which the undesired element
returns to the latter at the moment of death. This mechanism of
projection and introjection is equally at work in certain types
of breathlessness: something in breathing –taking the air in and
letting it out –appears to be unpleasant or unwished for, for-
cing one to find a double to assume this activity, only to finally
be annihilated by the double. To understand the meaning of
breathlessness and the involvement of the double in it, in this
chapter I will examine Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 short story
entitled “The Horla.”1
“The Horla” is constructed as the diary of a wealthy single

man living on a big estate near Rouen. Nothing much seems to
happen in his life, and yet he is very satisfied with it. Here are the
31
The Double That Takes My Breath Away 13
first lines of the story: “May 8. What a wonderful day! I spent

all morning stretched out on the grass in front of my house,
beneath the huge plane tree that completely covers, shelters, and
shades the lawn” (6). The diarist poses himself as a laid-back
man, with: “profound and delicate roots that attach a man to
the land where his ancestors were born and died, […] to what
one should think and what one should eat, […] to the smells of
the earth, of the villages, of the air itself” (6).
Indeed, it is an idyllic and organic life with an easy and
effortless breath thanks to the sweet air that seems to have
suffused this place from time immemorial and freely enters the
lungs of its inhabitants. All the diarist has to do is simply to con-
tinue a long chain of tradition and affiliation, to which he has
nothing much to add except his mere presence on the soil, under
the peaceful shadow of the ancient tree. He is therefore very
happy, and when he sees on the river a long line of boats with
different flags, he is even more pleased and salutes a magnificent
Brazilian three-master.
But this pastoral picture soon changes when a sudden,
feverish illness lowers the spirit of the diarist and makes him
ask: “Where do these mysterious influences come from that
change our happiness into despondency and our confidence
into distress? You might say that the air, the invisible air, is full
of unknowable Powers, from whose mysterious closeness we
suffer” (6). The air that seemed to innocently enter the lungs
thus suddenly turns into a potential danger, since breath brings
with it various forces that are all external and invisible. The air
now is no longer sweet and pure but rather takes on a character
opposite to that of the soil: whereas the latter is solid, stable,
and rooted, the air is amorphous and mobile –two traits the
diarist seems to particularly dislike.
The diarist’s illness soon worsens and the dislike now becomes
nothing less than death anxiety. He is convinced that someone is
trying to kill him in his sleep, or, more exactly, to strangle him:
I sleep –for a long time –two or three hours –then a dream –

no –a nightmare grips me. I am fully aware that I am lying
down and sleeping … I feel it and I know it … and I also
feel that someone is approaching me, looking at me, feeling
41
me, is climbing into my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking

my neck in his hands and squeezing … squeezing … with all
his strength, to strangle me. […] I try, with terrible efforts,
gasping for breath, to turn over, to throw off this being that
is crushing me and suffocating me –I can’t! (6–7)
This “someone” who tries to strangle the diarist remains at

this point an imaginary character: a nightmare figure that tries
to stop him from breathing. Once the nightmare is over, this
stranger/strangler disappears and breath and sleep are again
allowed, as if this battle for air was after all won by the diarist,
who can at last breathe on his own with no fear or anxiety.
Who could it be that scares the diarist so much? What is
the cause of his anxiety attacks? It is too soon to answer these
questions, but we know for certain that breath is central here.
As I noted earlier, breathing lets the outside in and the inside out
in a continuous trade, and the fragility of this process is revealed
in anxiety. Breath becomes the focal point of anxiety precisely
because it is natural, neutral, and transparent. Breath blurs
agency, which makes it a central theme also in Buddhist non-
self meditation (anatta). Anxiety attacks stem from what is both
feared and desired, that is, the loss of control, the immersion of
the I in something else, a zone in which the distinction between
the I and the not-I is no longer maintainable.
This zone is hinted at by another element in the diarist’s
nightmares: darkness. In the same way that breath incarnates
a danger because of the invisibility of the air and its unknown
origin in the external world, darkness equally threatens one’s
control of the situation through the restriction of sight. This
restriction culminates in sleep, a sort of inner darkness where
the eyes must be shut, and conscious surveillance must be
diminished in order to give way to invisible forces and uncon-
trollable dreams.
Indeed, once the cracks in the I appear, it is difficult to ignore
them, and it is even more difficult to restrict anxiety attacks
to specific times and places. Thus, the diarist starts to suffer
from these attacks not only during the night but during the day
as well. He then decides that he needs to get away from his
ancestors’ estate for a while and travel to Mont-Saint-Michel.
51
This journey, surprisingly, cures him of his illness, but even there
he must face the threat of the invisible. He climbs up to the mag-
nificent abbey on the top of the hill, and viewing the majestic
scenery, he expresses to the local monk his envy of the happiness
that must result from living in such a place. The monk, however,
doesn’t seem to share this enthusiasm and oddly answers: “It is
very windy, Monsieur.” He then continues: “Look, here is the
wind, which is the strongest force in nature, which knocks men
down, […] here is the wind that kills, whistles, groans, howls –
have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists” (9).
The innocent, sweet air of the diarist’s estate in the beginning
of the story becomes here a powerful wind that can destroy
everything in its path and yet is for the most part invisible and
uncontrolled. Wind, then, is a metaphor for a physical power
that has an element of the spiritual in all senses of the term. In
both Arabic and Hebrew the word for wind also means ghost,
and the Old English gast, the origin of the word ghost, means
breath. The air hides in itself death and destruction, and breath
is therefore a diaphragm not only between the outside and the
inside but also between life and death. Breath is the constant
source of life, but this source, like everything that is organic,
also contains a self-destructive element that lurks in every corner
and threatens to make the organic inorganic again.
This is why no journey can save the diarist from this inner
threat, and two days after his return the attacks recur:
Last night, I felt someone squatting over me, who, with his
mouth over mine, was drinking in my life through my lips.
Yes, he was sucking it in from my throat, just like a leech.
Then he rose, sated, and I woke up, so wounded, broken,
and annihilated, that I could no longer move. (10)
Life is taken away by a vampire or a ghost, but who is this

ghost? The diarist discovers that it not only takes his breath and
sucks his blood in his imagination but also, and more simply,
drinks the water from a bottle on his table in the real world.
This discovery makes him wonder –at last –whether this ghost
is none other than himself: “So I was a sleepwalker, then, and
was living, without knowing it, this double mysterious life,
61
which makes us suspect that there are two beings inside us, or
that a foreign being, unknowable and invisible, animates our
captive body when our soul is dulled” (10).
This actually is the only moment of truth and sincerity in
the story, the diarist daring to acknowledge the doubling of the
I. He is no longer the master of the house, the master of his
body, soul, and breath. In him is hidden another, invisible I, a
revelation that changes not only the content but also the form of
his language: “Who? Me? Me without a doubt? It could only be
me?” (10, translation modified), he cries, as if to declare that the
I or, rather, the “Me without a doubt” must be put, from now
on, into question. No sovereign autonomy of the self or the I is
possible, no matter how many Cartesian meditations the diarist
may try to practice.
Yet the truth is too dreadful to maintain, and so the diarist
decides to travel again to escape this inner ghost. This deci-
sion, though, is not a simple escape, since it stems from the
diarist’s deep understanding that he is dependent upon others,
upon the outside. He suddenly realizes that it is precisely the
negation of this dependence that leads to the appearance of
the double: “When we are alone for a long time, we people the
void with phantoms” (11). It is only when he is deprived of
others, remaining in his isolated and apparently autarkic estate,
that the attacks occur. Home shows its dangerous, uncanny,
unheimlich aspect when one tries to deny otherness and use
home as a protection against it. Otherness is a part of being
alive, as we’ve seen with the phenomenon of breath, and no
one can escape it. The appearance of the threatening double,
as I earlier claimed, is only the externalization of the internal
doubles each one of us secretly encompasses, doubles that are
agents of the inherent alterity within one’s subjectivity. It is the
refusal to acknowledge and embrace alterity that leads to its
projection outside, but rather than make one the master of the
house, this projection only further strengthens alterity until it
becomes monstrous.
This point is further stressed when, arriving in Paris, the
diarist attends a dinner party and meets there a doctor who
belongs to the Nancy School, where hypnosis and suggestion
were practiced at the end of the nineteenth century and much
71
influenced the young Sigmund Freud. The diarist is very skep-

tical about the technique of suggestion and more generally
about the possibility of being controlled from the outside, and
to prove the truth of his method the doctor performs a terri-
fying experiment. He hypnotizes the diarist’s cousin and asks
the diarist to sit behind her. He then orders her to look in a
“mirror,” which is actually nothing but a simple visiting card,
and to describe what her cousin does. She answers correctly: he
is taking a photograph from his pocket and looking at it. And
who is in the photograph? Once again she is right: the diarist
himself.
This scene presents a false mirror (the visiting card) and a true
photograph, but the false seems to be more accurate than the
true, since through it the cousin sees the interior nature of the
diarist: his narcissism, for sure, but also his tendency to remain
at the surface of things, not understanding their deeper nature.
It is paradoxically the fear of the invading exterior that makes
him cling to the external contours of phenomena, for example,
to his photography. These contours seem to reassure him of a
clear boundary between the inside and the outside and reinforce
his stable and well-defined identity. Yet the fear comes not only
from the outside but also from the inside, or more exactly from
the inability to clearly distinguish between the two, which leads
to an inevitably unstable identity. This is why he is extremely
troubled by his cousin’s further obedience to the hypnotizer, and
at the conclusion of the experiment, he states: “We are appal-
lingly subject to the influence of our surroundings. I will return
to my house next week” (15–16).
Rather than learning the lesson of the interdependency
between the outside and the inside, the diarist quickly sets up
borders again, wishing to return home, where, he thinks, he will
be safe from external powers. He then forgets what he himself
earlier understood –namely, that loneliness would only accen-
tuate his inner instability. It is the illusion and fantasy of pure
selfhood that brings most of his sufferings. But this fantasy can
lead only to further anxiety attacks, which now expand well
beyond breath, taking over his “true” and “authentic” will,
exactly as the hypnotizer took over the will of his cousin: “I
am lost. Someone possesses my soul and governs it. Someone
81
controls all my actions, all my movements, all my thoughts.

I am nothing inside, nothing but a slave spectator, terrified of all
the things I do” (18).
Rather than understanding the inner nature of this creature,
that it is a part of himself, his double, the diarist does everything
he can to externalize it, deciding that it has come from another
planet or simply from Rio de Janeiro –anywhere but from him-
self. And finally he “discovers” the true nature of this creature
and moreover its name: the Horla.
The Horla is everything that is outside the here and now:
hors-là. But its almighty power stems precisely from the com-
bination of the hors and the là, the outside and the inside. The
Horla, as the Freudian uncanny, is the hidden, most profound
and secret here and now. As such it is negated as what belongs
to oneself, remaining intimately close and extremely strange,
drawing its power from both internal and external sources.
Consequently, the diarist admires the Horla at the same time
that he is terrified by it and plans to kill it. But first of all he
must see it, which leads him to a paradox: wishing to see what
cannot be seen in principle. He believes that sight and intellec-
tual knowledge can conquer the Horla, but this attitude only
reinforces its control over him, since gradually all the invisible
and uncontrollable aspects of existence –from breath to sleep
and finally willpower –are rejected from the self and from the
là. The diarist cannot accept anything that is not clearly grasp-
able, and he therefore gradually rids himself of his inner forces,
which, unknowingly, he gives to his double, the Horla.
One day, however, he does manage to see the Horla, the invis-
ible; or at least that is what he declares. In a scene that stands in
an opposed symmetry to his cousin’s hypnotic session, he looks
at a “real” mirror, but once more, the true and the false get
confused:
Everything there was clear as in full daylight, but I could

not see myself in my mirror –it was empty, clear, profound,
full of light! My image was not inside it … yet I myself was
facing it! I could see the large clear glass from top to bottom.
I looked at it with terrified eyes, but dared not move for-
ward. I did not dare to make any movement, fully aware
91
that he was there, but that he would escape me again, he

whose imperceptible body had devoured my reflection. (22)
What had been discovered in the mirror? Only the eclipse of the
external I, that is, the disappearance of the material surface and
its replacement by an invisible spirituality, the space of the ghost,
of wind, of breath: the space of breathlessness, of breath taken
away by someone else. The Horla appears as the other side of
the external mirror figure and is not some all-powerful creature
but simply the emptiness of the self, the void upon which every
stable identity is created.
The message of this scene is clear, but the diarist insists on
not listening. Instead, as is common in contemporary politics, he
decides to build a wall against the imaginary invader, planning
to catch and kill the Horla by installing iron shutters and an iron
door in his room. Then, when he thinks the Horla has entered,
he locks the room and sets fire to the house, watching the flames
from a nearby field, with only modest remorse for the trapped
servants, whom he completely forgot. He finally goes to Rouen
and seems satisfied with his destructive action until suddenly a
doubt comes to gnaw at him: what if the Horla wasn’t dead?
He then starts to wonder if the Horla is capable of what he
calls “premature destruction” and realizes that since it is stronger
than the human, the Horla will die only at its own chosen hour.
Which leads him to the strange conclusion that ends the story:
“No … no … of course not … of course he is not dead… So
then –it’s me, it’s me I have to kill!” (24).
This ending is quite perplexing. Until the very last paragraph
it was always a question of self-control, of the attempt to remain
the master of the house, whereas the end reveals that the real
master is none other than death. Is death the ultimate limit and
conclusion of the wish to rule the world? The only power one
has over death is to receive it at a chosen time, as the Horla is
able to do, and the diarist’s suicide therefore has two motives:
first, to attain control over one’s death and, second, to end the
Horla’s life, thus secretly avowing that the Horla is a part of
himself. The diarist manages to identify partially with the Horla
(“it’s me”) and reintegrate his double into himself, but only in a
negative way, through self-annihilation.
02
Breath, as we saw, is the medium through which the outside

and the inside, the hors and the là, encounter each other. Whereas
in the beginning of the story the Horla takes the diarist’s breath
away, it soon steals his willpower and becomes a stubborn
force that leads him to his death. This is the path he traveled:
breathlessness–loss of desire–death. It may look linear, but as
a matter of fact all three elements are closely intertwined. The
refusal of exteriority, otherness, and heteronomy is a refusal of
life, desire, and breath. The exact order of these refusals and the
way they are expressed and felt in one’s life are less important
than understanding the inevitable destruction to which they will
necessarily lead.
“The Horla” is therefore one of the strongest examples of the
Doppelgänger literature at the same time that it is an exception
to its rule. For it does not focus on one particular desire that
is projected onto a double but rather exposes the very struc-
ture of desire as such, breath being nothing but the desire for
life. The structure of desire necessitates objects in the external
world, and, like breath, desire is insatiable by definition, thus
shaking one’s control over oneself and the world. It is only in
death that one becomes fully oneself, with no breath, no desire,
and no exteriority.
“I have no air.” I started this chapter with these words of my

father and I would like to conclude this part with them. Breath
is on the threshold between the inside and the outside, between
free will and the demands of reality, between life and death.
One cannot control breath, but one may be tempted to do so or,
rather, be tempted to control it by giving it up: not physically
but mentally or ontologically by refusing to acknowledge the
border, the zone of uncertainty that characterizes human life.
And indeed, my father looked for clarity where it could not
be found, adhering to stiff dogmas while secretly admitting they
can do no good. Someone else governed his life precisely because
of his futile attempt to control life. In this way he resembled the
diarist, wishing to overcontrol reality and himself only to con-
front a secret power that would eventually annihilate him. My
father had an invisible double, an external armor which perhaps
helped him in some moments but finally turned on him in the
12
form of a tumor, a result of an inner mutation that choked him

to death.
It is this double that I take with me as an encoded message that
I am trying to decipher here, one that I will have to decipher over
and over again my entire life. For the difficulty in accepting the
invisible, the ghost, the uncontrollable aspect of life was not only
my father’s share but is also mine, and probably every human
being’s. Each one of us has doubles, internal–external forces that
are part of what it is to be human, and the question is not how to
surmount or avoid them but rather how to accept them so that
they become a part of breath rather than its enemy.
My father’s message was pronounced in a few repetitive
words, and I have tried to translate them here in my writing. And
indeed, the diarist of “The Horla” wrote his diary not only as
an attempt to fight breathlessness but also as a means to under-
stand it, doubling himself this time in a conscious and creative
way. Therefore, in his good moments he managed to breathe in
writing and through writing. His words breathe not only his
sorrow and agony but also his joy. This, perhaps, is not so much
the diarist’s testimony but Maupassant’s: words can serve to
control breath, life, and death, thus becoming a “bad” double,
but words can also breathe freely, live, and die, presenting
the option of a “good” double. This is another message I take
from my father: do not write against life or death, but write
in, through, and with both of them together. Death, the abso-
lute master, will eventually come in terminal breathlessness, but
breath and breathlessness are parts of this zone between life and
death, the inside and the outside. We may call this zone human
life, that is, speaking and writing life to which no clear bound-
aries can be set.
THEORETICAL INTERVENTION
Both my father and the diarist of “The Horla” were very much
preoccupied with the question of control: control of the outside,
the inside, and the relationship between the two. They wished
to master themselves and their environment, yet this wish even-
tually led to their suffocation. Someone or something took over
2
their lives, a double that gradually seized control of their bodies

and souls until their very last breath. Where could this double
have come from? The obvious answer is “from within,” but this
is too simple. What permits in the first place the appearance of
a double, this externalization of an inner element? And what
mechanisms does it involve?
Because of the highly emotional, stifling, and finally psych-
otic atmosphere of “The Horla,”2 I wish to analyze it now with
the help of psychoanalytical theory, focusing on the notions of
narcissism and death drive. It is important to note that far from
the common understanding of narcissism as self-indulgence or
simply selfishness, the psychoanalytical articulation of the term
is much broader.3 Narcissism can actually take on many forms,
and more than self-love, it presents a difficulty in fully acknow-
ledging the separate existence of others and one’s dependency
on them, resulting in a withdrawal into one’s own sphere. The
double, then, comes not only to incarnate this difficulty but also
to pave a way out of it, signaling the impossibility of an autarkic
existence and the need to accept otherness.
Indeed, narcissism and the double go hand in hand, as can
be seen already in Ovid’s version of the myth of Narcissus, the
handsome youth who was unable to love anyone until he saw
an image of a beautiful boy in a lake. Alas, this beloved was
nothing but his own reflected image, and the realization of this
painful truth led Narcissus to jump into the water, uniting with
his self-image if not in love then at least in death.4 Narcissus’s
double in the water thus acts in two phases: first it rescues him
from his inability to love, but it can give love only to rob it from
him, finally leading to his destruction.
Primary Narcissism and the Birth of the Double

Is any form of narcissism doomed to fail? Let us first examine
Freud’s elaborate work on this theme. There are actually various
forms of narcissism according to him, most of which endure
throughout our lives. However, one of them, the most primitive
one, should be abandoned in early childhood, and Freud calls it
primary narcissism.
To begin with, all psychic energy is invested in the baby herself
and not in other objects. This energy is guided by the pleasure
32
principle, and only the inner realm is perceived as pleasurable

and loved, whereas the outside remains insignificant, provoking
indifference.5
But things become more complicated when the baby perceives
something pleasurable outside, for instance, milk, or something
unpleasurable inside, such as pain or hunger. She therefore
introjects the pleasurable object inside, making it a part of her-
self, or projects the unpleasurable feeling outside, attributing it
to someone or something else. In this way a “pure pleasure-
ego” is formed, with binary oppositions between inside/outside,
pleasure/unpleasure, and finally love/hate.6
Primary narcissism is thus far from being a passive state but
is rather a continuous and laborious process of introjection and
projection. This explains why it cannot subsist for long. Sooner
or later the baby must realize that many desired objects are to
be found only outside and, inversely, that many painful feelings
are unavoidable and are part of what it is to be a human subject.
In other words, one must understand the unavoidable negoti-
ation between the inside and the outside, with all the pain and
the pleasure it involves. It is only then that one can abandon
primary narcissism, addressing desire and love to things that are
other than oneself. Yet the fantasy of “pure pleasure-ego” is too
strong to give way. The residue of primary narcissism remains
with us all our lives, as can be shown when a loved object turns
to disappoint us. We then often transform our love to hostility,
regressing to the archaic state in which the outside is either
hated or simply ignored.7
With these first insights in mind let us examine narcissism as
it is presented in “The Horla.” The diarist seems at first to be
in a pure state of primary narcissism, enthusiastically declaring
how happy he is in his self-sufficient realm. Then he sees a line
of boats passing; a Brazilian three-master in particular gives him
a great sense of pleasure. He thus salutes the boat, but very soon
thereafter his attacks begin. He eventually becomes convinced
that the Horla was hiding in the boat and interpreted his ges-
ture as an invitation to invade his estate, his body, and finally his
soul. This hypothesis, which initially may sound superstitious,
actually makes sense if we examine it in the light of primary nar-
cissism. The pleasure the diarist took in seeing the vessel made
him introject it inside himself, since he cannot allow something
42
pleasurable to lie outside his estate. But he soon discovers its

exteriority, and the question is what prevents him from peace-
fully enjoying it inside him.
It is difficult to answer this since rather than directly face
the threat of the outside, the diarist becomes only further
entrenched in primary narcissism, treating every sign of exter-
iority with either indifference, hatred, suspicion, or envy. More
than that, there isn’t any expression in the story of affection
or empathy, let alone love. The diarist doesn’t feel any positive
emotion toward other people, and at the end of the story he
even carelessly causes the death of his servants without much
remorse. Indeed, affection and love presuppose a differentiation
between self and others, but also a certain violation of this dif-
ferentiation, making the love object both one’s own and Other.
The diarist can love only himself, and his illness bursts out when
he understands that this self contains otherness.
He finds this revelation so unbearable that he feels choked and
strangled by the Horla: the air that he breathes is contaminated
since it comes from the outside, such that he cannot inhale but
only exhale, emptying himself of his air, his will, and finally his
life. This excessive exhalation is what Freud calls projection, the
diarist attributing his contaminated inner parts to an outside
figure that is him and not him: namely, the Horla.
The Double as a Narcissistic Compromise

The Horla is the diarist’s double, resulting from a desperate
attempt to externalize what he believes does not belong to the
self, owing to his inability to bypass primary narcissism. The
double therefore incarnates a failed narcissistic attempt to
purify the inside of the outside. This, at any rate, is one of the
central theses promoted by Otto Rank, Freud’s disciple, in his
1914 book Der Doppelgänger (The Double).8
The trigger to this book was a German film from the preceding
year, entitled The Student of Prague,9 which takes place in 1820
in a gothic Prague. It tells the story of a young student falling
in love with a wealthy countess who disregards him because of
his poverty. He is in total despair when an old cunning man,
apparently the devil, enters his room and proposes to give him a
52
hundred thousand guilders if the student allows him to take an

object of his choice from the room. The student cannot believe
his ears: what could be of such value in his miserable, wretched
room? He happily signs the contract, after which the devil
invites him to look at the large mirror leaning against the wall,
and the student is amazed to see his own image getting out of
the mirror and walking away with the devil. He tries at first to
dismiss this loss and he rejoices in the money that allows him to
address the countess, but the mirror image soon starts to haunt
him. It gradually takes over his actions and invades his house
until the desperate student has no other choice but to shoot his
double, just to discover that it is himself that he has killed.
The film bears many similarities with “The Horla,” com-
bining the desire for domination, an obsession with a haunting
self-image, and a tragic suicide. In addition, both the story
and the film begin with an innocent act of letting in or letting
out an element that is eventually transformed into the double:
the salute to the Brazilian three-master in one and the sale
of the mirror image in the other. Something in the exchange
between the inside and the outside –this exchange that I have
described through the process of breathing –goes awry in
both cases, emptying the self and leaving it in a narcissistic yet
haunted state.
Following Freud, Rank conceives of narcissism not as an idle
state but as an active attempt to find a compromise between
the need for love and the fear of the outside. Loving oneself is a
way to hold the stick at both ends: to have love but turn it only
toward oneself.10 But Rank observes that this compromise must
fail since something in us “seems to resist exclusive self-love.”11
Each one of us has thus two contradictory tendencies: an inclin-
ation toward narcissism and a defense against it, and the turbu-
lent drama of the double comes to express this contradiction.
Hence, the student of Prague does not simply sell his mirror
image to the devil but, as in the famous legend of Faust, sells
something deeper: not his soul but his need for others. The
mirror image incarnates the way other people look at me and
my attempts to please them. By giving away his mirror image
the student hopes to win the countess’s heart without exposing
himself in his weakness. But as soon as the sale is completed,
62
his double won’t allow him to realize his love for the countess,
since love necessitates an acknowledgment of need. The desired
power that narcissism is supposed to give is converted into
extreme weakness, since the one who is nourished by the out-
side, the one who breathes, is not oneself but one’s double.
The double is thus not simply a different me or an alter
ego, but the element in me that needs the outside. It is this
element that I try, on the one hand, to conserve, in order to
love, and, on the other hand, to keep away, in order to protect
myself against the dangerous outside. This is why Rank links
the conflict between the need for love and the defense against
love to “a powerful consciousness of guilt” projected upon the
double.12 This guilt remains obscure in Rank and I suggest that
it stems from the shame I feel because of my need for others.
If I try to get rid of this shame and guilt and project it upon
a double, I only empty out my powers. I let the double act
upon objects in the world and engage with them, as happened
to both the student of Prague and Maupassant’s diarist, who
remained perhaps in their “pure” private sphere, yet an arid
and impotent one.
If until now the double has been understood in relation
to love and the need for others, Rank adds a complementary
factor – namely, death. According to him, ancient cultures
promoted the figure of the double as a guarantee of a second
life, a protection against death.13 One was conceived to be only
the double of an earlier incarnation, and after one’s death other
doubles would come to extend one’s existence for eternity.
The double is related to the understanding of one’s transience,
something that cannot be tolerated by the unconscious, such
that this figure is a narcissistic attempt to maintain one’s exist-
ence. But this protection against death has been transformed in
modernity into an announcement of death, for reasons I will
discuss later in this book. The double would live on after my
death and might therefore be a reassuring figure, but it might
also precipitate my death, as the end of “The Horla” so power-
fully demonstrates. What Rank doesn’t explain is what makes
the double friend or foe to begin with, and whether any narcis-
sistic attempt to protect oneself from the dangers of the outside
is doomed to fail.
72
To sum up Rank’s proposal, the double represents a narcis-

sistic endeavor to protect oneself from both love and death.
These two paradoxes are actually one, since getting out of your-
self by loving someone is experienced in primary narcissism as
a threat to life. The external world is dangerous, and the double
is a means to attenuate the risk. Yet the repressed must return,
and the double eventually reveals the fatal consequences of nar-
cissism.14 Rank justly connects love and death, but missing in
his theory is an account of the transformation of the double
from a narcissistic protection to a deadly danger. To further
understand the mechanisms behind the double, I shall first turn
to Jacques Lacan’s development of narcissism through what
he calls the mirror stage and then draw on Freud and Melanie
Klein to elaborate on the relationship between narcissism and
the death drive.
Paranoiac Knowledge and the Mirror Stage

On the evening of 18 April 1931, Huguette Duflos, a famous
actress in her forties, was on her way to her dressing room to
prepare for a show at the Parisian Saint-Georges theater when
an unknown woman around her age approached her and asked
if she was indeed Madame Duflos. When the actress affirmed
it was she, the woman pulled out a knife and tried to stab her.
The actress skilfully managed to defend herself and was only
lightly wounded, whereas her aggressor was arrested. After a
couple of weeks in prison the woman, a worker in a post office,
was hospitalized at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, where
she was treated on a daily basis by a young and still-unknown
doctor named Jacques Lacan. A year and a half later she became
known under the pseudonym Aimée (beloved), the heroine of
Lacan’s PhD thesis on paranoiac psychosis.15
Why did Aimée wish to kill the actress? Lacan draws on
Freudian and existentialist theories to propose that Aimée’s
psychosis had a logic of its own, involving social and personal
factors. Thus, she was not simply haunted and repelled by the
actress but was equally attracted to her, conceiving of her as
an ideal: “The same image that represents her ideal is also the
object of her hatred.”16 In fact, Aimée showed signs of hostility
82
and paranoia toward many other free-spirited women. These

were not envied for personal traits but were rather “doublets,
triplets and successive ‘prints’ of a prototype,”17 exactly the
same prototype she dreamed of becoming. By attacking the
actress, her double, Aimée equally attacked herself, and Lacan
characterizes her illness as a self-punishment paranoia.18
Although Aimée’s case may sound unique, Lacan soon
discovered that we actually all share the same mixed attitude
toward our ideal. A year after he defended his thesis, he started
his own analysis and became more acquainted with psychoana-
lytic theory. One of Freud’s basic discoveries, called the crystal
principle, is that pathology only shows in sharper lines what
remains invisible in “normal” human existence.19 Lacan uses
this principle to deduce from the case of Aimée a fundamental
element in any human subject as such, which he calls “para-
noiac knowledge.”
To understand what paranoiac knowledge is and how we are
all affected by it, let us turn to Lacan’s classic article from 1949
on the mirror stage.20 This stage, attributed to the baby aged
6–18 months, has a decisive role in the creation of the onto-
logical structure of the subject. The helpless baby is still totally
dependent on others, but by recognizing her body’s reflection in
the mirror and identifying with it, she suddenly gains an unpre-
cedented power. She takes this external image, which looks
unique, complete, and autonomous, as her own and in this way
thinks to overcome her primordial lack and total dependency
on others.
But this image, according to Lacan, is only a mirage: a mere
representation of the baby. On the one hand, the mirror stage
is a necessary step for the baby to unify her sensations of a
fragmented body and give herself a solid identity and self-
control. But on the other hand, it has an alienating effect, which
will mark the entire life of the subject,21 since the baby identifies
only with her external image, that is, the way she is perceived
by others. The baby attempts to overcome her dependency on
others, but in fact this dependency is only accentuated, since the
mirror image, as we already saw, shows the way others perceive
me and my need for their gaze.
92
So who is this Other in the mirror? It is not a complete

stranger but rather a double of myself: a double with which
I identify, yet which remains only a double, that is, permeated
with otherness. This leads Lacan to declare that the mirror
stage “decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into being
mediated by the other’s desire.”22 No matter how hard I try to
be this double I see in the mirror, it is still not me, which only
makes me further desire to be it –alas, in vain. From here stem
both the attraction and the aversion toward the double, as well
as the general paranoid atmosphere that surrounds our wishes
concerning others and ourselves.
We now better understand why narcissism involves feelings of
persecution and aggression with regard to the double. Whereas
Rank saw the double as a narcissistic attempt to resolve the
tension between the inside and the outside, for Lacan the double
is a crucial element in one’s identity, constituted through a pro-
cess of identification. And indeed, when Narcissus was born,
his mother asked the prophet Tiresias if he would have a long
life, and the prophet succinctly replied, “if he shall himself not
know.”23 Seeing oneself in the mirror is a form of knowledge that
involves both self-identity and a desire for otherness. Narcissus
did not simply desire himself but desired himself as Other,
understanding his true nature to be always outside. The double
incarnates the dependence of any self-identity upon otherness,
and Lacan therefore stresses that the recognition (reconnais-
sance) of the subject’s mirror image is equally and necessarily
a misrecognition (méconnaissance). Indeed, the mirror image is
exterior and alienating, and yet it remains indispensable for the
self-constitution of the subject and her world. Without a double,
there is no original, that is, no self.
This paradoxical situation evokes aggression not only toward
oneself (as cases of anorexia and self-mutilation show) but also
toward other people with whom I identify throughout my life
and whom I constitute as partial doubles of myself, as we saw in
the case of Aimée. The first identification with my mirror image
launches a series of further identifications, such that the dis-
tinction between me, my specular image, and others is hardly
tenable. It is precisely these unclear boundaries that further
03
accentuate anxiety and aggressiveness, as Maupassant’s story so

beautifully shows.24
Persecution and aggression are thus inherent elements of sub-
jectivity, and the figure of the double incarnates the ambivalence
with which I treat both myself and others. More than Rank’s,
Lacan’s theory shows that the double is not an esoteric phenom-
enon, as Romantic or gothic literature might have us believe, but
a necessary element in the structure of (modern) subjectivity;
it is a mixture of recognition and misrecognition we all share.
I inherently have a double within myself: a narcissistic image
that is both the condition of my identity and a threat to it.
To return to Maupassant, can we say that the Horla is the
mirror image of the diarist, his double, playing the same role the
actress played for Aimée? Not exactly. First, the Horla cannot
be seen and therefore it is not a mirror image or any positive
reflection. Second, it does not seem to represent anything ideal
but rather everything that is dark and demonic. To better under-
stand what and who the Horla is, let us recall the scene in which
the diarist is horrified by the eclipse of his own mirror image.
Curiously, he declares that he has seen the Horla, yet what he
actually sees is the absence of himself in the mirror. This scene
is, moreover, a variation of the hypnosis session, in which the
diarist looks at his own photo while his cousin sees him through
a visiting card, making him puzzle over what his true image is.
The diarist likes to watch his external image, which reassures
him of the clear boundaries between the outside and the inside,
whereas the Horla destabilizes this assurance.
The Horla is therefore not the mirror image itself but its emp-
tiness. It shows how thin and hollow is the envelope that wraps
a weak, chaotic, and unstable self. This understanding dramatic-
ally disturbs the distinction between the inside and the outside,
the end of the body and the beginning of the world.25 It is this
emptiness, these gaps and this upheaval of distinctions, that the
diarist tries to hide from himself, yet no desire, breath, or life is
possible without them.
To acknowledge inner emptiness, gaps, and unclear
distinctions, one must first surmount primary narcissism, but
Lacan’s notion of narcissism is slightly different from Freud’s.
Whereas in Freud there is a sharp distinction between the
13
“good” inside and the “bad” outside, the mirror stage nuances
this dichotomy through the baby’s identification with an
external image. Paradoxically, to get rid of the outside one needs
to locate oneself through an image that only the outside can
supply. It is through the mirror stage that one receives a clear
external envelope upon which to introject good objects and
from which to expel the bad ones. The mirror stage therefore
results in a located primary narcissism.
This located narcissism also helps us understand the natural
inclination against narcissism evoked by Rank. One is simultan-
eously enchanted by and hostile toward the narcissistic internal–
external I, the inner–outer double that one sees in the mirror.
Indeed, these feelings are often projected upon other objects
and persons, as in the case of the diarist or Aimée; but they
stem from the narcissistic drama of an identification that covers
a deep inadequacy between inner fragmentation and external
holistic image.
The mirror image and the double which results from it are
the necessary starting point of subjectivity. There is no way to
avoid them, and the challenge is rather to move from the I or
the ego toward the much more complicated and multilayered
figure of what Lacan refers to as “the subject.” We will never
become full subjects, since, on the one hand, we are structur-
ally and ontologically attached to our narcissistic mirror image
in the realm of the imaginary, and, on the other hand, we have
a fundamental inner lack and fragmentation that cannot be
surmounted. But through what Lacan calls the symbolic order
we may embark upon the road leading to subjectivity. This
road consists of a dynamic movement of signification, trying
to fill in gaps that can never be fully filled, thus making this
road infinite.
The symbolic order is different from the imaginary order of
the mirror stage first and foremost in that it acknowledges nega-
tivity –that is, the emptiness, gaps, and unclear boundaries that
the mirror image hides. Whereas this image presents the illusion
of a pure presence with no holes or rifts, the symbolic order is
based upon the constant movement between being and nothing-
ness. Highly influenced by the new science of cybernetics that
flourished in the fifties, Lacan was fascinated by the possibility
23
of representing words and images through chains of only two

symbols: 1 and 0. This system, in which data is encoded and
processed, results in chains like 1100011010100, a play with
being and nothingness that allows infinite creation.26 This is
not to say that images are not built upon infinite variations of
components but only that they hide this aspect of their creation.
The imaginary and the symbolic do not contradict but comple-
ment each other, the first providing static identities and fanta-
sies that should be renewed and transformed in the movement
of signification. This movement, as is shown by Ferdinand
de Saussure and other linguists, is based upon the difference
between signifier and signified, that is, the inability to fully
grasp reality.27 It is not despite but rather thanks to the barrier
between signifier and signified –with all the absences, holes, and
fragments it conveys –that the movement of signification can be
launched in the first place.
To fully explain the symbolic order I would need to go into
much more detail. But doing so would only take us farther away
from Maupassant, since what characterizes his protagonist is
precisely the blockage in the imaginary and his inability to rec-
ognize the 0, that is, the negativity and alterity that are hidden
behind the mirror image. Indeed, the drama of “The Horla,” as
with many other nineteenth-century stories of the double, is a
drama of narcissistic self-image that does not allow the protag-
onist to see beyond the duality of oneself and one’s image. These
stories are about the denial of the movement of signification in
an attempt to adhere to one’s static wholeness. It is therefore
only in the following chapters that the symbolic order will gain
more weight. For the meantime we must confine ourselves to the
capacities of our protagonist.
Negative and Positive Doubles

It is time to draw some conclusions from the discussion so far. We
saw that the Horla stands for one’s inherent defense against nar-
cissism, incarnating a secret avowal of inner otherness. It is the
opposite of the beautiful narcissistic mirror image, and its aim
is to remind the diarist of the emptiness and self-fragmentation
underlying this image. I therefore propose to call this type of
3
double a negative double, which stands in opposition to the

positive double incarnated by the mirror image.
The negative double does not have characteristics of its own
and is the result of self-fragmentation and emptiness projected
upon an invisible entity. The positive double, too, is the result
of projection, yet not of emptiness but of the ideal self-image, as
in the case of Aimée. Therefore, the negative double repudiates
the mirror image, whereas the positive double prolongs it, but
both these doubles belong to the imaginary rather than the
symbolic realm.
The imaginary character of the negative and positive doubles
makes them present a binary option: one can admire or hate
them, obey them or slay them, but one cannot engage with them
outside this stifling system. In the same way that the diarist did
not and could not communicate with the Horla, so Aimée did
not try to talk with the actress or become friends with her, but
only admired and envied her from a distance and then tried to
kill her. This is also the case with the student of Prague, whose
mirror image –his positive double –haunts him with no words
or symbols.28 Both the negative and the positive doubles form
a dual and destructive relationship with the protagonist, since
the singularity of the image –or its negation –cannot be opened
up to the multiplicity of language, its words and symbols.29 This
one-on-one confrontation has the nature of an either/or, and
from the moment it is launched, the protagonist is doomed, since
it is a confrontation between a total power that is imaginary
and an extreme weakness that is real.
Even though the positive double may at first appear more
attractive and innocent than the negative double, it, too, soon
usurps the protagonist’s power, who is left with nothing but self-
fragmentation and a desire to be filled by the double’s power.
The difference between the two is that the negative double is
threatening from the outset, since it comes to repudiate the
mirror image. Its real object of attack is the positive double,
with which the protagonist has identified. The protagonist tries
to maintain his or her holistic identity –which is nothing but
armor –alas, in vain, and this double, too, soon assumes power
and control. These two doubles result from a narcissistic projec-
tion, and although they take different forms, the consequences
43
are similar. The negative double attacks the protagonist’s inner,

positive double, whereas the positive double empties out so
much of the protagonist’s identity that the protagonist him-
self becomes the negative double –that is, empty, invisible, and
finally crazy or dead.30
The negative double has nothing to say and rather comes as a
warning against the imaginary. And yet, the diarist won’t listen.
He cleaves to his positive double –namely, the holistic mirror
image that is him and not him. The more the Horla threatens the
diarist’s positive double, trying to caution him against the trap
of self-image, the more the diarist defends himself and takes
refuge in logic and science, denying everything that cannot posi-
tively be seen or tested.
But aren’t logic and science a part of the symbolic order? The
diarist actually presents a very complex attitude toward them.
It is, after all, the rational doctor from the Nancy School who
initiates him into the mysteries of suggestion, evoking in him
both great attraction and repulsion. Later on, he reads a book
by a “doctor of philosophy and theogony” in which he learns
about the existence of invisible creatures,31 and finally it is no
other than the Revue du monde scientifique that informs him
of a collective madness syndrome in Rio de Janeiro, to which
he attributes his own madness, developing the thesis that the
Horla originates from the Brazilian three-master.32 Science does
nothing for the diarist but reveal its and his own limits, its and
his own impotence vis-à-vis the invisible and unknown. This
impotence is equally acknowledged by the monk of Mont-Saint-
Michel, the representative of Christianity, another symbolic
authority that is helpless when it comes to explaining Nature.
Both concurrent symbolic authorities, science and religion,
admit the limits of positivity. In other words, they admit the 0
upon which the 1 depends.
This avowal of limits could have helped the diarist to give up
his positive double and the pretension of controlling reality, but
instead, he projects every evidence of negativity upon his nega-
tive double, the Horla, who therefore becomes ever stronger. In
other terms, the diarist uses the symbolic order not to challenge
the imaginary and its doubles but rather to strengthen and
rigidify it. He looks for presence, positivity, and stability and
53
therefore finds himself in a binary world: no longer chains of

combined 0s and 1s but rather an either/or situation: science
or madness; purified breath or breathlessness; life or death.
Everything that contains 0 is projected upon the Horla, but a
world with only 1s is an arid, stifling, and lifeless world.
This brings us to the end of the story and the inevitable death
that the blockage in narcissism imposes upon the diarist. The
positive double in the mirror image is supposed to play the role
of my proxy in the external world, but it is intimately linked to
the negative double and the world of death: the world of ghost,
wind, and breath, the constant movement between inhalation
and exhalation, being and nothingness. As Rank argues, this
had been the function of the double in ancient culture, in which
the totem or religious icon had been conceived as an extension
of the self that protected it from harm and secured its immor-
tality.33 But modernity brought with it the era of individualism
and rationality, such that science is conceived as a means to
overcome the invisible, the dark, and eventually death itself. The
problem is, as we have seen, that this attempt to delete the 0 from
the symbolic chain makes room only for narcissistic fantasies of
wholeness and immortality, leading one to become trapped in
what Lacan calls “the chain of dead desire,”34 incarnated by the
negative double.
Indeed, desire is an attempt to satisfy a need, but if all needs
are projected upon a double, an external image, it becomes the
desire of the Other. The famous Lacanian affirmation that the
desire of the subject is the desire of the Other35 can be interpreted
in various ways; but for our purposes here, let us be content
with desire not as directed to the Other, but as belonging to the
Other, the Other as such, that is, someone else. Desire is never
mine, and the mirror stage launches a constant race after my
desire since it locates it outside me. The more I try to please my
ideal in the mirror, the more I feel this desire to be dead, since it
brings no satisfaction. I thus end up feeling myself dead as well,
deprived of any real desire: my double has taken up life and left
me with only death.
To avoid self- emptiness and feelings of inner death, the
diarist, despite his conscious efforts not to, gradually yields his
positive double to his negative one. Feeling his desire to be dead,
63
he assigns this morbid desire to the Horla, who now desires

instead of him. To put it the other way around, the Horla comes
to warn the diarist that his desire is not his, that it stems from
an imaginary ideal. Had the diarist heard the message, had he
understood the vacuity behind his mirror image, he might have
tried to surmount his primal narcissism. But he is so fearful of
death, emptiness, and alterity that he plans to kill the Horla –
that is, to annihilate the nothing, the nothing that is inside him
and that finally forces him to kill himself. The diarist cannot
stand any expression of nothingness, and over the “small”
moments of negativity in which his weakness is revealed to
him, such as breath and desire, he finally prefers the “big” and
radical negativity of death, first burning his house down and
then killing himself.36
Death, real or imaginary, is the inevitable result of the attempt
to remain in primary narcissism. The fantasy of “pure pleasure-
ego” soon betrays the impurity of the ego, which, owing to the
series of identifications it undergoes, can never fully be itself.
The double, be it positive as in The Student of Prague or nega-
tive as in Maupassant, comes to signal this necessary impurity.
The result in both cases is, however, not an understanding of the
need to bypass the imaginary order but rather a further lingering
in it that leads to violent suicide.
How can one explain this inclination toward self-
annihilation? Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage and the
aggressiveness that comes with it has given us important
insights in this regard. Whereas Rank described aggressiveness
in general terms, attributing it to feelings of guilt, Lacan
adds the dimension of identification and the gap between the
external, imaginary image, on the one hand, and inner feelings
of self-fragmentation, on the other. But violence is not only
the result of the mirror stage but also its cause. The inner self-
fragmentation already encompasses destructive impulses, and
trying to overcome them through the total mirror image only
accentuates destructiveness through the desire of the Other. To
better understand these two forces, desire and destructiveness,
it will be useful to return to Freud, who chose the Greek terms
Eros and Thanatos as alternative names for the life drive and
the death drive.
73
Death Drive and Destructive Narcissism

Freud discusses the phenomenon of the double in his 1919 “The
Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”).37 In one of the footnotes to the
paper he recounts a personal anecdote taking place in a wagon-
lit, “when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung
back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly
gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in.”38
Freud jumped up to warn the old man of his mistake but almost
immediately realized that this man was none other than him-
self, or, more exactly, his mirror image reflected on the cabinet’s
door. Freud characterizes this incident as uncanny, but curiously
he attributes this feeling not to the misrecognition itself –seeing
himself as Other –but rather to the instinctive dislike he felt
toward the old man, his double.
It is indeed rare to see ourselves from the outside. Although
we daily look at ourselves in the mirror, as well as in photos and
videos, we still remain inside ourselves, only trying to imagine
how others perceive us. Meeting your double, on the contrary,
means to be, for a short while, outside yourself, other than your-
self. The uncanny feeling thus relates to a mixture of familiarity
and strangeness, since seeing yourself from the outside reveals a
hidden secret you have already known very well. It is as if you
were forced to enter into the mirror stage for a second time,
with an already-stable identity, just to find out that this identity
is totally different from what you felt it was.
Thus, similarly to Maupassant’s diarist, who looked in the
mirror and saw nothing, so Freud realized that the image of the
old man was not himself, and this is why he felt an instinctive
dislike toward it. The uncanny involves a revelation of the nega-
tivity behind any positive image and identity. This negativity
provokes in its turn feelings of hostility and aggressiveness, and
this not only because of the gap between the holistic image and
the fragmented interior, as Lacan argues. Rather, the mirror
image covers up a primordial negativity that has already been
there beforehand. The role of the mirror stage is to appease and
channel this negativity, solidifying a clear identity and setting
boundaries, but negativity is always there in the background,
waiting for the right moment to burst out.
83
A year after the publication of The Uncanny, Freud further

pursued his investigation of negativity, relating it to the notorious
death drive.39 To explain where this drive comes from, he evokes
a mythological scene that is no other than the creation of life
itself. But contrary to the story of Genesis and other creation
stories, to live for the first time was far from paradisial, since
life means a huge and unprecedented tension that needs to be
eliminated: “In this way the first drive came into being: the drive
to return to the inanimate state.”40
The death drive, Thanatos, is thus the most primordial drive.
It is not evil in itself, since its tendency toward annihilation
stems only from the wish to return to the peaceful, inanimate
state from which we all came. Yet fortunately enough, Thanatos
is not the only drive, having a rival with which it is in constant
dialogue: the life drive, Eros. Moreover, Freud affirms that the
death drive is an invisible power that cannot be found in a pure
state or function on its own. Rather, it rides upon the activ-
ities of the life drive, manifesting itself in destructive behaviors
toward oneself and others.41
This development in psychoanalytical theory has consequences
for the notion of primary narcissism, and it is worthwhile to
examine these briefly. Whereas in Rank narcissism involved a
fear of two external dangers, love and death, these now become
two opposite drives that play a major role in narcissism. In 1923
Freud famously divided the psyche into three agents: id, ego, and
superego, which are created successively. Primary narcissism is
now attributed to the id alone, being the most primitive reser-
voir of energy both libidinal and destructive. The id is looking
for objects to invest or annihilate indiscriminately and does not
know the difference between the outside and the inside. It is only
when the ego is formed and gains force (in Lacanian terms: after
the mirror stage) that this distinction is made, the ego trying to
rein in libido by pulling it back from objects toward itself. In
this way the ego becomes a sort of love object in a secondary
narcissism, desexualizing all objects in order to remain the sole
target of libido.42
The difference between this secondary narcissism and the
previous notion of primary narcissism is that the ego is not
only a subject but also an object: an object of both self-love
93
and self-hatred. This hatred comes from the death drive, which
is constantly looking for libidinal objects to annihilate, com-
bining the destructive energy of the id with the judgmental gaze
of the superego. Therefore, the huge love object that the ego has
become is now the main target of attack. This is the paradox of
the ego: it wishes to be loved by investing itself with libido, but
love is always counterbalanced by the death drive’s hatred. If
the ego is stuck in this narcissistic state and neglects the external
world, it eventually finds itself hated by the superego, which
attempts to kill it.43
Indeed, this is the case of the diarist who could love no one but
himself. The Horla can be understood as a sort of persecuting
superego that aims the death drive at the diarist’s ego, erasing
his mirror image and finally destroying him completely. The
story presents an extreme case of narcissism, but it is important
to remember that each one of us experiences something of it
and the self-hatred it implies. Self-hatred is revealed not only
in uncanny events of seeing ourselves from the outside and
feeling hostility but also in various self-destructive behaviors
that contradict our presumed self-love. The ego’s attempts at
self-love can be easily transformed into self-hatred, and this ten-
dency becomes pathological when one refuses to admit one’s
dependency upon others, wishing to love no one but oneself.
This line of thought was further pursued by Melanie Klein
and her school. If the death drive is at work from the outset, and
if its activity is blind, it is reasonable to assume that it attacks
the self as much as external objects. To prevent self- attack,
the baby engages itself in an active work of splitting: not only
between itself and objects but also between parts of itself, as
well as between parts of objects. For in this way the death drive
can invade only isolated fragments of psychic life and not the
entire psyche. According to Klein, the death drive creates a con-
stant state of annihilation anxiety, and the baby regulates this
anxiety by designating specific parts to be split and annihilated.
Thus, some of the death drive is projected upon an external per-
secutor, and some of it remains inside and is transformed into an
aggression against this persecutor.44
Klein calls this primitive stage of splits and attacks the
“paranoid-schizoid position,” and if the baby does not manage
04
to outgrow it, life becomes an unbearable burden. The role of

psychoanalysis is to undo the split through a work of fusion.
This, I suggest, is analogous to the way Lacan proposes to tackle
the imaginary through the symbolic chains of signification and
the variations of 1 and 0. The 1 and 0 should not exclude each
other but rather create signifying combinations of meaning.
A “healthy” subject would know how to combine 1 and 0 to
move between life and death, love and hatred, attraction and
aggression, rather than sink into one of these extremes. The
diarist, on the contrary, wished to have only life, love, and
attraction, sharply splitting the 1 from the 0, trying to maintain
pure love inside and pure hatred outside –alas, in vain.
Herbert Rosenfeld, one of Klein’s disciples, describes a case
of a patient who, exactly like the diarist, has anxiety attacks at
night. He then dreams about “a very powerful arrogant man
who was nine feet tall and who insisted that he had to be abso-
lutely obeyed.”45 This giant man, according to Rosenfeld, is the
omnipotent, destructive part of the patient that was split off
from himself. The Horla could therefore be this split-off part,
yet the Horla –precisely as a negative double and the represen-
tative of the death drive –can perhaps be imagined but certainly
cannot be seen. Only the effects of its action are visible since its
essence is pure nothingness.
Psychoanalysis and Its Doubles

Kleinian psychoanalysis aims to make the patient accept a more
complex relationship with reality and external objects, grad-
ually passing from a state in which parts of the self and world
are split off from each other to an integrated and fused state.
But seen from another perspective, the analyst posits herself
as the patient’s double precisely to show him his own negated,
projected, and introjected doubles that haunt him. The analyst
may start as a haunting double herself, provoking violence in
the patient, but gradually she becomes a friendly one, helping
the patient discover, retrieve, and neutralize his various doubles.
This is equally true with regard to Lacanian psychoanalysis:
the analyst serves as a mirror upon which the patient projects
her doubles and ego ideals. But this is a stubbornly silent mirror
14
that serves as a negative double, refusing to collaborate with the

patient’s imaginary projections. The analyst says nothing and,
in this way, makes the patient finally discover that the mirror
image is only her alienated form.46 Only then can the patient
realize the complicated dynamics of 1 and 0, life and death, and
access the symbolic order.
Hence, psychoanalytical praxis itself makes extensive
use of the double and the diverse mechanisms it involves.
Psychoanalysis not only analyzes the double but also actively
produces negative and positive doubles. The double initially
serves as a warning against the fantasy of a self-enclosed psychic
realm, and the role of psychoanalysis is to undo the split and
make the patient reintegrate her doubles into herself. But the
double is the product not only of a split but also of a dynamic
and playful work of doubling and duplication. This work will
be unfolded gradually in the following chapters, but it is already
manifest here through the symbolic force of psychoanalysis;
this does not simply remain with one static double but rather
actively produces multiple doubles. The analyst may become the
patient herself but also her father, mother, daughter, lover, and
so on. Every one of these figures might be a narcissistic projec-
tion, but it is a part of a signifying process that constantly moves
between these figures. In this way the patient realizes not only
her need for the outside and the different doubles it comprises
but also her own inner multiplicity: a multiplicity that is neither
a chaotic self-fragmentation nor a rigid totality, but a field of
play between the diverse figures that constitute the I.
Now, the same work of symbolization as active doubling is
also the task of literature and more generally of writing. It is
no coincidence that the protagonist of “The Horla” writes a
diary, trying to echo his repressed feelings of having an inner
double.47 The diary is the most extreme case of self-doubling
in writing, but every instance of writing is in fact such an act.
When I write, I use language to express myself, going toward
the external world and back inside, taking in and letting out air,
words, ideas, and desires. I am therefore no longer alone, even
if I am writing all by myself. These words are part of me, a part
that I created but in a certain sense a part that no longer belongs
to me. I spread my doubles everywhere.
24
In his influential book The Literature of the Second Self,

Carl F. Keppler claims that all stories of the double are forms
of Bildungsroman, that is, stories of formation and initiation.
However, he adds that most often the formation is not directed
to the protagonist –who is blind and deaf to the warnings of the
double –but rather to the reader.48 In this chapter I have tried
to be this reader, but also the writer, since one always writes
to oneself. I tried to read and write the role of the double in
Maupassant but also in the life of my father. I tried to see what
and who was his Horla, and whether the tumor that finally
suffocated him was nothing but the last form of a negative
double that accompanied him throughout his life.
Here I must stop, breathe, and then take a step farther. For
it is too easy to find the doubles of others, especially when they
are dead. The endeavor of trying to analyze my father’s life risks
turning into a narcissistic position in its turn. It is more difficult
to look inside and ask what and who are my own doubles and
how I can read and write them, thus letting them express them-
selves without succumbing to their destructive forces. This will
be the challenge of the following chapters.
Notes
1 Guy de Maupassant, The Horla, trans. Charlotte Mandell (1887;
New York: Melville House, 2005). Hereafter, page numbers will
be given in parentheses in the text. For a detailed analysis of this
text with regard to the theme of the double, see Tymms, Doubles
in Literary Psychology, 96–97; Antonia Fonyi, “Le Horla: Double
indéterminé,” in Le Double: Chamisso, Dostoïevski, Maupassant,
Nabokov, ed. Jean Bessière (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), 91–
141; Johann Jung, “Du paradoxe identitaire au double transitionnel:
‘Le Horla’ de Guy de Maupassant,” Revue française de psychanalyse
74, no. 2 (2010): 507–519.
2 The first version of the story, published in 1885, was entitled “Lettre
d’un fou” and composed as a letter of confession written by the pro-
tagonist to his doctor in a mental clinic. See Guy de Maupassant,
“Letter from a Madman,” in The Horla, 45–57.
3 For a detailed account of narcissism from a philosophical point of
view, see Pleshette DeArmitt, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an
Im-Possible Self-Love (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 61–66.
34
5 Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), in The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953– 1974), 14:134– 135. Freud formulated similar nar-
cissistic processes in other papers from that period. See Sigmund
Freud, “On Narcissism” (1914), in Standard Edition, 14:67–102;
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in Standard
Edition, 14:237–258.
6 Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 135–137.
7 Ibid., 136–140.
8 Rank, The Double. This, in fact, was the first book ever to be
dedicated to the theme of the double.
9 Friedrich Kittler (“Romanticism –Psychoanalysis –Film”) sees
Rank’s analysis of the film as a significant shift in the history of
the double: from nineteenth-century Romantic literature to cinema
and psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. A similar claim was
raised by Tzvetan Todorov, for whom psychoanalysis replaced lit-
erature as the instance that can treat the doppelgänger. See Tzvetan
Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,
trans. Richard Howard (1970; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1975), 160–161. For a discussion on the various approaches to the
doppelgänger in literature, see Vardoulakis, Doppelgänger, 7–10.
10 Rank, The Double, 71–74.
11 Ibid., 73.
12 Ibid., 76.
13 Ibid., 84–85. A similar idea is developed in Mircea Eliade, The
Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History, trans.
Willard R. Trask (1949; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959).
I will return to this theme in the fourth chapter through a discus-
sion of Baudrillard’s theory of the symbolic exchange as involving
death and the role of the double in it.
14 Rank, The Double, 86.
15 Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec
la personnalité (1932; Paris: Seuil, 1975).
16 Ibid., 253.
17 Ibid. (my translation). It must be added that Aimée felt envy and
paranoia equally toward celebrated men. See ibid., 165.
18 Ibid., 247–254.
19 See Philippe Van Haute and Thomas Geyskens, A Non-Oedipal
Psychoanalysis? A Clinical Anthropology of Hysteria in the
Works of Freud and Lacan (Leuven: Leuven University Press,
2012), 17–18.
20 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”
(1949), in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (1966; New York: W. W. Norton,
2007), 75–81.
4
21 Ibid., 78.
22 Ibid., 79.
23 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 61.
24 Lacan further develops these themes in his 1948 “Aggressiveness in
Psychoanalysis.” Aggressiveness, according to this text, is derived
from the mirror stage and is “linked to the narcissistic relationship
and to the structures of systematic misrecognition and objectifica-
tion that characterize ego formation” (94).
25 Liran Razinsky analyzes “The Horla” in this fashion, drawing on
Didier Anzieu’s theory of the skin ego. See Liran Razinsky, “ ‘Rien
qu’un spectateur’: Image de soi, corporalité et sentiment d’existence
dans ‘Le Horla,’ ” Studi francesi 180 LX, 3 (2016): 435– 446.
Interestingly enough, Aimée was none other than Anzieu’s mother,
Marguerite.
26 Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, Book
1 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. John Forrester (1975;
New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Jacques Lacan, The Ego in
Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–
1955, Book 2 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Sylvana
Tomaselli (1978; New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
27 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or
Reason since Freud” (1957), in Écrits, 412–441.
28 They communicate only once in the film. The student plays cards,
and after he beats everyone, he remains alone, when suddenly his
double appears and asks whether he dares to play against him
too. The student accepts the challenge, loses, and then runs away
in panic.
29 Indeed, Aimée had multiple doubles, but with each one of them she
had an imaginary dual relationship. It is only in the third chapter
of the present book that we will encounter a multiplicity of doubles
that overcome the binary opposition of a dual relationship.
30 To these two doubles I shall add in the epilogue a third type of
double, which is located between the two: namely, the opposite
double. This double is often a monster that stands in opposition to
the beautiful mirror image, but it has positive traits and it is not the
negation of the entire imaginary order.
31 Maupassant, The Horla, 30–31.
32 Ibid., 33. The diarist tries to behave as a scientist himself,
performing experiments to discover where the Horla comes from.
These experiments, however, fail, since the Horla is not a subject of
the positivist logic of science.
33 Rank, The Double, 77–86. See also Sigmund Freud, “Totem and
Taboo” (1913), in Standard Edition, 13:1–161.
34 Lacan, “Instance of the Letter,” 431. See also the graph of desire,
in which desire crosses the symbolic chain, in Jacques Lacan,
54
“The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the

Freudian Unconscious” (1960), in Écrits, 671–702.
35 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
Book 11 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Alan Sheridan
(1973; New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 235–236.
36 On the distinction between “small” and “big” or “radical” nega-
tivity, see Dorfman, Foundations of the Everyday, 55–56.
37 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in Standard Edition,
17:217–256. Freud discusses the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann and
locates in it three mechanisms related to the double: doubling of
the self (Ich-Verdopplung), dividing of the self (Ich-Teilung), and
interchanging of the self (Ich-Vertauschung) (ibid., 233–234). To a
large extent he repeats in this paper his former insights regarding
narcissism, but he adds that the transformation of the double from
a protective to a threatening and uncanny figure lies precisely in
the surmounting of primary narcissism. A new critical agency
gradually appears in the psyche, which he calls here conscience,
later to become the superego. This agency already marks an inner
division or split (Spaltung) between the I and its double, which
is the perfect creature the I once thought it was (ibid., 234–235).
This implies that the double is more primordial than the I, the
latter being actually nothing but the pale double of the former.
For a detailed analysis of Freud’s text in relation to the double,
see Vardoulakis, Doppelgänger, 37–53; Rogers, The Double in
Literature, 26–29.
38 Freud, “Uncanny,” 248.
39 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in
Standard Edition, 18:1–64.
40 Ibid., 38 (translation modified).
41 Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id” (1923), in Standard
Edition, 19:46. See also André Green, “The Death Drive, Negative
Narcissism and the Disobjectalising Function,” in The Work of the
Negative, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Free Association Books,
1999), 81–88.
42 Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” 46.
43 Ibid., 56–57.
44 Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), in
Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946– 1963 (New York:
Free Press, 1975), 1–24. See also Herbert Rosenfeld, “A Clinical
Approach to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Life and Death
Instincts: An Investigation into the Aggressive Aspects of Narcissism,”
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 52 (1971): 169–178.
45 Rosenfeld, “Clinical Approach,” 176.
46 According to Lacan’s biographer, he saw Aimée as his own double
rather than the other way around. This puts into question his
64
ability at this pre-psychoanalytic phase of his career to expose and

neutralize the position of the double by making himself the nega-
tive rather than the positive double of his patients. See Élisabeth
Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (1993; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997), 47.
47 Aimée, too, was a prolific writer, and one of the reasons for her
psychotic outbreak was publishers’ rejection of her two novels,
one of which featured a protagonist named Aimée.
48 Keppler, Literature of the Second Self, 195.
74
2 The Shadow’s Gaze
When my turn came to say farewell to my father at his funeral,

I chose to read some lines from Rilke’s Ninth Elegy. It begins
with a simple question: why be human rather than a plant?
Why yearn and suffer rather than passively exist? This is Rilke’s
answer:
[B]‌ecause being here is much, and because all this

that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,
everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,
once. And never again. But this,
having been once, though only once,
having been of the earth –seems irrevocable.1
I then related these lines to my father, who had always tried to

truly be here, to live a full life, to be “of the earth.” I finished by
saying that this constant endeavor to live will always remain
with me as his heritage. But when I recall and write these words
today, they sound a bit strange. After all, not even 24 hours
had passed since my father cried out, “I have no air,” and I had
already transformed his negative, horrible words into a positive
heritage.
I don’t think I lied or tried to say nice words as people do at
funerals. I believe my father was truly eager to live, only he did
not know how. His double –an inner entity that he somehow
split from himself –defeated him, stifled him to death, first
mentally and then physically. His will, as I interpreted it in the
previous chapter, evokes the need for air, whereas his heritage
is the wish to live. The question, however, is how to fulfill my
84
father’s will and preserve his heritage without falling victim to

his destiny of brutal suffocation.
The weeks and months after the funeral were a time for
mourning but also for introspection. Indeed, it had been easy
for me to maintain a distance from my father while he was alive,
to tell myself how different we were from each other. But I’ve
always secretly suspected that in a certain sense my father was
my double, and I now needed to look at my own life and my
own doubles to see what forces play in me and act upon a life
I had naively considered to be exclusively mine.
Where should I begin? Perhaps with my high school years, the

gradual entering into adult life. In most films and books this
period is depicted as filled with impulses, hormones, and crazy
deeds, but mine was hardly marked by any passionate storm.
I docilely followed the herd, as did most of my classmates. My
high school was a reputable, semiprivate one in Jerusalem, to
which only competitive, ambitious, but also privileged pupils
were admitted. During my first year there I was quite happy,
especially since, unlike my junior high, there was no physical
violence. But I soon started to feel another sort of violence,
far subtler. Everywhere I looked I saw walls: the walls of con-
formism, indifference, and self-sufficiency. There was something
arid and even dead not only in the classroom atmosphere but
also and even more so in the way we treated each other. And
I, too, gradually started to build walls around myself, as if to
distance myself from this death, only to find that it had gained
a firm place inside me with stifling feelings of loneliness and
isolation. True life was absent, as Arthur Rimbaud famously
lamented, and rather than trying to go out and look for true life,
I took refuge in myself and the fantasy of a better life in a vague
future elsewhere.
Something essential was missing in those years, something
that was still nameless at the time but that today I would call
passion or libido. We heard rumors about kids from other classes
already engaging in sexual activity, and we were both jealous
and afraid. Afraid of what? Probably of our bodies, bodies that
remained strangers to us, as did anything that might expose
or shake our own strangeness. Any sign of otherness –social,
94
The Shadow’s Gaze 49
racial, sexual, but also intellectual –immediately fell victim to

our sarcastic remarks. But we secretly felt that the real others,
the real strangers, were no other than ourselves. We, Jerusalem’s
most privileged children, belonged to a community of strangers
in the world. Yet we refused to admit that, trying to cover up the
emptiness with a cynicism that was nothing but another expres-
sion of conformism. I don’t remember any rebellious or cour-
ageous acts performed by myself or by any of my classmates. We
just docilely and passively waited for these years to pass, hoping
that sooner or later we would arrive at a more stimulating and
lively environment.
When I began my obligatory military service, I thought
I had finally found a better place to express myself and be with
others. But although people seemed much nicer, the army dis-
cipline was hardly conducive to sexual or intellectual liberation,
and I soon started to feel again the inner death and a stifling
“something-missing” feeling. I wanted to live a full life with no
strict boundaries between work and leisure, day and night, intel-
lect and body, but where should I find it? Once again I plunged
into the inner world of fantasy, listening over and over again to
The Smiths with their urgent questions I couldn’t answer: “And
when you want to live how do you start? Where do you go?
Who do you need to know?”
Finally came my university years –which still endure –and
the sudden and almost surprising passion I found in the world
of knowledge. Every philosopher, writer, or poet seemed to
reveal a profound secret about life, and I imbibed their words
with insatiable thirst. Moreover, this passion was not only intel-
lectual. I finally dared to make my coming out, met my first boy-
friend, and thought I had finally arrived at a place that offered
me this unique mixture of intellectual, spiritual, and bodily
engagement.
But despite this blissful joy one thing still disturbed me:
some of the professors didn’t seem very fascinated by what they
taught. They were, rather, professional –that is, they conceived
of their teaching as their work rather than vocation –but this
professionalism made them look, at least in my eyes, quite
worn and dried out. I asked myself what had happened to
their initial passion, if there ever was one, and how they had
05
become so disenchanted with the world of knowledge. I had

the impression that something had gone awry in their lives;
that they had somehow become the shadow of what they used
to be or wished to become. Convinced of my own vocation as
a scholar and teacher, I swore to myself that I would never let
this happen to me. But I think that this vow stemmed from a
frightening doubt: What if they were right and I was wrong?
What if my sudden revelation of life was only a temporary
mask hiding the same inner death? Had I not jumped too
fast over the walls of my inner world toward the presumable
fullness of the outside, leaving behind someone or something
that would sooner or later come to take revenge?
Years passed in which I struggled, and mostly succeeded,
to maintain my passion for knowledge. I finished my PhD in
Paris, and upon my return to Israel started to teach at a small
university. Yet teaching turned to be much more complicated
than I had assumed it would be. I recall with unease a seminar
I gave in which I was talking enthusiastically about Husserl,
Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, only to encounter the indifferent
gazes of my students. What went wrong? There was something
missing in my teaching, something I couldn’t quite discern. It
wasn’t exactly passion but an ability to create contact and trust
not only with my students but also with myself. I realized that
I had started to use theory as a sphere of its own, detached from
what is commonly called “real life.” What had happened to me?
Could it be that I had become this professional professor that
I always swore I would never become? Although I conceived of
my life as quite full, deep inside me I still felt that something was
missing, and difficult as it might be, I now needed to find out
what that was.
To investigate this missing thing, I will rely in this chapter on

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale from 1847 named “The
Shadow.”2 The story recounts the deeds of a learned man who,
too, probably sensed that something was missing in his life and
therefore decided to travel and explore the hot lands of the
south: the lands of passion according to the Romantic tradition.
However, once he arrives there he discovers that the sun burns
so hot that he must remain inside the entire day. Only by night
15
can he go out, but even then he prefers to remain on his balcony,

watching the lively scenery of locals filling the street with their
merry or sorrowful deeds.
One thing, however, resists his eager eyes: the house opposite
to his remains dark and still. Who lives there? The beautiful
flowers on its balcony, surviving the unbearable sunlight, hint
of a mysterious presence, which is revealed one night, when
the man suddenly wakes up to a wonderful light radiating
from the house. He is astonished to see the flowers turning into
colorful flames and among them appears a young woman, an
incarnation of beauty, from whom emanates a dazzling light.
The man does not have time to do or say much since the spec-
tacle soon vanishes, with only soft music still being heard from
the inner room of the house. Was it a dream or reality? The
strange house now becomes an obsession for him. He is eager
to learn more about it, but weirdly enough he cannot find its
entrance.
One evening as he sits on his balcony staring, as always,
at the house, an idea suddenly crosses his mind: “I think my
shadow is the only living thing to be seen opposite” (385, trans-
lation modified). He then decides to set free his shadow, and
asks it to enter the house and then return to tell what it has seen.
The shadow obeys this wish, yet it does not come back. A split
occurs between the man and his shadow, a split that would have
fatal consequences for the man.
We thus find in this story the same split between original and
double that we found in “The Horla,” but the motives for the
split are different. Whereas Maupassant’s diarist refused until
the very end to admit his intimate link with his double, the
learned man is fully aware of this link. He initiates the split
himself, even if it is in the hope that the shadow would eventu-
ally return. Moreover, he is not exactly narcissistic. Rather, he is
truly interested in others but is afraid or does not know how to
find access to them. He thinks that by letting go of his shadow
he would better see the world.
This story, hence, does not present the drama of passive
breath, that is, the constant, imperceptible negotiation between
the inside and the outside, but rather of active vision. Indeed,
Maupassant’s diarist, too, wished to see the world, but only to
25
better protect himself against the passivity and invisibility of

breath, night, and all that which lies outside without clearly
distinguishing itself from the inside. He did not care for any-
thing or anyone but himself, and the Horla came to warn him
that refusing to acknowledge and let in alterity would lead to a
lack of air. The role of the shadow, on the other hand, is to see
what seems to be beyond normal sight. The learned man is not
afraid of passivity but rather attempts to find means to better
access the world around him.
The next morning the man is surprised and vexed to find that
his shadow has not come back. However, he soon grows a new
shadow, returns to his homeland in the north, and continues
with his quiet life of study and writing, about which we don’t
hear much. Many years pass, when one day someone knocks on
his door: an extremely thin, well-dressed man, whom he does
not recognize until this stranger cries: “Don’t you know your
old Shadow?” (386).
From this point on the story gradually shifts from the per-
sonality of the learned man to that of the shadow, and this is no
coincidence, since the shadow holds with it –or rather him, since
he gradually becomes human –a special power of sight. This
sight is related to the shadow’s constant preoccupation with rec-
ognition: not a recognition of essence but of appearance. Thus,
he is extremely sensible to his image and invests much effort in
improving it while diminishing the image of others. One of the
first things he does when he visits the man is to step on his new
shadow, to express his superiority over it. Moreover, the goal
of his visit to the learned man is to redeem his freedom with
the money he has gained, the same money that allowed him to
acquire expensive and apparently dignified garments.
The learned man is not interested in the shadow’s money and
willingly gives him (it) his freedom, but he reminds him that he
still owes him something else: namely, the story of what he saw
in the house to which he was sent. Who lived there? The shadow
reveals that it was no other than Poetry herself. The man, ever
more excited, is keen to get some details: “Tell me, Tell Me!” he
eagerly cries, but the shadow refuses to answer before the man
changes his tone and asks more respectfully: “And what didst
thou see?” Only then comes the surprising answer: “Everything,
35
[…] for I saw and know everything” (388). The man strives
for more, but the shadow agrees to say only these peculiar yet
elusive words:
I tell you I have been there, and so you will easily understand
that I saw everything that was to be seen. […] I learned to
understand my inner being and the relation in which I stood
to Poetry. Yes, when I was with you I did not think of these
things; but you know that whenever the sun rises or sets
I am wonderfully great. In the moonshine I was almost more
noticeable than you yourself. I did not then understand
my inward being; in the ante-room it was revealed to me.
I became a man! I came out ripe. But you were no longer in
the warm countries. I was ashamed to go about as a man in
the state I was then in; I required boots, clothes, and all that
human varnish by which a man is known. (389)
The shadow has become a man in a process similar to Adam

and Eve’s experience of eating the fruit of the knowledge of
good and evil only to become ashamed of their nakedness.
But what exactly is the knowledge he acquired? On the one
hand, he discovered his inner nature as a relative of Poetry, but
on the other hand, he became extremely preoccupied with his
self-image and the gaze of others upon him. The shadow, for
instance, retrospectively understands he was superior to his
master, but only because he was taller and more visible than
him. In other words, the process of initiation that he underwent
in the house of Poetry led him, not to a knowledge of creativity
or literature, but to a deep understanding of what it means to be
seen and the secret of appearance.
How could Poetry lead to the superficiality of appearance?
One of Poetry’s most fervent opponents was Plato. At the end of
The Republic the poets are expelled from the ideal state so that
the philosophers can reign without challenge, and the desire
for image and matter is transformed into a spiritual desire for
the Idea. Now, the learned man was attracted not only to the
spiritual aspect of Poetry but also to her images, and it is this
undesired desire that made him split and expel from himself a
part that could gain access to Poetry. What he really wanted was
45
to be the man from Plato’s allegory of the cave, who escapes and
goes out into the open. At first this man is unable to look at the
sun and can merely see its reflection in ponds and lakes. Only
after he gets used to the bright light can he raise his eyes and see
the ultimate source of Truth. But the sun of the south remains
too strong for the learned man. Poetry, on the other hand, offers
him a wonderful light that seems to be much more fit for his
eyes, and he wishes with all his heart to explore its origin and
further encounter it.
Torn between his eagerness for the beauty of images and
perhaps also his sexual desire for the woman, on the one hand,
and his wish for Ideal Truth, on the other, he decides to get
rid of his shadow. In this way he probably wishes to have his
cake and eat it through the shadow, but the result is a split
between a man of Idea and Essence and a shadow of Image
and Appearance.
The split, however, does no good for either of them. The
shadow, despite his master’s quest for beauty, does not find any
beauty in Poetry. What he sees in her is only images, and he thus
acquires unique visual capacities, seeing everywhere around him
appearance rather than essence. This leads him to a gloomy con-
clusion: “I saw what nobody saw and what nobody ought to
see. On the whole it is a despicable world: I would not be a
man if it were not commonly supposed that it is something to
be one” (389).
The shadow deduces that the nature of humans is evil, but
curiously he doesn’t mention any specific content of the evils he
sees in others. I therefore suggest that what he sees is nothing but
their being seen as such: the appearance and image with which
they try to cover a secret. But this secret is empty, revealing
nothing but the darkness, nudity, and vacuity that lie below the
surface of wealth, decency, and good manners. We are all evil,
pretenders, liars, and cheaters, not because we did something
wrong, but because we have a double life: an apparent life and
an invisible one. Again, the invisible life is not full of deeds and
actions that we try to hide, but on the contrary, it is completely
void. What appearance covers is only emptiness, as revealed
in another famous story of Andersen’s, “The Emperor’s New
Clothes.”
5
The shadow thus does not look for appearances as such but
for the gap between appearance and the emptiness it covers.
People are nothing but the sum of their images in the eyes of
others, and every presumed essence for him is a lie. This does
not mean that he vehemently condemns the realm of appearance
and image. On the contrary, he admits that he wished to become
human only because it is seen as good to be a man. The shadow
simultaneously despises and follows public opinion, one’s gaze.
He feels superior to others but is also eager to please them and
gain their respect. His understanding of the secret of the gaze
and the force it gives to the one daring to use it relentlessly
actually makes him very powerful. He therefore starts to exploit
people, threatening to expose the gap between their appearance
of fullness and their essence of emptiness. People begin to fear
him but also, surprisingly, to love him. They give him not only
money but also respect, making him a gentleman both wealthy
and worthy. They want the shadow to become one of them, a
liar like themselves, so that he will not expose the lie.
The shadow has thus acquired the knowledge of being seen
and appearance, leaving the man with the realm of essences,
which he tries to see around him but without exposing him-
self to either the sun or the gaze of the other. The split between
the two is therefore the split between two aspects of sight:
the shadow’s gaze is reactive, always looking for its own image
in the eyes of the other, whereas the man’s gaze is perhaps
more simple and direct, but since it eludes any aspect of being
seen it becomes blind to reality. Whereas we might think that
someone like the learned man who aims merely to see should
be stronger than someone obsessed with being seen, the story
teaches us that the contrary is true. After the shadow leaves the
man’s house, the man returns to his routine of studying and
writing, but something in the way people look at him changes,
and when the shadow comes again to visit him after a year, the
man admits the failure of his attitude: “Ah! […] I am writing
about the true, the good, and the beautiful; but nobody cares to
hear anything of the kind: I am quite in despair, for I take that
to heart” (390).
So when you don’t want to be seen, surprisingly enough
nobody wants to see you or hear from you. On first reading the
65
learned man may seem a humble person, marginalized because

of his shyness and poor self-marketing abilities. But when we
look at things more closely, we realize the learned man is neither
modest nor arrogant but rather blind: to appearance, but also
to materiality, sensual desire, and otherness. He attempts to be a
pure spirit but therefore loses touch with reality.
The split has deprived the learned man of both worlds: the
world of appearance but also the world of essence, since these
two worlds should remain connected in order to have value.
A gaze of pure essence is as blind and arid as a gaze of pure
appearance. And indeed, not just the man suffers from the split
but also the shadow. The shadow, we are told, barely has a
heart; he cannot truly love or feel anything other than envy and
the desire for power and respect. Ignoring appearances as the
man and knowing nothing but appearances as the shadow lead
to the same sterility of the soul.
The man therefore becomes increasingly weak and the shadow
tries to persuade him to join him on a journey, of which he will
pay all the expenses if the man agrees to serve as his shadow. The
shadow wishes to undo the split between origin and shadow,
but not in order to blur the hierarchies between them but, on the
contrary, to switch roles and become the master of his former
master. The man refuses at first, but the general indifference to
his studies makes him ever more ill, and people start to tell him
that he looks like a shadow. Terrified by this transformation,
he finally accepts the shadow’s offer, hoping to be healed in the
baths, the destination of the journey. The two hence go on the
road with this strange inversion: “The Shadow was master now,
and the master was shadow” (390).
When they arrive at the baths they meet there a princess, who
wishes to heal her sight, which is curiously too sharp. In this
sense she and the shadow, the master of appearances, would
make a perfect couple, and indeed she is immediately attracted
to him, realizing that the illness he wishes to cure is the lack of
a shadow. Yet when she confronts him with this insight, he tells
her she has probably been cured of her own illness, since he does
have a shadow, namely, the learned man.
The princess is somehow convinced by this strange story and
falls in love with the shadow, who, however, does not seem to
75
fall in love in return, since he doesn’t have a real heart. Rather,

he notices the new way she looks at him and understands the
power this opportunity could give him. Yet before the princess
agrees to marry the shadow, she wants to know if he has a well-
grounded knowledge. Indeed, the shadow claimed that he had
learned from Poetry everything there is to know, but this know-
ledge is that of appearance, whereas the princess now wishes
to see if he knows something about essence. She asks him a
difficult question, and the puzzled shadow finally calls upon the
learned man, who docilely waits at the threshold of the room.
The man, presented as a shadow, converses with the princess,
who is extremely impressed, since the person she has fallen in
love with must be very special to have such a clever shadow. She
is now ready to marry the shadow, whom she takes for a prince,
and both of them eagerly anticipate their future reign over her
kingdom.
The shadow’s transformation into a man is now almost com-
plete, and the only obstacle is still his lack of a real shadow. He
thus proposes that the man permanently become his shadow,
but this is too much for the man, who refuses this ultimate sur-
render of his position, if not as a master at least as a human
being. He threatens to expose the shadow and reveal his real
identity, but who would believe him now? The shadow calls the
guards, who throw the man into jail, and on that very evening
the wedding takes place. The story ends with these lines: “That
was a wedding! The Princess and the Shadow stepped out on
the balcony to show themselves and receive another cheer. The
learned man heard nothing of all this festivity, for he had already
been executed” (395).
Although Andersen’s story depicts the split as exterior, presenting

the man and the shadow as two distinct individuals, it is clear that
this cautionary tale tries to warn us against an interior split.3 The
learned man, as every man and woman, has two aspects: spir-
itual and material. The man and his shadow are doubles of each
other, two sides of the same coin, only that one has been projected
outside to dramatize and exteriorize an inner conflict. Therefore,
it would be misleading to see the learned man as an innocent,
humble, and shy person, running away from appearance and
85
falling victim to the cruelty of this world. We all have a shadow,

a material aspect with all sorts of needs and desires, but we tend
to hide it.
To return to Rilke’s demand to be here fully, to be of the
earth, I now understand it as a call to be here both body and
soul, whereas the split creates two unembodied beings. Vision
should not be detached from touch, that is, from one’s body.
It is, however, frightening to engage in a vision that remains in
touch with touch, a touching vision. For it necessitates a loss
of control, accepting to touch and be touched by the gazes and
bodies of others, as well as by one’s own impulses and emotions.
It forces one to depart from the peaceful yet sterile realm of
the detached subject, the same realm in which Maupassant’s
diarist, too, imprisoned himself. This is probably why it is so
tempting to split life between theory and practice, vision and
touch, but also work and leisure, such that these spheres remain
well protected. But when you start to split things, you risk losing
your shadow and yourself, which provokes a feeling of “some-
thing missing,” the same feeling I had all my life.
It is therefore time to dare to give a name to this “something
missing” I have felt from my early youth: my shadow. Sometime
in the past I rejected the shadow. How did this happen? I wished
to touch but didn’t dare to, wanted to see but was afraid of how
people would look back at me. I therefore didn’t find access
to people’s hearts and bodies, probably looking for them in
the wrong places. And then –but when was it? –I noticed my
shadow could do all that for me and sent it away to discover the
world in the hope it would come back and tell me what it found.
Yet from that moment on things went awry.
How would I regain my shadow and reconnect the different
spheres in me? The crucial moment in the story is the revela-
tion of Poetry, which becomes a fantasy and obsession for
the learned man. It is a fantasy of exquisite light that would
be truer than that of the sun, not only because it is softer but
also and more than anything because he thinks it is meant for
his eyes only, unlike the sun, which lights up the entire earth.
He fantasizes about unique and dazzling creation, the dream
of every writing person. Yet the wisdom of Poetry consists pre-
cisely in taking universal words and images and then, through
95
writing, giving them a particular expression. Poetry is neither

universal nor unique, neither external nor internal, but serves as
a bridge between the different realms.
Poetry can thus also connect the man and his shadow. Indeed,
its presence in the story already represents progress, in com-
parison to the stifling world of “The Horla,” where the diarist’s
narcissism wouldn’t allow him to even imagine a realm lying
outside his private estate. But Poetry doesn’t realize its poten-
tial and remains a rather negative force in “The Shadow.” It is a
mysterious and obscure figure, a fantasy that leads only to the
split between the man and his shadow rather than helping to
reconcile it.
It is probably this same fantasy of private and safe light, with
no risk or real alterity, that had made me split between essence
and appearance, trying to purify myself from the threatening
world. It is a fantasy of uniqueness and unicity, of personal cre-
ation that would nonetheless be universal. But paradoxically it
led me to the creation of a shadow and a double that blocked
any access to the real world. I have struggled to get rid of this
fantasy, but its temptation is still very strong. To understand this
fantasy and its consequences, but also the ways to transform it
into a bridge between me and the world, me and others, me and
myself, I propose the following theoretical intervention.
To regain the shadow and reunite the different spheres within

oneself, we should try to better understand what the shadow
stands for. The shadow is one of the emblematic figures of the
double in nineteenth-century literature, and we find its prototype
in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1814), the story of
the man who lost his shadow.4 This story quickly became popular
all over Europe, since, I suggest, it incarnated the sense of loss so
central to Romanticism. Does this mean that Romanticism lost
its shadow? This hypothesis is reinforced if we recall that the
Romantic movement arose as a reaction to eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, which sought to rationalize the world and chase
away its shadows.5 Yet a world without shadows would be a
06
dazzling world of pure light and pure spirit, with no place for
any object, body, or darkness.
Yet even if Romanticism has lost its shadow, it has equally
found it: found it as lost. The light of rationalism aimed to
eradicate the shadow, but what it actually did was to expose
it, since shadows are not afraid of light; on the contrary, they
need light to show themselves. Romanticism captured this para-
doxical nature of the shadow and therefore both mourned its
loss and warned against its overexposure. The spontaneous,
invisible shadow, a shadow that was one’s integral part, docilely
following one’s steps and maintaining one’s wholeness, was
conceived as lost forever. A new shadow now saw the light of
day: an enlightened, independent shadow, but therefore irreme-
diably split from oneself.
This is why Romanticism often expresses two emotions in
particular –longing and horror: longing for wholeness, that is,
an innocent self that would live in harmony with the good old
shadow; and horror facing the arrival of a new demonic shadow.
Andersen’s story thus goes beyond Peter Schlemihl, since it tells
the story of not only how the shadow was lost but also how it
acquired new life. The shadow, as the repressed, always returns,
wishing to usurp the place of the subject, such that a struggle for
life and death eventually takes place between them.
Whereas the shadow in Peter Schlemihl remained a negative
double, similar to the Horla, the shadow in Andersen’s story
gradually becomes an elaborate character, presented almost as
a real subject. It/he is therefore not only a negation of the self,
the residue of narcissistic processes as we saw in the previous
chapter, but also a positive double. Indeed, Andersen’s shadow
is a narcissistic projection of the protagonist’s ideal image, but
it is only a partial ideal: an ideal that opposes other aspects of
the learned man, and as such it is somehow split from him and
gains a life of its own.
To better understand the role of the shadow in the consti-
tution of subjectivity and self-identity, I propose to analyze it
with philosophical tools.6 I will begin with Hegel’s dialectic of
Lord and Bondsman as a prototype of the split between the two
parts of consciousness. I will then move to Sartre’s prolonga-
tion of this dialectic with his analysis of the gaze. These two
16
philosophers will help us understand the creation of the shadow

and its role. However, to understand how Poetry provokes the
split between the man and his shadow but may also lead to their
reconciliation, I will draw on Levinas’s early theory combined
with Kristeva’s notion of abjection.
The Shadow: From Bondsman to Lord

I have described Romanticism as a reaction to Enlightenment,
but there was in fact another, philosophical reaction to it
through what is known as German Idealism.7 The three main
philosophers of this movement –J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling,
and G. W. F. Hegel –continued a line of thought that started
with Immanuel Kant in his search for the limits of consciousness.
Kant’s critical method stressed the mutual dependence between
subject and object. The subject is the one who constitutes the
object, and yet it constitutes the object precisely as distinct from
the subject.8 Indeed, this combination of intimacy and alterity
already implies a certain doubling of the subject in the object;
however, Kant instead stressed an unattainable region of the
“thing-in-itself,” acknowledging a mysterious gap between per-
ception and what lies beyond it.
For Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, this region had to be over-
come. According to them, the human being comprises every-
thing there is to know, such that the I gains an absolute power
over itself and the world, making the problem of the double
apparently obsolete.9 However, the I soon discovers its need for
the Other, be it within oneself or outside it, and the two conse-
quently form together a complex relationship.10
I do not intend to give a detailed description of German
Idealism; rather, I wish to point to the inherent tension it holds
between the yearning for unicity and unity (between one and
oneself, one and the world/nature)11 and the inevitable medi-
ation presented by the figure of the not-I (in Schelling) or the
Other (in Hegel). This mediation and otherness, I suggest, is
incarnated by the figure of the double as an instance that may
be internal in reality but is felt and perceived as external. The
double defies the one, the unique, the unified; yet the double
is not some residue to surmount or get rid of, as the German
26
Idealists tended to depict it, but rather an inevitable counter-

process of duplication, a recurrent and obstinate shadow that
must accompany any light.
Roughly speaking, German Idealism and Romanticism are
both similar and remote. They share the same concerns but pre-
sent opposite diagnoses. Both aim to achieve unity –with the
self and with the world conceived as Nature –but whereas the
former is rather optimistic, presenting absolute knowledge as
being within reach, the latter melancholically laments the impos-
sibility of unity.12 Unity becomes for Romanticism an impos-
sible ideal that is always located elsewhere, be it in a fantasized
past, precarious emotional states, or mysterious experiences of
the Sublime.13
If we examine one of the most famous paintings of German
Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 Wanderer above
a Sea of Fog, we may note that as sublime as the wanderer’s
experience might be, we, the observers, can see only his back,
which hides from us the full scenery. In other words, the
painting presents both the unity of and the split between Subject
and World. The wanderer serves as an intermediary between us
and the world, us and ourselves, an obstacle that is simultan-
eously a source of identification. As such he is nothing but our
double, an incarnation of the inevitable mediation each one of
us encompasses. He is an ideal to be admired for his vision and
hated for not letting us assume his omnipotent position.
German Idealism, yet, proposes to overcome the wanderer,
this shadow that prevents one from attaining unity. Hegel’s
1807 famous dialectic of Lord and Bondsman,14 which is a
part of a greater search for absolute knowledge, is an exem-
plary case of this attempt. According to Hegel, when conscious-
ness encounters another consciousness, it enters with it into a
life-and-death struggle in which the winning party becomes the
Lord, and the losing, the Bondsman. The key to victory in this
struggle is accepting to die or, more precisely, not fearing death,
the Lord being the one who despises life whereas the Bondsman
remains attached to it.
Therefore, the Lord controls the Bondsman, who becomes
his source of life, supplying him with the fruits of the soil. The
Bondsman works and thereby gains knowledge about the world
36
and how to produce objects in and from it; but this soon creates
a strange inversion: the Lord becomes completely dependent on
the Bondsman, whereas the Bondsman, through his work and
attachment to life, gains mastery and power.15
Let us now try to locate this dialectic in Andersen’s story. In
the beginning the learned man and his shadow are united in a
state that is analogous to Hegel’s descriptions of simple con-
sciousness: unaware of others it goes out in the world to look
for its truth. To seek the truth the learned man undertakes a
journey to the south, where the light is brighter. Yet when he
arrives there, he encounters a first barrier, a limitation upon his
power of sight by the too-strong sunlight. Then a second limita-
tion presents itself, with the revelation of Poetry and the dazzling
light emanating from her figure. The learned man desires this
woman and wishes to possess her, yet he does not even know
how to access her house. It is this unsatisfied desire, the wish to
obtain an impossible object, that makes him discover otherness,
and it is precisely at that moment that the idea to let go of his
shadow comes to his mind.
Andersen thus proposes that the encounter with another con-
sciousness is not neutral or arbitrary but involves some dimen-
sion of desire.16 The man desires the woman and is so frustrated
by this desire that he splits himself in two. Indeed, many
interpreters see the struggle for life and death not as between
two consciousnesses but as between two parts within one con-
sciousness,17 which perfectly fits Andersen’s story. Yet contrary
to Hegel, the struggle in the story is not merely dual but already
involves a third party over which the two parts compete.18 We
now better understand the motivation for the struggle, which
is not only otherness as such but otherness involving frustrated
desire. The double is created upon a feeling of lack and limita-
tion, and the struggle for life and death is an inner drama that
both leads to the split and stems from it, as the story shows.
By letting go of his shadow, the man declares that he has not
succumbed to his desire and has won the battle. It is therefore
an act of both courage and cowardice. It is an act of courage
since the man gives up his interest in worldly creatures, that is,
in life. He declares that life interests him only theoretically since
he doesn’t need his shadow as the correlate of his materiality
46
and the desires it involves. But it is also a coward’s act, made in

a moment of frustration, when the man decides to give up his
object of desire –that is, the world as desired. Andersen shows
us that the Lord is not simply unafraid of death; for in a certain
sense he is afraid of life and its earthy needs. From the moment
the split takes place, the moment he triumphs over his shadow,
the learned man focuses his interest on purely spiritual truth
and not on material objects, which now become the share of the
shadow alone.
The shadow is therefore devoted not only to the world of
appearance but also to the world of matter, with all the needs
and desires it carries with it. He is attached to life by his ten-
dency to follow and obey, precisely because he doesn’t have any
independent existence without others. The truth of the shadow
is dependence, but he understands this only after the split and
his three-week stay at the house of Poetry. It is no coincidence
that he exits the house in the most dependent way: naked and
ashamed, hiding under the gown of a cake-woman. At first he
goes out only by night, as did the learned man, but whereas
the latter liked to watch without touching, the shadow stretches
himself tall upon the walls to scratch his back. He thus makes
himself big while leaning on something, a combination that
summarizes the secret of dependence. He soon discovers his
ability to look everywhere and observe people’s deepest secrets,
yet he is not interested in people per se but rather in the goods
he may gain from them. He accumulates objects and luxurious
clothes, until he decides to return to his Lord and ask for his
freedom.
Indeed, a Bondsman could redeem his freedom from his Lord
for a certain amount of money, but this offer is not only an act of
freedom but actually the beginning of the inversion between the
Lord and the Bondsman. Moreover, the refusal of the learned
man to receive anything from the shadow is only another step in
this direction. He wishes to maintain his superiority, his position
as a Lord who refuses to acknowledge his dependence on the
shadow and the world of matter, but this deprives him of any
satisfaction and makes him ever weaker and poorer.
For Hegel both the Lord and the Bondsman should eventually
understand their mutual dependence and their belongingness to
56
each other. But a consciousness that comprises these two elem-

ents without integrating them is an unhappy consciousness,
and it remains so until it finds a means to reconcile its split
parts. Hegel’s solution is to turn to a third figure, the priest, who
allows unhappy consciousness –split, doubled, and estranged –
to move toward the unity of Reason.19 Hegel’s full dialectic is
beyond the scope of the present book, and for our purposes it
suffices to note that both the Lord and the Bondsman need to
acknowledge their mutual dependence within the split and the
unhappiness it brings. Only then can they turn to a mediating
figure that would permit the reconciliation of consciousness
with itself.
Now, contrary to the learned man, the shadow acknowledges
his dependence from the outset. And yet, this acknowledgment
leads not to a deeper understanding of mediation but, on the
contrary, to a wish to feel the man’s need for him in return.
The learned man, however, refuses to admit any need, save his
wish to acquire the knowledge of Poetry, a kind of material
spirituality upon which the shadow can give only a partial per-
spective. During the shadow’s second visit the learned man is
obliged to confess his despair over the total lack of interest he
receives from people. The shadow replies, “You don’t under-
stand the world, and you’re getting ill” (390). and he is right,
since the learned man has no direct access to the world. He
needs the mediation of the shadow, yet he refuses to acknow-
ledge the material part of spirituality, and his work therefore
becomes sterile.
In this sense the shadow’s offer to take him to the baths is not
simply humiliating and cruel but may also be seen as an attempt
to make the man realize what dependence upon others means.
Both the shadow and the learned man secretly or overtly under-
stand their dependence, but they project it upon the other in
what gradually becomes a second life-and-death struggle.
From the moment they take the journey to the baths the
inversion of roles is accelerated, the man serving as the shadow’s
shadow and then using his spiritual wisdom to help the shadow
be accepted by the princess. But until the very end the man
doesn’t reflect on his own role as a shadow, and he rebels only
when the shadow wishes to officialize the inversion and make it
6
public. Even then, the man justifies his outrage by stating that the
inversion of roles “would be cheating the whole country and the
Princess too” (394) rather than by expressing any feelings of hurt
or humiliation. Until his very last breath the man is interested
in Truth and not in matter, remaining blind to the danger of
his rebellion at that stage and thus finding himself thrown into
jail and finally executed. This is his paradox: he, who became
Lord thanks to his indifference to life during the battle for life
and death, finally dies at the hands of his Bondsman because
of this very same indifference.20 He finally loses the fight since
his detachment from life gradually made him dead even while
he was still alive. Certainly, he never becomes a true shadow, a
true Bondsman. He maintains his superiority and denial of any
earthly need, but what was his gain, dying alone, humiliated,
and unrecognized?
The Secret of the Gaze

The end of Hegel’s dialectic of Lord and Bondsman suggests
that it is rather the latter who holds the secret of dependence.
It is therefore in him that the key to the reconciliation of con-
sciousness with itself can be found. The shadow, however, grad-
ually rejects his status as a Bondsman and aims to become a
Lord like the learned man. The shadow is the agent of depend-
ence, but it seems very difficult to truly accept this position as
an inherent part of oneself. To better understand this difficulty,
let us examine what a human shadow stands for.
My shadow is a dark reflection of my body resulting from a
blocked passage of light. It thereby reveals my body as an obs-
tacle: something that stands out and pierces the infinite light
around me. The shadow is the visual projection of my body as
an opaque mass of matter; a superfluous object in the world of
light; an obscure reminder of my corporeal existence. It is not
my lived body but the representation of its external contours
with no expression or inner details.
This is why in popular culture the shadow often stands
for a source of shame: it is the dark and evil side I try to hide
although eventually one exposes it to light. At the same time, as
the story of Peter Schlemihl shows, my shadow may also stand
76
for a source of pride: no matter how poor and miserable I am,

I have at least one docile servant who lawfully accompanies me
wherever I go and reminds me that I exist. As long as I live,
I have a body and a shadow, both proving me to be something
in the world: something that matters. In this sense, the imper-
sonal and crude traits of the shadow can turn from drawback to
advantage: the shadow hides my inner sensations, allowing me
to maintain a homogeneous and unified image upon which I can
project whatever trait I wish to show to the world.
Therefore, the split in Andersen’s story is not between shame
(the shadow) and pride (the learned man) but rather between
the entire realm of shame/pride –the realm of appearance –and
another realm. I previously called this other realm essence, but
I also argued that essence should not be split from appearance;
otherwise, it becomes sterile and detached. The learned man is
a scholar and what he is interested in is pure theory. The word
“theory” is derived from the Greek theoria, “vision,” yet it is
an intellectual rather than practical vision. The learned man is
keen to observe, but he wishes neither to be seen nor to touch.
He negates his embodied existence and would like to become a
pure and almighty spirit.
Indeed, from the very beginning of the story, long before the
split, the man adopts a voyeuristic position, remaining in con-
trol and not willing to expose himself to the too-intense sun-
light. Whereas in the north the faint light would not draw a very
sharp shadow, the sun of the south doesn’t allow him to hide
his body from himself and from others, and he therefore decides
to remain inside and watch the world from a safe distance. But
we already know that this attempt is challenged by the opaque
vision of the opposite house and the enlightening woman who
lives there. The man suddenly feels the desire to touch and enter
the house, and it is precisely this desire that risks exposing him
to the world of shame/pride, such that he asks the shadow to
enter the house in his place.
On the literal level the man lets go of his shadow, but on
a deeper level he detaches himself not only from the world of
appearance –of shame and pride –but also from the world
of others and the desire it involves. He wishes to watch the
world and write books about it, but he lacks the courage to go
86
down, encounter other people’s gaze, search for the entrance to

their houses, and go inside. Therefore, his vision cannot pene-
trate anything and becomes theoretical and detached. From the
moment the split takes place his situation becomes even worse
since he seems to lose sight of things. He describes the world but
nobody is interested in these descriptions, since it is not a lived
world, a world of flesh and bone, but a theoretical construction.
The story, however, doesn’t attempt to teach us that truth and
essence are obsolete values in a world of appearance, since this
evaluation is already the result of the split between the man and
his shadow. The question is not whether soul and essence are
superior to body and appearance but rather how to avoid the
split between them in the first place. To better understand this
possibility, let us turn to Sartre’s notion of the gaze, developed
in his 1943 Being and Nothingness.21
Sartre describes a scene in the first person in which I am
secretly peering at a spectacle through a keyhole when suddenly
I hear someone coming: I’m caught in the act of looking. Before
this moment of exposure, I am all alone and “there is no self to
inhabit my consciousness.”22 I am completely immersed in the
situation such that “I am my acts” in “a pure mode of losing
myself in the world.” Wrenched from my immersion in the spec-
tacle, awoken from the world of dreams, I become aware of
myself only when I notice that someone is looking at me. But
this means that “I am conscious of myself as escaping myself,”
that is, as dependent upon the gaze of others.23
Without the Other I would never know myself and would be
only pure consciousness of the world. I therefore feel ashamed,
not so much because I got caught watching, but because I now
realize my dependence on others and their gaze upon me. At the
same time, I may also feel proud: proud that I exist and that
others take pains to look at me; proud of my ability to finally
say “I.” Shame and pride are thus two faces of the same coin,
the coin of appearance but also of existence: existence that is
enabled and exposed through appearance.
Sartre conceives of shame and pride (together with fear) as
the fundamental feelings evoked by the Other’s gaze. However,
there is another possibility when facing this gaze: that is, to
simply refuse and ignore it, as does the learned man. Sartre gives
96
an illuminating description of this possibility in an early short

story entitled “Erostratus,” which begins with the line “You
really have to see men from above.”24 Like the learned man,
Sartre’s protagonist enjoys sitting on his balcony and watching
others from a safe and superior place. He hates humanity but
strangely enough fancies watching people –watching them and
fantasizing about killing them.
In Sartre’s world one has to choose: watch or be watched.
It is a binary system of activity and passivity, relating to two
broader attitudes: sadism, desire, hate, and indifference, on the
one hand; and masochism, seduction, love, and language, on
the other. In the first attitude, to which belongs the active gaze,
I wish to annihilate the other. In the second, I try to attract the
Other with my passive being seen, but in this way I let myself
be annihilated.
These two options are very present in Andersen’s story. The
learned man surely likes to watch and does not wish to be
watched. Moreover, he traveled to the south probably to see the
world in brighter light. But the story also reveals the impasse
created by this attitude: the man’s inability both to get out
during the day and to observe the interior of the opposite house
by night. His confusion grows when he sees (or was it a dream?)
the dazzling woman who incarnates everything he would like to
see but cannot. When he notices that his shadow can enter the
house, he lets it go, not only to make it see the house for him but
also to get rid of his own aspect of being seen.
For Sartre, my shadow –he uses this term metaphorically –
is “my being as it is written in and by the Other’s freedom.”25
I cannot control or fully grasp the way others see me, and no
matter how much I wear pretty clothes and makeup, the Other
still has the freedom to look at me and constitute me at her
wish. My shadow is the part in me that I cannot see, the part
that is constituted only by the Other’s gaze. It therefore opens
up in me “the dimension of the unrevealed”26 or the “unrevealed
Me.”27 The learned man, keen to reveal everything, cannot bear
the presence of the unrevealed, and by letting go of his shadow
he has a double gain. First, he transforms his passive, being-
seen element into an active and seeing one, making the observed
shadow into an observing agent. Second, he frees himself from
07
this element and, with it, from the anxiety the unrevealed
provokes in him and the need to succumb to the Other and feel
shame, pride, or fear.28
The shadow, on the other hand, holds the secret of the unre-
vealed, but curiously enough he uses it not to observe himself
but to watch and blackmail other people. He consequently
becomes rich and powerful, but the price he must pay is his
inability to love. Love, according to Sartre, is possible only if
one accepts the gaze of the Other upon oneself. Even when the
shadow meets the princess, it is only in her eyes that he sees love.
He recognizes immediately this emotion through his ability to
see the unrevealed, but he soon translates the love of the other
into a wish to control and possess her.
The shadow, the holder of the secret of the gaze, is paradox-
ically unable to fully accept the gaze of the Other. His passive
origins won’t allow him to endorse his own passivity, and he is
constantly eager to locate it within others, especially his former
master. He is a shadow that has been let go and gradually
becomes a Lord, thus revealing the impasse of both Hegelian
and Sartrean dialectics, since when the two parts remain
disconnected, they cannot achieve love or happiness.
In Hegel, as we have seen, the dialectic does not stop here,
since the Lord and the Bondsman need to find a synthesis, a
mediation through a third party. Alone they cannot access
Truth and self-knowledge. Sartre, however, proposes no medi-
ation between the seer and the seen, the active and the passive,
and for him the solution consists merely of being aware of one’s
existential situation and avoiding the fall into what he calls
bad faith.29
Nonetheless, as we have already seen, there is one figure in
the story that incarnates the possibility of mediation, being
both the reason for the split and the key to its solution: namely,
Poetry. Poetry sets the highest limit to sight, presenting some-
thing that cannot be clearly discerned and controlled. In many
ways Poetry is the unrevealed, the most secret dimension of one-
self, the blind spot in every one of us. Poetry comes from the
outside, from language, and yet in it one can find one’s deepest
wishes and essence. It is simultaneously the strangest and the
most intimate element in each one of us, if we only dare to
17
listen to it without fearing to lose our minds, as happened to

the sailors who listened to the Sirens according to the Odyssey.
This mysterious, inner– outer dimension both attracts and
repulses the learned man, who wishes to reveal the unrevealed,
and once he understands this paradox, he releases his shadow.
The shadow, on the other hand, feels at home in the house of
Poetry and discovers their common nature. For Poetry, as the
unrevealed, reigns in the kingdom of images and appearances.
These images are simultaneously particular and universal,
connecting me to others, me to myself, body to soul, appearance
to essence. But the shadow, too, finally misses the truth of Poetry,
learning the secret of the image but ignoring its deeper layers,
namely, its affective and creative parts, which are essential to
both truth and love.
Both the man and the shadow are deeply transformed by
Poetry, yet both also completely miss her nature and remain at
a level of shallow fascination. They touch upon the unrevealed
but cannot transform it into a real knowledge of otherness. The
unrevealed as a dimension of otherness will stand at the center
of the rest of this chapter. Following Levinas and Kristeva, I will
explore the possibility of a new kind of light: dark and bright,
strange(r) and familiar.
The Impossible Escape from Being

Emmanuel Levinas is well known for his ethics of otherness, but
this ethics is actually rooted in a more primordial, anonymous,
and dark world that he depicts in his early writings from the
1940s. He calls this realm the il y a (there is) and gives the
example of insomnia, the inability to sleep that makes me feel
surrounded by a timeless and impersonal environment. I try to
let go and fall asleep, alas in vain, which provokes a “conscious-
ness that it will never finish,” a “[v]‌igilance without an end,” and
a sense of “immortality from which one cannot escape.”30
Rather than death anxiety, the il y a incites a fear of endless,
yet empty existence. Who hasn’t known the horrible nocturnal
experience of infinite hum? Compulsive and trifling thoughts
attack my mind and won’t let go; the sound of the air condi-
tioner from an adjacent building drives me crazy; the loud TV
27
set of the neighbors next door keeps emitting pseudocheerful

yet unrecognizable sounds, coming from another world which
is nonetheless mine. When will all this end?
The darkness and passivity of night push one closer to the
il y a, and indeed, in both “The Horla” and “The Shadow,” as
well as many other doppelgänger stories, night plays a signifi-
cant role. The diarist of “The Horla” is afraid to fall asleep since
during this time he is no longer in control of himself or reality
and is therefore exposed to atrocious nightmares. The figure of
the Horla, as a negative double, comes to threaten the world
of light, sight, and clear shapes, showing the dark and empty
side of the I. In Levinas’s terms, the Horla is the representative
of the il y a, that which precedes every human subjectivity. The
more the diarist tries to elude and control it, the more the il y a
announces itself, leaving no other option for him but to kill him-
self, for only death frees one from endless darkness.
The learned man, on the other hand, likes the softness of the
night, and it is also by night that Poetry is revealed to him. Poetry,
in fact, bears a similarity to the Horla, since both stem from
the dark il y a. Poetry is mysterious and inaccessible, appearing
only at night, but unlike the Horla, she isn’t the darkness itself.
Rather, a circle of alluring light surrounds her figure and makes
her appear bright and shining. She might be a hallucination,
but she is not a nightmare; rather, she is a fantastic, sweet, and
soft entity.
I will soon return to the light of Poetry, but let us linger for a
while on the darkness of the il y a, the completely anonymous and
neutral realm that can never be purely perceived as such. Indeed,
in insomnia we get closer to this Being without beings, Existence
without existents, but its opaque and impersonal nature resists
any real penetration. Moreover, rather than approach the il y a,
we are instinctively pushed to escape it to rescue our subjectivity.
We fancy, not blurred backgrounds, but rather distinct objects
that we can manipulate to reassure ourselves that we are still
the masters of the house and not its shadow. The experience of
insomnia is so unpleasant, threatening to abolish our personal
identity and stable world, that we have a natural aversion to it.
However, no matter how much we try to mask and hide
from ourselves the il y a, we are doomed to it as human beings,
37
and Levinas calls this irrevocable attachment hypostasis. The

hypostasis is the ongoing event of subjectivity appearing in the
background of the il y a, the binding link between me and my
existence.31 Indeed, before the hypostasis there was nothing and
no one, only pure existence without existents. The hypostasis is
already a rupture of the anonymous il y a; it constitutes subject-
ivity as the appropriation of general existence by the personal.
A new agency sees the day: the I, who lives in the present.
Yet the present, contrary to its etymology, is not initially a
gift but rather a burden that unsettles my presumed ownership
and “masculinity.” The present urges me to constantly take care
of myself, to be occupied with myself precisely since I am not a
pure spirit. I necessarily have a body that needs food and shelter,
and being alive in this world means to accept its materiality. The
hypostasis therefore frees me from pure anonymity, but it sim-
ultaneously demarcates me as matter, such that I can never be
completely free.32
The unavoidable materiality of the subject may seem evident
and banal, but according to Levinas it has severe consequences,
doubling me into two: the free I and the material self. Levinas
goes so far as to characterize the material self as “a viscous,
stupid, heavy double,” and he adds: “My being doubles with
a having; I am encumbered by myself.”33 We cannot avoid
thinking here again of Maupassant’s diarist, who attempted
to conceive of himself as a pure spirit, negating his body and
with it any exteriority: his need for air, food, but also love. The
Horla came to remind him not only of his dependency upon the
external world but also that it is within himself that his dark
double resides, a familiar stranger belonging to the opaque gen-
erality of the il y a. The learned man, too, conceives of himself
as exclusively spiritual, but the shadow is not a negative double.
Rather, the shadow takes the hypostasis to the extreme, being
constantly occupied with his materiality and that of others.
Both the diarist and the learned man try to distance them-
selves from the material needs of their bodies. But according
to Levinas, the I is a captive of its body, which is the necessary
price of hypostasis, that is, of being a concrete existent rather
than anonymous existence. The body gives me a unique form,
but it also carries with it a certain anonymity. It is a piece of
47
matter that I never chose and to which I am chained until the

end of my life. Whereas for a philosopher of embodiment such
as Merleau-Ponty the body is the key to my connection with
others, since we are all parts of the Flesh,34 Levinas characterizes
the material captivity of the I as “tragic solitude.”35
The diarist and the learned man seem to affirm Levinas’s pos-
ition, since they are both extremely solitary persons, and yet this
solitude is not imposed but rather chosen by them to protect
themselves from the threatening environment. One of Levinas’s
earliest writings is entitled “On Escape,” which anticipates his
notion of Being or Existence as evil. The revelation of Being
is described as an experience of revolt, when one suddenly
understands the impossibility of escaping the game of life and
therefore feels the acute need to break free of it.36 What makes
Being so horrifying is its endlessness, as Levinas says elsewhere:
“Being is evil not because it is finite but because it is without
limits.”37 Being belongs to the realm of the il y a, the anonymous
and general existence that precedes and conditions my subject-
ivity. As such it is a “bad infinity,”38 a monstrous darkness that
swallows the I, making me feel all alone, with no one present in
this world, not even myself.
I therefore try to escape solitude, occupying myself with
objects and goods, but for Levinas the only way to overcome the
evil of the il y a is to turn toward the Other as infinite. The Other
is not general or anonymous; it is a subject that shows me its
face precisely as something I cannot grasp or possess. According
to Levinas’s later theory, the best way to know someone is to
ignore the color of their eyes.39 The face is what cannot be seen;
it is what transcends me and my capacities of perception, and if
I dare to accept this and welcome the Other, a new door is opened
up for me: the door to Infinity, in which I would no longer be
lonely. The Other incarnates a possibility for a different form of
hypostasis, one that is no longer concerned with matter and the
il y a but with transcendence and a spiritual event. This event
makes me something different from what I am, precisely since
I dare to welcome what I am radically not: namely, the Infinity
of the Other.40
I do not wish to fully analyze here Levinas’s complex theory.
Rather, I want to emphasize a crucial yet often-ignored point,
57
namely, that he speaks of two infinities: a bad one, amounting

to the il y a, and a good one, belonging to the realm of the
Other. Levinas explicitly evokes this distinction only once in his
writings,41 but I believe it is central to his thought. My claim
is that although they are different, these two infinities do not
exclude each other but rather depend on each other. They stand
as two limits of the world of light, and the figure in our story
that represents the link between them –between the realm of
the il y a and the realm of the Other –is Poetry.
In his early writings Levinas conceives of the Other as
feminine, an assertion that provoked all sorts of criticism.42
However, he later stressed that the feminine is not necessarily a
woman but an aspect or an element contained in each one of us,
whether we be a man or a woman.43 The feminine is our anti-
phallic, dark, undefined, and mysterious aspect. The word “fem-
inine” in Hebrew, nekevah, is derived from nekev, “hole.” This
does not mean that the feminine is an emptiness waiting to be
filled and penetrated by the male. On the contrary, the feminine
is an undefined space that can never be filled. It is perhaps the
Origin of the World (the title of Gustave Courbet’s painting), yet
this origin has no clear beginning or end.
Levinas thus uses a physiological metaphor, and yet he
describes the encounter with the Other in spiritual and quasi-
theological terms, even when he comes to portray the phenom-
enon of the caress or of Eros.44 The materiality of the il y a
is something that should eventually be surmounted, and this
is for me the real problem in Levinas’s theory, since it misses
the link between body and soul, matter and spirit, thus falling
victim to the same mistake committed by the learned man in
“The Shadow.” By adopting a complementary theory that is
both semiotic and psychoanalytical, I propose not to abandon
Levinas but rather to deepen his insights and discover the
doubles he hides.
The Abject Origins of Poetry

Let us turn, then, to Julia Kristeva and her theory of abjection,
developed in her 1980 Powers of Horror.45 The first chapter in
this book is entitled “Approaching Abjection,” as if to say that,
67
as with the il y a, we can only get closer to it but never fully

attain it. The abject shows itself when the subject returns to its
boundless origins. Echoing terms we encountered in Levinas,
Kristeva speaks of a revolt and collapse of meaning, since the
abject disobeys the superego’s rules of the game. The abject is
therefore banished from the I, and yet it “does not cease chal-
lenging its master.”46 So what is the abject? No positive answer
can be given: “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either.
A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing.”47 Kristeva
gives the example of a corpse, the summit of abjection, since
in confronting a dead body “I am the border of my condition
as a living being.”48 This border is precisely what challenges
all borders, revealing the opaque matter from which the body
stems and to which it belongs until and beyond its death.
The material boundlessness of the abject makes Kristeva
situate it within the realm of the maternal. Whereas in Lacanian
psychoanalysis the father is responsible for the Law and with it
all rules and limits, the abject comes to defy these. It is a threat to
the clear limits of the subject that goes back to the first months
of a baby’s life and her tight connection with the mother, unable
to clearly separate herself from her. The abject is related to the
feeling of being swallowed and invaded by something that is nei-
ther me nor an object: a sort of interiorized womb, it contains
me, permits my existence, but I must also resist it in order to
become an individual.
These traits of the abject bring it close to the il y a: a dark,
anonymous realm from which I stem and which I try to resist
all my life without being able to escape it. But whereas the il y a
is an existential or ontological term, therefore allowing Levinas
to finally abandon it in favor of the “good” infinity of the Other,
Kristeva’s psychoanalytical standpoint makes her insist on the
necessity of the abject. She thus conceives of it as the crucial yet
negated dimension of each one of us to which we should remain
attuned. In other words, she insists on the need to approach the
abject, whereas for Levinas the il y a is an existential problem
that should eventually be solved.49
For both Levinas and Kristeva, however, everyday life consists
in setting seemingly clear boundaries around well- defined
objects, living in a world of light that hides and rejects a dark
7
dimension. This hidden dimension is incarnated in Andersen’s

story not so much by the shadow –who is ashamed of his dark
origins and uses them only as a means to gain more power in
the world of light –but rather by Poetry. She appears to the
learned man as if in a dream, something between reality and
hallucination, a dark boundlessness that is somehow circled by
light. She comes to remind him of the origin of the truth he is
looking for, an origin that is soft and beautiful but also opaque
and ungraspable: a limit to his knowledge.
This is why Poetry becomes an obsession for him: not only
because she is desirable but also because of her abjection. She is
perhaps not abject herself, but she makes the learned man realize
something about his own abject origins: the obscure bases of his
seemingly clear knowledge; his fragile body, without which his
soul could not survive; his secret desires that he obscures with
nice and well-ordered words.
Kristeva’s work in the seventies consisted in uncovering what
she calls the semiotic order that is hidden beneath the symbolic
sphere.50 Whereas the symbolic is the sphere of logic, order, and
meaning, the semiotic is the preverbal dimension that is nonethe-
less a part of language. The semiotic is where rhythm, prosody,
and rhyme reign. These come from the baby’s cries and gestures
in the first months of life. They are not mute but full of con-
tent: impulses that seek to be discharged. When language comes,
it imposes order on the semiotic, but language must remain in
touch with its semiotic origins to conserve its energies and cre-
ativity. For Kristeva, writing, and especially poetic writing, is the
realm where the meeting between the semiotic and the symbolic
culminates, since it combines the form and force of the semi-
otic with the content and order of the symbolic. In this way are
created poems that are both powerful and meaningful.51
There is an intimate link between the semiotic and the abject,
both referring to the first months of one’s life and the maternal
sphere of impulses and drives that precede law and order. Poetry
in Andersen’s story belongs to this sphere, but it is important to
note that she is not purely semiotic or abject but rather connects
the diverse realms and uses them to achieve her power, beauty,
and truth. She is semiotic and symbolic, abject and appealing,
partial and whole. She is an ideal of perfection, but one that
87
necessitates the difficult work of approaching one’s primordial

origins.
It is this complexity of Poetry that enables her to connect the
two infinities that remained irreconcilable in Levinas: the il y a
and the Other. On the one hand, Poetry stands for the boundless
origins of subjectivity, appearing at night as what precedes and
conditions any light. But on the other hand, she is someone and
not anonymous. She might be a hallucination, and yet she has
a face that the learned man is compelled to welcome. The face,
according to Levinas, cannot be seen with one’s eyes, and indeed,
the learned man could “see” Poetry only with his eyes half shut,
and as soon as he jumped out of bed and opened his eyes wide,
she disappeared, with only soft music still being heard. Music
does not present any words or visions and as such it belongs to
the realm of the semiotic alone.52 Rather than understanding the
need to go toward the semiotic, the man tries to use his eyes to
see again the face of Poetry, alas in vain. The infinity of Poetry –
both as an Other and as il y a, abject or semiotic –calls for a
different sight, one that the man once accidently touched upon
but thereafter blocked access to.53
We now better understand why the shadow says he is a rela-
tive of Poetry. Their common nature lies not only in image
and appearance, as I earlier argued, but also in the realm that
connects the well-defined words and objects to their indefinite
origin in the il y a and the semiotic. The shadow knows the secret
of hypostasis and does not hide it from himself, at least not ini-
tially. But he also knows the secret of the abject, the undefined
aspect that underlies all visible and well-defined objects. This
is why the shadow says that he became human in the house of
Poetry, that is, was born there as a human. And the first thing he
does after he exits the house is to hide himself under the skirt of
a cake-woman, where he still feels at home, in the abject “origin
of the world.”
The shadow, not respecting any limit, can therefore reach
every place he wants and reveal the darkest secrets of others.
These, as I have stressed, are not concrete secrets, since they go
back to a more primordial secret: the horrible, disgusting, and
limitless muddiness that hides itself behind, below, and inside
every object and subject in this world. But whereas Poetry is a
97
mixture of “bad” and “good” infinities, the shadow sees only

the first of these two. He does not have access to the Other,
and he himself is not a real Other, since he receives his shape
and status only from his fine clothes. Deep inside, he remains
anonymous and generic. He is a negative double that managed
to become a positive double, but still not an Other.
What does it mean to stop being a double and become an
Other? First and foremost, it means to start seeing others as
they really are, that is, infinite, inaccessible beings. The shadow
sees others only as doubles, abject forms, empty shadows. This
gives him great power over them, but he gradually succumbs
to the very same fear of the abject that he locates in others.
He, too, is ashamed of his origins and does everything he
can to conceal them and to be acknowledged as a real man.
He becomes obsessed with the learned man precisely because
his former master is the only one who knows his secret. The
shadow attempts to seduce him to become a shadow like him
and give up his pretension of truth. He offers him money but
also tries to humiliate him. But one cannot humiliate someone
who is a stranger to the world of shame and pride. The only way
to make the learned man anonymous and material, to make him
abject, is to kill him, make him become a corpse, and with this
slaughter the story ends, leaving us to wonder what the shadow
will now become.
The learned man, from the moment he lets go of his shadow,
refuses to be either horrified by the il y a or fascinated by
the materiality that is attached to it. But at the same time he,
too, remains blind to otherness. The revelation of Poetry could
have opened him to both infinities: that of the il y a, matter
and embodiment, and that of the Other as separate from him.
But like Odysseus, the emblem of Enlightenment,54 the learned
man wishes to benefit from the song of the Sirens without
paying the price of madness, the lack of clear boundaries. He
wishes to penetrate the impenetrable, to violate something that
must remain inaccessible, and he therefore sends his shadow
to enter the house, only to lose him as well as Poetry forever.
Without the bad infinity to which the shadow is attached, the
learned man cannot access either infinity, and begins to lose
his power.
08
We therefore seem to return to the same impasse time and

again. Poetry could be a way out, a means of reconciliation
between the different parts of the I, but both the learned man
and the shadow see only one of her aspects. They ignore the com-
plexity of otherness: otherness that is material and anonymous,
on the one hand, and spiritual and personal, on the other. They
thus remain doubles of each other in the same dual and destruc-
tive relationship that we explored in the previous chapter. Poetry
remains only a potential rescue in the story, and it is rather we,
the readers, who must discover how to attain it.
We have gone a long way with Andersen’s story, and it is time

to return to the beginning of this chapter and the more exist-
ential questions about the split, its motivations and its possible
resolution. Hegel taught us that a certain split within oneself is
a necessary step toward knowledge. His solution was to turn to
a third figure that would mediate the torn aspects within one-
self. In Sartre, however, no such mediation is possible. For him,
the split is one’s existential condition of being in the world as
watching or being watched, since according to him one cannot
be both. It would be easy to dismiss Sartre’s either/or picture,
but the story shows the truth of his assertion. Indeed, this truth
should be overcome, but it must first be acknowledged, under-
stood, and worked through. To explain how this might happen
I presented Levinas and Kristeva not so much as theoreticians
of otherness but of its preconditions in the il y a, the abject, and
the semiotic. These are necessary elements if we wish to bypass
any pretension of possessing autarkic knowledge, and it is only
by getting closer to their infinite though difficult nature that
one might also access the infinite world of the Other, of which
Poetry is an illuminating example.
In both stories we have encountered so far we found a split
self that led to two doubles: in Maupassant a negative double
and in Andersen a positive one. But whereas the split remained
passive in Maupassant –the diarist finding himself one day
facing a monstrous creature –in Andersen the split is active,
and as such it presents a certain recognition of the necessity of
the double. It is in the face of otherness that the learned man
decides to let go of his shadow; but he does this as a protection
18
against otherness rather than as a real acknowledgment of it,

in the mistaken belief that this is the only way he can access
Poetry. The key for this access, I will claim, is to move from the
double as a result of a split to a double as actively created in a
process of self-duplication and doubling. Only in this way can
one no longer negate alterity but, rather, manage to access and
welcome it.
After two stories of a split self and an imprisonment in
haunting interior spheres, it is time to see how the double may
lead to a different contact with others and with oneself. We will
now turn to the sphere where the body and soul, matter and
spirit, inevitably cross each other and cannot be kept separate.
This is the sphere of love, and I now wish to examine the role
the double plays in it. I must try to understand the double no
longer as what shuts me down and haunts me, but as what opens
me up to both the infinity of the other and my own infinity: the
infinite doubles that constitute any identity.
Notes
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and
Stephen Spender (1923; London: Hogarth Press, 1968), 83 (trans-
lation modified).
2 Hans Christian Andersen, “The Shadow,” in The Complete Fairy
Tales, trans. Susannah Mary Paull, rev. Craigie Jessie Kinmond
and William Alexander (1847; Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997),
383–395. Hereafter, page numbers will be given in parentheses in
the text.
3 Generally speaking, there are three approaches to this question in
nineteenth-century literature: the double is presented as a part of
the “original” that takes a different form, as in Stevenson’s The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; is presented as distinctly
external to it, as in Jean Paul (e.g., Siebenkäs) and Hoffmann (e.g.,
The Devil’s Elixirs); or is located in an intermediate zone, creating
a frightful ambiguity, as in “The Shadow,” Poe’s William Wilson,
and Dostoevsky’s The Double. See Robert Louis Stevenson, The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886; Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1996); Jean Paul, Flower, Fruit and
Thorn Pieces: Or the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of the
Advocate of the Poor, Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs, trans. Edward
Henry Noel (1796–1797; Boston: James Munroe and Co., 1845);
E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Devil’s Elixirs, trans. Ronald Taylor (1815;
28
London: John Calder, 1963); Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson,”

in Selected Tales, ed. David Van Leer (1839; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 66–83; Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double,
trans. Constance Garnett (1846; New York: Dover Publications,
1997). Twentieth-century and contemporary literature often play
on this theme, moving from one kind of double to another as if to
challenge our premises, as in Saramago’s The Double, Palahniuk’s
Fight Club, or finally Nabokov’s Despair, which is almost a
parody on this theme, as well as Roth’s Operation Shylock. See
Jose Saramago, The Double, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (2002;
Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004); Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
(1996; New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Vladimir Nabokov,
Despair (1936; New York: Vintage International, 1989); Philip
Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1993). This distinction between inner and outer double is
linked to the difference between splitting and doubling or duplica-
tion. See Miyoshi who distinguishes between division and duplica-
tion: Miyoshi, Divided Self, xii.
4 Adalbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, trans. Leopold von
Loewenstein-Wertheim (1813; London: Calder & Boyars, 1957).
The character of Peter Schlemihl appeared again the following
year in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “A New Year’s Eve Adventure,”
in which a man gives up his mirror image; E. T. A. Hoffmann,
“A New Year’s Eve Adventure,” in The Best Tales of Hoffmann,
trans. Alfred Packer, ed. E. F. Bleiler (1815; New York: Dover
Publications, 1967), 104–129. Peter Schlemihl is equally alluded
to in Andersen’s “The Shadow” when the learned man, obsessed
with his uniqueness, is embarrassed by the loss of his shadow
merely because he feared that people would think he was imi-
tating the famous tale of the man who lost his shadow (Andersen,
“Shadow,” 385). For a survey of the figure of the double in
nineteenth-century literature, see Wain, “The Double in Romantic
Narrative”; Rosenfield, “Shadow Within”; Webber, Doppelgänger;
and Herdman, Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. For specific
comparison and analysis of Peter Schlemihl and “The Shadow,” see
Herdman, Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 41–46.
5 See Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 21– 45. The relations
between Romanticism and Enlightenment are, of course, more
complicated than what I can sketch here. For further elaboration,
see, for example, the distinction made by Beiser:
Hence the romantics never broke the Enlightenment’s ideal

of a complete explanation of all of nature. They did, how-
ever, transform the paradigm of explanation: to understand an
event is not to explain it as the result of prior events in time
38
but to see it as a necessary part of a whole. Their paradigm is

thus holistic rather than mechanistic.
(Frederick C. Beiser, “The Enlightenment and Idealism,” in
The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl
Ameriks [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 35)
6 Another perspective which I will not be able to develop here is

Jung’s notion of “the shadow” as an archetype that includes the
dark aspects of personality. See Carl Gustav Jung, Aion: Researches
into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R. F. C. Hull (1951;
New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), 8– 10. Ursula Le Guin, for
instance, takes such a position, analyzing the shadow in Andersen’s
story as a complex representation of evil that each one of us, and
especially children, should admit. See Ursula K. Le Guin, “The
Child and the Shadow,” in The Language of the Night: Essays on
Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood (1979; New York:
HarperCollins, 1993), 54–67. Jon Cech refers, although briefly, to
Le Guin’s reading of “The Shadow” and suggests that admitting the
shadow is a necessary step specifically for the artist. See Jon Cech,
“Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Stories: Secrets, Swans
and Shadows,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Hans Christian
Andersen, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House,
2005), 47–48.
7 Beiser, “Enlightenment and Idealism,” 18.
8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and
Allen W. Wood (1781; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998).
9 “The starting point of absolute idealism is a rejection of all forms
of dualism, because these make it impossible to explain the cor-
respondence between the subject and object involved in know-
ledge.” Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against
Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 371. See also Matthew C. Altman, “Introduction:
What Is German Idealism?,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German
Idealism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6.
10 See, for example, Fichte’s notion of the “not-I” (Nicht-Ich), which
functions as a necessary opposite to the “absolute I” (Absolute
Ich); and Schelling’s notion of “Nature” (Natur) as opposed to
the “Self” (Ich). Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge, ed.
and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (1794–1795; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 102–105; F. W. J. Schelling,
System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (1800;
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 5–12.
11 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of
Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (1809;
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 27–29.
48
12 According to Romanticism, the resolution of the oppositions is

always paradoxical; the oppositions strive for unity while they
are maintaining themselves as such (Slethaug, Play of the Double,
11–12).
13 Some historians understand German Idealism and Romanticism
as part of the same movement, while others maintain the diffe-
rence between the two. Beiser, for example, asserts that “the early
romantics were the true founders of absolute idealism” (German
Idealism, viii). Frank, on the other hand, argues that:
[t]‌he early Romantics also speak often (using the terminology

of that time) of the Absolute or the unconditioned, but they
were of the opinion that we could not grasp the Absolute or
the unconditioned in thought, to say nothing of being able to
arrive at it in reality.
(Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations
of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth
Millán-Zaibert [1997; New York: State University of
New York Press, 2008], 24)
Moreover, as my discussion on Kierkegaard in the next chapter

will show, there were other voices at the time that looked for a
compromise between unicity and unity.
14 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (1807;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111–119.
15 Ibid., 117. It is interesting to note that this idea of violent drama
between the isolated I and the Other –which rules almost all the
history of philosophy –pertains perhaps only to masculinity’s
sphere and point of view. Luce Irigaray, for example, suggests that
femininity is inherently double and therefore also peaceful:
Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one

can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two
lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already
two –but not divisible into one(s) –that caress each other.
(Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans.
Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke [1977; Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985], 24)
16 Judith Butler sees the desire as the driving force in Hegel’s dialectics
and as the most essential concept for Hegel’s legacy in French
thought. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections
in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987).
17 See John McDowell, “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self:
Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ in
58
Hegel’s Phenomenology,” in Hegel: New Directions, ed. Katerina

Deligiorgi (London: Routledge, 2006), 33– 48; Joseph C. Flay,
Hegel’s Quest for Certainty (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1984), 86. Hegel himself affirms that the external doubling
of consciousness into Lord and Bondsman is soon internalized in
what he famously calls unhappy consciousness:
[T]he duplication which formerly was divided between two

individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is now lodged in one.
The duplication of self-consciousness within itself, which is
essential in the Notion of Spirit, is thus here before us, but not
yet in its unity: the Unhappy Consciousness is the conscious-
ness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being.
(Phenomenology of Spirit, 126)
18 The accent of desire in Hegel’s dialectic of Lord and Bondsman

is introduced by Kojève, who was highly influential on Lacan,
among others. As we saw in the previous chapter, Lacan’s mirror
stage is precisely the scene in which both identity and otherness are
discovered as rooted in desire: desire for the Other and of the Other.
But Poetry is already an invitation to the symbolic realm, and as
such, she transcends the imaginary order. See Alexandre Kojève,
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols
Jr., ed. Allan Bloom (1947; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1969), esp. 6.
19 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 136–138.
20 In Hegel, on the contrary, neither the Lord nor the Bondman
should die, precisely in order for the movement of consciousness’s
knowledge to continue.
21 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on
Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (1943;
New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 252–302.
22 Ibid., 259.
23 Ibid.
24 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Erostratus,” in The Wall, trans. Lloyd Alexander
(1939; New York: New Directions, 1969), 41. A similar position is
held by Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’s The Stranger,
trans. Matthew Ward (1942; New York: Vintage, 1989).
25 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 262.
26 Ibid., 268 (emphasis in the original).
27 Ibid., 282.
28 Indeed, the learned man wanted the shadow to return and tell him
what he saw, but this only shows his wish to control his aspect of
being seen, making it come and go at his command.
29 For a criticism on Sartre’s too-sharp distinction between seer and
seen, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible,
68
trans. Alphonso Lingis (1964; Evanston, IL: Northwestern

University Press, 1968), 50–104, 130–155; Lacan, Four Fundamental
Concepts, esp. 84.
30 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen
(1947; Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 48.
31 “The event by which the existent contracts its existence I call
hypostasis” (ibid., 43).
32 Ibid., 55.
33 Ibid., 56.
34 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 130–155.
35 Levinas, Time and the Other, 57.
36 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (1935;
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 52–53.
37 Levinas, Time and the Other, 51.
38 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(1961; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 158–159.
39 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen
(1982; Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 85–86.
40 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 184–219.
41 See Rudi Visker, Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into
Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 237. Visker
proposes that although the distinction is between a “bad” infinity
and an infinity without an adjective, it is clear that the latter is
characterized by Levinas as “good.”
42 A lot has been written about Levinas’s gender bias, the most
recent treatment of which is Simon Critchley’s The Problem with
Levinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Simone
de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany- Chevallier (1949; London: Jonathan Cape, 2009);
Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the
Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” (1967), in Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), 97– 192; Luce
Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” in An Ethics of Sexual
Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (1983; Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 185–217.
43 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 68–69.
44 Levinas, Time and the Other, 84–90; Levinas, Totality and Infinity,
256–266.
45 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon
S. Roudiez (1980; New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
46 Ibid., 2.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 3.
49 On the similarity between Levinas and Kristeva, see Tina Chanter,
“Kristeva and Levinas: Abjection and the Feminine,” Studies in
Practical Philosophy 4, no. 1 (2004): 54–70.
78
50 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret

Waller (1974; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
51 Ibid., 57–67.
52 Ibid., 24.
53 On the obliqueness of sight in Levinas, see Hagi Kenaan, The
Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze, trans.
Batya Stein (2008; London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).
54 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott,
ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (1944; Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2002), 35–62.
8
3 The Double’s Lesson of Love
I will never forget the summer of 1998: the summer of love,

the summer of S, the summer of Lol. For years I was convinced
it had taught me what love is, but it’s time to retrace the facts,
return to that summer, and somehow reactivate it. It is time to
understand what love really is.
S and I went that summer to Paris to improve our French at
the Sorbonne. S was my first boyfriend, and although we split
several months before that summer, we remained best friends.
Actually, I was still very much attached to him, more than I was
willing to admit. The plan was to spend three months in Paris,
but my secret plan was to regain S’s love. Each of us had a
sublet apartment, but mine would not be available immedi-
ately. S had proposed that I stay at his place for a few days, and
this offer quite excited me. Would this be the beginning of an
old-new story?
On the way from Charles de Gaulle airport to the city center,
the sexual tension between us grew, and when we got inside his
apartment, we found ourselves in a passionate storm. The next
day I woke up in his bed and realized I was caught inside a story
the nature of which was unclear to me. S behaved as if nothing
had happened. No words of love were heard. The fervent night
we spent seemed for him to be a matter of momentary impulse
and not a lasting emotion. But something in me was trembling,
hoping for the impossible to happen.
At about the same time a Parisian friend offered me Marguerite
Duras’s novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein.1 My French was still a
bit shaky, but I was curious about the book and started to read
it slowly. The first few pages were particularly difficult, since
I was confronted by not one but two foreign languages: French
98
The Double’s Lesson of Love 89
and Duras. I had never before encountered such writing (fem-

inine? Nouveau Roman? It is impossible to classify Duras) and
was both fascinated and irritated by it.
The novel tells the story of Lol, a fragile yet obstinate young
woman from the imaginary town of S. Tahla. It begins with an
unforgettable event, a primal scene that took place ten years
before the present time of narration: a ball attended by Lol and
her handsome fiancé, Michael Richardson. The couple are hap-
pily dancing, dreaming about their future together, when the
last two guests of the ball make their entrance: an older, mys-
terious, thin woman and her young daughter. The older woman
immediately attracts the attention of Michael, who seems to be
completely entranced; he approaches her and, after hesitating,
invites her to dance.
Lol, curiously, doesn’t appear worried or anxious but, rather,
“transported in the presence of this change” (6). She watches the
new couple dance for what seems to be an eternity, remaining all
evening at the back of the room and not taking her eyes off them.
But why doesn’t Lol disrupt this dance and remind Michael of
their love and engagement? I was profoundly disturbed by Lol’s
behavior, wishing her to react, to wake up and stop the couple
from falling in love. Whereas I was troubled, Lol seemed to
enjoy this betrayal, staring, enchanted, at the couple, taking part
in this new love that was being born in front of her.
Indeed, this scene was too overwhelming for me, too close to
something I tried to elude. Going back to my own story, I started
to feel an increasing frustration with my relationship with S,
especially after I finally moved to a place of my own. This move
signified for S the beginning of his new Parisian adventures. “I’d
like to find a summer love,” he nonchalantly confessed to me,
not realizing how painful it was for me to hear these words.
Nonetheless, I swallowed my pride, unable to express a question
and a wish I secretly knew the answer to: “couldn’t I be your
summer love?”
I was therefore both too close to Lol and too remote from
her: paralyzed like her but not at all enchanted by the prospect
of S’s new love story. Lol presented a possibility I could not even
begin to imagine: that of willingly accepting the end of her story
and the beginning of her lover’s new affair. But this new affair
09
was also hers. She remained so immersed in the couple’s dance

that she could not envisage her imminent separation from them.
She was therefore willing to give up her love but only on the
condition of gaining it back differently, through the spectacle of
the dance. The night, however, had to end eventually, and when
dawn came and the orchestra finally left, the new couple –or
rather triangle –needed to wake up from their dream and regain
the reality that waited outside the ballroom. Only then did an
immense pain hit Lol, who started to shout, begging the couple
to remain, to continue dancing, to prolong their ecstatic night
together. And when they finally exited the ballroom and Lol’s
view, she collapsed.
I must admit I was rather relieved by this new turn of the
story. Or more exactly, I was reassured to see that Lol suffered
too, such that my own suffering found its justification. I actu-
ally lived a double life, since S didn’t seem to be aware of my
emotions, and I kept them to myself for fear of being rejected.
But the growing gap between my misery and his happiness, my
blind yearning for the old love and his eager search for a new
summer love, finally led me to explode. One day he phoned and
cheerfully recounted his recent activities, and I found myself
telling him stupid, hurtful things that made him hang up in
anger. And there I was, grasping the silent handset, all by myself
in the middle of Paris. What have I done? Why was I so cruel?
I couldn’t stand S’s happiness and was horrified by the thought
of seeing him with a new guy. I was compelled to reveal my
sorrow but had to admit that my love was lost and begin, at
last, to mourn it.
Lol, too, mourned and suffered for several weeks after
the night of the ball, until one evening she went outside and
started to follow the first man she saw on the street. The man
was curious about this beautiful, lost young woman, and when
he realized she was the famous Lol, whose story had quickly
spread in town, he phoned her mother to take her home. Soon
after, without even seeing her again, he asked for her hand in
marriage, and consequently, “[o]‌ne day in October Lol Stein
found herself married to Jean Bedford” (21).
How to understand this hasty marriage? Lol, for sure, neither
looked for nor found a new love story. On the contrary, it was
19
essential for her to follow the first man she saw and then pas-
sively marry him, as if to declare that from now on she would
split her objective life from her emotional life, a split that, as
in the case of Andersen’s “The Shadow,” soon dries both parts
up. She and her new husband move to a remote city, where she
has three children and leads a peaceful and monotonous life.
Ten eventless years pass, and then her husband is offered a job
back in S. Tahla. He hesitates, wondering if this return will
cause harm to Lol, but she convinces him that she has perfectly
recovered from the painful memories of the past.
Back in S. Tahla, in the same house where she grew up, every-
thing seems at first to repeat the same rigidity of Lol’s life so far,
but one day she notices a couple passing near the house, looking
at it attentively, and talking about the people who live there. She
doesn’t hear much of the conversation, only these words: “Dead
maybe” (Morte peut-être), words that could refer only to her.
The man then kisses the woman and they go away.
Lol is profoundly shaken by this seemingly trivial incident, so
much so that after ten years this sleeping beauty finally wakes
up. It’s time for her to go looking for the man and the woman
who approached her house and then disappeared. Who were
they? It would have been perfect if they were Michael and the
mysterious woman from the ball, but Duras is a very subtle
writer. The woman Lol saw was instead another “survivor”
of the ball, Tatiana, a friend who had stood next to her and
caressed her hand while she watched her fiancé dance with the
other woman; whereas the man, Tatiana’s lover, was someone
Lol had never seen before. What moves Lol so much, hence,
is not the possibility of finding her lost fiancé. Rather, in this
couple she recognizes a certain resemblance to Michael and
the older woman, a resemblance that is not physical but of a
different order. Lol needs to explore this strange similarity, this
substitution of the original couple. She, who never went out
beforehand, now takes to walking for hours in the streets of
S. Tahla, looking for couples in love, for lovers, for her lovers.
And she eventually finds them.
At this point in the story Lol’s adventures intrigued me to an
ever-greater extent. I realized she had something very important
to teach me regarding similarity and substitution, and I tried to
29
listen to her lesson. Although I was still rather depressed by my

own loss, I decided one evening that it was time for me to try to
move on and to go out, as Lol did, looking for a substitution for
S. After all, I lived in the Marais, the fashionable gay quarter of
Paris, filled with bars and guys waiting to replace S in my life.
And if Lol could look for a substitute, why shouldn’t I? After
much hesitation I gathered all the courage and energy I could
find and went out for the first time in quite a while. I wandered
in the alleys of the Marais, looking into all the cheerful bars,
without being able to make up my mind to enter one of them.
All men looked the same to me –uniform, banal, common –
whereas I was searching for someone special and unique,
someone whom, in my fantasy, I would recognize immediately.
Finally, after exhausting myself with walking and watching
the undifferentiated masses, I saw, inside a bar, a person who
immediately attracted my attention. There was something so
sweet, alive, and familiar about him; here is my man! I moved
closer and was on the verge of stepping in when suddenly, to my
great horror, I realized it was none other than S himself, who
was excitedly talking with another guy, both sharing the enthu-
siasm that only new couples know.
I froze in place and didn’t know what to do. S didn’t seem
to notice me, and after a couple of seconds that seemed an
eternity, I found myself literally running away from the place,
feeling incredibly miserable. My attempt to get out of my
house, out of myself, out of S, had failed, and I returned home
completely devastated. But luckily enough, I was not entirely
alone there; someone had faithfully waited for me in the
apartment, namely, Lol. And only then did I realize that I was
completely wrong.
I was wrong since I didn’t actually want to forget S. I was
looking for his substitute but wanted it to resemble him as much
as possible, to be S himself, which indeed it actually was. I was
wrong because rather than love S, I wanted to possess him. I was
not willing to set him free, to let him live his own independent
life. Rather, I planned to meet his imaginary double who would
somehow obey my wishes like a golem. But golems exist only in
fairy tales, and even there they finally rebel. Indeed, how strong
is our secret wish to possess and control our loved ones!
39
It was Lol who taught me how to resist this wish, and this
by finding real doubles: doubles and not copies. In one of her
strolls in S. Tahla, she suddenly notices what would soon be
her new summer love: the man she saw with Tatiana in front
of her house. She follows him for a long time, fascinated by
the way he looks at every single woman on the street, and this,
she thinks, not out of a sexist male attitude but, on the con-
trary, as an expression of his profound lack, the same lack she
recognized in her fiancé.
The new lover, like Michael, always demands more and is
never satisfied with only one person. For most of us this trait
may seem appalling, but for Lol it is instead a sign of intimate
acquaintance with multiplicity, and it is this sign that she had
been looking for ever since the ball. She follows this man,
Jacques,
imagining he was having for a few seconds each of the

women, then rejecting them, mourning each and every loss,
mourning one alone, the one who did not yet exist but
who, if she did, would be capable of making him, at the last
minute, stand up the woman among a thousand others who
was about to come, come toward Lol V. Stein, the woman
Lol was waiting for with him. (47–48)
What a beautiful, cruel, perverted, and accurate observa-

tion! Each time he looks at a woman the man experiences a
painful feeling of loss, not only because of the impossibility
of being with her but also, more profoundly, because there
exists no woman who can encompass all women in the world.
Such a woman would free him from the pain of choosing
only one of them, opening up an infinite field of possibil-
ities which would somehow also be actual. Could Lol be this
all-encompassing woman?
But Lol had learned her lesson. She had once made the mistake
of pretending to be this unique woman by becoming engaged to
Michael. Her mistake consisted of wishing him to actually reject
these thousand women rather than welcome them; of wishing
herself to supplant all other women rather than let them remain
in him, in herself, in the world. The night of the ball had opened
49
Lol’s eyes, and I tried to learn her difficult lesson: setting free the
loved ones precisely in order to love them.
Lol, then, continues to follow the man secretly, until she sees
the woman they were both waiting for, Tatiana, who joins her
lover and enters with him a notorious hotel-by-the-hour. Lol
recognizes this hotel, where she used to go with Michael, and
she now hides in the adjacent rye field to watch the lovers from
a distance. She thus reproduces the scene at the ball, where she
watched the couple dancing, but she also reproduces her love
affair with Michael. By doubling Michael with Jacques and her-
self with Tatiana, she manages not only to watch the lovers but
also to watch herself. She feels included in the scene rather than
a mere spectator, especially since she carefully chose a pair of
doubles who know that they are doubles:
They are neither happy nor unhappy. Their union is

constructed upon indifference [insensibilité], in a way which
is general and which they apprehend moment by moment,
a union from which all preference is excluded. They are
together, two trains which meet and pass, around them the
landscape, sensuous and lushly green, is the same, they see it,
they are not alone. One can come to terms with them. (51)
This is an extraordinary description of –what? Not of love,

but of a couple’s harmony that receives its force by avoiding
any cliché of finding “the second half,” the chosen person.
Both lovers know that there is no such thing as eternal love.
They agree to meet only for a short while, like two trains
passing each other, and then move on. This agreement, how-
ever, makes every encounter unique, since rather than a mon-
otonous journey on the same train, it becomes a brief meeting
of two passing trains from which they must derive the most
pleasure possible. They know that other trains await them, but
they are not in a hurry, since these other trains are not better
or worse, and the landscape around them is the same. They
know that everything is equal, which enables them both to be
together with each other and to be open to the outside. They
have an intimacy that allows room for others, for a thousand
other men and women who can share their affair, one of whom
59
is Lol. They keep the window open, as if to invite others to

come to terms with them, and it is through this window that
Lol shares their affair.
To join the couple, however, it is not enough for Lol to
watch them through the window. Throughout the novel, from
the famous ball until the very last lines, not only numerous
windows are opened and closed but also doors, giving various
types of access to people’s presumably private spheres. It is as if
Duras tried to respond to André Gide’s famous plea: “Families,
I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions
of happiness.”2 In this novel all homes, doors, and windows
are practically or potentially wide open, and no one possesses
anyone forever.
Whereas the learned man in Andersen’s story could only
observe the opposite house and never enter or touch it, Duras
rehabilitates the gaze’s capacity to touch and blurs the distinction
between the senses, alternating between windows (vision) and
doors (touch). And indeed, one of the problems of the ballroom
was that it had only doors and no windows, thus constituting
a too-isolated scene.3 Windows and doors, gazes and touches,
continuously change roles in the novel, and consequently, after
Lol spends the evening watching the lovers through their room’s
window, she decides to look for a door. She finds out Tatiana’s
address, but before she enters the house she observes it several
times from the outside, to familiarize herself with it. Then finally
comes the time to cross the threshold.
Tatiana and her husband live in a spacious house, but they
are not quite alone in it, having a regular visitor, a colleague
of the husband’s. This man is none other than Tatiana’s lover,
Jacques. Lol chooses a moment when all three are in the house
and rings the bell at the gate. Tatiana goes out to the terrace to
see who has come to visit without notice; she recognizes Lol and
cries, “Lola, is that really you?” She runs toward her old friend,
whom she has not seen for ten years, while her husband and her
lover go out too and watch the two women, who now approach
them. It is precisely at this moment that Lol’s gaze is put into
action, turning toward Jacques: “Lol, her head on Tatiana’s
shoulder, sees him: he almost lost his balance, he turned his head
away. She was not mistaken” (65).
69
Lol’s gaze found what it looked for, and it was so powerful

that it overwhelmed the man and made him turn his head
away. Like Michael ten years before, influenced by the mys-
terious woman at the ball, the new man is severely shaken
by the look of this woman, whom he sees for the first time,
without knowing she has already seen him. But the gaze alone
is not enough: not because it is inferior to the touch but because
the novel seeks to undermine the sharp distinction between the
senses and show their interdependence. It is only when Lol
comes close to the lover and is introduced to him that his real
identity is revealed both to Lol and to us, the readers. Who
is he? The novel takes an especially slow and choppy rhythm
when it comes to depict the dramatic moment when Lol finally
arrives at the terrace with Tatiana: “Arm in arm, they ascend
the terrace steps. Tatiana introduces Pierre Beugner, her hus-
band, to Lol, and Jacques Hold, a friend of theirs –the distance
is covered –me” (65).
What? The narrator is actually the lover? I remember how
amazed and puzzled I was to read these lines, which I had to read
over and over again to grasp them. The supposedly objective
narrator who has meticulously described Lol’s thoughts and
visions, who has entered into her head and seemed to totally
identify with her –this narrator is now revealed as Lol’s object
of love and Tatiana’s lover. The traditional neutrality of the
narrator’s position was suddenly broken and I was jolted by
it, as if it told me something extremely important about what
it means to truly narrate, to transgress the supposedly clear
limits between objectivity and subjectivity, adopting a gaze both
impartial and in love.
The narrator, Jacques, amazed me with his ability (through
Duras’s mediation) not only to enter into Lol’s past and liter-
ally attend the famous ball but also to see and describe her gaze
upon him. Contrary to Sartre’s theory, according to which one
can only see or be seen but not see oneself be seen, Jacques
succeeds in attaining access to Lol, to the unrevealed: the way
she looks at him. However, as he often declares, he invents these
thoughts and visions, which has led some critics to accuse him
(or, rather, Duras) of trying to know Lol better than she her-
self does.4 But rather than controlling and manipulating Lol,
79
I believe Jacques has learned from her the lesson of love, which
is the profound secret of the double. He thus gradually becomes
her double, identifying with her so much that he finally can see
and feel what she sees and feels.5
Jacques is thus not only Michael’s double but also Lol’s.
Contrary to most doppelgänger stories in nineteenth-century lit-
erature (contrary to what we saw, for example, in Maupassant,
Andersen, and others), the figure of the double in Duras is freed
from the well-defined, dual relationship of an original and a
double.6 It shows that once you start to double (rather than
split) yourself, you can no longer limit and fix this process to
only one figure. Learning the secret of the double opens you
up to multiplicity, and Lol, Jacques, and Tatiana acknowledge
the multitude of men and women who are hidden in every indi-
vidual person. They accept the need to switch trains and there-
fore reject any idea of possession, either of oneself or of the
other. Every double is both equal and unique, and the challenge
is to see this multiplicity within one person rather than frenetic-
ally run from one person to another.
But it takes Jacques quite some time to truly become Lol’s
double. Lol invites Tatiana, her husband, and Jacques to visit
her a few days later, for what would become a very dramatic
evening. All sorts of couples and triangles are formed and
deformed during that evening; all sorts of windows and doors
are opened and closed, serving as a means to watch, pene-
trate, and transform the other and oneself. At first, Tatiana
and Jacques want to hear about the famous ball and what
has remained of Lol’s love for Michael, but as the evening
progresses Jacques understands that the ball was not a simple
scene of betrayal. Rather, it was a scene in which “love had
changed hands, identity, one error had been exchanged for
another” (92).
The night of the ball was a scene of love, an initiation into
the secret of love, which is equally the secret of the double. Love
turns out to consist of a fundamental yet necessary error: namely,
to see the loved one, but also oneself, as a singular person rather
than a multiplicity or even an infinity of people. This is why,
when asked about Michael’s transformation during the ball,
Lol succinctly replies: “Seeing that he had changed, he had to
89
leave” (93). Love changes and transforms, forcing one to leave

first oneself and then, although this might take much longer, the
belief in well-defined boundaries and distinct identities. Indeed,
Michael had left not only himself but also Lol, but this in favor
of the indefinite number of women and men offered to him by
the mysterious woman. In other words, he merged the realm of
the “one” with the realm of the “many.”
This transformation had ravished Lol, because she witnessed
the magnificent infinity created before her eyes, but it had also
shocked her, since she saw her own emptiness, pretending to be
“one” and then remaining with nothing. This emptiness, how-
ever, is only the first step, since it allows other people, other
doubles, to come and populate her. For ten years Lol tried again
to pretend to be “one,” rigidly following the same routine, and
it is only when she saw Jacques and Tatiana near her house and
heard them say she was “dead maybe” that she woke up. She
understood that she might be dead inside, but this death, if fully
acknowledged, could be transformed from a self- destructive
force into a means to accommodate others. It is an emptiness
full of possibilities that Lol can now fill with doubles and allow
true love to take place.
This emptiness also explains Lol’s curious habit of lying
about both trivial and significant details regarding her love life.
She is lying not to hide some profound truth but to declare that
love necessarily involves a “retreat of clarity” (99), and Jacques
now wishes to join this retreat. He wishes to leave himself and
enter Lol’s emptiness: “I want to be a part of this lie which she
has forged. Let her bear me with her, […] let her consume and
crush me with the rest” (97).
As the evening unfolds, Jacques’s transformation becomes
manifest, and he reverts to speaking of himself in the third
person, as if he has become a stranger to himself. But he still
doesn’t know what is yet to come. Tatiana urges Lol to explain
her mysterious behavior, to tell the secret she hides, and Lol
finally confesses that she is filled with happiness because she met
someone a few days earlier. Tatiana and her husband are very
moved by this confession, but Jacques remains silent, becoming
extremely anxious. Is this “someone” Lol has met he himself or
is it someone else? Tatiana and her husband leave, but Jacques,
9
on edge, remains with Lol: “I feel I am going to fall. I can sense

my body growing weak, some sort of level is rising, drowning
the blood, my heart is of silt, goes soft, turns to sludge, is going
to sleep. Who could she have met in my place?” (101, my
emphasis).
Jacques knows that even if this someone is himself, it is not
precisely him. It is his double, someone who replaces him, in
all senses of the word. It is not a specific person, but the very
essence of the double; it is the need to constantly substitute one-
self, to be constantly replaced. Hence, even when Lol reassures
him that it was indeed he whom she met, his feeling of power-
lessness only increases, since he realizes the huge price this
love would require from him. Lol is uttering his name, Jacques
Hold, and coming from her lips he realizes for the first time
the emptiness behind his and any nominal identity: “Lol’s vir-
ginity uttering that name! Who, except her, Lol V. Stein, the so-
called Lol V. Stein, had noticed the inconsistency of the belief
in that person so named. […] She has plucked me, taken me
from the nest. For the first time my name, pronounced, names
nothing” (103).
Jacques discovers through Lol the nothing, his own nothing
as well as that of others, a nothing that is nonetheless filled and
covered with names, identities, persons, all simultaneously false
and true, a realization that brings him to the edge of madness. For
now he can be whoever he wishes to be or, more precisely, who-
ever Lol wishes him to be, becoming “the eternal Richardson”
who encompasses much more than only one person:
[W]e will be mingled with him, willy-nilly, all together, we

shall no longer be able to recognize one from the other, nei-
ther before, nor after, nor during, we shall lose sight of one
another, forget our names, in this way we shall die for having
forgotten –piece by piece, moment by moment, name by
name –death. (103)
The nothing is brought by death, but it is a death which is a part

of life itself and not external to it. Death stands at the basis of
every identity, making it a lie, which can be uncovered only by
love: love –the biggest lie of all, since there is no reason to love
01
one person rather than another. But love is also the biggest truth,
since it gives the lovers access to their nothingness; it enables
them to undergo a transformation, change trains, and realize
the possibility of comprising a thousand women and men inside
and outside them.
Despite his immense confusion, Jacques still tries to retain his
old ideas about love, thinking that Lol offers him a “normal”
relationship. He promises her that he will stop seeing Tatiana,
but his loving words, to his great surprise, make Lol beg him to
maintain his relationship with Tatiana and allow her to watch
them from a distance. At first, Jacques is horrified by this voy-
euristic desire, by this “pathological” inability to experience
straightforward love. Yet he does not condemn her, and this,
in my eyes, is what makes his love for Lol so extraordinary. He
truly loves her and therefore accepts her as she is, even though it
will mean being with her only through the mediation of Tatiana
and probably a thousand other women.
More than that, he understands that Lol wishes to love in a
way that involves not possession but participation. She chose
him precisely because he is capable of this kind of love, a cap-
acity she has found in his eyes, in his gaze upon other women.
He always wants more, always lacks something, recognizing,
like her, the impossibility of loving only one person. But Lol
wishes to realize this idea not only in theory but also in practice,
to double herself with another person, Tatiana, and watch her
make love with Jacques over and over again. Through this pro-
cess of identificatory participation Lol becomes both Jacques
and Tatiana, without claiming any real ownership upon their
love, knowing that ownership and love are contradictory terms.
Jacques is completely hers and completely free, and so are
Tatiana and, finally, Lol herself.
Yet, let us not forget: although the night of the ball taught
Lol the secret of the double, it remains a traumatizing secret.
Her choice to constitute a new love triangle therefore stems
not only from her initiation into the secret of love but also
from a compulsion to repeat. She wishes to reproduce the ball
over and over again to better understand it, resurrecting her
traumatic past, which still haunts her.7 Lol thus presents a mix-
ture of truth and confusion, lucidity and madness, and I believe
1
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I was so attached to her 20 years ago precisely because of this

mixture.
When I read the novel today, I still find myself identifying
with Lol, but also, and much more than before, with Jacques
Hold, who learns from her the secret of love. For even his sur-
name implies his capacity to contain: both this secret and Lol.
Indeed, it is easier to identify with Jacques since he cannot be
accused of being mentally ill. On the contrary, he is a member
of the medical profession, and yet he is not Lol’s doctor and has
no pretensions to cure her. He rather wishes to become her, even
if this would entail madness.8
What does Jacques find in Lol? He probably recognizes in
her a secret he already knows, a secret we all know, yet in a
different form. Jacques and Tatiana have arrived at the same
secret as Lol but through opposite paths: “they by doing, saying,
by trying and failing, by going away and coming back, by lying,
losing, winning, advancing, by coming back again, and she, Lol,
by doing nothing” (51–52). Jacques, like Tatiana, had changed
so many trains that he learned to recognize their similarity,
whereas Lol took only one train, Michael’s, but it was enough
for her to learn the lesson. Jacques is too full of experience,
whereas Lol is innocent and empty, and it is probably this emp-
tiness that allows him to truly fall in love with her. He can fill
her with himself, but also with a thousand other women (and
men) who will all be able to be her, double her.
This might sound narcissistic and manipulative, but Jacques
manages both to fill Lol and to be filled with her, with her emp-
tiness, such that their identities cease to be clearly distinguished.
Jacques willingly obeys every one of Lol’s strange wishes, even
when they threaten to destroy him. He agrees to meet Tatiana
in the hotel, and when he notices Lol hiding in the field outside,
he feels “something between terror and disbelief, horror and
pleasure” (110), but he is immediately calmed when his gaze
crosses Lol’s –they are together.
Unlike the gaze of Andersen’s learned man, Lol’s gaze is
participative, and she manages to be simultaneously in the
field outside the hotel and inside the hotel room. She is with
Jacques and Tatiana, allowing the game of doubles to take
place, Jacques becoming Lol, Tatiana becoming Lol, Jacques
2
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1
becoming Michael, and finally Tatiana becoming the mysterious

woman from the ball but also a thousand other women. Tatiana
becomes “a vaguely defined woman in the arms of a man” (113),
not in a reifying way but in a loving way, since both Tatiana
and Jacques are transformed into general and all-encompassing
human beings. Jacques is therefore surprised to hear himself
saying to Tatiana for the first time that he loves her, that she is
his life –words that are both true and false. For these words,
and Tatiana is quite aware of this, are not addressed to her or to
Lol or to any other specific woman. They are, rather, addressed
to an infinity of women (and men) hidden in one body that is in
the arms of another body, which hides in its turn an infinity of
men (and women).
How can the story further evolve after this explosion of iden-
tities? Well, it cannot; it can only repeat itself in variations, since
once you learn the secret of love, the secret of multiplicity, the
secret of the double(s), you can do nothing but endlessly reiterate
this process of transformation into nothingness and infinity.
The novel, however, goes on. Another intimate meeting of
Jacques and Lol takes place, then another dinner party, and finally
Lol and Jacques take a trip to the town where the ball took place
ten years earlier. They wish to revisit the crime scene, the primal
scene of Lol’s trauma, but when they enter the ballroom they dis-
cover nothing. For by that time the ball itself has become the
double of an infinite number of other balls and events. The trans-
formation is now complete: all events, men, and women become
doubles and substitutes for each other.
But what remains? After returning from the trip, Jacques goes
to meet Tatiana at the hotel while Lol waits for them in the rye
field, which gives us the impression that there is no way out, and
Lol, Jacques, and Tatiana are condemned to eternally repeat this
triangular scene; but surprisingly enough, Lol falls asleep, as if
to say she was tired of these trains and she now wished to get
off and perhaps simply walk home.
The end of the novel remains open, and in an earlier version
an ambulance comes to take Lol, who has become mad, away.9
Duras comments in an interview that Lol’s character is inspired
by a woman she met at a New Year’s Eve ball at a psychiatric
hospital. This woman amazed her with her empty rigidity,
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1
attempting so hard to imitate normality that she did not look

normal at all.10 My interpretation, however, is slightly different:
Lol imitates everyone since she is everyone, and yet she is no
one; she lets herself be filled with the nothingness we all share,
and Jacques, who loves her, acquiesces to becoming this empty
multiplicity, to fully realize for her, with her, the loving secret of
the double.
My movement from the summer of 1998 to that of 2018, when

I am writing these lines, is the movement from the “one” to
the “many.” The scene in which I saw S with his summer love,
together with my reading of the novel, was an initiation into the
secret of multiplicity. But to fully understand this secret I needed
to acknowledge first my inner emptiness, a difficult process
which took much longer than that incident at the bar. It was
easy to accuse S of avidity for other guys, but it was –and still
is –more painstaking to look inside and realize that the rigid
armor of a self-contained person, of a well-defined Eran, needed
to be given up to let others come in.
I do not believe, however, that it is possible or even desir-
able to fully give up myself. If there is something I did not quite
understand 20 years ago, and that only now I have begun to
grasp, it is that love does not entail a constant change of trains,
either inside or outside. I am not obliged to move hectically
from one person to another as Jacques and Tatiana used to do
before meeting Lol. True love means entering into the nothing-
ness of oneself and of the other, but nothingness means, not
total destruction, but rather a ravishing. I need to be carried
away to make room for and allow the inner and outer doubles
to show themselves. It is paradoxically by mourning the fantasy
of one beloved person that I may finally find him or her, together
with the thousand men and women we each contain.
Duras’s novel opens up new perspectives for understanding the

double: no longer as single but as multiple. To a large extent
this idea extends Levinas’s notion of the Other as infinite, but
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the double is not completely an Other. Rather, it is a meeting

point between internal and external multiplicity, which
culminates in love. The following theoretical intervention aims
to further elucidate the double as giving access to oneself and
to the Other, serving as a bridge between them. I will begin
with Kierkegaard’s theory of love and repetition, continue
with the multiplicity implied in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return,
and conclude with Deleuze’s notion of multiple doubles. As in
the previous chapters, my aim is not to grasp fully the different
theories at stake but rather to extract from them some elem-
ents that permit a better understanding of the double. More
particularly, I will attempt to discern a movement from the
“one” to the “many,” movement the double might block but
also launch, provided that it is no longer a single double but
multiple ones.
Kierkegaard: The Main Shoot Comes Last

In September 1840 the 27-year-old Søren Kierkegaard proposed
to Regine Olsen, with whom he had fallen in love three years
earlier. Regine willingly accepted his proposal, and yet, only
a year later, Kierkegaard broke their engagement, along with
Regine’s heart. The problem, he tried to explain, was that the
Idea of Olsen overshadowed her concrete existence. He there-
fore could not stand the prospect of marrying her, with the gray
and everyday existence it would imply.
Kierkegaard’s ending of the engagement bears many simi-
larities to Lol’s story, both presenting a brutally abandoned
woman. But whereas Michael broke off his engagement in
favor of a mysterious older woman, Kierkegaard did so in
favor of Regine herself –yet not the actual woman but her Idea.
This Idea, this all-encompassing ideal, played the same role
for Kierkegaard as the mysterious woman played for Michael,
standing as a mature incarnation of Femininity. Moreover,
Regine, like Lol, initially sank into despair, and she, too, even-
tually recovered and married another man. But unlike Lol, at
least as far as we know, she experienced many happy years of
marriage without any wish to repeat the heartbreaking scene
of abandonment.11
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This is why I will focus here not on Regine but on Kierkegaard,

who, moreover, thinks less about his abandoned fiancée and
more about himself.12 He is trying to understand the reasons
for his impaired capacity to love and the means to repair it.
Although Kierkegaard discusses this issue in various of his
writings, the most relevant text for our purposes is the 1843
book entitled Repetition,13 since it features the figure of the
double as a solution to the problem of love.
Duras has taught us that when it comes to love, the double
cannot be singular but must be plural or multiple. It is no longer
a question of a negative or a positive double that threatens
one’s narcissism and illusions of grandeur, as was the case
with Maupassant’s diarist and Andersen’s learned man. Rather,
multiple doubles now play an active role, serving as a bridge
between me and myself and me and the Other.
This active work of self-doubling is also at play in Kierkegaard,
who creates several doubles of himself in Repetition. First, he
publishes the text (as he does with other texts from the same
period) under a pseudonym, choosing to speak here in the
name of Constantine Constantinus, probably in an attempt
to introduce constancy and stability into the rather chaotic
world of the doubles. Second, the narrator meets a young man
who, exactly like Kierkegaard himself, falls so desperately in
love with a woman that this overwhelming love prevents him
from marrying her. And finally, as we will see later, the narrator
finds himself sinking into a world of not only one double but
multiple doubles, which he calls “shadow-existence.” An array
of doubles is thus gradually created with unclear boundaries
between author, narrator, and protagonists.
If the double is a repetition of oneself in space, Kierkegaard
links the double also to repetition in time, which stands at the
center of his text. The narrator attempts, in vain, to initiate the
young man into the secret of repetition to correct what he sees
as his fatal mistake: namely, “that he stood at the end instead
of at the beginning.”14 To explain this enigmatic assertion,
Kierkegaard contrasts recollection and repetition. In recollec-
tion, one thinks of the past, for instance the moment when one
fell in love, and is paralyzed by the impossibility of recapturing
this tremendous feeling, which overshadows the present. It is
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1
as if love began and ended almost at one and the same time,
since the initial shock of the first encounter is so strong that any
further contact can be only its pale and degraded image. One
therefore becomes melancholic, seeking, in vain, to regain the
happiness of the past.15
Contrary to melancholic recollection, repetition looks not at
the past but at the present moment, being assured of its sustain-
able existence since it will be repeated in the future: “genuine
repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is
possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes
him unhappy.”16 This sounds very promising, but how does one
“recollect forward,” engage in the happiness of repetition, and
overcome the painful loss of the past? The narrator himself is
dubitative whether such a happy repetition is possible. He there-
fore decides to perform an experiment and journeys to Berlin,
where he had experienced happy moments and where he now
tries to repeat his past deeds.
Alas, the experiment fails, since everywhere the narrator
goes in Berlin seems changed and lost forever. He thus declares
the inexistence of repetition, and yet, he knows that there is
one place in which repetition is still possible. This place is not
located in “real” life but in the arts, and especially in the the-
ater, where one goes “like a double to see and hear himself
and to split himself up into every possible variation of himself,
and nevertheless in such a way that every variation is still him-
self.”17 In a crucial paragraph he explains his theory of repeti-
tion, which goes back to a very young age when imagination
was the chief ruler, and the self was nothing but a multiplicity
of doubles:
In such a self-vision of the imagination, the individual is not

an actual shape but a shadow, or, more correctly, the actual
shape is invisibly present and therefore is not satisfied to cast
one shadow, but the individual has a variety of shadows,
all of which resemble him and which momentarily have
equal status as being himself. As yet the personality is not
discerned, and its energy is betokened only in the passion of
possibility, for the same thing happens in the spiritual life as
with many plants –the main shoot comes last.18
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In this early primitive state –a sort of Lacanian multiple-mirror

stage –numerous shadows are cast by the actual shape: numerous
and not one, since the actual shape is only invisibly present.
Neither this shape nor any one of the shadows can claim to be
truer than the other. Sooner or later one must overcome this
state and engage in actual life; but it is crucial to give full rein
to this free play of shadows and doubles before the main shoot
appears and declares the others obsolete and illusory.19 The arti-
ficial experience of theater thus resurrects a natural multiplicity
that had been active at an early age but was later repressed in
favor of a “main shoot,” that is, one possibility that has taken
over the others and has claimed to be the “true” self.
How does this solve the riddle of repetition? By remaining
long enough in the primitive state where the possible and
the actual are not yet distinguished from each other, one can
have an infinite number of experiences and take on an infinite
number of personalities both internal and external. When later
in life these events occur and these personalities are actualized,
they are perceived, not as completely new and shocking, but
as a repetition of something that had already been experienced
even if only in the imagination. In this way the anxiety of losing
the happiness of the moment is dramatically attenuated, since
the present is only a repetition of the past and as such can be
repeated in the future. Every event is a well-known visitor from
the past that may come and go without demanding to endure
eternally.
We now better understand what it means to repeat instead
of recollect: nothing is lost since everything has already been
lived in the “shadow-existence,” and these shadows docilely
wait for the right time to resurrect and repeat themselves.
The key to genuine repetition is thus, first, to experience the
shadow-existence long enough at a young age and, second, to
remain in touch with it, so that repetition can be an ongoing
process, from the past to the present and from the present to
the future.20
Kierkegaard therefore inverts the relationship between ori-
ginal and double. In the beginning the self was formless and
empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep; only shadows,
without a unifying source, existed. Then came a force that said,
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“Let there be Self,” making the main shoot appear, which now
dominates the shadowy creatures that preceded it. The shadow-
existence is the predecessor of the self, and as such it can be a
threat to the main shoot, making one create a narcissistic nega-
tive or positive double against which one fights in vain. But if
one manages to bypass narcissism, the shadow-existence may
become an opportunity, a playful state in which everything is
both potential and actual. To put it differently, as long as one
remains in a self-enclosed narcissism, each love –but also each
otherness –is understood to be a danger to the main shoot
and thus must be warded off; but if one overcomes the fear
of the outside and the demand for unicity, love and otherness
are perceived as an invitation to reactivate the shadow-existence
and repeat one of its possibilities.
This also reveals the true reason for Kierkegaard’s breaking
of his engagement: not merely out of fear of losing his ideal
conception of Regine Olsen but also and especially out of fear
of losing his own self-image. Love threatens only the narcissistic
main shoot, and after having succumbed to his own narcissism,
Kierkegaard attempts to fight and conquer it, even if it is too late.
As we have already seen in Rank and Freud, love necessitates a
certain loss of the self, and by seeing the self no longer as origin
but merely as a secondary phenomenon, Kierkegaard hopes he
can undo his loss, overcome his pretentious main shoot, and
access love. To do so, he not only develops a theory of love
based on repeating one’s doubles but also actively doubles him-
self first through Constantine, then through the young man, and
finally through various other doubles, as we will soon see. He is
therefore in a position similar to that of Jacques, who narrates
Lol’s deeds and gradually becomes her double precisely in order
to love her. By narrating, inventing, and creating one’s doubles,
a true way out of the self is opened up.21
However, these various doubles remain only literary creatures,
and the question is how to retrieve the shadow-existence not
only through writing but also in real time and real life. The
only actual place in Repetition that gives access to this state is
the theater, precisely because it is located somewhere between
reality and fantasy. Let us have a closer look at what happens
there to Constantine.
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Curiously, it is not the actors on the stage that permit him to

enter into the shadow-existence but the very architecture and
settings of the place, making him sink into what reminds us of
the dark il y a or the maternal womb:22 “Everywhere I looked
there was mainly emptiness. Before me the vast space of the the-
ater changed into the belly of the whale in which Jonah sat; the
noise in the gallery was like the motion of the monster’s vis-
cera.”23 In this huge uterus, this abject environment, the narrator
suddenly has a revelation, returning to the shadow-existence of
his childhood24 and meeting there a feminine entity that is nei-
ther his exact double nor the double of Regine, but a hybrid
creature, a combination of the two:
My unforgettable nursemaid, you fleeting nymph who lived

in the brook that ran past my father’s farm and always help-
fully shared our childish games […], you who did not age as
I grew older, you quiet nymph to whom I turned once again
[…]. You, my happier self, you fleeting life that lives in the
brook running past my father’s farm, where I lie stretched
out as if my body were an abandoned hiking stick, but I am
rescued and released in the plaintive purling! –Thus did
I lie in my theater box, discarded like a swimmer’s clothing,
stretched out by the stream of laughter and unrestraint and
applause that ceaselessly foamed by me.25
This is a most remarkable description of repetition involving the

figure of the double: a double of both Kierkegaard and Regine,
an imaginary, indefinite creature, who is both a nursemaid and
a nymph; a woman who is also a man and who never grows
old, reminding us of Andersen’s figure of Poetry. This creature
is actually not only one double but a multiplicity of possibilities
that can coexist in the shadow-existence without contradicting
each other. Together they constitute the “happier self” that can
appear only when the main shoot retreats and vanishes, even if
only for a short while.
This repetition, this retreat to the shadow-existence, is, how-
ever, only the first step. When Constantine wakes up from his
hallucination, he immediately notices another double, this time
a real one: a young woman who, like him, has returned to the
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theater over and over again. This is a woman with whom he

can fall in love because she, too, knows the secret of repetition.
But curiously enough, he does not approach her and is content
with looking at her. Constantine cannot transform potentiality
into actuality out of fear that it would ruin the charm of repeti-
tion. It is as if repetition existed for him only in well-protected
spheres such as books and theaters. So I repeat my question:
what about real life? Isn’t the shadow-existence supposed to
constantly accompany one in the background, so that when
one finally encounters the loved one, it is a reassuring repetition
rather than a frightful event?
If we return to Lol, we know that she, too, likes to watch
her doubles from afar, but not only this. The novel skillfully
plays between windows and doors, vision and touch, virtuality
and reality, each one of these poles depending on the other.26
In this way Lol encounters and invents various doubles, grad-
ually accessing a zone remindful of the shadow-existence.27
However, we should also recall that it is only through the
traumatic ball and her fiancé’s betrayal that Lol was initiated
into the secret of the double. It is this loss, this emptiness, that
allows her to connect with the shadow-existence and multiply
her doubles.
Now, Kierkegaard, too, lost his fiancée, even if it was he
himself who had caused this loss. The experience of loss, the
emptying of the self, damages the main shoot, but this damage
can also open up access to the shadow-existence. This is the key
to real love, combining loss and retrieval, painful recollection
and happy repetition: “anyone who has not experienced this
[melancholic] mood at the very beginning in his own love has
never loved. But he must have a second mood alongside it.”28
The entrance into the shadow-existence involves yearning for
the past, as we have seen in the description of the nursemaid,
and one must resist the temptation to sink into a nostalgic mood
that longs for the lost “happier self” without resurrecting and
repeating it in the present. This is also the key to overcoming
the impasse of Romanticism that locates happiness only in the
past: every encounter, new and overwhelming as it might seem,
only repeats a more primordial encounter, rooted in the depths
of childhood; but this repetition should enable one to reinforce
1
and vitalize one’s acts in the present rather than nostalgically

turn the gaze toward the past.
To accept the loss of the past and its promise for the pre-
sent, one needs to have a “second mood” alongside nostalgia
and melancholy, and Kierkegaard names it irony. This concept
stood at the center of his doctoral dissertation from 1841, which
focused on Socrates, the greatest ironist of all.29 Kierkegaard
defines irony as an “infinite absolute negativity,” an attitude in
which actuality loses its validity, including the actuality of the
ironic person herself.30 Irony negates, not this or that phenom-
enon, but actual existence as such, and this is why it is infinite.31
It opens up the infinity of possibilities, making one free, while
still holding one in the present. Irony doesn’t abandon actuality
altogether; rather, it destroys the burdening history that prevents
one from being truly free. The ironic person is therefore free
from recollection, which is the first condition for being able to
truly love according to Kierkegaard. But aren’t love and irony
two contradictory terms?
Whereas in his doctoral thesis, written before he ended his
engagement, irony remained a negative force, in Repetition
Kierkegaard adds to it a positive aspect. Irony becomes a force
that maintains the right balance between potentiality and
actuality. While practicing irony, the lover can transform recol-
lection into repetition and death into life.32 The actual moment
is too burdened by history, with all the losses and aches of
the past, and irony comes to free actuality from this limiting
aspect. Rather than remaining imprisoned in the past, one can
now regain the infinite field of possibilities. Irony is thus any-
thing but cynicism, as one might wrongly suppose, since its
negativity is creative and life-giving, removing from the present
only its unnecessary elements. Through irony one returns to the
shadow-existence to find there the right doubles to echo the
present moment and prolong it backward and forward in time.
Indeed, the present becomes only doubling and repetition, but
this new status makes it infinitely full.
To access irony, one needs elasticity and a “vow of silence,”33
since only in this way can one maintain the right distance
from the present, the main shoot, and discover its potential
doubles.34 The task of irony is extremely delicate, since rather
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1
than destroying the main shoot, it doubles it, making the

self and the loved one unstable and unactual and yet truer
and more real than before. To acquire irony, therefore, one
has to be very skillful, knowing how to maintain the equi-
librium between the main shoot and the shadow-existence,
not falling into either the rigidity of the first or the madness
of the second.35 One must have a stable and an elastic self,
such that negativity can be introduced without annihilating
it completely.
It is this combination that the narrator of Repetition does
not find in himself, and upon his return from Berlin he declares
that “repetition is too transcendent for me. I can circumnavi-
gate myself, but I cannot rise above myself. I cannot find the
Archimedean point.”36 Irony and repetition require a fixed
point from which to ascend, a main shoot both solid and fluid
that allows self-transcendence without losing oneself. But who
is capable of this task? If we examine how Lol repeats the
night of the ball, we are tempted to say that she is a true ironic.
But does she have a stable self or rather an empty one? Isn’t
she torn between the rigidity of her main shoot and the total
fluidity of the shadow-existence? It is hard to answer since
we never get Lol’s own point of view but rather her lover’s,
Jacques Hold, who identifies with her, doubles her, and invents
her thoughts. It is, finally, the man who is the real subject, even
in a novel written by a woman. But this man goes through
a process of feminization, accomplishing the vocation of
his surname as a caring person, a holder. He serves as Lol’s
nursemaid,37 a hybrid creature that is both male and female.38
Yet unlike Kierkegaard’s nursemaid, he is not an imaginary
entity but a real person (i.e., within the novel): he is a living
double. This makes Jacques a most interesting case, and prob-
ably the true ironic character of the novel, capable of love and
repetition.
Whereas Kierkegaard’s narrator remains a narcissistic spec-
tator, Jacques dares to act in the world, making love to Tatiana
and finally to Lol while seeing both as doubles of each other and
of himself. But Jacques is not a purely active agent but also a
passive observer, or more accurately, he manages to overcome the
dichotomy between vision and touch, theory and praxis. Indeed,
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1
Kierkegaard’s narrator relates the ability to repeat and main-

tain irony to the position of the observer, who circumnavigates
life, the world, oneself, and others. Moreover, whereas Lol has
mainly observed others and rarely herself, Jacques doesn’t set
clear boundaries between himself and Lol, which gives him an
exceptional capacity for sight.
Kierkegaard’s narrator adds a temporal aspect to observation,
since one should look not only at the present but also and espe-
cially at the future: “The person who has not circumnavigated
life before beginning to live will never live.”39 This kind of cir-
cumnavigation stems from the shadow- existence, where one
explores all possibilities –deeds, emotions, personalities –so
that once they are realized, they are not perceived as new but
as an ironic repetition. However, real observation cannot be
effected once and for all but, as irony, should become a constant
endeavor. Observation introduces ironic negativity and distance
into actuality and thus keeps in touch with the latent possibil-
ities it encompasses. Curiously, the narrator characterizes this
ability to observe as feminine in the sense that it lets the world
penetrate the observer:
So I am by nature: with the first shudder of presenti-

ment, my soul has simultaneously run through all the
consequences, which frequently take a long time to appear
in actuality. Presentiment’s concentration is never for-
gotten. I believe that an observer should be so constituted,
but if he is so constituted, he is also sure to suffer exceed-
ingly. The first moment may overwhelm him almost
to the point of swooning, but as he turns pale the idea
impregnates him, and from now on he has investigative
rapport with actuality.40
This description is remindful of Jacques’s transformation during

the first evening in Lol’s house, when he almost faints, grad-
ually understanding her, letting himself be impregnated by her,
be feminized by her, become her. Not only is the shock of love
an overwhelming emotion in the present and a circumnaviga-
tion of the future, but it is also and more than anything a trans-
formation of attitude. One is initiated into the secret of love,
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transcending the actuality of both the lover and the loved one
and attaining their Idea, that is, the realm of possibilities.
The Idea, however, must remain attached to actuality rather
than replace it. It is not a Platonic, bright Idea that overshadows
actuality, as it was for Andersen’s learned man. Rather, it is a
shadow-existence that encircles the main shoot to make it infin-
itely larger than it actually is. Every actuality, every self, and
every deed are only main shoots that hide a multiplicity of shoots
in time and space, and the difficult task of the ironic observer
is to discern this invisible multiplicity without detaching herself
from the visible actuality. She needs to use the negative force of
irony, to go through a certain loss of actuality, in order to under-
stand what hides beneath this loss, the deeper levels of actuality
that connect it to potentiality.
It is, therefore, extremely difficult to become a real observer,
and both Kierkegaard’s narrator, Constantine, and his double,
the young man, admit their failure to do so. In a series of letters
the young man sends to Constantine, he compares himself to
Job, the man who lost his family, his health, and his goods. After
his loss, Job sat among the ashes, the ruins of his former world,
scraping his skin with a piece of broken pottery and complaining
of his bad fortune, which he did not merit. The young man, too,
laments his loss, although it was brought about only by himself.
But rather than simply waiting to be healed and compensated
by God as Job finally was, the redemption he hopes for is curi-
ously not to regain love but to lose it completely. It is only when
he hears that the young woman has married that he can access
genuine repetition and recover from his sorrow: “I am myself
again. This ‘self’ that someone else would not pick up off the
street I have once again. The split that was in my being is healed;
I am unified again.”41
It is thus the complete loss of love that unifies the young man
with himself. Only by giving up actuality can he access repeti-
tion, returning to the shadow-existence and undoing the split
and the illusion of an isolated self. But again, the problem is
that the shadow-existence, irony, observation, and finally love
are not understood to be possible in real life. Only when he has
no actuality to long for can the young man regain the field of
possibilities, yet it is an arid and solitary one.
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It is no coincidence that Repetition ends with a letter from

Constantine to “the real reader of this book,” in which he
admits that the young man was his invention. This avowal
places the figure of the double in the realm of writing and litera-
ture, since only these may allow access to the shadow-existence
in a well-protected sphere.42 Observing oneself simultaneously
as actuality and possibility is too difficult in real life. Yet in a
last surprising act, the narrator affirms the primacy of literature
over life, placing himself as a “vanishing person” in relation to
the young man, his literary double, “just like a midwife in rela-
tion to the child she has delivered.”43
The act of creation and writing is a feminine act, referring to
the figure of Poetry as an agent of the shadow-existence that can
introduce negativity and irony into the present moment and make
it fuller, richer, more poetic. But this figure, as we have learned
from Andersen, should not be isolated from life. Poetry, litera-
ture, and writing are, rather, an invitation to discover otherness,
and this discovery cannot be confined to self-enclosed spheres.
Poetry is feminine but also masculine, receptive but also active,
observing but also touching. It is indeed tempting to become
one’s own midwife, narcissistically creating one’s doubles. The
challenge, however, is to deliver oneself through delivering
others and vice versa. Jacques might be only a literary figure,
but he serves as a model of this loving and observing irony that
actively produces doubles to access the Other. I propose now to
examine another such figure: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
Nietzsche: The Eternal Return of the Doubles

Lol spent ten years in a foreign town named U. Bridge before
she could go back to her hometown –ten years of insignificant
life before she could regain the strength to return to the cycle of
repetition. Zarathustra spent ten years in his cave on the moun-
tain –ten years of eventless life before he could go down to
the polis and incite people to acquire the secret of the Eternal
Return. These ten years were a necessary bridge for both Lol
and Zarathustra, but this bridge is only the beginning of the
road. From the moment he descends from his cave, Zarathustra
lives a nomadic life, wandering from town to town, through
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1
seas and forests, professing his wisdom to a rather reluctant

audience, until he finally returns to his cave. There, with only his
faithful animals by his side, he can confront the consequences
of the Eternal Return: not only in theory but in flesh and bone.
This experience is described in the famous chapter of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra entitled “The Convalescent,” which begins,
not surprisingly, with Zarathustra’s act of self- duplication:
“One morning not long after his return to his cave, Zarathustra
sprang from his bed like a madman, screamed with a terrifying
voice and behaved as though someone else were lying on his
bed, who did not want to get up.”44
Indeed, someone else was lying on his bed: namely,
Zarathustra’s self, or “main shoot,” that had been abandoned to
let him enter into the primordial zone where no stable self can
be discerned. This zone, which Kierkegaard names the shadow-
existence, is called by Nietzsche the Eternal Return, and we now
need to examine this term and the light it throws on the diverse
notions we have encountered so far.
The Eternal Return is evoked time and again by Zarathustra
throughout the book without giving many details except that
it is an “abysmal thought” (abgründliche Gedanken). Now,
abysmal, as abgründlich, means groundless or bottomless. It
is this lack of ground that equally characterizes Kierkegaard’s
shadow-existence, where no main shoot stands in the center
or at the bottom of infinite shadows and doubles. Giving
up the ground and jumping into this realm is therefore an
extremely frightening and dangerous experience, and this is why
Zarathustra, even after leaving his double in his bed, invests
huge effort in summoning what I characterize as the shadow-
existence: “Up, abysmal thought, out of my depths! I am your
rooster and dawn, you sleepy worm: up! Up!”45
The image of the worm reveals an abject aspect that remained
implicit in Kierkegaard and Duras. For in this zone of shadows
one loses the clear boundaries between the inside and the out-
side, revealing the interpenetration of the two. This revelation
is so overwhelming for Zarathustra that when the worm finally
appears, he cannot stand the sight of it and collapses: “Hail
to me! Here now! Give me your hand –ha! Let go! Haha! –
Nausea, nausea, nausea –oh no!”46
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Most commentators see nausea (Ekel) as a reaction to the

undesired aspect of the Eternal Return: if everything must repeat
itself over and over again, then not only the grandeur of humans
will repeat itself but also their pettiness, or “the small human
being” in Zarathustra’s words.47 But is it the pettiness of others
that scares Zarathustra or rather his own? It is precisely the lack
of distinction between the various categories –great and small,
me and the Other –that provokes Zarathustra’s horror: “Naked
I once saw them both, the greatest human and the smallest
human: all too similar to one another –all too human still even
the greatest one!”48
One needs to be naked to discover the similarity between
the great and the small, which are nothing but doubles of each
other. But once this secret is revealed, it is difficult to avoid it.
Even if one puts on expensive clothes, as Andersen’s shadow
did, one can no longer hide from oneself the abject matter of the
naked flesh, common to all humans.49 But whereas we have seen
so far that the abject is always related to states of indefiniteness
and unclear boundaries, Nietzsche introduces another dimen-
sion to it: repetition.50 To better understand the abject aspect of
repetition, I propose to further investigate the place of repetition
within the realm of the doubles.
In The Gay Science Nietzsche speaks of the Eternal Return
as a hypothetical gesture in which one accepts living one’s
life “once again and innumerable times again.”51 The Eternal
Return here is commonly understood as an affirmation of life
through the wish to repeat every moment of it over and over
forever.52 Zarathustra, however, is skeptical about the actual
recurrence of all things. After his attack of nausea, he falls ill
for seven days, an illness that is simultaneously a convalescence
after being initiated into the secret of the Eternal Return. At the
end of this week his animals sing for him the song of the Eternal
Return: “that all things recur eternally and we ourselves along
with them, and that we have already been here times eternal
and all things along with us.”53 But Zarathustra won’t listen,
knowing that the animals are wrong.
They are wrong in thinking that nothing present is lost
because it will return. Zarathustra, as well as Kierkegaard and
Lol, know that nothing present is lost precisely because it has
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already been lost. Everything has already happened, but not

actually; the present is therefore nothing but an actualization
of possibilities that were somehow lived, forgotten, and now
return. This may lead one to happiness but also to pain, since
it entails the primacy of potentiality over actuality and an
upheaval of our basic attachment to what exists. To accept the
Eternal Return is to give up any attempt to control and prolong
the concrete and actual world, subordinating it to an immense
field of possibilities.54
This explains the abject character of the Eternal Return: every
well-defined actuality, every person and thing, hides an immense
field of possibilities that do not know any boundary between
the I and the not-I, the beautiful and the ugly, the alive and the
dead. This is why the corpse, as Kristeva notes,55 provokes the
strongest feeling of abjection, showing the potential death and
decay that lies in each one of us and that will necessarily arrive
and repeat itself.
The abject aspect of repetition becomes clearer if we con-
sider the intimate link between the Eternal Return as repeti-
tion in time and the double as repetition in space. The positive
double is an incarnation in space of another I, standing for
something I am, I was, or I would like to be.56 This is a potential
I, a possibility of myself located in the past, the present, or the
future. This potential I is then conceived of as a threat by the
actual I and is therefore rejected, with the negative double being
the most radical denial of every potentiality whatsoever. Yet,
actuality that negates its roots in potentiality cannot endure, and
one ends up annihilating oneself, as happened to Maupassant’s
diarist. To accept the Eternal Return is to accept not only one
double but an infinite number of doubles, infinite possibilities of
the self, of the world, and of the Other, a most difficult task that
no human being can fully accomplish.
To conclude, there are two kinds of repetition: the first,
evoked by the animals, denies loss and wishes to retrieve and
master actuality. The second is the Eternal Return, in which
one sees actuality as only a repetition of potentiality. To access
the Eternal Return, one must acknowledge the arbitrariness
and transience of oneself and the world, which therefore lose
their clear boundaries. Only then can one open oneself up
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to the infinite possibilities that repeat themselves –not inde-

pendently of actuality but through it. In Nietzsche, however,
only one figure manages to fully access the Eternal Return: the
Overman. We, normal human beings, have too strong a ten-
dency to repeat the actuality of the past rather than its potenti-
ality. We are doing something, having something, and wanting
this something to repeat itself over and over again. Is this a
natural tendency? And how might it be transformed into the
Eternal Return?
The Eternal Return versus the Compulsion to Repeat

To address these questions, it will be useful to return to Freud
and his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in which he
discusses the place of repetition in human life. He enumerates
various cases of repetition in which one compulsively repeats a
painful and traumatic event from the past, and wonders how
this corresponds to the pleasure principle. He suggests that the
compulsion to repeat features a desperate attempt to master the
original traumatic event.57 However, he is not content with this
explanation, since repetition cannot always be related to a con-
crete trauma. He therefore takes a step further and proposes,
as we have already seen, that the appearance of life itself
constitutes the most primordial trauma, because of the unprece-
dented amount of energy it entails.
Freud conceives of energy as something wild and dangerous
that needs to be bound and discharged as soon as possible to
protect the organism from its devastating consequences. Every
new event necessitates repetitive attempts to bind it, but even if
one lives an eventless life, as Lol tried to do, one cannot avoid
the compulsion to repeat, since trauma is something structural
that is a part of what it means to be alive. The organic element in
every living creature wishes to return to an inorganic, peaceful
state, and at the origin of Life stands Death: for dust thou art,
and unto dust shalt thou return.58 This explains why Jacques can
understand Lol: indeed, he himself did not suffer from any con-
crete trauma, at least as far as we know; but he can understand
Lol’s trauma precisely as a human being who has an inherent
compulsion to repeat. Through his identification with Lol he
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finds an external expression of an internal, tacit, and invisible

traumatic element in himself, an element that has waited for
the right moment to burst out. But this external expression is
already a transformation of the compulsion to repeat, which,
through love, becomes something that not only lingers on the
past but also proceeds toward the future.
Indeed, Freud sees the compulsion to repeat as a manifest-
ation of the death drive, but he equally mentions a “good”
and pleasurable repetition, which characterizes the world of
the child. He gives the famous example of his grandson’s fort-
da game, in which he cheerfully threw a toy under his bed
and then pulled it back out, repeating and imitating according
to Freud the daily departure of the mother and transforming
it into a joyful game.59 Rather than mourning the loss, the
child uses it as a source of play, understanding that the dis-
appearance and reappearance of the toy (and of the mother)
have an equal value. This is why children love repetition
whereas adults despise it: adults are too fearful of the nega-
tivity revealed by repetition, but consequently, they end up
trapped in a compulsion to repeat, trying to grab something
rather than letting it go.
Two temporalities are thus always in conflict: the tempor-
ality of the adult, which is linear and objective, and for which
repetition replaces the impossible return; and that of the
infant, which is circular and subjective, with no clear distinc-
tion between potentiality and actuality.60 It is only within this
latter temporality that the Eternal Return is possible, since nega-
tivity is threatening only with regard to the actual world and
not the potential one. The Overman accepts negativity and thus
becomes a child again, always in the present and never in the
resentment of the lost past. He or she is free of the compulsion
to repeat precisely because they accept the Eternal Return as it
is: what returns, or what one returns to, is not only death, as
in Freud, but all possibilities that precede any actuality. These
possibilities are the shadows and doubles of actual life, and the
Overman manages not to prefer any one of them over the other
but to accept them as they come.
It is this notion of repetition that does full justice to the Eternal
Return presented in The Gay Science. To live every moment “once
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more and innumerable times more” could have meant a compul-

sion to repeat, but its profound meaning is to accept actuality in
its arbitrariness and hence not to favor any moment more than
another. Every moment, every actuality, is a main shoot, but this
shoot covers a plurality of shoots that are no less true, and one
should accept repeating any one of them precisely in order not to
compulsively repeat only one of them.
We may probably never fully attain the Eternal Return, but
we can embark on the road or the bridge that leads to it, a bridge
that love, among other forces, can construct. If we return to Lol,
we may note that she is already walking on this bridge. The
Eternal Return for her is the ability to resurrect her fiancé, but
not the actual one. It is the ability to understand that Michael
is an Idea that contains a thousand other men –and a thousand
other women. Jacques is one of these avatars, who is initiated,
in his turn, into the secret of repetition. After overcoming his
first nausea, Jacques manages to give up his main shoot and
resurrect all his doubles that have waited inside him. However,
and this is crucial, he cannot do this on his own. He is holding
Lol, but she is also holding and supporting him. Love must be
mutual, the lover allowing the other and him-or herself to give
up the repetition of the main shoot and return to the primordial
shadow-existence with all its doubles.
Whereas Nietzsche and Kierkegaard believe that the drama
of the double is internal, Lol teaches us that it must involve
real others. Indeed, Lol may lack a strong main shoot, and
she is therefore easily susceptible to the compulsion to repeat,
trying to compensate for her lack by rigidly repeating her habits
as she did for ten years in U. Bridge. But when she returns to
S. Tahla and finds Jacques, she manages to give up her compul-
sive repetition and, above all, to allow him to join her in the
shadow-existence and become someone else. What attracts her
to him, I propose, is that he incarnates the Kierkegaardian ideal
of a strong-enough-yet-not-too-strong main shoot. This allows
him to contain her but also lose himself in her, to become her,
become a woman, a thousand women who are all potential, all
lost, and therefore all retrieved, as long as they do not pretend to
be actual. They are all available for Jacques in the joint shadow-
existence he creates with Lol.
21
Deleuze’s Two Forms of Doubles

To conclude this chapter, I wish to briefly examine the notion
of the double as formulated by one of the most passionate
thinkers of multiplicity: Gilles Deleuze. “Multiplicity is the
affirmation of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being.”61
We are no longer stranger to these words, and yet what happens
to the main shoot or the narcissistic double in this process of
becoming? To better understand Deleuze’s enterprise and how
it differs from what I propose in this book, let us examine first
how he conceives of the Eternal Return and the role the double
plays in it.
Deleuze sees the Eternal Return as what brings one back
to innocence, which is the “truth of Multiplicity.”62 Innocence
consists of an equality of possibilities with no preference, expect-
ation, or guilt. These possibilities become actual when a die is
thrown over and over again, and the repetitive arbitrariness
of the result of the throw frees one from the anxiety and guilt
that stem from choosing. Zarathustra says that he loves the one
who is ashamed when the dice fall to his fortune,63 not because
this result is inferior to others, but because rejoicing at the
lowest number affirms the equality of all results. Zarathustra’s
attraction to decline results not from a strange perversion but
from the need to counterbalance the natural tendency to prefer
“success.” One should affirm all deeds whatsoever, and especially
those considered negative by society, since in this way the “main
shoot,” one’s self-image, has to give way to the multiplicity of
oneself and the world: “I love the one whose soul is overfull, so
that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things
become his going under.”64
This “going under” allows one to pass from the “one” to the
“many,” and yet it is extremely difficult to do so. Whereas inno-
cence is the primordial state of the human, as children’s playful
repetition proves, Deleuze stresses that the adult feels guilty
of actuality. This guilt stems from our belief in free will that
can control reality, yet free will is nothing but an illusion: “We
split the will in two, inventing a neutral subject endowed with
free will to which we give the capacity to act and refrain from
action.”65
3
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1
This split (dédoublement) is a bad duplication through the

invention of the modern subject, supposedly neutral and freely
deciding what to do and what not to do. It is a split between,
on the one hand, a multiplicity of desires with no actual objects
attached to them and, on the other hand, a rigid subject who
tries, in vain, to control itself and the world. We thus return
to the first chapter of the present book and the advent of the
double in an attempt to master reality. But this double is now
revealed to be none other than the modern subject itself (“main
shoot”), whereas the original is the indefinite multiplicity that
is still potential (“shadow-existence”). Moreover, this illusion
of free subjectivity can be revealed not only in extreme cases of
losing one’s mind but also in each act we do, since it is secretly
accompanied by anxiety and guilt: Was this the right thing to
do? And am I the one who has done it?
These feelings of guilt and anxiety lead to fatal consequences.
We become, in Deleuze’s words, “bad players,”66 focusing on
the content –the result of the throw –and not on the form –the
playful movement of the hand. We thus lose the joy of the play,
thinking that the result stems from our free action and trying to
block the way to other results. We become reactive, and instead
of concentrating on the act of throwing, we look at other results
and other players and try to defend ourselves from them. One
actuality triumphs and negates its rivals, but this triumph is very
short-lived and opens the way to negating existence as such. We
reject more and more parts of existence: everything that does
not fit our concrete actuality, everything that contradicts the
illusion of free will. But life, then, becomes ever more stifling,
with resentment, reactivity, guilt, and anxiety taking the place
of playful joy. The most dangerous consequence of this process
is nihilism, in the literal sense of the term, depriving existence
not only of large parts of the world but also of large parts of
ourselves, as happened to Maupassant’s diarist, who ended up
suiciding.
Deleuze proposes an original way to regain the Eternal Return:
namely, through being reactive to reactivity or nihilist toward
nihilism. To overcome narrow actuality and recover the multi-
plicity of possibilities, one should use the same nihilistic logic,
yet this time directed toward the pretentious modern subject
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and its supposedly free will. Only in this way can one access
the Eternal Return.67 In the same way that Kierkegaard’s irony
negates the negative aspects of actuality, its burdening history
that prevents one from being free, so Deleuze proposes directing
negativity toward one’s negative forces to free one from them.
In Kierkegaardian terms, the main shoot attacks the other,
potential shoots and pretends to be the only one. One there-
fore needs to use irony to fight the main shoot and open up
access to the shadow- existence. But Deleuze adds here an
important aspect: the main shoot is not peacefully and harmo-
niously created once and for all. It is, rather, the result of a con-
stant struggle between various shadows and shoots, responding
to various external and internal pressures. One constantly
eliminates possibilities, shadows, and shoots to protect the main
shoot, but this endless fight leaves one with an arid life that
wastes its energy on fighting the infinite richness of life rather
than joining it.
Against the rigid modern subject, the main shoot that is
nothing but a secondary double –reactive and nihilist toward
everything that transcends it –Deleuze proposes to recuperate
the multiplicity of the Eternal Return. This repetition in time
discovers a profound repetition in space, with multiple doubles,
multiple possibilities that are available in every given moment,
yet under the condition that we see them only as doubles of
each other, with no original. The shadow-existence is prior to
the main shoot, but this shadow-existence does not belong to
the past but exists and needs to be regained over and over in
the present.
Deleuze’s entire philosophy, with and without Guattari, is
devoted to promoting multiplicity and the force of becoming,
and this against a stiff notion of the subject and the familial
structures that enable it. This is a call to move from a narcis-
sistic and self-enclosed double to multiple doubles. But here
I locate the problem with Deleuze’s philosophy, for it does
not connect these two forms of doubles. Rather, it conceives
of them as two opposite options between which one needs
to choose: either a rigid structure of a modern subject or a
fluid apparatus of potentialities, with no bridge or spectrum
between them.
5
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1
Thus, in Deleuze and Guattari’s book on Kafka we find series

of doubles that overcome the tendency to direct desire toward
actual objects. Desire is a primordial power that precedes the
illusionary free will, and to regain its force one needs to under-
stand that objects are nothing but obstacles to desire, something
that blocks its force rather than letting it freely flow. By dupli-
cating and multiplying the subject, these obstacles are removed
since rather than a subject that desires an object, we now have
multiple subjects going in multiple directions without fixating
on any of them.68 But is this multiplication a literary technique
or something that can be achieved in real life?69
If we consider Duras, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, we can see
that in all three the “one” is not simply abandoned in favor of
the “many.” Rather, there is a tension and a movement between
these poles, tension and movement that are inherent parts of
human subjectivity. The question, therefore, is not how to get
rid of narcissism but how to introduce multiplicity into it.
Moreover, the impossibility of removing the narcissism of
the “one” stems not only from ontological and psychological
reasons but also from historical and sociological ones. The
culture of narcissism and individualism is well anchored in
the social and economic reality of late capitalism. Indeed, it is
tempting to consider the movement from the narcissistic double
to the multiple doubles as analogous to the movement from
Romanticism to Postmodernism. But this would be wrong not
only because Romanticism itself contains multiplicity, as we
have seen with Kierkegaard, but also because multiplicity is not
an ideal of its own.
Indeed, in Postmodernism multiplicity no longer poses a
problem, and yet it doesn’t merely serve as a means to open
oneself to alterity. Rather, consumerist society understands
multiplicity as a means of further possession and accumulation.
One wishes to possess multiple objects and goods, together
with multiple personas, as exemplified by Doppelgänger Week
on social-networking sites. It is as if the idea of the double no
longer scares us. But do we have access to the negativity that
underlies multiplicity or do we simply elude it? The double, even
in its multiple form, seems to have become a means to prolong
the narcissistic self. I therefore propose to reexamine in the next
6
2
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chapter the various forms of the double we have encountered so

far, situating them in a historical and social context.
Notes
1 Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, trans. Richard
Seaver (1964; New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). Hereafter, page
numbers will be given in parentheses in the text. I slightly modified
the translation in some places.
2 André Gide, Fruits of the Earth, trans. Dorothy Bussy (1897;
London: Penguin Books, 1988), 58. Translation modified.
3 In a short essay dedicated to the novel, Jacques Lacan discusses the
function of the gaze in the ball and its effects as the story unfolds.
See Jacques Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” in Writing and
Psychoanalysis: A Reader, ed. John Lechte (1965; London: Arnold,
1996), 136–142.
4 See, e.g., Laurie Edson, “Knowing Lol: Duras, Epistemology and
Gendered Mediation,” SubStance 21, no. 2 (1991): 17–31.
5 While studies of the figure of the double mainly focus on male
characters, Charlotte Goodman offers a notable examination of
this figure among female protagonists in Bildungsromane written
by women novelists. It is not another woman who plays the role
of the double in these works but rather the protagonist’s brother.
In this way, claims Goodman, the novelists wish to emphasize the
ways in which society limits the full development of women by
rigidly differentiating the gender roles. See Charlotte Goodman,
“The Lost Brother, the Twin: Women Novelists and the Male-
Female Double Bildungsroman,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 17,
no. 1 (1983): 28–43. Duras, on the other hand, not only challenges
the gender distinction but almost makes it obsolete with the help
of the double.
6 It is noteworthy that even in Romantic literature, especially in
E. T. A. Hoffmann, we sometimes see the proliferation of the dual
rivalry such that an array of doubles is gradually created.
7 For a detailed analysis of traumatic models in Duras, see Eran
Dorfman, “Duras vs. Duras: Traumatic Memory and the Question
of Deferred Retroaction,” in Democracy, Dialogue and Memory,
ed. Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz (London: Routledge,
2019), 140–152.
8 The affiliation of doubling with female madness can also be found
in André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja (trans. Richard Howard
[1928; New York: Grove Press, 1960]). However, while Jacques is
willing to become Lol at the price of insanity, Breton appropriates
Nadja’s madness, seeing in her an embodiment of Surrealism itself.
7
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1
Ultimately, Breton clearly delineates between himself and his muse,

merely staying in the role of an observer of the mad woman. Susan
Suleiman points out that the core difference between the two works
is derived from the gender politics of the authors. It is not Jacques
who writes the mad woman, but Duras who writes them both,
well aware of being a woman writer. See Susan R. Suleiman, “Love
Stories: Woman, Madness, and Narrative,” in Subversive Intent:
Gender, Politics, and Avant- Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
9 Cf. Annalisa Bertoni, “Finitude et infinitude dans la genèse du
Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” in Les Archives de Marguerite Duras,
ed. Sylvie Loignon (Grenoble: UGA Éditions, 2012), 213–225.
10 Marguerite Duras, “Marguerite Duras à propos du ‘Ravissement
de Lol V. Stein,’ ” interview by Pierre Dumayet, Lectures pour tous,
INA, 15 April 1964, video, 13:36, accessed 17 September 2019,
www.ina.fr/ v ideo/ I 04257861/ m arguerite- d uras- a - p ropos- d u-
ravissement-de-lol-v-video.html.
11 See James Daniel Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 8– 14. On Kierkegaard’s
notion of love, see Sharon Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
12 It is in Either/Or (1843), in a section entitled “Silhouettes,” that
Kierkegaard gives voice to various abandoned women. See Søren
Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pt. 1, vol. 3 of Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed.
and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1987), 165–216.
13 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition (1843), in Fear and Trembling /
Repetition, vol. 6 of Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1983), 125–231. Two famous books by Kierkegaard that
were written the same year try to propose solutions to the problem
of love: Fear and Trembling and Either/Or. See Søren Kierkegaard,
Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling /Repetition, 1–124. For
a detailed analysis of repetition in Kierkegaard, see Niels Nymann
Eriksen, Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition: A Reconstruction
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000). For an analysis of repetition
with regard to Paul de Man’s idea of repetition, see Arne Melberg,
“Repetition (In the Kierkegaardian Sense of the Term),” Diacritics
20, no. 3 (1990): 71–87.
14 Kierkegaard, Repetition, 137.
15 Julia Kristeva reads Duras in this melancholic vein, perceiving
Tatiana Karl as Lol’s double as a part of the latter’s nostalgic quest
for the archaic, death-bearing symbiosis with the mother. See Julia
Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon
S. Roudiez (1987; New York: Columbia University Press, 1989),
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219–259. I believe that Duras offers a Kierkegaardian repetition

rather than recollection and that we can find other examples that
better correspond to melancholic recollection. This is the case, for
instance, in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. The protagonist
of the film tries to retrieve his lost beloved one through a relation-
ship with her “double,” just to discover that he cannot save either
of them, repeating the same loss time and again.
17 Ibid., 154.
18 Ibid.
19 But this shadow-existence also demands satisfaction, and it is
never beneficial to a person if this does not have time to live
out its life, whereas on the other hand it is tragic or comic if
the individual makes the mistake of living out his life in it.
(Ibid., 154–155)
20 This element of repetition had a crucial influence on Heidegger, but

for him there is no such thing as “shadow-existence” but rather
an empty field of possibilities of which one is reminded through
death anxiety. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John
Macquarrie and Edward S. Robinson (1927; New York: Harper &
Row, 1962), 434–439.
21 It is not only Lol and Jacques who experience their love through
doubling: the text itself encompasses a chain of textual doubles.
The Vice-Consul, which was published two years after Lol,
brings back the character of the enigmatic woman from the ball,
Anne-Marie Stretter, who would appear once more as a main
character in the 1973 “texte-théâtre-film” India Song. Thus,
Duras introduces us not only to the doubling of her texts in the
different mediums of theater and cinema but also to an inter-
textuality within her oeuvre, which becomes her own shadow-
existence. See Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul, trans. Eileen
Ellenbogen (1966; New York: Pantheon, 1968); India Song, trans.
Barbara Bray (1973; New York: Grove Press, 1976). For further
examination of the intertextuality in Duras as a deconstructive
strategy, see Susan D. Cohen, Women and Discourse in the Fiction
of Marguerite Duras: Love, Legends, Language (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1993), 56–102.
22 This immersive aspect has been examined especially in relation
to cinema and the regression to an infantile state that it involves.
See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and
the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster,
and Alfred Guzzetti (1977; Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1982).
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24 Although it is not clear when exactly the shadow-existence takes

place, it certainly belongs to early childhood:
In the days of childhood, we had such enormous categories

that they now almost make us dizzy, we clipped out of a piece
of paper a man and a woman who were man and woman in
general in a more rigorous sense than Adam and Eve were.
(Ibid., 158)
25 Ibid., 166.
26 Hélène Cixous and Michel Foucault point out that the intertwining
of sight and touch is a major characteristic of Duras’s writing.
The gaze is interrupted time and again by the touch, which itself
produces the visible. Cixous treats Duras as a “blind” writer who
operates within her unconscious, until “[a]‌ll of a sudden she sees
[… a]nd it’s that ‘all of a sudden’ that allows her to write.” See
Hélène Cixous, “On Marguerite Duras, with Michel Foucault,” in
White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers,
trans. Suzanne Dow (1975; Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 164
(emphasis in the original).
27 Duras herself is no stranger to the idea of shadows. In an inter-
view included in the published edition of Le camion (The Lorry,
1977), Duras treats her writing as an implementation of pain,
as a process in which a “dark shadow” (ombre noir) within her
bursts onto the blank page. See Marguerite Duras, Le Camion:
Suivi de Entretien avec Michelle Porte (Paris: Éditions de Minuit,
1977), 124.
28 Duras, Le Camion, 137.
29 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual
Reference to Socrates, vol. 2 of Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1841; Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
30 Ibid., 259.
31 Ibid., 261.
33 Ibid., 145.
34 It is remarkable to note that these descriptions anticipate Edmund
Husserl’s concept of epoché –suspension of judgment –a term
borrowed from the ancient Greek Pyrrhonist school. The epoché
introduces negativity into reality in order to circumscribe the phe-
nomenon through the method of free variation and to discover its
full richness in time and space.
35 In Concept of Irony Kierkegaard defines irony itself as a “divine
madness” (261).
0
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37 We know that he is of the medical profession, but we never learn

whether he is a doctor or a nurse, Duras intentionally keeping this
ambiguity.
38 The gradual feminization of Jacques and his play with identities
echo Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory developed in
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993).
40 Ibid., 146.
41 Ibid., 220.
42 The narrator affirms that he depicted his double as a young poet
since “for him [as a poet] the repetition is the raising of his con-
sciousness to the second power” (ibid., 229).
43 Ibid., 230.
44 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del
Caro, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin (1883–1885;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 173.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 174.
47 Ibid., 176–177. See Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 10,
103, 109; Douglas Burnham and Martin Jesinghausen, Nietzsche’s
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 131.
48 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 177.
49 The same horrifying discovery is also the lot of the protagonist
of Sartre’s novel Nausea, who suddenly witnesses the world
transforming itself into a “black, knotty mass, entirely beastly,”
such that he himself becomes “soft, weak, obscene.” See Jean-Paul
Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (1938; New York: New
Directions, 1964), 127–128.
50 Kierkegaard, too, implicitly makes this link between the abject and
repetition. Contrary to the experience of the theater, where the
shadow-existence is described in a positive manner, the narrator
Constantine recounts a horrible experience in which everyone and
everything became one huge body. This happened during the long
ride from Copenhagen to Berlin in an express coach:
During those thirty-six hours, we six people sitting inside the

carriage were so worked together into one body that I got a
notion of what happened to the Wise Men of Gotham, who
after having sat together a long time could not recognize
their own legs. Hoping at least to remain a limb on a lesser
body, I chose a seat in the forward compartment. That was
1
3
a change. Everything, however, repeated itself. The postilion

blew his horn. I shut my eyes, surrendered to despair, and
thought the thoughts I usually think on such occasions: God
knows if you can endure it, if you actually will get to Berlin,
and in that case if you will ever be human again, able to dis-
engage yourself in the singleness of isolation, or if you will
carry a memory of your being a limb on a larger body.
(Kierkegaard, Repetition, 151)
However, on his return journey something changes, and it is pre-

cisely the abject character of the journey that permits a “good”
repetition:
Long live the stagecoach horn! It is the instrument for me for

many reasons, and chiefly because one can never be certain
of wheedling the same notes from this horn. A coach horn
has infinite possibilities, and the person who puts it to his
mouth and puts his wisdom into it can never be guilty of a
repetition.
(Ibid., 175)
51 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff

and Adrian Del Caro (1882; Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 194.
52 See Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms
with Eternal Recurrence (New York: Routledge, 2005), 6, 9; Eric
Oger, “The Eternal Return as Crucial Test,” Journal of Nietzsche
Studies 14 (1977): 13.
54 Winfried Menninghaus sees the Eternal Return as a “rumination”
that aims to transform disgust (Ekel) into pleasure: “This figure
of an immanent transformation of disgust into a ‘fountain of
pleasure’ is likewise the physiological cipher of eternal return. For
in both cases, pleasure in return is the prominent sign –rather: the
only one –of affirmation.” Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The
Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland
and Joel Golb (1999; Albany: State University of New York Press,
2003), 173.
55 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3–4.
56 According to Freud (“On Narcissism,” 90), narcissistic love is
directed to what one is, was, or would like to be or to someone
who was once a part of oneself. The advent of the double, as well
as of narcissistic love, is thus always related to a repetition in time.
57 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 15–16.
58 Ibid., 38.
2
3
1
59 Ibid., 4–5.
60 For an analysis of the two forms of repetition in Freud in comparison
to Kierkegaard, see Hans W. Loewald, “Some Considerations on
Repetition and Repetition Compulsion,” International Journal of
Psycho-analysis 52 (1971): 59–66.
61 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
(1962; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 24.
62 Ibid., 22.
64 Ibid.
65 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 23.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 68–71.
68 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature, trans. Dana Polan (1975; Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986), 53–63. See also their Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurky, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane (1972; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983); A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987).
69 Deleuze discusses this question in “Literature and Life,” focusing
on the therapeutic force of literature:
[T]he writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician,

the physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set
of symptoms whose illness merges with man. Literature then
appears as an enterprise of health.
(Gilles Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” trans.
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco,
Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 228)
31
4 Islands of Doubles
I am writing these lines in a Parisian café. It is summer but the

weather is gloomy. The busy street is filled with shops selling all
the goods that Western consumer culture can offer. It is the sales
period and the discount percentages are highlighted with bright
colors on the shop windows. Despite the hectic movement there
is a feeling of emptiness and the heart yearns for more. Why
have I come here? I had hoped to find the needed inspiration
for writing this book, but now the notorious Parisian spleen is
taking over.
Until the age of 21 Paris was only an abstract name for
me, not a real place. Then my sister proposed that we travel
there as tourists, and I agreed without any presentiment of the
implications that this visit would have for my life. We arrived at
our hotel late at night, and the next morning we studied a map
and planned a long itinerary to the Louvre by foot. After ten
minutes of walking along the grand boulevard we arrived at the
Place de la République. We continued along the wide sidewalks
when all of a sudden, I noticed inside a café two young men
engaged in an intense conversation. They were leaning toward
each other slightly, their gazes meeting at a point between them;
it was a fascinating tableau of intimacy, trust, and passion. I was
extremely touched by this scene, feeling an electric shock passing
all through my veins, transforming my body from within.
This incidental scene lasted only a few seconds, and although
I could have watched it forever, I soon had to hide my emotion
and go on with our touristy itinerary. And yet, this spectacle
determined much of my later life. I don’t recall in detail the rest
of that short visit to Paris, but after returning to Tel Aviv, I began
to study French; and when I finished my master’s degree, it was
4
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1
obvious to me that rather than applying for a PhD program at a

prestigious American university, as most of the good grads did,
I would study in Paris. I was constantly searching for one thing:
that lost moment of intimate contact that had marked me so
deeply.
Have I found it? Yes and no, as may be true for many fan-
tasies that one tries to fulfill in reality. But more than 20 years
after that primal scene, sitting in this Parisian café and looking
out at the gloomy street, I must admit the failure of my ori-
ginal search. For I was not looking for real and lasting contact
as a part of life but rather for an island that would protect me
from life. The two men I saw in the café were fantastic creatures
that overshadowed any real encounter I later had. I cannot even
recall their faces, only a frozen impression of their concentrated,
fixed gazes, similar to those I saw years later in Chris Marker’s
film La jetée.
What struck me so much about them was their intimate
contact that made them so real. They were both similar and
different, and it is this combination that made them so close and
yet respectful of the distance between them. They were doubles
of each other: not completely the same, not completely other, but
rather in between, and between them glowed a beautiful arch
that bridged them. I therefore wanted to know them, be them,
be their double, have them as my doubles. But whereas they
respected each other’s distance, I did not respect it, wishing to
smash it, get inside their image, and appropriate it. I transformed
them into my positive, narcissistic doubles, such that rather than
enriching my reality they overshadowed it, forming an isolated
zone to which I had no access.
This was the paradox: the fantasy of the real somehow
prevented me from accessing it, since every reality paled in com-
parison to this fantasy. This fantasy of the real –the real as
opposite to reality –is still at work in me right now, provoking
this feeling of spleen. The street, the shops, the people all betray
the real in both senses of the word “betray”: they reveal the real
while being untrue to it, or rather, they reveal the real as untrue
to the Idea of the real.
The real should be connected to reality while introducing a
certain fantasy into it, but if we remain satisfied with fantasy
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Islands of Doubles 135
alone, we end up with an artificial imitation of the real, detaching

it from reality. Rather than imitation, the real involves a doub-
ling: a combination of closeness and distance, similarity and
difference, the same combination the two men I saw managed
to maintain, respecting their inability to fully grasp each other.
It is this respect, this true notion of doubling, that disappears in
the detached fantasy of the real. How to overcome this fantasy?
The answer lies first and foremost in understanding that it is
not something I invented myself; rather, this fantasy is a cultural
construct, as the Parisian street in front of me so powerfully
illustrates.
Indeed, in the oeuvre of Marguerite Duras I found the real
precisely since her protagonists dare to connect with each other
on the basis of their lacks and absences, becoming respectful
doubles of each other. But the problem is that these protagonists
themselves might become an aesthetic fantasy. There is some-
thing very concentrated, pure, ideal in all their gazes and words.
This is the force of literature, but it is also what threatens to
detach it from contemporary reality in the age of late capitalism.
Let us imagine Lol today: What would she do? Would she
use social media to communicate her situation? Would she find
other models of identification in her favorite TV series? These
questions sound absurd since Duras’s characters remain atem-
poral, serving as ideal –too-ideal –figures of love. This is why
I turn now to the opposite pole of contemporary French litera-
ture, where we find the writings of Michel Houellebecq. This
author is haunted by the question of fantasy versus reality, con-
stantly alternating between his wish to love and his inability to
do so in the arid reality he depicts. Houellebecq’s protagonists
always feel they are deprived of something they locate in others,
toward whom they feel a mixture of hostility and attraction,
which we will need to decipher. These others, I propose, are
actually the protagonists’ doubles, becoming a constant source
of fantasy. But it is a destructive fantasy, since it prevents these
characters from understanding what real doubles mean.1
The double may provide access to reality, as we have seen in
the previous chapter, but it may also imprison one in a narcis-
sistic fantasy, as we have seen in the first two chapters of this
book. Houellebecq’s writings mostly feature the narcissistic type
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of doubles, but in one of his novels he manages to launch a

movement toward the other type. This novel is The Possibility
of an Island,2 which introduces a series of dystopic doubles,
teaching us something highly important about the place of the
double in contemporary Western society. As the title of the novel
suggests, these doubles all inhabit an island, an isolated sphere
protected from the sea of life. Perhaps by following the protag-
onist and his doubles, we may be able to understand the (im)
possibility of this island and learn how to jump into the deep
water of the real.
“I’ve always lived as though I were in a hotel” (277), deplores

Daniel, who is referred to in the novel as Daniel1, since in
fact a series of Daniels follows him after his death. The novel,
then, presents two worlds: our contemporary world, which is
the world of Daniel1, and the dystopic, futuristic world of the
neohumans. Every new incarnation of Daniel1 has only one
goal in life, which is to read his ancestor’s life story and write
a commentary on it. Other than that, they have nothing much
to do, being restricted to a limited space, protected by an elec-
tronic fence from the semi-inhabitable environment outside.
This residence used to be Daniel1’s mansion in the south of
Spain, and his incarnations lead lives of dull repetition there.
They confront no risk or adventure whatsoever and merely
wait for the arrival of the Future Ones, who will redeem them
by making the world real again: a home rather than a precar-
ious island.
To understand how the world has become so dull, we need
to go back to the life of Daniel1. He characterizes himself as a
clown –he is, in fact, a comedian –a vocation that was revealed
to him at the age of 17 while staying with his sister at an all-
inclusive resort. He quickly discovered that it was not really all-
inclusive, with all sorts of lacks and shortages bothering him so
much that he presented a humorous sketch about them to the
bored residents of the resort. From that moment on, Daniel1’s
principal occupation in life is to detect and describe the gap
between fantasy (the “all-inclusive”) and reality, trying to make
fun of it while it secretly gnaws at him from within. For the
existence of this gap doesn’t allow him to lead a happy life.
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Every human relationship bores him immediately since he sees,

like Andersen’s shadow, how ridiculous, pathetic, and miserable
the others are. The only attraction he finds in life is women, but
they must be eternally beautiful and young, a condition that
precludes any long-lasting relationship. He is twice divorced,
and his only consolation and true friend is his dog, Fox.
Fox, too, is reincarnated in the future world, and Daniel25,
a future incarnation of Daniel1, explains that its role is to
reintroduce love in a loveless world: “Through these dogs we
pay homage to love, and to its possibility. What is a dog but a
machine for loving?” (161). Only dogs love you independently
of how you look and what you do, being capable of uncon-
ditional love. But isn’t it so because they accept reality as it is
without fantasizing too much about it? The quest for the real
and the quest for love are intimately intertwined, and the impos-
sibility of one entails the impossibility of the other.
This double impossibility stands at the center of the novel,
which constantly moves between our world, entitled “the final
period,” and the future world, which is loveless and unreal. The
life story of Daniel1 is presented as an exemplary story of our
world, in which love is still possible. It is precisely when Daniel1
is convinced he will never find love that he meets Esther: a young,
beautiful, and sensual Spanish woman. He is so shaken by their
encounter that he writes her a love poem, the first poem he has
ever written (with rhyme and meter in the French original):
At heart I have always known

That I would find love
And that this would be
On the eve of my death.
I have always been confident,
I have not given up:
Long before your presence,
You were announced to me.
So you will be the one,
My real presence,
I will be in the joy
Of your nonfictional skin
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So soft to the caress,

So light and so fine,
Entity nondivine,
Animal of tenderness. (157)
According to the poem Esther can become an object of love only

because she is an incarnation of a spiritual fantasy. She had been
announced to Daniel1, and here he found her, the one and only:
the real presence and the presence of the real. This love comes
from above, as if from heaven, but once it is materialized on
earth it ceases to be purely divine or spiritual and becomes also
animal and carnal. It is not fictional or imaginary but real: the
real, reconnecting fantasy with reality such that it transcends
itself without losing itself. Yet the real comes with a high price,
and the love of his life also announces to Daniel1 the approach
of his death.
Why is this so? Daniel1 is 47 when he meets the 22-year-
old Esther. But the age gap is not the main thing here. There
is an inherent link in the novel between love and death, inde-
pendently of how old you or your loved one are. Thus, imme-
diately upon falling in love with Esther, Daniel1 understands
that: “love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is
oppressed, tortured, and finally killed by the other, who in
his or her turn oppresses, tortures, and kills without having
evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with
complete indifference; that’s what men, normally, call
love” (159).
This cruel and pessimistic description of love stems in part
from Daniel1’s anxiety about the inevitable decline of his body.
Yet why cannot love be mutual, with the two bodies growing old
together? “Unrequited love is a hemorrhage,” declares Daniel1,
but he basically means that all love, sooner or later, becomes
unrequited. In the same way that his former wife ceased to
attract him when she aged, so now he is convinced that the
young Esther, sooner or later, will find his body repulsive and
abandon him for a younger and more attractive man. It is only
a question of time until one of the partners wishes to leave.
Real love necessitates eternity and stability, characteristics that
are missing in our world, where each day the body deteriorates
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toward its final destruction. Therefore, the body, while it is

young and alive, always strives for more:
It’s not weariness that puts an end to love, or rather it’s a

weariness that is born of impatience, of the impatience of
bodies who know they are condemned and want to live, who
want, in the lapse of time granted them, to not pass up any
chance, to miss no possibility, who want to use to the utmost
that limited, declining, and mediocre lifetime that is theirs,
and who consequently cannot love anyone, as all others
appear limited, declining, and mediocre to them. (264)
So even if the two bodies are still young, they cannot be satis-
fied with each other since they know how transient life is, and
they will sooner or later turn toward other attractive bodies to
maximize their gains while it is still possible. In other words, as
we have seen in the previous chapter, every actuality hides mul-
tiple possibilities to be activated. But rather than understanding
the potentiality behind a concrete actuality, a person who may
encompass a thousand other persons, Daniel1 feels the urge to
turn toward more and more actualities, more and more women.
Multiplicity thus becomes an endless, tiresome, and desperate
race for more.
Let us recall that Michael’s and Jacques’s bodies, too, always
strived for more, and yet, the latter managed to concentrate his
overwhelming desire on Lol, precisely because he doubled her
with Tatiana and a thousand other women. His desire led him
to a concentrated multiplicity (although shared between Lol’s
and Tatiana’s bodies), “changing trains” no longer actually but
potentially. For Daniel1, however, this strategy is not possible.
Although he is aware of multiplicity, he attributes it to the field
of actuality alone, that is, to the concrete, seemingly available
bodies that he sees around him.
Everything for him therefore remains on the surface of
actuality, within the shallow here and now. He does not wish
to explore the possible behind the actual but the contrary: to
make every possibility actual or “real.” Consequently, he is torn
between a too-rigid reality (beautiful bodies to be actualized
immediately with no depth) and a too-rigid fantasy (a beautiful
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body that would remain so forever), confusingly moving from

one to the other. He demands a guarantee that the train he takes
will remain bright and shining forever,3 but since decline and
death are part of life, he soon comes to hate it altogether.
The Possibility of an Island, however, is critical about
Daniel1’s position and proposes another solution to the problem
of multiplicity, presented through the future incarnations.
These are created by the members of a sect envisaging a future
world with no death or bodily decline. In the meantime, they
take the DNA of every member, so that they can be resurrected
one day, when death is conquered. The headquarters of this
sect are located in the island of Lanzarote,4 a paradise in the
Canaries, where Daniel1 arrives almost accidently, but he soon
becomes very tempted by the promise of eternal life and joins
the sect.
It takes hundreds of years, but the day of resurrection
finally arrives. The future Daniels are genetic doubles of their
ancestor, but this is only a temporary solution since they still
must eventually die, with every incarnation succeeding the
former. Death is not yet overcome, and only the Future Ones
will be immortal. Until then, the Daniels only comment on
the life story of their ancestor in an attempt to preserve his
heritage and prepare the way for the future immortal Daniel.
The Daniels remain isolated on their “island” and communi-
cate with the incarnations of other people only through the
Internet, with no bodily contact with another creature save for
Fox, the dog. Consequently, no human love or real experience
is possible in this world.
Although the Daniels live in a world apparently very different
from that of their ancestor, they share with him the incapacity to
love. Indeed, Daniel1 thinks he loves Esther, but this supposed
love is confronted with his wish to possess her, a wish that cannot
be fulfilled and brings him to despair when she announces that
she is moving to New York. Moreover, her farewell party soon
turns into a wild orgy lasting two whole days, with everyone
having fun except for Daniel1. He drinks heavily and watches
with envy, sadness, and disgust the free love –or, rather, sex –
between the young men and women. He finally realizes, with
huge pain, that Esther is incapable of granting him love:
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Esther did not like love, she did not want to be in love,
she refused this feeling of exclusivity, of dependence, and
her whole generation refused it with her. I was wandering
among them like some kind of prehistoric monster with my
romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains. […] They
had succeeded, after decades of conditioning and effort,
[…] they had reached their goal: at no moment in their lives
would they ever know love. They were free. (294–295)
Daniel1 condemns Esther, but it is he, rather than she, who is

obsessed with the decline of his body, of any body, and with
the alleged impossibility of love it entails. However, Esther
and Daniel1 share one thing in common –namely, their strong
attachment to actuality. Both wish to fully exploit the present
moment, but Esther does not attempt to freeze it like Daniel1,
who confuses actuality with his fantasy of eternal love.
At the end of the party Daniel1 is drunk and devastated,
knowing that he will never see Esther again. He decides to
devote himself to the writing of his life story, and then one
morning, during his daily walk with Fox –the only creature
he loves in the world and that loves him back –the dog sud-
denly disappears. After a few hours of searching, he finds the
body of the dog, who has been run over by a truck, probably
driven by one of the locals, who did it to express hatred for the
unsympathetic Daniel1 and his wealth. Daniel1’s heart is now
completely broken. He finishes the writing of his life story, and
having nothing to do and no one to love, he commits suicide.
We are approaching the end of the novel but the story is
not yet over. Something is still missing; something still needs
to be understood. This is the task of Daniel25, the reader of
the story who is therefore not only Daniel1’s double but also
ours, the readers. And indeed, like us, Daniel25 feels an ever-
growing suffocation and malaise as the story evolves, and when
he comes to the sad end of his ancestor, he cannot remain indif-
ferent. He wishes to better grasp what had made him commit
suicide and what role love had played in it, and he therefore
contacts Esther31, the incarnation of the original Esther. After
some reluctance she finally confides that Daniel1 never lost his
love for her ancestor. Until his very last day he kept sending
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her letters, to which, however, she never replied. And more

strangely, the last letter he wrote to her, just before his suicide,
was a happy one, declaring his absolute belief in their love and
the possibility of resuming it. He concluded this letter with the
following love poem:
My life, my life, my very old one

My first badly healed desire,
My first crippled love,
You had to return.
It was necessary to know
What is best in our lives,
When two bodies play at happiness,
Unite, reborn without end.
Entered into complete dependency,
I know the trembling of being,
The hesitation to disappear,
Sunlight upon the forest’s edge
And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant;
There exists in the midst of time
The possibility of an island.
(377–378)
This poem stands in contrast to the first one Daniel1 wrote to

Esther. Whereas the earlier poem depicts her as a fantasy coming
into life, his last poem is more realistic. The first strophe is a call
from Daniel1 to his life, his desire (vœu, literally “wish”), and
his love, three entities that, for him, become one. Indeed, it is
described as crippled, almost gone, yet suddenly it returns. This
return involves a learning of what is best in life, revealed in the
second strophe as a repetitive encounter of two bodies that unite
and are reborn endlessly. But this implies that these bodies accept
death and resurrection, a negative aspect that comes in the third
strophe and underscores the fragility of the process, the constant
threat and temptation of disappearance. If one accepts this threat
and this temptation without succumbing to them completely, a
new possibility can open up: the possibility of an island.
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Only at the end of his life can Daniel1 transform Esther,

presented in the first poem as a gift from heaven, into something
real, but this reality is conquered through the recognition of its
ephemeral nature. In other words, the island of love becomes
a real possibility only if one gives up the attempt to possess it,
daring to leave it and come back to it, physically and mentally.
It is as if the all-inclusive resort from the beginning of the novel
was revisited, but this time it really does include everything, pre-
cisely because it does not pretend to be eternal. A different kind
of eternity sees the day, cyclical and nonlinear: the eternity of
disappearance and reappearance, death and life, negativity and
positivity, nourishing each other as in the fort-da game.
Perhaps only after the writing of this poem could Daniel1
commit suicide, accepting to disappear in order to reappear
through his incarnations, which would continue the cycle of
love. But the neohumans do not know what love is, which
explains the tremendous effect the poem has on them: not only
on Daniel25 but also on one of his closest Internet friends,
Marie23. She decides to leave her residence in New York and
wander out in the wild, giving up her “island” to look for a
possibility of another island, namely Lanzarote, the source of
the sect. She hopes to find there a community of neohumans
who would nonetheless be real. “I don’t know exactly what
awaits me,” she says to Daniel25 before she leaves, “but
I know that I need to live more” (333).
After some hesitation, Daniel25 decides to do the same,
hoping they will meet in Lanzarote. He, too, feels that life should
be fuller, that the lack of desire experienced in his residence does
not reflect real life. He takes Fox, unlocks the gate, and for the
first time in his life goes out into the open, looking for the possi-
bility of a new island. He soon discovers what nature is, getting
bitten by insects, feeling cold at night, smelling his own sweaty
body, helping Fox to get rid of a tick. But despite –or because
of –these brutal inconveniences, he feels happy at last, and even
close to loving, the closest he has ever been.
This happiness and this love are not directed to someone in
particular but to the World, to Life, to Being: “I had attained
innocence, in an absolute and nonconflictual state, I no longer
had any plan, nor any objective, and my individuality dissolved
41
into an indefinite series of days; I was happy” (392). Daniel25

seems to have learned the lesson of Lol, Zarathustra, and Deleuze.
He gives up his individuality, the accumulative and linear entity
which we call a “person,” in favor of the cyclic repetition of day
and night. He realizes, in both senses of the term, the last poem
of Daniel1, but he takes a step further, understanding that every-
thing and everyone are doubles of each other, and one cannot be
preferred over another. He therefore no longer desires to meet
Marie23 in Lanzarote, as he had planned before, and is con-
tent with happiness and love that are global, nonindividualized,
nonlinear.
These feelings are put, however, to the test when he encounters
the savages, the “normal” humans who have survived the cata-
strophic conditions of the dystopic environment. They treat
Daniel25 as a god, but he remains indifferent to their admir-
ation, and when they offer him a woman, he rejects her as an
abject body. But then comes their revenge. In an uncanny repe-
tition of the story of his ancestor, Daniel25 loses track of Fox
and soon finds out that he was killed by the jealous, hateful wild
humans.
Only now, after he has lost everything he was attached to, can
Daniel25 declare: “I now knew with certainty that I had known
love, because I knew suffering” (408). Strangely enough, he does
not mourn Fox but simply accepts the dog’s loss as a fact, since
his love for the dog, too, is unpossessive, consenting to the neces-
sity of death. When he gets close to the ocean and the supposed
target of his journey, Lanzarote, he suddenly finds a letter in
a bottle signed by Marie23, which recounts her journey from
New York to that area. Attached to the letter is a page from
Aristophanes’s myth of love as it appears in Plato’s Symposium.
According to this famous myth, love consists of finding the
missing half, the chosen person who complements and makes
one whole again. One should therefore look for this missing half,
reunite with it, and together attain an “all-inclusive” reality. But
Daniel25, unlike his ancestor, vehemently rejects this notion of
love, affirming that it “had intoxicated Western mankind, then
mankind as a whole” (417). In other words, he gives up love for
one person in favor of love for all persons, or for no person –
which is basically the same thing for him.
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When Daniel25 sees in the ocean a path of rocks that prob-

ably leads to Lanzarote he doesn’t even consider taking it. He
prefers to remain in the monotonous sandy environment near
the sea, with no animal or vegetal life around him. The only
entertainment this area offers is numerous shallow excavations
in the sand that remind him of little graves, and he makes a habit
of randomly picking one of them and lying inside it for hours.
His neohuman body can survive in these conditions for several
decades, and he therefore does not need anyone or anything
in particular. He simply wishes to remain where he is: “I was
making my way toward a simple nothingness, a pure absence of
content” (419–420).
Daniel25 thus finally ends his journey and probably his life in
a routine similar to the one he left behind in his residence with
no human contact; and yet, he is out there, in the real world. He
has no goal. He has given up the possibility of being reincarnated
time and again until the supposed Future Ones come. He has no
hope for a future eternity, and it is precisely this departure from
“the cycle of rebirths and deaths” (419) that allows him to join
the eternity of the present with its cycle of day and night. He
lives in the midst of eternity, repeating over and over again the
very same day. But what about love and happiness? These are
the final, puzzling lines of the novel:
Happiness was not a possible horizon. The world had

betrayed. My body belonged to me for only a brief lapse of
time; I would never reach the goal I had been set. The future
was empty; it was the mountain. My dreams were populated
with emotional presences. I was, I was no longer. Life was
real. (423)
Although Daneil25 dared to jump into the world and accept

its essential decline and negativity, it seems that he himself has
finally become part of this negativity, with no positive way out.
And still, he concludes that life was now real. What is so real
about this empty life?
The novel ends here but it is for us, the readers, to con-
tinue. We should listen to its message, namely, that the real
can be achieved only through the annihilation of both fantasy
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and actuality. These realms should turn into nothingness, as

happened to Daniel25, but this is only the first necessary step
leading to their reconnection. An example may help us grasp
this idea.
I remember how moved I was as a child –and still am today –
when I read and watched The Neverending Story.5 The book
and film feature the magic realm of Fantasia, which is gradually
being destroyed by the Nothing. This destruction stems from
the split between fantasy and reality, and it can be undone only
by Bastian, the child who is reading the story and is summoned
into it. Bastian is so used to escaping his painful reality through
books that he is terrified to realize that he is a real character in
the story. He vehemently refuses to enter into Fantasia, since this
would threaten the clear boundaries he has firmly set between
fantasy and reality, books and life. The Nothing therefore con-
tinues to destroy Fantasia until the very last moment when
Bastian accepts that he must enter into the book to regain both
his actual life and his fantasy, two realms that are no longer
separated from each other.
The destruction of Fantasia was therefore a necessary step
in regaining it through and with reality. In the same way, The
Possibility of an Island stresses the need to dive into the deep
water of the Nothing and give up fantasy just to retrieve it,
albeit in a different guise. Daniel25’s life before and after his
departure might seem objectively identical, but a vast ocean
separates them. Outside the residence, he is no longer chained
to the past and the future but is fully in the present. Even if the
words “love” and “happiness” are not part of this life, it is not
so much because he is unloving or unhappy; rather, these terms
are too charged with the old fantasy promoted by Aristophanes,
the fantasy of the all-inclusive life and self, whereas Daniel25
wishes to live something much less pretentious that would
nonetheless be his.
This is Daniel25’s lesson to us, his readers who live hundreds
of years before him, in an age of disenchantment. We, like him,
might feel the world has betrayed us, yet this betrayal comes
from the fantasy of an all-inclusive life. Daniel25, as a double
who knows he is a double, understands the equality of all things.
Indeed, he takes this equality to the extreme, annihilating any
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positive actuality and remaining in an empty world of pure poten-

tiality. But perhaps he has no other choice, since he must overcome
the powerful fantasy of his ancestor, who had been poisoned by
shallow promises of love and happiness. The question is whether
one can give up fantasy without abandoning it altogether. Is
Daniel25’s new routine the end of his life or only a phase in his
quest for the real?
To return to the beginning of this chapter and the fantasy of

the intimate gaze, I do not believe I need to give up this fan-
tasy altogether. Rather, I wish to challenge the idea, first, that
this gaze belongs to someone in particular and, second, that
finding this someone would guarantee the permanent presence
of this gaze in my life. “I was, I was no longer,” says Daniel25,
accepting the precariousness of identity and presence. This is the
only way to avoid falling into the trap of possessive and accu-
mulative “love.” But the temptation to possess, if not in reality
then in fantasy, is ever so strong, and the lesson of Lol, Jacques,
Kierkegaard, Zarathustra, Deleuze, and Daniel25 cannot be
simply understood and acquired for good. Daniel25 chose to
avoid the temptation through an abstract love in an isolated
existence, but neither this choice nor Lol’s would fit most of us.
The challenge we face is how to maintain a relationship with the
Other and with oneself that is both abstract and real, universal
and particular, multiple and unique. And the figure that can help
us confront this challenge is the double as the agent of equality
and multiplicity.
The equality and multiplicity introduced by the double may,
moreover, enable a contact with fantasy that would no longer
contradict the real but rather complement it. The real is a mix-
ture of potentiality and actuality, whereas fantasy adheres to a
rigid set of possibilities that any realization would only damage.
The double calls one to annihilate this fantasy, yet it can even-
tually be retrieved at the price of letting go of the main shoot:
a frozen actuality that is nourished by a frozen fantasy. Fantasy
itself is thus transformed from singular to multiple, becoming a
part of actuality, a shadow-existence that accompanies any light
to make it brighter but also to enable its change. For it is not
one person whom I love but a thousand persons, and it is not
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I who loves but a thousand I’s. A difficult lesson to learn that the
double teaches us, over and over again.
The end of The Possibility of an Island has left us with perplexing

insights. On the one hand, love has been revealed as a matter of
multiplicity and potentiality, but on the other hand, Daniel25
could realize this love only by giving up all human relationships.
He started his life imprisoned in his residence and escaped it
only to arrive at another isolated environment, satisfied with
the wide yet empty ocean in front of him. The aim of this theor-
etical intervention is to understand how the double may enable
human relationships outside protected islands; or more exactly
how it may connect these different islands, realizing the double’s
vocation as a bridge between the inside and the outside, the
I and the not-I.
In the previous chapter such a possibility has been found in
the work of Marguerite Duras, with Lol’s initiation into the
secret of love which is also the secret of the double. Whereas Lol
is on the verge of madness, having a too-fragile self or “main
shoot,” Jacques, through the force of love, seems to become her
double while maintaining his subjectivity. Lol and Jacques thus
serve as models of love, yet they remain ideal figures, purified of
any historical or social factors. This is why I have turned in this
chapter to Houellebecq, who vividly presents the difficulty, in
consumer society, of giving up the I in favor of multiple doubles.
Whereas in Romantic and gothic literature the double comes
as a surprise, an unexpected danger that appears out of the
blue to the self-assured protagonist, Houellebecq’s characters
are shaken and destabilized from the outset. When they meet
their doubles, they are thus merely surprised, as if they already
knew they were not sovereign and unique subjects in the world.
It is no longer a matter of an original suddenly threatened by
its double, since this “original” recognizes that he or she has
nothing original about them.
In this sense, Daniel1’s futuristic doubles only emphasize
what their ancestor already knows. This knowledge gives him
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the force of irony and observation, which are the preliminary

conditions for love according to Kierkegaard. However, irony
and observation should be inherent parts of action, negating
actuality while remaining attached to it. Daniel1’s irony and
observation, on the other hand, are an expression of his dis-
appointment with the fantasy of the “all-inclusive.” This fan-
tasy overshadows every actual event or encounter in his life,
such that rather than seeing the different possibilities that are
encompassed within actuality, he develops a binary vision of
“all or nothing.” Even if actuality does match his fantasy on
rare occasions, as happened with Esther, he believes that the
gap between the two will soon show itself again, with time’s
degrading effects either on him or on his lover.
Daniel1 thus doesn’t have access to the field of potentiality,
to the shadow-existence which precedes actuality. He sees only
the main shoot of himself and of others and compares it to an
ideal main shoot, similarly to what happens in the mirror stage
according to Lacan. Indeed, Daniel1 is quite aware that he is not
this image, but rather than giving up the imaginary realm and
accessing the symbolic order, he desperately clings to the ideal
image of others as if to save him from himself and from the devas-
tating effects of time. The mirror image is projected upon others
who are supposed to fulfill his fantasy, and since they cannot do
so for long, his irony becomes nothing but a form of nihilism.
It is against this nihilism that Nietzsche has warned us; yet
this nihilism characterizes not Daniel1 alone but an entire cul-
ture nourished by impossible fantasies. Daniel1’s doubles, on the
other hand, have no fantasies, but also no desire, passion, or love,
and even Daniel25 finally gives up any hope of achieving love in
real life. Fantasy is a necessary element in human relationships
as long as it is attached to actuality and nourishes it, connecting
it to the shadow-existence rather than blocking access to it.
How can fantasy be transformed to become a connective force?
And what role does the double play in this transformation?
The Double in the Age of Simulacra

To answer these questions, it will be helpful to draw on a socio-
logical theory that discusses the role of fantasy in contemporary
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Western society. Such a theory is developed by Jean Baudrillard,

who claims in his Simulacra and Simulation (1981) that the real
in our days has disappeared in favor of its imitation in the form
of simulacra.6 Simulacra, however, have no real origin and are
merely empty imitations of a fantasized real. The most famous
example Baudrillard gives of this empty imitation is Disneyland,
constituting a space that Baudrillard characterizes as “hyper-
real,” that is, a fantasy of a real that does not exist.
As a matter of fact, we have already encountered in the pre-
sent book various simulacra. Lacan’s mirror stage, for example,
is a simulacrum of a stable identity. The mirror image is an imi-
tation not simply of the body but of an aspect of completeness
and perfection that does not exist in reality. The baby identifies
with this image, naively thinking that it is herself, but the image
is only a mirage, thus making her, through this identification,
a double with no original. The imaginary realm, as conceived
by Lacan, consists of simulacra, fantasies of wholeness that
provoke aggression and hostility because of the inevitable
gap between these fantasies and the partial and disappointing
reality.7 However, one cannot get rid of this imaginary in favor
of “real,” “direct,” or “authentic” life. Rather, one has to enter
into the symbolic order to introduce multiplicity and partiality
into the static images, understanding the emptiness on the basis
of simulacra. Thus, emptiness would no longer be distressing
and paralyzing but would instead open up the possibility of
creating and re-creating one’s identity and world in a constant
movement of becoming.8
Simulacra have always played a crucial role in the constitution
of subjects and objects on both the personal and the social level,
providing ideals that should be overcome to a certain degree
without disappearing completely. But according to Baudrillard,
what has changed in our times is the faith or, rather, lack of
faith in simulacra: one now knows that they have no original,
no reference, no reality behind them. And yet, this disbelief,
rather than freeing one from the authority of the simulacra, only
makes one desperately look for “better” simulacra. Daniel1’s
frenetic search for beautiful bodies is a powerful example of
this paradoxical situation. He knows that each desired body is
a pure fantasy, an ephemeral envelope, but he never thinks to
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look at what exists below or beyond the skin. No depth is to be

found in his world, and the knowledge of their emptiness only
brings the expiration date of simulacra closer in time, with every
damage to the body, every crack in the skin, experienced as an
unbearable threat to the wholeness of the simulacrum, bringing
one down to the abyss of nothingness.
In the age of simulacra one thus secretly or overtly knows
that there are only doubles with no origin, and yet this does
not open up any free play of multiple and multiplied doubles.
Indeed, in the previous chapter we have seen several examples of
such doubles, with Duras, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Deleuze9
presenting a multiplicity that puts into play potentiality and
actuality. Baudrillard and Houellebecq, however, introduce a
new type of multiplicity, which no longer connects potentiality
with actuality but focuses only on actuality, moving from one
body to another precisely because they are all equal and there-
fore exchangeable.10
The relation between multiplicity and unicity is thus reversed:
whereas the shadow- existence is the multiple basis for the
unique main shoot, giving it mobility and capacity for internal
change, in the age of simulacra actuality loses its attachment
to the potential field from which it stemmed. Unicity now
precedes multiplicity, yet it is a unicity with no depth, and every
main shoot is perceived and measured according to a singular
fantasmatic image to which it conforms or not. And since most
of the main shoots cannot correspond to this image, and surely
not for a long time, they must be quickly given up and replaced
inside and outside oneself. One changes not only lovers but also
personalities, looks, and styles, constituting a multiplicity of
main shoots with no shadow or background.
Daniel1’s characterization of Esther and her generation can
be better understood in this context: they know their bodies are
ephemeral, and since they don’t find any origin or depth behind
them, there is no reason for them to stick to only one body and
one person. Daniel1’s desire to possess Esther does not stem
from very different motives: since she perfectly fits his rigid idea
of a “woman,” he immediately falls in love with her. But for how
long? Even if she had not left him, sooner or later she would
have gotten old, and then this “love” would have been revealed
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as nothing but the wish to realize and possess fantasy, the simu-
lacrum of Esther rather than the real Esther.
Certainly, at the end of his life, Daniel1 understands the vanity
of his fantasy and the need to accept negativity precisely in order
to access love. But this understanding leads him to suicide, that
is, to the complete destruction of his main shoot, hoping that his
future doubles will do what he did not manage to. Daniel25, on
the other hand, seems to have escaped the world of simulacra.
He goes out into the open and enters the real, where everything
stands as it is, with no reference to fantasy. He discovers nature
and learns to love it, but when he is offered a human woman,
he is appalled. The abject aspect of this feminine body, her smell
and look, makes her too Other for him –but also too real. He
prefers to remain with his cloned dog Fox, and when it is killed,
he gives up human and neohuman society altogether. He thus
ends up repeating the same annihilating act of his ancestor,
except that rather than suiciding, he empties his world of both
actuality and possibility. Daniel25, after all, is only the double
of Daniel1, and since Daniel1 was the double of nothing, a pure
simulacrum, Daniel25 doesn’t find any shadow-existence, any
other possibilities to return to and to actualize.
This pessimistic end, however, should not discourage us. As
we saw in Chapter 1, all stories of the double are of the genre of
the Bildungsroman, that is, formation or coming-of-age stories.
Therefore, although the protagonist of the novel is unable to
understand the message of the double and ends up committing
suicide, we, the readers, are the true target of the story.
When I taught The Possibility of an Island in a seminar, one
of the students burst into tears while expressing her disappoint-
ment with the end chosen by Daniel25. She said that she had
had such high expectations for him; she really wanted him
to overcome the destiny of his ancestor and join Marie23 in
Lanzarote. In short, she wanted a happy ending for the novel,
but when you are a double of a double of nothing, no happy
ending is possible. More than that, the term “happy ending”
itself is a simulacrum, a fantasy that has no equivalent in reality.
The question is less what Daniel25 could have done than what
this novel initiates us into. If Lol has initiated us into the secret
of the loving doubles, here we are initiated into the secret of the
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empty doubles: the double as a simulacrum. But how to com-

bine and relate these two secrets, these two types of double?
The answer may be found in Baudrillard’s early work that
attempts to find an alternative regime to that of simulacra. The
solution for him is to be found in tribal or traditional soci-
eties that knew how to maintain a symbolic exchange, that is,
relationships based on valuable, rather than empty, subjects
and objects. The key for symbolic exchange is the circula-
tion of gifts and countergifts, that is, the ability to give and
even squander rather than accumulate. The most extravagant
example of carefree squandering is the potlatch, a gift-giving
feast held by indigenous societies in North America. Whereas
in Western societies competition between people is a matter
of accumulating goods, and the most powerful person is the
richest one, tribal societies present a different form of compe-
tition: one indeed accumulates goods, but only to give them
away as gifts, thus publicly establishing the power and prestige
of the gift giver.11
This exchange system does not dissimulate negativity but on
the contrary attributes to it a central role. One gives up what
was laboriously gained in order to access what it signifies: power
and prestige that are no longer linear and accumulative but cir-
cular and playful, since the gift is balanced by a countergift. It is
a kind of fort-da game, rejoicing in both the loss and the gain of
goods, in a repetitive and cyclic regime that is alien to the pro-
gressive one we know in our economy.
To use negativity as a motivating force, one needs to acknow-
ledge death, and it is here that the double enters into the scene.12
As we have seen in Rank, the double can be used to help one
confront the danger of death, and it is only in modernity that it
has become the messenger of death. Baudrillard further develops
this idea, tracing three phases in the evolution of the double: in
the first, attributed to tribal or traditional societies, the double
serves as a means to negotiate with death, giving up one’s unicity
in favor of eternity. One is not unique but rather continues a
chain of doubles that will proceed after one’s death, such that
the body might be born, grow old, and die, but the spirit will
be sustained through an archetype with which one identifies as
one’s double.13 One is both this archetype and different from
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it, which makes it a double: not completely I, not completely

Other, but a bridge between the two.
Yet modernity brings with it a second form of double, whose
role has changed “from a subtle exchange of death with the
Other into the eternity of the Same.”14 The soul is no longer
located outside, in the double with which one negotiates, but
inside, and one now pretends to be unique and autonomous,
which transforms the double into a haunting figure, announ-
cing one’s death but also more broadly one’s dependence on the
Other, as we have seen in the first chapter.15
To explain this idea, Baudrillard refers to Chamisso’s story
Peter Schlemihl, about the man who lost his shadow. Peter
Schlemihl does not simply lose his shadow but actually sells it,
getting rid of it as what stands for his body and the death it
would bring. This, Baudrillard claims, is not some esoteric story
but a fable of our times: “We have all lost our real shadows, we
no longer speak to them, and our bodies have left with them.
To lose one’s shadow is already to forget one’s body.”16 With the
shadow and the body we have also lost death, as the negativity
that allows symbolic exchange. The problem is that we cannot
simply “lose” our bodies or death, and they soon reappear as a
remainder or residue, as we have also seen in “The Shadow.” Not
only our capitalist economy but also our systems of communi-
cation attempt to get rid of the remainder, of what threatens
wholeness and control, but the repressed must return. We try
to adopt a skin “as closed and as smooth as possible, faultless,
without orifice and ‘lacking’ nothing,” but we sooner or later
face again our “porous skin, full of holes and orifices.”17
In Houellebecq’s terms, the “all inclusive” promised by the
simulacrum of the perfect body sooner or later reveals that some-
thing is missing. Rather than acknowledging this negativity to
allow a symbolic exchange, it is soon covered up with another
false positivity, another simulacrum in an endless, frustrating
process. To confront this frustration, we have now arrived at
the verge of a third type of double, namely, the clone. Cloning
creates an exact copy by using one’s DNA, and as such, the
clone has no remainder: it is a pure copy. Baudrillard compares
its logic to that of cancer, which reproduces the same cell over
and over again in a way that will eventually destroy the system
51
since this logic does not recognize any limits, any need to cease
reproduction.18
In this sense, Daniel25 gives a surprising answer to Baudrillard.
He, who is a clone of Daniel1, does not hesitate to acknowledge
the remainder, the gap between him and his ancestor, and he
moreover decides to cease the chain of cloning. He does not
wish to repeat the same life, and therefore, he goes out into the
open, regains his body, and dares to confront death and finitude
with no hope of redemption or reincarnation. It is thus para-
doxically in the most extreme phase of the double, the double
as an exact copy, that a resistance to this logic is established,
together with a return to negativity as a constitutive power.
Whereas Daniel1 looks for the real and encounters nothing
but ephemeral simulacra, Daniel25 is born already as a simu-
lacrum and therefore does not even know what the real could
look like until he reads his ancestor’s last poem. This poem
allows him to encounter negativity and, with it, potentiality,
that is, other possibilities of himself that transcend his repeti-
tive actuality. He thereby enters into a sort of shadow-existence,
but it is a rather empty one, since Daniel25 is a simulacrum of
a simulacrum. His rebellion can be only partial, revealing the
nothingness, death, and negativity that are hidden behind every
simulacrum. But how to continue from here?
The Community of Doubles

It is here that Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher who
invested much effort in understanding the relationship between
potentiality and actuality, may come to our aid. In The Coming
Community (1990) he claims that the apparent superficiality of
the spectacle (but also of simulacra)19 is not a catastrophe but
rather an opportunity to arrive at a radically different social
structure.20 Agamben gives the example of an old French com-
mercial for Dim Stocking, in which several women dance in a
choreography both harmonious and uncanny. The reason for
this strangeness, he explains, is that every woman was originally
filmed separately and only then was juxtaposed to the others
in the edited version. The result is an image of women who are
both detached and collective, unique and archetypal, concrete
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and unreal. Their individuality is subjected to the group, but the

group in its turn is subjected to their individuality as an arche-
type of something in common. This group is thus a group of
doubles: women with no individual depth, constituting together
a simulacrum of femininity.21
The age of simulacra and spectacle thus gives up any pre-
tension of depth, betraying from the outset the status of each
person as a double or simulacrum. Whereas for Baudrillard this
is something to deplore, for Agamben this is, rather, an oppor-
tunity: it is the first step in understanding that every singularity
today –as it has always been –is what he calls “whatever singu-
larity.”22 We are all “whatever singularities” in the sense that no
specific trait defines us and distinguishes us from others except
our “suchness,” that is, our way of being which cannot be
described in language or image. No objective quality separates
us from each other, and the commercial of Dim Stocking
only reveals our common sameness, the same sameness that
characterizes all Daniels, but also all Lols, Michaels, Jacques,
and Regines.
This does not mean that differences between individuals do
not exist, only that they are secondary to a primordial simi-
larity: we are all doubles of each other to begin with. This
idea might sound abstract or contrary to common sense, but
Agamben gives a more intuitive example when he says that we
cannot make a list of the qualities of a person we love. If we try
to do so, it is probably because we do not love them anymore;
what makes us love someone is not this or that but their manner
of being such as they are.23
The key to attaining this community to come, this commu-
nity of whatever singularities, is to reveal the similarity behind
difference, which goes hand in hand with Agamben’s idea of
potentiality as a potentiality not to do. Whereas we tend to
see potentiality as what should yet be actualized, Agamben
rehabilitates a potentiality that resists actuality, and as such it
is common to us all.24 The literary figure that incarnates this
potentiality is Bartleby the Scrivener, the man who replied, “I
would prefer not to,” whenever he was asked to do something.25
In The Coming Community Agamben brings together a
variety of such figures or characters, all carrying with them a
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fundamental negativity that the age of simulacra attempts to hide

while actually betraying. In the coming community imagined by
Agamben this negativity brings about a common suchness, a
common “whatever,” an element of doubling which gives sin-
gularity a foundation rather than threatening it. Daniel25 could
therefore be an honorable member of this coming community,
and yet it is not clear how to pass from the negative potentiality,
the potentiality to not be, to a positive potentiality, one that is a
part of actuality and not simply its negation.
To understand this, we need to better discern the movement
from the single, narcissistic double to the multiplicity of doubles.
Indeed, Agamben does not simply skip the sociological analysis
of the narcissistic age of the simulacra and spectacle. On the
contrary, he proposes to use the fragility and superficiality of
the spectacle in order to break the narcissistic mirror image and,
then, on the basis of its infinite shatters, rebuild a community
based on multiplicity and duplicity. But The Possibility of an
Island shows us that the individualism and narcissism of our
times make us only further cling to simulacra, fragile as they
might be. How, then, to use this fragility to break the mirror or
at least turn it upside down?
The Two Narcissisms

This question brings us back to the beginning of the book and
the refusal of Maupassant’s diarist to see the radical negativity
and alterity upon which his self- image is based. I analyzed
this refusal as stemming from his profound narcissism, and
we are now in a position to nuance this analysis with the help
of the different doubles and concepts we have encountered in
these pages.
Let us start with Levinas and his notion of the il y a, the dark
and opaque existence that precedes and conditions our lives as
existents. Levinas mentions two ways to escape the il y a: either
through the world of light and knowledge or through earthly
pleasures. We met the first option in Andersen’s learned man
and the second in Daniel1. But the il y a, as we have seen in
Kristeva, is not an abstract entity but the very matter that makes
us what we are. It is what awaits us on the other side of the
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mirror, the inner texture of the flesh under our skin, simultan-
eously ours and not ours, us and not us.
This primordial organic zone is invested with a death drive
that only accentuates its abject aspect. Therefore, one tends to
project it onto others to distance oneself from this threatening
zone. Kristeva invites us to dare and approach the abject, and
the question is how to overcome our instinctual aversion to it.
Whereas the diarist and the learned man split themselves to avoid
the threat of the abject, Lol is the first literary figure we have
met who, through the traumatic night of the ball, understands
the vacuity of unicity and the need no longer to split but rather
to double herself as well as her lovers. She therefore constructs
a love triangle that is both narcissistic and involves real other-
ness. It is narcissistic since she sees others not as they are but
as doubles, either of herself or of her fiancé; and yet, through
these doubles she manages not only to love and escape her self-
enclosed world, populating it with so many possible doubles,
but also to initiate Jacques into the secret of love. This love is
thus both unique and universal, singular and multiple, what can
be called “whatever love,” which involves the suchness of the
lovers and therefore permits them to include in it a multiplicity
of other women and men.
Lol’s story teaches us that it is not a question of overcoming
narcissism but of transforming it. For Kristeva, contrary to
Freud and Lacan, the water in which Narcissus observes him-
self is never clear, since he sees not only his sleek envelope but
also something of his abject interior.26 The relationship with
one’s double necessarily involves an uncanny element, some-
thing that transgresses the frontiers between I and Other.
Therefore, the ability to love one’s double rather than attack it,
understanding its intermediate position, is already the first step
toward love.
Freud conceives of love as narcissistic in the sense that we
love what we are, what we were, or what we would like to be.27
The question, however, is what place one gives to the Other28 in
such narcissism. In the case of Lol this place is not very clear,
especially since her story is told from Jacques’s point of view.
But Jacques, for sure, not only sees Lol as Other but also dares
to become her, jumping toward the unknown on the verge of
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madness. In this sense he makes the full Levinasian movement,

but he also shows something that remained hidden in Levinas.
For Jacques not only turns from the il y a to the Other but also
connects the two realms through his becoming Lol’s double. On
the initial level, he ceases to seek only pleasure, as he did with
Tatiana prior to meeting Lol, and starts looking for the infinity
of the Other that he sees in Lol’s face. But he does more than
simply welcome Lol as radical Other; he actually becomes her,
enters into her mind, such that she is both Other and his double.
The double, I claim, is the necessary bridge between me and
the Other, the implicit link in many theories of otherness. To
truly love, one needs to overcome a narcissistic crisis, but one
accomplishes this by addressing the Other, not as a deus ex
machina, but as something that echoes one’s inner otherness
and abject aspect. This was surely Daniel1’s error: he thought
love would be a redemption from himself, from his aging, from
his abject body and soul, from the emptiness of his main shoot.
His narcissism did not allow him to overcome his aversion to
his own abject aspect, and so he remained with the fantasmatic
sleek mirror image: not of himself but of young women who
became his narcissistic doubles.
In the same way that we distinguished two types of doubles
(single29 and multiple), we thus need to distinguish two sorts of
narcissism: one that is superficial and unable to see beyond the
mirror image and another that is more profound and primor-
dial, since it accepts, although painfully, the dark abject aspect
of oneself. In this narcissism, one recognizes the other side of
the mirror, the thickness of the double(s), the “bad” infinity that
unites us all and that is the condition and the first step toward
the “good” infinity of love.
As I argued in Chapter 2, the “bad” infinity of the il y a and
the abject and the “good” infinity of the Other are interrelated,
and only the acknowledgment of the first enables access to
the second. In Kierkegaardian terms, it is by regaining one’s
shadow-existence (which is intimately linked to the abject il y
a) that one can not only transform one’s main shoot but also
integrate the Other in it and allow the Other to access his or her
own shadow-existence. Lol and Jacques, as any true lovers, thus
become doubles, but not in an imaginary and fusional sense.
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They instead remain both doubles and Others: doubles of each

other’s internal otherness.
It is upon his decision to end his life that Daniel1 was close
to this insight, but it was too late. Esther had already left, and
besides, she was probably not the right person to double him-
self with, precisely because of her too-young and too-beautiful
body, which might have kept her in superficial narcissism. To
realize the secret of the double, we have seen, one needs to accept
negativity and loss, two elements that seemed alien to Esther.
But why couldn’t Daniel25 take a step further and truly love
Marie23 or at least go to the island of Lanzarote and join the
neohumans there?
Indeed, he did dare to exit his self-enclosed residence in which
he was attached only to the life story of his too-identical –super-
ficially narcissistic –double. But the only creature he managed
to love was Fox, precisely because the dog would never force
him to become something other than what he already was.
No foreign shadow-existence would be opened up by Fox, no
need to become it, become its double. And the same goes for
the human female he rejects with disgust: not simply because
of her allure and smell, but because she reminds him of his
primitive instincts, his own abject flesh that is his and Other,
connecting him with all organic creatures. He thus chooses a
self-
enclosed life of repetition which resembles the negative
potentiality developed by Agamben, yet he does not engage it in
any play with actuality. Like his ancestor, he made the first step
to overcome superficial narcissism but then got stuck, unable to
reach the island of Lanzarote and the real Others who awaited
him there.
Robinson Crusoe and the Possibility of Another Island

How to accomplish this journey and go all the way from the
first narcissism to the second, from the single double to multiple
doubles allowing access to otherness? Another literary example
may help us to understand this. One of the most famous
modern figures of individuality and autarkic order is Robinson
Crusoe.30 Finding himself on a desert island, he invests huge
efforts in appropriating Nature and rebuilding the Western
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civilization from which he has been excluded. Even when an

Other arrives on the island –namely, Friday –nothing changes
in Robinson’s attitude: he is the only master of the island and
his work consists in taming and making it fit his own needs. The
arrival of Friday is only an opportunity to reaffirm his mastery,
involving not even a Hegelian or Sartrean struggle for life and
death. Robinson does not know anything about the double and
does not seem to be interested in questions of love or otherness.
But the irony of fate eventually supplied Robinson with many
doubles: namely, the diverse versions of him written there-
after, each depicting a slightly different Robinson and trying to
challenge his excessive self-assurance in the original novel. One
of these Robinsons appears in Michel Tournier’s novel Friday
(1967).31 This Robinson is at first very similar to his ancestor,
trying to master the island and make it his own; yet something
in him is profoundly different, as the novel gradually unfolds. At
first he invests huge efforts in building a wooden boat to escape
the island,32 but this enterprise finally fails and he consequently
adopts a strange habit of going to “the mire,” a muddy zone
on the shore, where he remains for hours, losing himself in the
most abject matter of the island. He does this for several weeks,
neglecting himself completely. He loses himself in pure matter,
in the abject, in the il y a, touching the verge of madness: not
through a real Other but through a primitive otherness which is
equally sameness.33
This stage ends with a psychotic hallucination that brings
him close to death, but at the last minute he recovers and, like
his ancestor, begins a meticulous effort to gain mastery over the
island. The first thing he does is to give it the feminine name
of Speranza (Hope), thus affirming his masculinity as its con-
trast.34 The mire, however, does not disappear and constitutes
a constant and appealing temptation, until he finds a substi-
tute for it in a cavern that contains a cavity perfectly fitting his
body. Adopting a fetal position, he stays in this earthy-maternal
womb for hours, returning there often.35 But one day he is
horrified to realize that he was on the verge of ejaculating in
this womb, which would have meant committing a dangerous
incest with the island, his mother. He then decides to never go
down to the cavern again. Rather than a mother, the island shall
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henceforth be his wife. He finds a parcel of soft soil with which

he often “makes love,” astonished by the beautiful white flowers
growing there as if from his sperm.36
This idyllic life of masculine mastery is brutally disrupted
with the arrival of Friday. For Friday does not simply obey his
master, as in the original story. That is, he obeys him technically,
but his heart is elsewhere, and whenever he can, he returns to his
idle activities, unable to understand Robinson’s attempts to dis-
cipline him. Robinson is profoundly disturbed by this carefree
attitude.37 More than that, he observes orange flowers where his
own white flowers used to grow on the lovemaking soil and is
outraged when he surprises Friday in the middle of his “inter-
course.”38 No matter how hard he beats him, a doubt comes
into his mind: what if Friday is his double?
One day Friday steals Robinson’s tobacco and sits in the cavern
to tranquilly smoke a pipe, when he is suddenly discovered by
his maser. In an act of despair he throws the pipe away, only to
ignite the gunpowder Robinson had stored there, causing a huge
explosion. Friday saves Robinson’s life at the last moment, but
the island is ruined, and all the grain and goods cultivated and
accumulated so meticulously are now gone.39
Strangely enough, this does not enrage Robinson but
liberates him, as if he had participated in a ceremony of pot-
latch to understand the redemptive aspect of negativity and
the vacuity of linear accumulation. Another possibility of an
island is now opened up: the island as a realm of possibilities,
a shadow-existence with which his main shoot dares to engage
in a constant dialogue. “There is always another island,”40 says
the epigraph of the novel, which I take as a metaphor for the
movement both within the I and between the I and the Other.
The I is a desert island, but only as long as it restricts itself to a
unique main shoot. Once negativity is revealed, once the main
shoot explodes, other shoots can be found, other islands within
and outside oneself.
Deleuze, who was fond of desert islands,41 analyzes Friday
as a novel about the loss of what he calls “the structure of the
other.”42 The shipwreck deprives Robinson of the human com-
munity, but this loss, after being processed and mourned, finally
leads him to retrieve “another island,” a double of the original.
3
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1
Deleuze describes this double as a halo enveloping actuality. It

is an element relating to the air rather than to the soil: not solid
but vague, showing that every actuality is doubled by an airy
possibility.43
Deleuze thus sees the double as opening up a field of possi-
bilities, but the condition for this opening is the disappearance
of the Other. For Deleuze, Other and double are two contra-
dictory rather than complementary terms. But if this is so, how
to explain the curious relationship that is established between
Robinson and Friday? It is only after the explosion that the other
island, the double island, fully appears to Robinson, and with
it comes a new look at Friday, the key figure of the novel who
gives it its title. Like Lol, Friday gradually becomes Robinson’s
double in the full sense of the term, permitting him to over-
come his narcissism and accept his inner and outer otherness, a
shadow-existence that is not only his. Therefore, Robinson not
only becomes ever more interested in Friday but also begins to
admire him and, I would even say, love him.
This love is not sexual and does not bear the characteristics
of the strange relationship Robinson had developed with the
island. Yet the latter was not love but rather autoeroticism, a
narcissistic lovemaking with himself. Loving someone is not
necessarily desiring him or her sexually but desiring to become
them, and it is this desire to become Friday that now powerfully
fills Robinson.
When a ship comes to the island, after almost 30 years of
isolation, it is Friday rather than Robinson who is very excited.
Robinson dislikes the vulgar and petty talk of the crew, and he
is all the more shocked to realize that he is 50 years old, that is,
an old person in terms of that period. Friday, on the other hand,
immediately becomes friends with the crew and is fascinated by
the ship’s machinery. Robinson decides to remain on the island
with Friday, but the next morning he discovers to his horror
that Friday has abandoned him and boarded the ship. It is just
before dawn and the darkness further oppresses Robinson. He
is now old and alone and decides to end his life in the best way
he can imagine, that is, by returning to the heart of Speranza, to
the cavern where the maternal cavity will contain and hold him
until death comes.44
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Robinson, then, overwhelmed after Friday’s disappearance,

wishes to submerge into the dark il y a and reunite with it. This
wish has tempted him from the beginning of the novel, first with
the mire, then the cave, and finally the soil, three narcissistic
unions that ended with the explosion and the discovery of the
second type of infinity through Friday. But without the Other as
a double, Robinson loses access to this second infinity. He made
it all the way from one infinity to the other, just to be abandoned
at the end, and therefore sees no other option than to return to
his roots.
Unsure if he can access the cavern after the explosion, he
finally finds a crevice that can serve as his final shelter and in
which he can join Speranza. But when he approaches the crevice,
he is astonished to see a human body coming out of it. It is Jaan,
the Estonian cabin boy from the ship, who escaped it to join
Robinson on the island. Robinson is saved, and in the last lines
of the novel the sun rises and he can baptize the newcomer:
Sunday, to celebrate the sun, who has saved him from his fate
in the darkness.45
Friday bears many similarities with The Possibility of an
Island: Robinson is appalled by the vulgar people from the ship
in the same way that Daniel25 is disgusted by the savage humans;
Robinson loses Friday and is alone, and likewise, Daniel25 loses
Fox; and finally, Robinson decides to find a cavity in the ground
that can be his grave, which is reminiscent of how Daniel25
used to lie for hours in the sandy holes and pretend he was dead.
The main difference between the novels lies not in Robinson’s
being finally saved but in Friday’s being not simply a dog or
other animal. Rather, he is both an Other and a double. Although
Robinson initially considers Friday to be an irrational creature
that needs to be tamed to fit his rationalized regime, the explo-
sion finally makes him see Friday in a different light: an Other
whom he identifies with and tries to become. This is why when
Jaan appears on the island he can so easily take on the role of
Friday: not because Robinson is blind to the differences between
the two, but because at this stage he already understands the
“whatever singularity” of all people, the status of the double
that we all share and that allows him to admit Jaan immediately
to his nascent community of Speranza.
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Although Robinson tries to control Jaan, changing his name,

the new name he gives him is derived from the sun, or, in the
French original, from Jupiter. This is not only the king of the
gods but also the god of the sky: the infinite otherness above
us. In this way Robinson tries to access Jaan, as an Other, by
making him his double. On the one hand, Jaan belongs to the
unknown infinity, but on the other hand, it is Robinson himself
who gives him his name and words, in the same way that Jacques
narrates Lol’s story. Robinson baptizes Jaan only to accentuate
his dependence on him: Jaan literally saved Robinson’s life, not
because he said or did something, but because his presence per-
mitted Robinson to maintain contact with the field of possi-
bilities. Through Jaan’s new possibility, new name, Robinson’s
own field of possibilities is open again.
Robinson thus needs a concrete Other. Before the arrival of
Friday he tried to transform the island itself into his double
under various forms: sister (the mire), mother (the cavern), and
wife (the soil). The presence of a real human, however, allows
a much broader access to multiplicity as a field of possibilities,
with the various doubles contained in it. Without the Other this
multiplicity cannot attain its full form but remains only as a
negative potentiality, as we can see in Daniel25’s monotonous
last days and Robinson’s wish to reunite with the island after
Friday is gone.
But what about the people from the ship? Why can’t they
be both Others and doubles for Robinson? These people are
considered by Robinson only as simulacra of Others. They all
talk about things that seem absurd to him; they all set for them-
selves goals in which he no longer believes; and they all treat
each other in a way very different from the symbolic exchange
Robinson has learned from Friday, with its cyclic, aimless
form.46 Friday himself is attracted to this world and decides to
join it. Since he never belonged to it, he sees it only as a richer
prolongation of his playful environment, and since he is alien
to the thought of duration and possession, he is not concerned
about Robinson staying alone on the island. But for Robinson
the danger of returning to his old I, his old main shoot, is too
great, and he therefore cannot stand these people from the
“normal” world outside. He wishes to remain in the cyclic time
61
of the island, in Speranza as the realm of the Eternal Return.

And yet, again, he cannot remain there alone.
The Double as Seductive Force

I have tried to analyze Speranza as a metaphor for the I, and
the possibility of “another island” as a bridge to other islands,
both internal and external. The double is the key figure to allow
one to discover more islands, but time and again we see that to
access the double, one needs to resist the stubborn main shoot
as well as the various simulacra and fantasies it carries with
it. To break down simulacra and fantasies one needs to find a
Friday –but also a Lol or a Marie23. And then –what’s next?
Is it possible to broaden the field of possibilities, the islands of
doubles, beyond dual relationships?
I will discuss this question in the epilogue to this book, but
in the meantime it is important to notice the seduction involved
in the double as a means to open up the field of possibilities.
This seduction may rise first from a wish to possess and grasp
someone or something we do not understand, someone or some-
thing that does not fit our well-known actuality. The relation-
ship with this entity may therefore be narcissistic to begin with,
but then comes a crossroad: either the impossibility of fitting the
Other into our world will make us abandon this relationship
altogether, being perceived as too strange and abject; or it will
further seduce us to put into question our main shoot, gradually
allowing us to become the double of this Other –letting us enter
into the realm of love.
Every true love story is perceived as a threat because it
necessitates self-transformation. One wishes to be recognized
and loved, yet by someone who demands that we change our
very idea of recognition and love. We must abandon our fan-
tasy and simulacrum of love and dare to see the Other as it
is, and yet, the only way to do so is through the double: the
Other as a double, myself as a double, each double opening up
a corresponding field of possibilities, such that I am no longer
myself, but neither is the Other.
Lol and Friday are two extreme examples of these seductive
Others, whose field of possibilities is so strange to the Western
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mind that they project to us both seduction and abjection: a wish

to become them and a wish to escape the lack of boundaries
they introduce. This, I suggest, is the double effect of literature
as well: a mixture of seduction and abjection, a temptation we
need both to accept and somehow to resist in order to survive.
In this sense writing itself is a doubling, yet one with no ori-
ginal. It is a field of possibilities that is actualized in concrete
words, yet words that do not refer to a stable main shoot. The
common mistake is to see literature as a simulacrum and fan-
tasy, as happened to Madame Bovary, who was so fascinated
by the romantic novels she read that she could not be content
with her own love life. The stories and novels I have examined
in this book attempt to avoid this trap precisely through the
figure of the double. The double is seductive; it gives erotic
motivation to get closer, to conquer the fear of abjection. Yet
once we get nearer, once we get inside, there is no longer a way
out. Our main shoot is made fragile, together with the common
fantasies and simulacra it contains. Indeed, at any moment we
can close the book and return to our ordinary lives, but if we
manage to enter the book and become its double, making it
our double, an Other we try to access, a new field of possibil-
ities will be opened up.
With what concrete Others can we experience the doubling
of literature? And for how long? There is no universal answer to
these questions, which should be addressed and tested by each
one of us through and with the multiple doubles and Others,
which are all around us, waiting for us to notice them.
Notes
1 This explains why Houellebecq may sometimes appear misogynist
or racist, and I do not underestimate the difficulty that a woman or
a Muslim may have in reading him. However, Houellebecq does not
simply despise women and Muslims but is, rather, obsessed with
them since they constitute his opposite doubles, a notion on which
I will elaborate in the epilogue of this book.
2 Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin
Bowd (2005; London: Phoenix, 2006). Hereafter, page numbers will
be given in parentheses in the text.
3 This is also the case of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, which will be discussed
in the epilogue of this book.
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6
1
4 Houellebecq previously dedicated a novella to this touristy island.

See Michel Houellebecq, Lanzarote, trans. Frank Wynne (2000;
New York: Vintage Publishing, 2002).
5 Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, trans. Ralph Manheim
(1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).
6 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria
Glaser (1981; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
7 It should be mentioned that as Klein and Kristeva show, fantasies
of wholeness and violence are produced not only in the mirror
stage but also during the semiotic phase that precedes it.
8 In his novella Aura, Carlos Fuentes depicts the falling in love of
a young man with a young woman. The man gradually realizes
the young woman to be a phantom of an extremely old lady, and
himself to be a double of the latter’s late husband. It is through
reading the late husband’s writings (symbolic) and seeing photos
of him (imaginary) that the young man understands the secret
of the double. He thus lets loose and makes love to the old lady
herself, instead of to her young phantom. See Carlos Fuentes,
Aura, trans. Lysander Kemp (1962; New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1965).
9 Deleuze is, moreover, well aware of the question of simulacra, and
he analyzes their primacy already in relation to the Platonic idea.
His discussion, however, is purely ontological and ignores the way
Plato tries to rehabilitate the realm of Ideas for moral and social
reasons precisely since it is threatened by the realm of simulacra.
See Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” in Logic of Sense,
trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (1969; London: Athlone
Press, 1990), 253–265.
10 Gordon E. Slethaug also characterizes the double in postmodern
literature as revealing the arbitrariness and nonlinear reality of
Western society, focusing on the question of language. See Slethaug,
Play of the Double, 30–32.
11 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain
Hamilton Grant (1976; London: Sage Publications, 1993), 1–2,
35–49. See also Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. Jane I. Guyer
(1925; Chicago: HAU Books, 2016).
12 Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, for example, features an unnamed
protagonist who rebels against modernity’s consumerism through
his double, who teaches him how to embrace negativity and
accept death.
13 See Eliade’s succinct words:
Men would thus have a tendency to become archetypal and

paradigmatic. This tendency may well appear paradoxical, in
the sense that the man of a traditional culture sees himself as
real only to the extent that he ceases to be himself (for a modern
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1
observer) and is satisfied with imitating and repeating the

gestures of another. In other words, he sees himself as real, i.e., as
“truly himself,” only, and precisely, insofar as he ceases to be so.
(Myth of the Eternal Return, 34)
14 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 95.

15 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange, 141.
16 Ibid., 142.
17 Ibid., 104–105. Clément Rosset (The Real and Its Double) proposes
in the same way that the double is constituted upon a remainder
that needs to be abolished to allow a return to the “real,” yet he
does not explain what this real would be like and how to attain it.
18 For a critique of “the culture of the copy,” which, however, goes in
a different direction, see Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy:
Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone
Books, 2014).
19 Agamben refers to Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, but the argu-
ment can apply also to Baudrillard’s theory, since spectacle and
simulacra share the same superficiality with no depth or refer-
ence. See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (1967; New York: Zone Books, 1995).
20 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt
(1990; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
21 Ibid., 47–50.
22 Ibid., 1–2.
23 Ibid., 2. Montaigne articulated a similar idea in his famous essay
on friendship: “Because it was he, because it was I.” Michel de
Montaigne, “Of Friendship” (1580), in The Complete Essays of
Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1957), 139.
24 Giorgio Agamben, “On Potentiality,” in Potentialities, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999),
177–184.
25 Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”
(1853), in Great Short Works of Herman Melville (New York:
Perennial Classics, 2004), 39–74. Bartleby, moreover, is nothing
but the narrator’s double, a secret potentiality that the narrator
splits from himself and that finally leads him to his death, a nega-
tive double that curiously does not rebel or attack the original but
rather passively shows him a radical potentiality that he is blind to.
See Keppler, Literature of the Second Self, 115–120.
26 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 14–15. See also Julia Kristeva, Tales
of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (1983; New York: Columbia
27 Freud, “On Narcissism,” 90. Freud actually mentions a second type
of love, which is not narcissistic but “anaclitic,” based on the wish
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to lean on the lover who satisfies one’s needs. Yet it is difficult to

understand in what way this type of love goes beyond narcissism.
28 As in other places in this book, I use the term “Other” not to desig-
nate an abstract symbolic entity as in Lacan but rather a concrete
Other, which is nonetheless infinite and inaccessible by definition.
29 The single double refers to both the positive and the negative
double.
30 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719; Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009).
31 Michel Tournier, Friday, or, The Other Island, trans. Norman
Denny (1967; New York: Pantheon Books, 1969).
32 It is interesting to note that the boat’s name is Évasion, the same as
the title of Levinas’s book on the instinctual aversion of Existence.
33 Tournier, Friday, 39–41.
34 Ibid., 47–48.
35 Ibid., 97–102.
36 Ibid., 119–120, 128–130.
37 Ibid., 144–147.
38 Ibid., 166–167.
39 Ibid., 174–178.
40 Ibid., 5.
41 Gilles Deleuze, “Desert Islands,” in Desert Islands and Other
Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 9–14.
42 Gilles Deleuze, “Michel Tournier and the World without Others,”
in Logic of Sense, 301–320.
43 Ibid., 312–313, 317.
44 Tournier, Friday, 232–233.
45 Ibid., 235. In the original French the boy is baptized Thursday
(Jeudi) after Jupiter, the god of the sky.
46 Robinson is especially shocked by their resemblance to what he
himself was like before, seeking to master and accumulate people
and goods rather than understand the primordial equality of all
entities: “Each was in search of something, some special acqui-
sition, wealth or personal satisfaction; but why that thing more
than another?” (ibid., 224). In this sense, these people could not
be the Other he found in Friday: “That was what other people
were: the possible obstinately passing for the real” (ibid., 220).
For Deleuze this is a proof of Robinson’s rejection of the Other in
favor of the double, but it is clear that these “other people” claimed
their actuality without understanding the potentiality beneath it.
As such, they were indeed others, but not Other as what opens up
the infinite field of possibilities through the figure of the double.
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Epilogue
“It’s Not Me, It’s You”: From the
Personal to the Collective Double
This book is approaching its end, but I feel that the quest has
not yet arrived at its destination. I started with the narcissistic
endeavor to remain in one’s self-enclosed sphere and gradually
moved to the possibility of dwelling on multiple islands. Opening
up to the world and its multiplicity, however, is not only an indi-
vidual itinerary. Rather, it involves the sometimes painful rec-
ognition of one’s social, political, and cultural circumstances,
which can no longer be warded off. I have tried to give an
account of these circumstances but have limited myself to the
personal perspective. A radical understanding of the double,
however, necessitates taking another step, one toward the col-
lective sphere, and it is now time to do so, even if my discussion
here must remain brief.
I have argued throughout this book that the double is the
mediating force between me and the Other. A change of perspec-
tive from the personal to the collective does not mean that the
former should be set aside. On the contrary, if the double can
serve as a bridge between me and the Other, it can also connect
the individual with the social sphere. In this way it allows a
better understanding of how such mechanisms as duplication,
identification, and projection operate not only between individ-
uals but also between groups of people, thus challenging the
premises of identity politics.
As we have seen, the double is initially conceived of as an
obstacle, a haunting figure that one attempts to fight and over-
come, alas in vain. The transformation of the double from a
foe into a friend can be achieved only through a laborious and
continuous process of abandoning one’s narcissism and opening
up to one’s inner and outer doubles. Indeed, personal suffering
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172 Epilogue: “It’s Not Me, It’s You”
and a desire to transcend oneself might induce one to embark

upon this way toward otherness. But what, if anything, would
convince groups to undergo the same process?
The postmodern promise of “liquidity” and effortless flow
between identities and categories eventually led to the current
rise of nationalism on the right and identity politics on the left.
Indeed, groups are not yet readily willing to give up their hos-
tility toward each other, and it is not by preaching to them how
to define themselves that a change may occur. I therefore pro-
pose taking advantage of the double as mediating both between
me and the Other and between different groups.
My strategy will be to remain on the borderline between the
personal and the collective spheres with the help of the double.
Having been raised as an Israeli and a Jew, I carry with me a
complex web of doubles which took me quite a while to become
acquainted with and finally accept. By moving from indi-
vidual identity to social identity and vice versa I hope that this
acquaintance and coming to terms with can be generalized both
in theory and in praxis.
The Opposite Double

I live in Israel/Palestine, the home of two Semitic peoples, one
Jewish and the other Palestinian, who have been fighting each
other for more than a hundred years. These two peoples, how-
ever, have many things in common: not only their beloved home-
land but also their history, having suffered from a forced exile
and a long-lasting wish to return home. Could it be that Israeli
Jews and Palestinians are actually doubles of each other? And if
so, why is this dimension so forcefully denied by both parties?
To understand this, I wish to elaborate on one type of double
that has been mentioned so far only in passing: the opposite
double. The opposite double is not to be confused with the nega-
tive double that we encountered in the first two chapters. Let us
recall that the negative double has no traits whatsoever, and all
it does is challenge the presumed positivity of the protagonist.
The Horla is a negative double par excellence, coming to warn
the diarist against his illusion of self-sufficiency. The shadow
in Andersen’s tale is also a negative double, but it gradually
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Epilogue: “It’s Not Me, It’s You” 173
becomes a positive one, emptying out the learned man of his

human characteristics and turning him into a negative double:
so negative that he had to be completely annihilated.
The opposite double, on the other hand, has traits of its own,
but these always stand in contrast and comparison to those of
another entity. The two actually secretly share a fundamental
quality that one of them, the presumed “original,” judges to be
undesirable and therefore projects upon the other, thus consti-
tuting this Other as its opposite double. This projection aims
to get rid of the unwanted quality, but this quality is often
only imaginary and fantasized, such that it cannot simply be
removed. As a result, the “original” becomes obsessed with it,
saying repeatedly to its double, “it’s not me, it’s you.” This insist-
ence, however, only proves that the former is no less “to blame”
than the latter.
A flagrant example of the opposite double is given in Oscar
Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).1 It is no sur-
prise that this work was considered scandalous at the time,
being accused of exhibiting a corrupt and decadent morality.
It is as if the novel itself, together with its author, became the
opposite doubles of “decent” Victorian society. The Victorians
read it with great avidity while simultaneously condemning it,
as if to purify themselves from their very own “immoral” deeds.
What is it in Dorian Gray that incited such reactions? When
the handsome Dorian sees his portrait painted to a marvel by
a friend, he is astonished. Rather than being content with his
reflected beauty, Dorian envies the painting since it will remain
beautiful forever, whereas he will grow old and eventually lose
his charm. He thus wishes the painting to grow old instead of
him, a wish that is miraculously fulfilled.
At first Dorian is thrilled with his unexpected luck, but a
strange anxiety soon befalls him, and he becomes obsessed with
the changes in the painting. He wishes, time and again, to see
his “real” self rather than his unchanging, beautiful, yet decep-
tive appearance. Interestingly, the changes in the painting do
not reflect his aging so much as his moral corruption, which
gradually grows to monstrous dimensions. To counterbalance
these changes, Dorian becomes very attached to his reflection in
the mirror, falling in love with it precisely as Narcissus did with
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his reflection in the lake. The important thing for our purposes,
however, is that although the painting and Dorian are at first
identical, they gradually drift apart from each other, finally
becoming complete opposites. The ugly and corrupt portrait
is the opposite double of the handsome and innocent-looking
Dorian –but who is the original in this case? After all, the por-
trait is far more authentic than Dorian himself, showing his
inner nature, and it is precisely for this reason that it provokes
in him extreme feelings of aggressiveness.
Dorian moreover has two doubles: an identical yet false one in
the mirror, at which he stares with admiration, and an opposite
double in the picture, at which he looks with fascinated horror.
These two doubles are in fact two poles between which each
one of us moves: an idealized self and a monstrous self, yet none
is truer than the other. As we saw with Lacan’s mirror stage,
the idealized double is an inherent narcissistic element that can
never vanish completely. The opposite double results from the
tyrannical regime of the ideal double and is composed of all
the traits that contrast and threaten this ideal. As such, it, too,
cannot simply vanish.
At the end of the novel, Dorian decides to get rid of his opposite
double. He violently stabs the portrait, only to find out, like
the protagonists of most nineteenth-century doppelgänger tales,
that it is he himself whom he has destroyed. When the servants
enter his room, they find a dead body they do not recognize:
Dorian had taken on the figure of the monstrous old man from
the painting, whereas the latter had become beautiful again.
The story thus reveals that the double does not necessarily
have to be physically identical or even similar to its “origin”; it
suffices that the two maintain a certain link, a common ground
which can sometimes take the appearance of an opposition. The
opposition is created only because of the too-strong identifica-
tion with the idealized double, the perfect mirror image which
hides all the flaws, deficiencies, and chaos that are part of being
human. This idealized image is often considered the “original,”
but it is actually nothing but another double, whose origin does
not exist. Rather than looking for an original, one needs to cope
with these various doubles to open up to the multiplicity that
underlies human existence.
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Where do we find the opposite double in “real life”? On the

personal level, the opposite double appears in what we some-
times call our nemesis, chosen precisely because of his or her
similarity to us. As a matter of fact, we constitute this opposite
double when we project upon someone something that is too
unbearable for us. We repeatedly say, “it’s not me, it’s you,”
but we secretly know that this is not the case. Such denial and
projection may cause conflicts and misunderstandings, but
whereas on the personal level there would be someone there
to respond and say, “no, it’s not (only) me, it’s (also) you,”
on the collective level things become more complicated. Here
we no longer deal with personal conflicts but with hatred
between groups of people, hatred that sometimes leads to
racism and in extreme cases genocide.
The Semite and the Anti-Semite as Doubles

To better understand this, let us turn to a striking analysis of
the opposite double by Sartre, given in his essay Anti-Semite
and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate.2 Sartre wrote
this essay in 1944, immediately upon the liberation of Paris, and
before the extent of the extermination of Jews became known.
Consequently, he presents the Jew less as a victim than as an
active agent in a game: the game of doubles. Two other agents
equally play in this game: the anti-Semite and what Sartre calls
“the democrat.”
“If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”3
This is Sartre’s provocative affirmation, which challenges the
common view of the Jew as a mere obstacle in the eyes of the
anti-Semite. Drawing on his existential theory, he argues that
the Jew is a crucial element in the anti-Semite’s identity. Every
identity and essence are empty to begin with, and the anti-Semite
attempts to escape this truth together with the burdening need
to constantly shape and reshape one’s identity. Anti-Semitism is
therefore not a rational belief or something that one can argue
against to convince the anti-Semite of her mistake. Rather, it is
a passion,4 that is, an affective attitude that protects one against
one’s inner void. Since existence precedes essence, identity is
never natural or full, and rather than admitting this negativity,
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the anti-Semite chooses to project it upon the Jew, who para-

doxically guarantees in this way the anti-Semite’s wholeness and
stability.
Although Sartre does not use this term, it is clear that the Jew
stands as the opposite double of the anti-Semite, allowing the
latter to feel herself “authentic.” The anti-Semite will always be
the “original,” and therefore, even if she is poor and marginal,
she can feel superior and aristocratic with regard to the inferior
Jew.5 But as in the case of Dorian Gray, the anti-Semite secretly
feels not only that the Jew is not so different from her but also
that he holds her secret.
Indeed, the Jew is often depicted by anti-Semites as bearing
extreme and unmistakable traits, but the purpose of these
stereotypes is precisely to distinguish and contrast the Jew
with the anti-Semite. That a Jew can pass for an Aryan was
an unbearable truth for the Nazis precisely because this would
make the Jew too close to what he really was: their double.
The Nazis looked with admiration into their mirrors and with
horror at the Jews, but the temptation to kill the latter soon led
to self-destruction. The demonization of Jews (as well as gays,
Romanies, the disabled, and other “dangerous” minorities)6
is nothing but a confirmation of this minority’s position as a
double.
Sartre never says why the Jews are the group chosen as an
object of passion, but if we combine his insights with the notion
of the opposite double, we can say that it is the multiple and
unclear origin of the Jews that makes them an easy target. The
diasporic Jew belongs to more than one identity or nation, in a
somewhat similar way to today’s Muslims living in the West. The
Jew incarnates a multiplicity, which threatens the anti-Semite,
unsure of her own identity. Multiplicity is always related to
negativity: the possibility of not being only this or that. And this
possibility, which is part of what it is to be human, is rejected by
the anti-Semite without making it disappear completely: the Jew
must both disappear and remain precisely as that which should
disappear, which makes anti-Semitism a paradoxical attitude. It
sets itself a goal that can be achieved only at the price of self-
destruction, the price paid by Dorian Gray and so many other
pretentious “originals.”
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If all this is true regarding the anti-Semite, what can be said

about the democrat, whose equivalent today would be the
humanist liberal? Surprisingly, according to Sartre, the demo-
crat, too, wishes to annihilate the Jew. The democrat sees only
the universal aspect of human beings and not their particularity.
In this sense, for the democrat, everyone is a double, but lacking
an original or distinction, and thereby the human need to differ-
entiate oneself and belong to a group is denied.7
This endeavor should not be confused with Agamben’s idea
of the “coming community,” since the latter admits differences,
although subjecting them to the common “suchness” of the
community members. The democrat, on the other hand, wishes
to achieve a universal identity and a homogeneous society that
hides the particular differences of its members. To take one step
beyond Sartre, we should note that this attitude is often held by
the privileged classes, who are ignorant of the reassuring aspects
of clinging to a stable identity. The democrat’s ideal of a uni-
versal identity relies on social, economic, and cultural stability,
and the question is, first, how to access such an identity when
such stability no longer exists and, second, how to transform
homogeneous universality into multiplicity.
This is why Sartre finally turns to the Jew, who stands between
these two extremes of a too-rigid identity (national particu-
larism) and an apparent lack of identity (liberal universalism).
The Jew knows the secret of the double, and by entering into
his or her head one can therefore find answers to the crucial
question of individual and group identity.8 According to Sartre,
as we saw in Chapter 2, one faces the gaze of the Other as one’s
truth, since it is only the Other who can constitute one as a
being-in-itself.9 The Jew, however, complicates this situation,
since she incarnates “a doubling of the fundamental relation-
ship with the Other.”10 The Jew is looked at: first as a human
being and then as a Jew, and in both cases she serves as a model
for comparison, counteridentification, jealousy, and hatred.
Like everyone else, as a child the Jew passes through the
mirror stage, identifying with her double. But the Jew is later
forced to pass through a second mirror stage. In the first, she sees
herself through the eyes of the Other and in this way acquires a
solid-enough identity. In the second mirror stage, she takes upon
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herself another external identity –no longer as a human being

but as a Jew. Indeed, the mirror stage is only the first identifica-
tion of the child, preceding a chain of identifications that char-
acterize her from then onward. However, these identifications
are normally hidden or taken as “natural.” It is only when one
belongs to a minority that the artificial aspect of identification
is revealed.
This might seem like a drawback, making the Jew an eternal
victim; but it is actually also an advantage, giving the Jew the
secret of the double, which can open her up to the secret of
multiplicity. Whereas in the first mirror stage as a child it is my
gaze that seems to launch the process, making me believe I am
the master of my image, in the second mirror stage the gaze of
the Other upon me is clearly revealed. I am initially tempted
to reject this gaze, but if I manage to take a further step, I may
understand not only my dependency upon this gaze but also,
and especially, its dependency upon me. For I am not only an
Other but also a double: someone through whom the Other
defines itself.11
Rather than using this knowledge to bypass the narcissistic
clinging to the mirror image and see the truth behind it, the Jew,
according to Sartre, tends to “purify” herself from the second
mirror stage and cling only to the first. She thus projects her
unflattering image onto other Jews: the “inferior” double looks
for doubles even more inferior than itself, in a peculiar victim–
perpetrator dynamic. In this way, however, the Jew becomes
nothing but an anti-Semite: “Each Jewish trait he detects is like
a dagger thrust, for it seems to him that he finds it in him-
self, but out of reach, objective, incurable, and published to the
world.”12
This description powerfully illustrates how the Jew sees other
Jews as her doubles, thus assuming the position of the anti-
Semite, who hates the Jews precisely because he secretly feels
they resemble him. But the Jew cannot really deny her resem-
blance to her despised doubles, since they are too similar to her.
She therefore needs to find another category within Jewishness –
for example, gender, ethnicity (Ashkenazi, Mizrahi), or social
status –to denigrate.13 Admitting one’s status as a double is a
task too difficult to achieve, and Sartre claims that many Jews
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choose an “inauthentic” existence, escaping their situation as

Jews.14 The Jew, as a double, could have found the right medi-
ation between harsh particularism (the anti-Semite) and blind
universalism (the democrat). But the temptation to escape the
truth of the double is too strong: the Jew is, after all, human, all
too human.
Sartre’s view is thus pessimistic: rather than reclaim her iden-
tity, the Jew, as a despised minority, as an opposite double, finally
does nothing but find other opposite doubles among Jews. If we
broaden the discussion and see the Jews as a model for other
minority groups, we may better understand the problem of con-
temporary identity politics. Thus, minorities today do reclaim
their identities, but this is done by extending or reversing the
positions.
In the best case the minority group turns to the major group
and tells it: “it’s not me, it’s you who is monstrous.” In the worst
case, as we saw earlier, it says so to other minority groups which
it finds inferior to it. In both cases, however, the game of the
opposite doubles is played without acknowledging the inter-
dependency between them. Sartre teaches us that a minority
group should not simply reject its status as an opposite double
but rather expose its hidden premises. This can be done by
acknowledging both the particular qualities of the group and its
common ground with others. Yet why is it so difficult to do so?
The Monstrous Double in the Age of Sacrificial Crisis

An interesting answer can be found in the work of René Girard,
a historian, anthropologist, and literary critic. He suggests that
the basic fear of human beings is not to be different from but
rather to be equal to each other. Although equality is one of the
humanistic ideals of Western society, Girard argues that equality
is actually experienced as a threat, since it means that the indi-
vidual has no value of her own, being identical to all others.15
Girard develops a complex theory of what he calls “mimetic
desire,” according to which our initial desire is empty and we
desire only on the basis of our identifications with our parents
and peers.16 This theory resembles to a large degree Lacan’s
mirror stage, but its accent is put on the collective level: “it
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is not the differences but the loss of them that gives rise to
violence and chaos.”17 The group thus needs to find a means
to restore differences, and this first and foremost through the
act of sacrifice. A scapegoat, or “surrogate victim,” is chosen
and sacrificed by the group to discharge the violence provoked
by the threat of equality. The sacrifice is a purifying violence,
which is tamed and controlled through the ritual. It is a sort of
collective catharsis that permits unanimity without the fear of
total equality.
This brings us back to the theme of the double: the surrogate
victim is often an animal, which represents the group or one of
its characteristics. It therefore serves as the double of the group
members, combining both positive and negative aspects of the
double: it is positive in the sense that it represents the society
members, and it is negative in the sense that it is sacrificed. It
is a gift given to the gods through a violent act that permits
one to accept oneself and others as doubles without the fear of
self-annihilation. Through the act of sacrifice the group achieves
what Girard calls “unanimity-minus-one,”18 that is, a combin-
ation of equality and differences. The “minus-one” comes from
the killing of the double, ensuring a collective identity that none-
theless reserves a place for negativity –that is, differences.
Does this mean that Jews are the surrogate victims of anti-
Semites? Yes and no. Girard talks of a “sacrificial crisis” in
which the victim is perceived as either too remote or too close
to the group members. The group members start to sense what
is supposed to remain implicit: the fact that they are all doubles
of each other. They sacrifice something or someone that is too
much of a double or not enough of a double. They therefore
need to sacrifice more and more victims to try to purify the
ghost of the double, enacting a chain of violence that may lead
to the group’s self-destruction.19 In a desperate attempt to break
this dangerous chain, the group often identifies a “monstrous
double,” which is supposed to be the source of all violence. The
problem is that monsters tend to duplicate themselves, haunting
the society in a phenomenon equivalent to hysteria, violently
expressing the crisis of differences rather than resolving it.20
Girard does not talk about the present moment, but it is clear
that at least since the Romantic era we live in a time of a global
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sacrificial crisis, when the growing individualism encounters

diminishing collective mechanisms that would guarantee one’s
uniqueness. On this background it is clear that the Jew serves
as the monstrous double of the anti-Semite. Indeed, the Jew is
too remote from and too close to the anti-Semite, and therefore,
she provokes an overwhelming anxiety about similitude. The
Jew must be sacrificed, but this sacrifice is never enough, since
the Jews, that is, the doubles, can never be truly eliminated. The
fewer Jews remained in Europe during the Holocaust, the more
fear and disgust they provoked in the eyes of the Nazis. The
sacrificial crisis was at the heart of the Nazi regime, as it is in
any fascist movement. It is therefore likely that if all Jews had
been annihilated, another surrogate victim or monstrous double
would have been invented, and the chain of violence would have
continued.
Girard does not propose any way out of the sacrificial crisis.
For him, the fact that we are doubles of each other must remain
the biggest secret of all, and any evocation of it leads only to
further violence. Indeed, he mentions festivals and carnivals as a
means to playfully admit the double, using masks and orgiastic
elements to discharge the fear of similitude.21 Nevertheless, he
does not explain how to use these to constitute a more inclusive
society. Girard’s endeavor is more descriptive than prescriptive:
for him, Western culture lives in an era of sacrificial crisis, and
the researcher can only lament this without proposing solutions,
and more than that, any exposure of the crisis would only
enhance it.
We have seen that for Sartre it is the Jew, as a double, who is
summoned to find a solution to the crisis by adopting an inter-
mediary position between particularism and universalism. Where
can we find such a Jewish position? Contemporary Israeli Jews,
for example, claim, instead, to be the “original,” finding other
opposite or monstrous doubles in the figure of the Palestinians.
To conclude this epilogue I propose to go further back in history
and locate an intermediary position within a Jewish thinker we
have already encountered. This, by no surprise, is Freud, who
tried throughout his life to maintain the tension between the
universal and the particular. Not only did he construct a general
theory that he tried to apply to individuals, but also he himself
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belonged to both the European and the Jewish cultures. As such,

he accepted becoming what I call a lucid hero: a hero who is
aware of his being only a double.
Freud and His Doubles: Toward a Lucid Hero

Our Western culture prioritizes individualism and uniqueness
and leaves no appropriate room for the double. This leads to
a fear of similarity, which Girard characterizes as a sacrificial
crisis, and the rise of the opposite or monstrous double. The
changing social role of the double was briefly described in the
first chapter of this book using Otto Rank’s theory, and it is
worthwhile recalling it. According to Rank, in ancient cultures
the double had guaranteed one’s immortality and love, and it
is only in modernity that the double’s role has been inverted,
becoming the forerunner of death and failed love. Modernity
looks for the individual and unique rather than the similar and
common, and hence the double can return only in its monstrous
form. Is there a way to change this tendency and rehabilitate the
social role of the double?
I believe that an answer can be found in Freud, who, as we
have already seen, was much concerned with his own doubles.22
Freud aims, on the one hand, to maintain the position of the
individual, the subject of psychoanalysis, but on the other hand,
he acknowledges the dangers of narcissism that the double
comes to expose and accentuate. I propose that it is through the
biblical figure of Moses that Freud tries to resolve this tension,
conceiving of him as both a hero and a double.23
The hero, by definition, is someone who is unique, brave, and
strong: anything but a double. Freud, however, reveals in his
analysis of Moses that the hero, too, is nothing but a double: of
his parents, his sons, his people, but also all the heroes, of whom
he is but one link in a long chain.
Moses and Monotheism was the last book Freud published,
and many see it as his heritage and will.24 He argues in it that
Moses, the father of the Jewish religion, was actually Egyptian
and that, moreover, he was not the one who invented mono-
theism. To succinctly summarize Freud’s thesis, monotheism
was introduced by the pharaoh Akhenaten. After his death,
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polytheism was immediately restored, but one of Akhenaten’s

followers, a man named Moses, sought to pursue monotheism
further. He thus looked for people who would be willing to
adopt it and found the Hebrews, who, because of their inferior
status, agreed to leave Egypt and follow Moses and his God.
Moses, however, was such a tyrannical leader that the Hebrews
finally assassinated him and replaced his God with a volcano
God named Jehovah. Years passed, and a new, Midianite leader
whose name was also Moses was reminded of Moses’s tradition
and sought a compromise between Jehovah and the ancient
God of Moses. It is this compromise which led to Judaism as
we know it today.
It is not my intention to accept or reject Freud’s speculative
proposal.25 Rather, I would like to point to the fact that although
Freud speaks of two figures of Moses and of two Jewish Gods,
nowhere in his book does he mention the word “double.” As
such, the double is the repressed of the text, which nevertheless
constitutes its secret motivation. In what follows I will try to
uncover the double and yet maintain its status as the unexposed.
The double is necessarily a secret force, and my challenge, as it
has been all along in this book, is to give it its rightful place:
neither repressed nor overexposed.
The double, as the repressed, returns over and over again in
Freud’s text, and its first appearance is in the figure of its father,
the thinker who conceived it, namely, Rank. In Freud’s depiction
of Moses as a hero he draws on a book Rank published in 1909,
entitled The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,26 which examines
various mythological heroes, including Moses.27 Freud had pre-
viously been very close to Rank, who had been his disciple but
who finally rebelled against him. At the end of his life Freud
curiously chooses to return to this prodigal son, making an
effort, however, to emphasize that it was he himself who incited
Rank to write about the hero.28 Freud, so it seems, examines the
traits of the hero not only to understand Moses but also and
most of all to understand himself as a hero.
This hypothesis is more nuanced than it might seem at first
sight, since the question of the hero is soon revealed as a conflict
between father and son and as a rebellion of the latter against
the former. Let us read Freud’s definition of the hero, which
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he extracts from Rank: “A hero is someone who has had the

courage to rebel against his father and has in the end victori-
ously overcome him.”29 According to Rank, the mythological
hero is expelled from his noble home in his childhood and is
raised by substitute parents from a lower class. Later, he returns
to eliminate and take the place of the father who chased him
away, thus regaining his status and proving his real origin. This
drama, however, characterizes not just the hero but also each
one of us, since as children we all have experienced what Rank
and Freud call the “family romance.”
The family romance comprises three main phases: the parents
first seem perfect to the child; then they disappoint the child
and provoke frustration and violence. Finally, to alleviate this
tension, the child duplicates the parents in his or her imagin-
ation: the actual parents become only pale doubles of the
original, lost parents. The child hence aims to overcome the
malicious doubles to regain his or her “original” parents –and
in this way to become a hero(ine).30
The myth of the hero thus borrows its materials from the
infantile imagination, but the important thing for our purposes
is that the double plays a major role in both cases. The double
allows us to distinguish between the “real” or “original” parents
and the “false” or “derivative” ones. But this distinction itself is
already fictitious and a part of a romance. For even when the
hero achieves his goal, as presumably Oedipus did, he becomes
nothing but the double of his father and follows the same fatal
destiny. Although the hero is the prototype of the unique, Rank
and Freud discover behind him a chain or a web of doubles.
To return to Moses, who is supposed to be an archetypal
hero, we can now better understand why Freud elaborates, not
on his rebellion against his father,31 but rather on his murder by
his sons, that is, his people. If the hero is only a double of his
father, this at least has the advantage for the father that his sons,
even if they eventually kill him, are nothing but his doubles.
I thus propose that Freud develops the thesis of the double
Moses to better understand his own situation at the end of his
life, since there were those who sought his death: not only the
National Socialists but also his rebellious psychoanalytical sons,
such as Rank.
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Let us, then, retrace the chain of doubles as they appear in

Moses and Monotheism. At first reading it seems that there
is only one original in the book, namely, Moses the Egyptian,
and one double, namely, Moses the Midianite. However, Freud
affirms that Moses the Egyptian converted to monotheism in
the wake of Akhenaten’s reforms, and so, if not a double, he is
at least a follower and a son. More than that, Moses repeats not
only the deeds of Akhenaten but also those of what Freud calls
“the primitive father.” This is the tyrannical leader of the clan
whom Freud depicted 25 years earlier in Totem and Taboo. In
the same way that this father was assassinated by his sons, who
were envious of his almighty power, so the cruel Moses was
murdered by his people.32
Moses is therefore both a son and a father, a hero and a
leader who is killed by his people and eventually replaced
by a new hero, a new Moses. The interesting thing, however,
is that his double takes his place and overcomes him just to
identify with his heritage: the heritage of the double. Freud,
by rewriting the myth of Moses, identifies with him and grad-
ually becomes his double, both as a rebellious son and as a
threatened father. Through Moses he tries to understand how
to become a hero without being completely annihilated by
his sons. His implicit answer lies in the double as an integral
dimension of the hero: heroic as Freud might be, he would still
remain a double of his father(s), but he would also be doubled
by his sons. One can never definitely overcome one’s father,
but this is not necessarily a drawback. For even if Freud were
finally murdered, he would still survive through his doubles,
who would continue his legacy and his dynasty despite their
violence against him.33
I hence propose to read Freud’s Moses and Monotheism as
dealing with the birth of the individual while introducing into
it a dimension of duplication and multiplicity. Already the word
“monotheism,” which is at the center of Freud’s book, implies
unicity, the belief in one God; it is thus highly curious that the
father of monotheism, Moses, is only a double who has doubles
of his own. It stems from this that Freud’s endeavor is even
greater than we first thought: to introduce not only the double
into the individual but also multiplicity into monotheism.
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Thus, Freud quotes a scholar who claims that Pharaoh

Akhenaten “is the first individual in human history.”34 The first
thing Akhenaten did when adopting monotheism was to change
his name, which had previously been Amenhotep IV. Becoming
monotheist, Akhenaten tried to cancel the multiplicity of his
dynasty (Amenhotep I, II, III, IV, …) and pretend to be unique
and singular: a father but not a son, an original and not a double.
This idea of a link between individualism and monotheism
and the need to reintroduce multiplicity into them is further
supported by Freud’s assertion that monotheism was partly the
result of Egypt’s becoming a great empire, with many cultures
and gods that needed to be unified under one God. It is tempting
to relate this process to the emergence of the child from her pri-
mary narcissism. The child realizes that the world is much wider
than her own narrow sphere, containing many objects that she
still conceives of as a part of herself, her growing empire; but
she also begins to sense the danger that these objects may intro-
duce: the danger of the outside. It is in this moment, according
to Freud’s later model of narcissism, that the ego is crystallized
with clear boundaries between the inside and the outside. The
ego becomes unique, but it consequently faces two external
dangers that threaten it: death and love.
Indeed, Freud wonders why the God of the Dead disappeared
in the new monotheistic religion, and why neither Akhenaten
nor Moses promised their believers the resurrection of the dead.
But Freud’s question is very strange if we recall that he him-
self has taught us that the unconscious cannot bear the idea of
death. If one is unique, then one will necessarily perish: this is the
price of individualism. So once there is only one leader without
precedents and one God without competition, once there is
no longer a place for multiplicity –death becomes a complete
annihilation of the individual. As such it must be repressed and
rejected from the new religion.
The same goes for love: Moses, the father of monotheism,
who does not acknowledge multiplicity or duplication,
becomes a loveless and cruel leader, as revealed by the mas-
sacre he ordered after the incident of the Golden Calf. As Rank
shows, without the double there is no love, since the double
is the means to transcend one’s ego and access the Other. It
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is precisely the denial of the double and the consequent lack

of love that finally led to the assassination of Moses by the
Hebrew people, who could no longer stand his tyranny.
Freud thus seeks to resolve the two problems of uniqueness –
death and love –by reintroducing the repressed figure of the
double. He thereby reveals the multiplicity behind monotheism
and narcissism: the two beliefs in uniqueness. These beliefs are
perhaps necessary for the development of societies and individ-
uals, but if they don’t allow any room for the double, mono-
theism and narcissism soon lead to violence and self-destruction,
as Freud witnessed at the end of his life. Freud therefore retro-
actively duplicates Moses, as if to restore life and love in what he
sees as a deadly and loveless leader who has left his people with
a violent heritage. By disclosing to the Jewish people (but also
to the Judeo-Christian European culture) that their supposedly
unique origin is actually multiple, he believes they might even-
tually attain true immortality and love.
It seems clear that Freud does not depict the objective history
of the Jewish people but the world in which he lived and which
he tried to analyze and cure by reintroducing chains of doubles
into it. Akhenaten might be the first individual in human history,
but it is Freud’s contemporary culture of individualism and cruel
monotheism that he addresses. The obstinacy of uniqueness and
the secret fear of equality and lack of differences, as Girard
shows, were as powerful in the 1930s as they are still today.
Freud experienced this situation on the personal, political,
but also the professional level: on the personal level he suffered
from a malignant disease, with the existential anxiety it brought
with it;35 on the political level, he saw how the Nazis took over
Germany and then invaded Austria, making him feel like a for-
eign body in his beloved Vienna, the heart of Europe; and on
the professional level, he worried about what would become
of psychoanalysis after his death.36 In Moses and Monotheism,
he tries to solve a multifold fear of annihilation by embedding
Moses, but also himself, in a chain of doubles. He sees how his
sons and what he thought were his people and culture come to
kill him spiritually or physically; and to defend himself he tries
to become a hero, yet one who does not deny his origins as a
double. Freud thus aims to become a lucid hero.
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A hero, as we saw earlier, is “someone who has had the courage

to rebel against his father and has in the end victoriously over-
come him.” Admittedly, Freud “kills” his own Jewish father by
distancing himself from his tradition and presenting Judaism
as stemming from Egyptian culture and leading to Christian
and European culture. However, it is no coincidence that in
the 1930 introduction to the Hebrew translation of Totem and
Taboo –the book that promoted the thesis of the primitive
father’s assassination –Freud writes that if someone were to
ask him, “ ‘what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ he would
reply: ‘A very great deal, and probably its very essence.’ ”37 This
“very essence” is at the center of Moses and Monotheism, but
it is a hybrid essence: Egyptian, Jewish, and European. In this
way Freud, as a lucid hero, not only kills his father but also
saves him, becoming his double to protect his heritage precisely
by reshaping it retroactively. Freud adapts Judaism to the needs
of his time, trying to show Europe that the Jews cannot be
exterminated since Moses was only a link in a chain of doubles,
like Jesus himself.38
To become a lucid hero, Freud must turn not only to his father
but also to his sons. He speaks of his own work (das Werk, like
das Kind) as something that is rebelling against him, something
that is no longer under his control: an independent child, even
a stranger.39 How to face, then, posteriority? Freud, aware of
the imminence of his disappearance, addresses his future readers
and tells them that even if he is forgotten, one day someone
will come across his writings and will know that “there was
someone in darker times who thought the same as you!”40 In
other words, says Freud: you, the reader, are only my double.
Perhaps you or your ancestors have killed me, but this only
to guarantee my immortality: as every father, I am invincible.
Even though I am hated in the present, even though I will soon
die, I will find love and eternity through you: “you –hypocrite
Reader –my double –my brother!”41
Was Freud truly a lucid hero, or have I tried to become his double
and introduce this lucidity into him? The double is a savage,
uncontrollable force, and the individual, if it wants to live and
love, must admit its existence yet never completely possess it. It
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is by addressing myself but also others that I may come to terms

with my doubles: others who preceded me and others who will
come after me.
I started this book with the death of my father, and I end it
with the understanding that doubles exist not only in space but
also in time: they are our parents and our children, our friends
and our foes, inside and outside ourselves. Accepting one’s
doubles, however, cannot magically bring love and immortality
on either the personal or the collective level, since this acceptance
is a painstaking, never-ending process. For how can one fully
acknowledge one’s dependence on others and give up any pre-
tension of uniqueness? It is true that contemporary Western cul-
ture does not allow such a radical resignation. Still, with the
notion of the lucid hero, I have tried to delineate a means to
embark upon this way toward the double: a way that is not
reserved only to literary figures like Lol, Jacques, or Daniel25,
and not only to real individuals, but equally has manifestations
on the political level.
Surely enough, no collective entity would admit that it is
a double of another, but collectivities are connected to each
other through individuals. If these dared to challenge their own
pretensions to being individual, as Freud himself did toward the
end of his life, then far from arriving at fascism, we may achieve
a society of multiplicity or multitude: a community which is
always still to come.
Notes
1 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; London: Dover
Publications, 1993). See also Rank, Double, 78.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the
Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (1946; New York:
Schocken Books, 1995). For a recent exhaustive analysis of this text,
see Sarah Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in
Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010), 68–116. See also Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and
the Jewish Question: Anti- antisemitism and the Politics of the
French Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
3 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 8.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 Ibid., 19.
0
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6 As we will soon see with Girard, when a cycle of violence starts,

it is very difficult to end it, and indeed, the Nazi violence quickly
expanded to include these other minorities.
7 Ibid., 39–41.
8 It should be said, however, that this “head” is mostly the product
of Sartre’s own imagination. In a certain sense, as Sartre him-
self later confessed, the Jew he depicted was his own double and
mirror image, not only that of the anti-Semite and the demo-
crat. See Hammerschlag, Figural Jew, 68–69, as well as Michael
Walzer’s preface to the English translation of Anti-Semite and Jew,
v–xxvi.
9 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 260–269.
11 Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon show very clearly how
men depend on women and white people on black ones, by
attributing to them the easy category of the “Other.” My claim is
that the true category concealed by the word “Other” is precisely
the double. See Beauvoir, Second Sex; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin,
White Masks, trans. Charles L. Markmann (1952; London: Pluto
Press, 2008).
13 Sartre himself talks about the role of gender within Jewishness,
borrowing from Wilhelm Stekel the case of a Jewish husband who
is constantly aware and ashamed of the Jewishness of his wife. She
therefore finds herself helpless in the face of his scornful gaze, since
she can no longer deny her position as a double:
As a young girl, she was proud; everybody admired her

distinguished and assured manner. Now she trembles all the
time for fear of making a mistake; she fears the criticism that
she reads in the eyes of her husband…. At the least mishap, he
might reproach her with acting Jewish.
(Ibid., 75, emphasis in the original)
14 Ibid., 64–102.
15 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 49–50.
16 Ibid., 169–190.
17 Ibid., 51.
18 Ibid., 246, 259.
19 Ibid., 39–49.
20 Ibid., 160–166. In fact, for Girard, “doubles are always mon-
strous” (ibid., 162), since they uncover what Kristeva would call
one’s abject origin, the lack of differences between me and myself,
between me and the Other.
1
9
21 Ibid., 166– 168. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York:
Penguin Press, 2004).
22 See Freud, “Uncanny.”
23 Freud’s preoccupation with Moses began very early, when he
repeatedly visited Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses at the
church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. In 1914 he anonymously
published a paper on it, as if he had to keep secret his proximity to
Moses, his ancestor and double.
24 Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism” (1939), in Standard
Edition, 23:1–138.
25 See Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable
and Interminable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991);
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric
Prenowitz (1995, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jan Assmann, Moses the
Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
26 Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological
Exploration of Myth, trans. Gregory C. Richter and E. James
Lieberman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2015).
27 Freud actually made an anonymous contribution of several pages
to this text, which were only later published separately under his
own name. As in the case of Michelangelo’s sculpture in Rome,
this anonymous contribution reveals Freud’s secret interest, if not
particularly in Moses at least in the figure of the hero. The most
famous hero on which Freud based his sexual theory was the Greek
Oedipus, with the Hebrew/Egyptian Moses waiting until the end
of Freud’s life to appear explicitly.
28 Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” 10.
29 Ibid., 12.
30 Indeed, the figure of the hero for Rank and Freud is always male,
addressing the complex relationships between father and son,
but I believe that these theories can be applied to other combin-
ations within the family. As we saw in Chapter 3, the mechanisms
of mirroring and identification are far from being restricted to a
figure from the same sex.
31 Although the biblical Moses rebelled against the pharaoh and not
his biological father, Freud explains that the myth underwent too
many distortions for us to know who the “real” father was.
32 Ibid., 101.
33 This situation was indeed already presented in Totem and Taboo,
with the sons who murdered the primitive father lamenting his
2
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1
loss, interiorizing him in their bodies, and eternalizing him in

various ceremonies (Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 141–143).
34 Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” 21. It is highly significant that
Freud quotes this in English, as if to say that he is only the double
of this quotation’s author, James Henry Breasted.
35 On Freud’s own death anxiety, see Liran Razinsky’s Freud,
Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013).
36 Yerushalmi takes a step further and claims that psychoanalysis
is Jewish science, thus linking Freud’s professional and religious
identity. See Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 96–100.
37 Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” xv.
38 According to Edward Said, Freud challenged the Eurocentric bias
by understanding his Jewish origins as mixed, both European and
non-European. See Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European
(London: Verso, 2003).
39 Freud, “Moses and Monotheism,” 104.
40 Ibid., 56.
41 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, ed. Marthiel Matthews
and Jackson Matthews, trans. Robert Lowell (1857; New York:
New Directions, 1963).
3
9
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Tymms, Ralph. Doubles in Literary Psychology. Cambridge: Bowes &
Bowes, 1949.
Van Haute, Philippe, and Thomas Geyskens. A Non-Oedipal
Psychoanalysis? A Clinical Anthropology of Hysteria in the Works
of Freud and Lacan. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012.
Vardoulakis, Dimitris. The Doppelganger: Literature’s Philosophy.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.
Visker, Rudi. Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into
Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999.
Wain, Marianne. “The Double in Romantic Narrative: A Preliminary
Study.” Germanic Review 36, no. 4 (1961): 257–268.
Webber, Andrew J. The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German
Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Dover Publications,
1993.
Yerushalmi, Yosef H. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and
Interminable. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
2
0
Index
abject/abjection (Kristeva) 7, 75–76, alterity 5–7, 32, 36, 52, 59, 61,
79–80, 109, 116–118, 144, 152, 81, 125, 157; inherent 16; and
158–161, 166–167; and desire subjectivity 16; see also Other/
77; and Eternal Return 118; fear otherness; stranger/strangeness
of the 79; and the il y a 76; and ancestor 13–14, 136, 140–141, 144,
narcissism 159; origin 190n20; 147, 148, 152, 155, 160–161, 188,
and repetition 117, 130–131n50; 191n23; see also father
and seduction 167; and semiotic Andersen, Hans Christian 6, 50,
77–78; see also maternal; semiotic 54, 57, 60, 63–64, 67, 69, 77, 80,
absence 30, 32, 135, 145 82n4, 83n6, 91, 95, 97, 101, 105,
accumulation 64, 125, 144, 109, 114–115, 117, 137, 157,
147, 153; linear 162; see also 172; “Emperor’s New Clothes”
possession 54; see also “The shadow”
actuality 111, 113–114, 118–124, annihilation 36, 38–39, 145, 187; of
139, 141, 147, 149, 151–152, the individual 186; of myself 69;
155–157, 160, 163, 166; and of the other 69; self- 19, 36, 180;
fantasy 141, 149; and the Idea see also destruction; negativity
114; and possibility anonymity 7, 72–74, 78–80
115, 139, 149, 163; and Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration
potentiality 110–111, 114, of the Etiology of hate (Sartre) 8,
118, 155, 170n46; and the real 175–179
145–146; and the self 114; anti-Semite/Anti-Semitism 175–181,
see also possibility; potentiality 190n8; see also Sartre, Jean Paul
affirmation 117, 122, 131n54 anxiety 14, 17, 30, 39–40, 70,
Agamben, Giorgio 8, 155–157, 160, 107, 138, 173; and breath 14;
177; The Coming Community and choosing 122; death 13, 71,
155–156; see also “suchness”; 128n20, 192n35; and guilt,
“whatever” 122–123; about similitude 181;
aggression/aggressiveness 37, 44n24, see also fear; horror
150, 174; see also violence Anzieu, Didier 44n25
Aimée (Lacan) 27–31, 33, 43n17, appearance 52–57, 64, 68, 71,
44n25, 44n29, 45n46, 46n47; 78, 173; and emptiness 55; and
see also Lacan, Jacques essence 6, 52, 54–56, 59; and
air 11–13, 15, 20, 24, 41, 47, 52, existence 68; and theory 67;
73, 163; and death 15; and see also seeing/being-seen; shame/
destruction 15; and soil 13, 163; pride
and wind 15; see also wind archetype 83n6, 153, 156
Akhenaten (ancient Egyptian Aristophanes 144, 146; see also love
pharaoh) 182–183, 185–187 attraction 29, 34, 40, 122, 135, 137;
alter ago 3, 5, 26; see also ego; see also love
image; mirror Aura (Fuentes) 168n8
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Index 203
author 105, 127n8, 135, 173; breathlessness 2, 11–12, 19–21, 35;

see also literature; reader; writing see also lack of air
autoeroticism 163; see also Breton, André 126n8
narcissism Buddhism 14
Butler, Judith 84n16, 130n38
baby 22, 28, 31, 39, 76–77, 150
Bartleby, the Scrivener (Melville) 156 Camus, Albert 85n24
Baudrillard, Jean 8, 43n13, 149–156; cancer 2, 11, 154
gifts and countergifts 153; capitalism 125, 154; and
“hyperreal” 150; Simulacra and literature 135
Simulation 150 Cech, Jon 83n6
beauty 51, 54–55, 77, 173 Chamisso, Adelbert von 59, 154
Beauvoir, Simone de 190n11 childhood/children 83n6, 110, 120,
becoming 101–103, 113, 124, 150, 122, 146, 184, 186; as doubles
158–160, 163–164, 166–167; 189; and imagination 106–107,
versus being 122; a woman 121 184; and repetition 120; and
Being 71, 74, 143; versus becoming shadow-existence 129n24
122; without beings (Levinas) 72; Christianity 9, 34, 187–188
and infinity 74; being-in-itself 177; cinema 43n9, 128n21, 128n22
and nothingness 31–32, 35 Cixous, Hélène 129n26
Being and Nothingness (Sartre) clone 8, 154–155
68, 190n9 collectivity: double in the collective
Beiser, Frederick C. 82–83n5, sphere/level 171–172, 175,
83n9, 84n13 189; Girard on 179–180; and
Bildungsroman 42, 126n5, 152 individuals 189
body 16, 23, 28, 49, 58, 60, 66, Coming Community, The see
68, 71, 73, 77, 81, 99, 102, 109, Agamben, Giorgio
133, 139, 155; abject 76, 144; community: based on multiplicity
afraid of 48; dead 76; and death and duplicity 157; coming
154; decline of the 138, 141; as (Agamben) 156–157, 177, 189; of
ephemeral 151; feminine 152; doubles 155; in Friday 162, 164;
forgetting the 154; fragmented 28; of neohumans 143; of strangers
imperceptible 19; and love 142; 49; of whatever singularities
and narcissism 160; neohuman (Agamben) 156
145; as obstacle 66; and others compulsion to repeat (Freud) 100,
74; body’s reflection 28; and 119–121
repetition 142; and shadow 67, consciousness 26, 62–63, 65–66, 68,
154; and soul 16, 58, 75; and 71, 85n20, 130n42; encounter
spirit 153; and world 30; see also with another 62–63; limits of 61;
flesh; matter pure 68; simple (Hegel) 63; and
boundaries 3, 12, 37, 49, 76, 98; sleeping 14; split in 60; unhappy
between author, narrator and (Hegel) 65, 85n17
protagonists 105; between fantasy consumerism 168n12; Western
and reality 146; between the I consumer culture 133;
and the not-I 3, 7; between inside consumerist society 125, 148
and outside 3, 17, 30, 116, 186; contact 50, 81, 84n15, 106, 134,
between intellect and body 49; 145; bodily 140; intimate 134
unclear 31, 79, 167 control 3, 20–21, 28, 33, 62, 67, 70,
breath/breathing 5, 11–14, 18–20, 72, 85n28, 96, 118, 122–123, 154;
25, 30, 35–36, 42, 51–52; and loss of 14, 58; and love 92; self-
anxiety 14; and desire 20; and the 19, 28; see also master/mastery
double 21; and ghost 15; between copy: and clone 154–155; culture of
inside and outside 14–15, 20–21; the 169n18; versus double 93; of
between life and death 15, 20–21; the self 3
and otherness 16; and writing 21 corpse 76, 79, 118
4
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204 Index
creation: of doubles 81, 105, 108; as Other (Lacan) 29, 35–36, 85n18;
feminine act 115; infinite 32; of and otherness 29, 63; sensual 56;
life 38; personal and universal 59; sexual 54; structure of 20; and
of the subject 28; and writing 41, symbolic chain 44n34; to become
58, 115 163; to possess 151; to transcend
culture: ancient cultures 5, 26, 35, oneself 172; voyeuristic 67, 100;
182; Christian and European 182, see also passion
187–188; consumer 133; Egyptian destruction/destructiveness 36,
188; Jewish 182, 187; popular 66; 38–39; of the body 138–139;
traditional 168n13; Western self- 39, 176, 180, 187
181–182, 189; see also society dialectic of Lord and Bondsman
cybernetics 31 see Hegel, G. W. F.
difference: admitting 177; and
darkness 14, 54, 60, 72, 74, 107, equality 180; Girard on 179–180,
163–164; see also night; sleep 187, 190n20; hiding 177; lack/loss
death/dead 2, 5–6, 19–22, 24, 27, of 180, 187, 190n20; as negativity
34–36, 38, 40–41, 47–48, 63, 66, 180; similarity and 135, 156
72, 76, 91, 98–99, 120, 136, 138, disgust 78, 131n54, 140, 160,
140, 142, 155, 161, 163, 168n12, 164, 181
182, 186–187, 189; and air 15; DNA 140, 154
anxiety 13, 17, 128n20, 192n35; doppelgänger see double
and body 154; acknowledge 153; Dostoevsky, Fyodor 82n3
cycle of rebirths and death 145; Double, The (Der Doppelgänger)
and the double 153; fear of 62, (Rank) 24, 189n1
64; and identity 99; inner 49–50; double, the: in ancient culture 26,
and irony 111; and life 99, 119, 35; and death 5, 12, 26, 153;
143; and love 27, 137–138, 144; creating a 59, 81, 108; and
and nothing 99; and the Other emptiness/void/nothing 6, 19,
154; potential 118; see also death 152–153; external/outside/outer
drive; immortality; suicide 16, 26, 29, 31, 61, 82n3, 103,
death drive 8, 22, 27, 36–40, 120, 121, 148, 171; as a friend or a foe
158; see also life drive 1, 9, 26, 171; groups as doubles
Debord, Guy 169n19 8–9, 172; and immortality/
Deleuze, Gilles 8, 104, 122–125, eternity 9, 12, 26, 81; interior/
132n69, 144, 147, 151, 162, 163, internal/inside/inner 5, 6, 16,
168n9; innocence 122; “Literature 26, 31, 41, 61, 82n3, 103, 121,
and Life” 132n69 148, 171, 185; life 15, 54, 90;
dependence/dependency 64–66, 73, and literature/writing 21, 41–42,
165, 178, 189; inter- 4, 8, 9n2, 108, 115, 128n21, 130n42, 141,
17, 96, 179; between Lord and 168n10, 169n25, 188; and love
Bondsman 63; and love 141–142; 9, 81, 92, 97–98, 105, 148, 186;
on others 39, 68 as mediation/intermediary 4, 6,
Derrida, Jacques 86n42, 191n25 61, 62, 172; monstrous 179–182;
desire 23, 29–30, 33, 35–36, 41, 190n20; multiple/multiplicity of/
53, 56, 58, 64, 69, 77, 84n16, infinite/chain of/web of/array of
85n17, 125, 139, 142, 149; and doubles 4–5, 7–8, 44n29, 81,
abjection 77; and breath 20; 104–106, 110, 116, 118, 124–125,
between consciousnesses 63; and 126n6, 148, 151, 153, 157,
destructiveness 36; for domination 167, 172, 184–185, 187–188;
25; graph of 44n34; for the narcissistic 22, 122, 124–125,
Idea 53; and identification 179; 134, 157, 160; negative 5, 32–36,
lack/loss of 20, 143; “mimetic” 40–42, 46n46, 60, 72–73, 79–80,
(Girard) 179; morbid 36; 105, 108, 118, 169n25, 170n29,
multiplicity of desires 123; of the 172–173, 180; opposite 44n30,
5
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Index 205
167n1, 172–176, 179, 181–182; envy 15, 24, 43n17, 56, 140
and the original 2, 29, 51, 81n3, equality 147, 180, 187; of all things
107, 150–151, 162; and Other/ 146; and difference 179–180;
otherness/alterity 3, 6, 22, 79, primordial 170n46; as a threat 179
104–105, 148, 154, 159, 163–166, Eros 36, 38, 75
170n46, 171, 178; positive 5, essence 6, 40, 42, 54–57, 67–68,
32–36, 41, 46n46, 60, 79, 80, 105, 70–71, 175; versus appearance/
108, 118, 134, 170n29, 173, 180; image 6–7, 52, 54–56, 59;
and repetition 105, 109, 117–118; existence precedes 175; hybrid 188
single or multiple/plural 3–5, Eternal Return (Nietzsche) 8, 102,
41, 97, 103–105, 109, 159–160; 104, 115–121, 123–124, 131n54,
three phases in the evolution of 166; as abject 118; and the
(Baudrillard) 153–154; two forms compulsion to repeat 119; Deleuze
of (Deleuze) 122 on 122; of the doubles 115; and
doubling/duplicating 9, 41, 61–62, nausea 117; as repetition in time
81, 85n17, 94, 123, 125, 157, 171, 118; and shadow-existence 116
177, 185–186; diary as self-41; eternity 26, 89, 92, 107, 145,
and love 128n21; with no original 188; cyclical and nonlinear
167; and the real 135; and 143; and love 138; of the Same
repetition 111; self- 6–7, 41, 81, (Baudrillard) 154; and unicity
105, 116; versus splitting 82n3, 153; see also infinity
158; and writing/literature 167 existence: and appearance 68;
dream 1, 13–14, 40, 51, 69, 77, concrete 104; Existence as evil
90, 145 (Levinas) 74; Existence and
drive, death see death existents (Levinas) 72, 157;
drive, life see life “inauthentic” 179; and irony
Duflos, Huguette see Aimée 111; isolated 147; negating 123;
Duras, Marguerite 7, 88–89, 91, precedes essence (Sartre) 175
95–97, 102–103, 105, 116, 125, existentialism 27, 175
126n5, 127n8, 128n21, 129n26, exteriority 20, 24, 57, 73
130n37, 135, 148, 151; India externalization 16, 22
Song 128n21; and Kristeva
127n15; The Lorry (Le camion) fairy tale 50, 92
129n27; and shadows 129n27; family romance (Rank and
and traumatic models 126n7; Freud) 184
The Vice-Consul 128n21; see also Fanon, Frantz 190n11
The Ravishing of Lol Stein fantasy 32, 35, 41, 48–49, 58–59, 62,
dynasty 185–186 72, 92, 103, 134–135, 137–138,
142, 146–147, 149–150, 152, 166;
ego 31, 36, 38–39, 186; formation and actuality 141, 149; annihilate
of the 44n24; “pure pleasure-ego” 147; in contemporary Western
23, 36; skin (Anzieu) 44n25 society 149–150; destructive 135;
Eliade, Mircea 43n13, 168n13 frozen 147; and literature 167; of
emotion 24, 58, 60, 62, 70, 88, love 166; narcissistic 135; of the
90–91, 113, 133 real 134–135, 150; and reality
“Emperor’s New Clothes” 135–136, 139, 145–146, 150;
see Andersen from singular to multiple 147
emptiness 19, 30–34, 36, 49, 54–55, fascism 181, 189
75, 99, 101, 109–110, 133, father 2, 5, 11, 20–21, 41–42, 47–48,
150–151; and appearance 55; 76, 109, 183, 188; double of the
inner 30, 103; and possibilities 98; 184–185; kill/overcome 184–185,
self- 35; see also negativity; void 188; and monotheism 9, 182,
Enlightenment 59–61, 79; and 186; primitive (Freud) 185, 188,
Romanticism 82n5 191n33; and son 183, 185
6
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206 Index
Faust (Goethe) 25 ghost 15–16, 19, 21, 35; of the

fear 14, 68, 70, 71, 181; of the abject double 180; see also phantom
79; of actuality 110; of endless Gide, André 95
existence 71; of the outside 108; Girard, René 8, 179–182, 187;
see also anxiety; horror “mimetic desire” 179; scapegoat
femininity 75, 104, 109; 180; surrogate victim 8, 180–181;
feminization 112, 130n38; as “unanimity-minus-one” 180
inherently double 84n15; Levinas God 114, 144, 165, 180, 185, 183,
on 75; simulacrum of 156 186; see also monotheism; religion
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 61, 83n10 Goodman, Charlotte 126n5
Fight Club (Palahniuk) 168n12 Guattari, Félix 124–125
film 5, 24–25, 43n9, 48, 128n15, guilt 26, 36, 122–123
134, 146
flesh 68, 74, 158; abject 160; naked hallucination 72, 77–78, 109, 161;
117; see also body see also illusion
forgetting 92, 118, 122; death 99 hatred/hate 24, 27, 39, 40, 69, 175,
Foucault, Michel 129n26 177; self- 39; see also hostility
fragmentation 31–33; self- 32–33, Hebrew: language 15, 75; people 9,
36, 41; see also split/splitting 183, 187–188; see also Judaism/
Frank, Manfred 84n13 Jewishness; Israel
free will 122–125 Hegel, G. W. F. 6, 60–66, 70, 80,
freedom 52, 64, 73; and irony 111; 84n16, 85n17, 85n20, 161;
Other’s 69 dialectic of Lord and Bondsman
Freud, Sigmund 6, 8–9, 18, 22–25, 6, 60–66, 85n17; struggle for life
28, 30, 36–39, 44n32, 45n37, 108, and death 62–63, 65–66
119–121, 131n56, 158, 181–189; Heidegger, Martin 50, 128n20
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” hero 184–185, 188; chain of heroes
119; crystal principle 28; 182; lucid 182, 187–189; as
doubling/dividing/interchanging of male 191n30
the self 45n37; fort-da game 120, history 172, 187; and irony
143, 153; and hypnosis 16–17; 111, 124
and Kierkegaard 132n60; Totem Hitchcock, Alfred 128n15
and Taboo 185, 188, 191n33; Hoffmann, E. T. A. 45n37, 81n3,
“The Uncanny” 37–38 82n4, 126n6
Friday (Tournier) 8, 160–167 “The Horla” (Maupassant) 5,
Friedrich, Caspar David 62 12–42, 44n25, 51, 59, 72
Fuentes, Carlos 168n8 horror 60, 101, 174, 176; see also
anxiety; fear
gaze 6, 28, 39, 47, 50, 53, 55–56, hostility 23, 27, 37, 39, 135, 150,
58, 60, 66, 68, 95–96, 100–101, 172; see also hatred/hate
111, 126n3, 133–135, 178, Houellebecq, Michel 8, 135,
190n13; active 69; intimate 147; 148, 151, 154, 167n1, 168n4;
the Other’s 6, 53, 68–70, 177; Lanzarote 168n4; see also The
participative 101; secret of the 55; Possibility of an Island
and touch 129n26 Husserl, Edmund 50, 129n34;
gender 178; and the figure of the epoché 129n34
double 126n5; and Jewishness hypnosis 16, 30, 117
190n13; and Levinas 86n42;
performativity (Butler) 130n38; id 38–39
politics 127n8 Idea 53–54, 104, 121, 134; and
Genesis 38 actuality 114; and concrete
German Idealism 61–62, 83n9, existence (Kierkegaard) 104;
84n13; see also universality/ versus Image and Appearance 54;
universalism Platonic 114, 168n9
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Index 207
ideal 27–28, 30, 33, 35–36, 40, 60, 182; as a shadow 106; and social/
62, 77, 104, 108; partial 60 collective 171–172, 189; see also
Idealism see German Idealism identity; personality; self, the;
identification 28–29, 31, 33, 36, 62, subject/subjectivity
96–97, 101, 112, 119, 135, 150, individualism/individuality 35,
153, 164, 171, 174, 178, 191n30; 143–144, 156–157, 160,
chain of identifications 178; 181–182, 187; culture of 125;
counter- 177; and desire 179; with and monotheism 186
the double 177 infinity 31–32, 71, 74, 79–81, 93,
identity 2, 12, 30, 34, 37, 57, 72, 96, 97–98, 102, 164–165; “bad” and
98–99, 101–102, 147, 150, “good” 74–76, 79, 86n41, 159;
175–177, 179; collective/group/ of the Other 74, 103, 159; of
social 172, 177, 180; and death 99; personalities 107; of Poetry 78; of
and double 29, 81; external 178; possibilities 111; the two infinities
flow between identities 172; holistic (Levinas) 78; of women/men 102;
33; identity politics 8, 171–172, see also eternity
179; and love 97; of minorities 179; interdependency/interdependence
multiple 3, 7; and otherness 85n17; see dependence/dependency
play with identities 130n38; self- 3, intimacy 61, 70, 94, 133–134;
29, 60; stable/solid/static/nominal see also love
28, 32, 99, 150, 177; universal 177; introjection 12, 23, 40
unstable 17; and void 19; see also inversion: between Lord and
individual; personality; self, the; Bondsman 63–64; between man
subject/subjectivity and shadow 56, 65–66; see also
il y a (Levinas) 7, 71–72, 73–76, 79, transformation
80, 109, 157, 159, 161, 164; and invisibility 11–12, 14–15, 18,
the abject 76; and the Other 78 21, 34, 52
illness 13, 15, 24, 56, 65, 101, 117 Irigaray, Luce 84n15, 86n42
illusion 31, 114; of grandeur 105; irony (Kierkegaard) 111–115, 124,
of self-sufficiency 172; see also 149; as “divine madness” 129n35
hallucination isolation 48, 131n50, 163; see also
image 22, 27–28, 30–32, 37, loneliness
52–55, 58, 60, 67, 71, 78, 106, Israel 8, 172, 181; see also Hebrew;
134, 149, 150, 155–156, 178; Judaism/Jewishness
external 30–31, 35–37; versus
Idea and Essence 7, 54; narcissistic Jehovah 183
30, 32; self- 22, 25, 32–34, 53, Jesus 188
108, 122, 157; see also mirror Job (biblical figure) 114
imaginary order (Lacan) 31–34, Jonah (biblical figure) 109
36, 40–41, 44n30, 85n17, Judaism/Jewishness 9, 172, 175,
149–150, 168n8 177–179, 183, 188, 190n13;
imitation 103, 120, 135, 150 and multiplicity 176, 178; as
immortality 9, 35, 71, 140, 182, opposite double 175–176; as a
187–189; see also death surrogate victim 180; see also
impulse 48, 58, 77, 88; destructive 36 Hebrew; Israel
incarnation 26, 136–138, Jung, Carl Gustav 83n6
140–141, 143 Jupiter 165
indifference 48, 50, 56, 66, 69, 138
individual 9, 57, 76, 85, 128n19, Kafka, Franz 125
156, 177, 179, 181, 187: and Kant, Immanuel 61; “thing-in-
abject 76; and death 186; and itself” 61
the double 185, 188; the first Keppler, Carl F. 9n2, 9n3, 42,
186–187; in modernity 182; the 169n25; Literature of the Second
multitude in 97; in psychoanalysis Self 42, 169n25
8
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208 Index
Kierkegaard, Søren 7, 84n13, negative double 72; Poetry’s (“The

104–117, 121, 124–125, 127n11, Shadow”) 51, 54, 58, 63; and
127n12, 127n13, 128n15, shadow 66; sunlight 51, 54, 58,
129n35, 130–131n50, 147, 149, 63, 67, 142
151, 159; Concept of Irony limit/limitation 7, 19, 34, 61, 63,
129n35; Either/Or 127n12, 74, 76, 78
127n13; Fear and Trembling literature 6, 41, 49, 53, 115, 167;
127n13; and Freud 132n60 and capitalism 135; doubling of
Kittler, Friedrich 43n9 167; French 135; and life 115,
Klein, Melanie 6, 27, 39–40, 168n7; 125; and multiplication 125;
fusion 40; “paranoid-schizoid nineteenth-century/Romantic/
position” 39 Gothic 1, 3, 12, 30, 43n9, 59,
knowledge 49–50, 53, 77, 80; 81n3, 82n4, 97, 126n6, 148;
absolute (German Idealism) 62 and otherness/others 115,
Kojève, Alexandre 85n17 167; postmodern 168n10; and
Kristeva, Julia 7, 61, 71, 75–80, psychoanalysis 43n9; and shadow-
118, 157–158, 168n7, 190n20; existence 115; as a simulacrum
and Duras 127n15; and Levinas and fantasy 167; therapeutic force
78, 86n49; Powers of Horror of 132n69; twentieth-century
75; Tales of Love 169n26; see and contemporary 82n3; see also
also abject/abjection; maternal; narrative; reading; writing
semiotic Literature of the Second Self
see Keppler, Carl F.
La jetée (Marker) 134 logic 34, 44n32, 77; see also
Lacan, Jacques 6, 27–32, 36, 38, rationalism/rationality; science
40, 44n24, 44n34, 45n46, 76, loneliness 17, 48, 74; see also
85n17, 86n29, 107, 126n3, isolation; Levinas, Emmanuel
149–150, 158, 170n28, 174, 179; loss 59, 110, 114, 160
“the chain of dead desire” 35; love 7–8, 22–27, 38–40, 55–56,
“paranoiac knowledge” 27–28; 69–71, 73, 88–92, 94, 96–100,
recognition (reconnaissance) and 102–103,
misrecognition (méconnaissance) 105–106, 108, 113–115, 121–122,
29; “the subject” 31 127n11, 127n13, 135, 137–149,
lack 31, 63, 93; of air 2, 5; of 156, 158–161, 163, 166–167, 182,
desire 143 186–189; accumulative 147;
language 33, 41, 69, 70, 89, 156; “anaclitic” (Freud) 169n27;
and the double 168n10; and Aristophanes’s myth of 144; and
semiotic 77; see also symbolic the compulsion to repeat 120;
law 76–77 and death 27, 137–138, 144; and
Le Guin, Ursula 83n6 double 81, 92, 97–98, 105, 108,
Levinas, Emmanuel 7, 61, 128n21, 148, 158, 186; eternal
71–76, 78, 80, 87n53, 103, 157, 94, 138, 141; and Eternal Return
159, 170n32; criticism of 75; 121; falling in 56–57, 89, 101,
hypostasis 73–74, 78, 86n31; 104–105, 110, 138, 141, 151,
insomnia 71–72; and gender 168n8, 173; inability to 8, 22,
86n42; and Kristeva 78, 86n49; 70, 105, 140; and irony 111,
and Merleau-Ponty 74; “On 149; making 100, 112, 162–163;
Escape” 74; phenomenon of the and multiplicity 104; narcissistic
caress 75; “tragic solitude” 74 131n56, 158; and negativity/
libido 6, 38–39, 48; see also desire nothingness 100, 103, 152; and
life drive (Freud) 36, 38; see also possession/ownership/control 92,
death drive 100, 140, 147; and possibilities
light 54, 59–60, 62–63, 69, 71, 98; and recollection 111; and
77–78; and infinity 75; and repetition 104, 108, 112; self- 6,
9
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2
Index 209
22, 25, 38–39; triangle 100, 158; mother 76, 120, 127n15, 161, 165;
see also intimacy; sex see also maternal; semiotic; womb
lucid hero 182, 187–189 mourning 48, 93, 103, 120
movement of signification
Madame Bovary (Flaubert) 167 (Lacan) 31–32
madness 7, 34–35, 79, 99–102, 112, multiplicity 3–4, 8, 9n2, 41, 93, 97,
116, 126n8, 148, 159, 161; female 102–106, 114, 122–125, 139–140,
126n8; and irony 129n35 147–148, 150–151, 158, 165,
main shoot (Kierkegaard) 104, 171, 174, 176–178, 185–187,
106–112, 114, 116, 121–124, 189; concentrated 139; of doubles
147–149, 151–152, 159, 162, 44n29, 106, 157; of language 33;
165–167; see also actuality; and possibilities 109, 123, 165;
possibility; potentiality; and singularity/unicity/unity 3,
shadow-existence 97, 103, 122, 151; and the subject
Man, Paul de 127n13 4, 97, 125; and theater 106–107;
Marker, Chris 134 see also plurality
master/mastery 53–54, 56–57, 63, multitude see multiplicity
160–162; see also control music 51, 78
materiality 56–58, 63, 73, 75, 79, myth: of the hero 183–184; of love
80; see also matter (Aristophanes) 144; of Moses 185,
maternal (Kristeva) 76–77, 109, 191n31; of Narcissus (Ovid) 22
161, 163; see also mother;
semiotic; womb Nabokov, Vladimir 82n3
matter 53, 64–66, 73, 75–76, 81; Nadja (Breton) 126n8
see also body; flesh nakedness/nudity 53–54, 64
Maupassant, Guy de 5, 12, 21, 26, Nancy School 16, 34
30, 32, 36–37, 42, 42n2, 51, 58, narcissism 6–8, 17, 22, 25–27, 29,
73, 80, 97, 105, 118, 123, 157; 30–32, 35, 37–39, 41–42, 42n3,
see also “The Horla” 45n37, 51, 59, 60, 101, 105,
melancholy 106, 110–111, 128n15 108, 112, 115, 122, 125, 135,
memory see recollection 157–160, 163, 171, 174, 178, 182,
Menninghaus, Winfried 131n54 186–187; culture of 125; primary
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 50, 74 22–24, 27, 30, 36, 38, 45n37,
Michelangelo 191n23, 191n27 186; secondary 38; superficial and
minority 178–179, 190n6; profound 159; see also self, the
and double 176; and major Narcissus 6, 22, 29, 158, 173
groups 179 narrative/narration 96, 108
mirror 17–19, 25, 28–31, 35, 37, 40, narrator 96, 105–106, 109,
157–159, 173–174, 176; image 6, 112–115, 169n25
12, 18, 25, 28–37, 39, 41, 44n30, Nature 15, 34, 61, 113, 160;
82n4, 149–150, 157, 159, 174, as opposed to the “self”
178; stage 27–29, 31, 35–38, (Schelling) 83n10
44n24, 85n17, 107, 149–150, 159, nausea (Ekel) 116–117, 121
168n7, 174, 177–179; see also Nazism 176, 181, 184, 187
reflection negative double see double
modernity 35, 154, 182; see also negativity 31–32, 34, 36–38, 40,
culture; society 45n36, 111–112, 115, 123–124,
monotheism 9, 182, 185–187; 129n34, 145, 152–155, 157,
and individualism 186; and 160, 162, 168n12, 175, 180;
multiplicity 185; see also God; ironic 111, 113; and multiplicity
religion 125, 176; and positivity 143;
Montaigne, Michel de 169n23 in repetition 120; see also
Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 9, nothingness
182, 185, 187–188 Neverending Story, The (Ende) 146
0
1
2
210 Index
Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 104, 115– painting 62, 173–174

119, 121, 125, 149, 151; “abysmal Palahniuk, Chuck 82n3, 168n12
thought” 116; Gay Science 117, Palestine 8, 172, 181
120; Thus Spoke Zarathustra 116 paranoia 27–29
night 50–52, 64, 69, 72, 78; see also “paranoid-schizoid position” see
darkness; sleep Klein, Melanie
nightmare 13, 72 particularism: and universalism
nihilism 123–124, 149 58–59, 71, 177, 179, 181; see
nostalgia 110–111 also individual; individualism/
nothing/nothingness 35–37, 40, 99, individuality; German Idealism;
102–103, 145–146, 151, 155; universalism
and being 31–32; and love 100, passion 48–50, 88, 106, 133, 149,
103; as ravishing 103; see also 175, 176; see also desire
negativity; emptiness passivity 11–12, 51–52, 69–70, 72,
not-I 12, 14, 118, 148; “not-I” 91; and activity 69
(German Idealism) 83n10, 61 past: loss of the 111; happiness
Nouveau Roman 89 of the 106; and possibilities 111;
and present 105–106, 107; and
observation/observer 112–115, 149; shadow-existence 110
ironic 114; see also seeing/being- pathology 28, 39, 100
seen; sight; spectator; voyeurism Paul, Jean 81n3
obsession 51, 58, 77, 79, 173 personality 106, 113, 144, 151;
Odyssey/Odysseus 71, 79 dark aspects of 83n6; infinite
Oedipus 184, 191n27 personalities 107; internal and
one, the: and the many 97–98, external 107; see also identity;
103–104, 122; see also multiplicity individual; self, the; subject/
Origin of the World (Courbet) 75 subjectivity
origin/original 29, 77, 151, 173–174; Peter Schlemihl (Chamisso) 59–60,
absent 2; and the double 3–4, 29, 66, 82n4, 154; and The Shadow
51, 81n3, 97, 107, 124, 148, 162; (Andersen) 82n4
and femininity 75; multiple 176, phantom 16, 168n8; see also ghost
187; and shadow 56; unknown 14 Phenomenology 4
Other/otherness 3, 5–8, 16, 20, 22, philosophy 5, 34, 49, 53, 60–61, 74,
24–26, 28–29, 35–37, 48, 51–52, 124, 155
54–56, 58, 61, 63–64, 67–71, photo/photography 2, 17, 30,
75–76, 79–81, 84n15, 103, 108, 37, 168
115, 118, 147, 149, 152, 158–161, Picture of Dorian Gray, The see
163, 165–167, 170n46, 172–173, Wilde, Oscar
177, 186, 190n11; concrete 165, Plato 53, 54, 114, 144, 168n9;
167, 170n28; and death 154; allegory of the cave 54; Republic,
desire of 29, 35, 63; and double 6, The 53; Symposium 144
8, 79, 104, 159, 163–166, 170n46, pleasure 23, 94, 101, 131n54,
178; the face of the (Levinas) 74, 138, 157, 159; principle (Freud)
78; the gaze of the (Sartre) 70, 22–23, 119; “pure pleasure-ego”
177–178; and identity 85n17; see ego
and il y a (Levinas) 78; inner 32, plurality 105, 121; see also
159, 163; infinity of the 74, 103, multiplicity
159, 165; and literature 115, Poe, Edgar Allan 81n3
167; and multiplicity 165; the poem 77, 143–144, 155; love
Other (German Idealism) 61; “the 137, 142
structure of the other” (Deleuze) Poetry 6–7, 49, 52–54, 57–59, 61,
162; see also alterity; stranger/ 63, 65, 70–72, 75, 77–81, 85n17,
strangeness 109, 115
Overman (Nietzsche) 119–120 positivity 34, 172; false 154; and
Ovid 22 negativity 143
12
Index 211
possession 95, 97, 125, 143, 147, 151, Rank, Otto 6, 9n3, 24–27, 29–31,
165–166, 188; and love 92, 140; 35–36, 38, 108, 153, 182–184,
versus participation 100; see also 186, 189n1; Myth of the Birth of
accumulation the Hero (Rank) 183
Possibility of an Island, The rationalism/rationality 34–35,
(Houellebecq) 8, 135–167 59–60; see also logic; science
possibility 7, 93, 98, 106–108, Ravishing of Lol Stein, The (Duras)
113, 118, 120, 124, 142–143, 7, 88–126
152, 155, 162, 165; and actuality Razinsky, Liran 44n25
115, 149, 163; actualization reactivity 55, 123–124
of 7, 107, 118; and emptiness reader 42, 80, 96, 115, 141,
98, 128n20; equality of 145–146, 152, 188; as double 188
possibilities 122; Heidegger reading 103, 136, 146; and writing
on 128n20; and love 98; 168n8; see also literature; writing
multiple/infinite 109, 111, real, the 136–138, 143, 145–147,
119, 123–124, 139; realm/set/ 152, 155; and doubling 135;
field of possibilities 111, fantasized 150; “hyperreal” see
114, 118, 128n20, 147, 163, Baudrillard; Idea of 134; and love
165–167; see also actuality; 137; as opposite to reality
main shoot; potentiality; 134–135; and simulacra 150
shadow-existence reality 40, 51, 55–56, 77, 137–138,
Postmodernism/postmodernity 5, 143–144; and fantasy 135–136,
125, 172 139, 146, 150; negativity in
Post-structuralism 4 129n34; as opposite to the real
potentiality 59, 119–121, 123–124, 134–135; and virtuality 110
139, 147–148, 151, 155–156; recognition 52; and
and actuality 108, 110–111, misrecognition 30
114, 118, 155, 170n46; field recollection: and love 111;
of 149; negative 157, 160, melancholic 106, 128n15; and
165; positive 157; see also repetition 105–107, 111, 128n15
actuality; main shoot; possibility; reflection 19, 22, 28, 37, 54,
shadow-existence 173–174; positive 30; and shadow
potlatch 153, 162 66; see also mirror
presence 31, 34, 51, 59; of the religion 34–35, n186; see also God;
real 138 monotheism
present (time) 73, 105–107, repetition 2, 104, 106–108, 110,
111, 113; as actualization of 112, 114–115, 120–121, 127n13,
possibilities 118; as doubling and 130n42, 136, 142, 144, 153, 155,
repetition 111; and irony 111; and 160; and abject 117, 130–131n50;
repetition 110 and children 120, 122; compulsive
pride (Sartre) 67; see also shame/pride 119, 121; de Man on 127n13;
primal scene 89, 102, 134 and double/doubling 2, 105, 109,
primary narcissism see narcissism 111, 117–118; Freud on 119;
“primitive father” see father “good”/happy 106, 120, 131n50;
projection 12, 16, 23–24, 26, 31, Heidegger on 128n20; and irony
33–35, 39–41, 57, 60, 65, 149, 112–113; and love 104, 112;
158, 171, 173, 175–176, 178; and recollection 105–107, 111,
and shadow 67; narcissistic 33; 128n15; and shadow 107; and
visual 66 shadow-existence 109; in time and
pseudonym 27, 105 in space 2, 105, 118, 124, 131n56;
psyche 38–39, 45n37 and theater/books/the arts 106,
Psychoanalysis 4, 6, 22, 28, 38, 40, 110; two forms/kinds of 118,
41, 43n9, 75–76, 182, 184, 187; 132n60; uncanny 144
as Jewish science 192n36; and Repetition (Kierkegaard) 105, 108,
literature 43n9 111, 112, 115
2
1
212 Index
repressed, the 27, 60, 154, 183 Semite see anti-Semite; Judaism/
reproduction 100, 155 Jewishness
resemblance 91–92, 170n46, 178; sex 48–49, 54, 140, 163; see also love
see also similarity shadow 6, 12, 47, 50–60, 62–71, 73,
respect 6, 55–56 77–78, 80, 85n28, 106–108, 117,
Rilke, Rainer Maria 47, 58; Ninth 120, 124, 137, 151, 154, 172;
Elegy 47 and abject 78; for the artist 83n6;
Rimbaud, Arthur 48 and body 67, 154; creation of
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 8; 59, 61; dark/evil/demonic 60, 66,
see Friday; Tournier, Michel 83n6, 129n27; Duras on 129n27;
Romanticism 5, 50, 59–62, 84n12, existence see shadow-existence;
110, 125, 180; and Enlightenment and il y a 78; infinite shadows
82n5; and German Idealism 62, 116; Jung on 83n6; and light 60;
84n13; and multiplicity 125 loss of 60, 82n4; and Other 79; as
Rosenfeld, Herbert 40 reflection 66; and repetition 107;
Rosset, Clément 169n17 as the repressed 60; and shame/
Roth, Philip 82n3 pride 66–67
“Shadow, The” (Andersen) 6,
sacrificial crisis (Girard) 179, 50–81, 82n4, 91, 154; and Peter
180–182 Schlemihl (Chamisso) 82n4
Said, Edward 192n38 shadow-existence (Kierkegaard) 7,
Saramago, Jose 82n3 105, 106–108, 110, 113–114,
Sartre, Jean-Paul 6, 8, 60, 66–71, 121, 123–124, 128n19, 128n20,
80, 85n29, 96, 130n49, 161, 128n21, 147, 149, 151–152, 155,
175–179, 181; bad faith 70; 159–160, 162–163; and childhood
Erostratus 69; Nausea 130n49 109, 129n24; and Eternal Return
Saussure, Ferdinand de 32 116; and irony 111; and the main
Schelling, F. W. J. 61, 83n10 shoot 108, 112; and narcissism
science 34–35, 44n32; see also logic; 108; and Poetry 115; reactivate
rationalism/rationality 108; in real life 108; and
seduction 69, 166–167; and repetition 109; and theater 109,
abjection 167 130n50; and writing/literature
seeing/being-seen 40, 51, 53–55, 108, 115; see also main shoot;
67, 69, 85n29, 96; see also possibility; potentiality
appearance; observation/ shame 26, 53, 64, 66
observer; Sartre, Jean-Paul; sight; shame/pride (Sartre) 67–68, 70, 79
voyeurism; watching Sherman, Cindy 2
self, the 3, 6, 16, 18, 24, 30, 35, sight 6, 18, 52, 55–56, 63, 68, 70,
39–40, 45n37, 62, 107–108, 78, 99, 113; and darkness 14; and
112, 118, 173; and double 29, negative double 72; obliqueness
106; emptiness of 19, 110; of 87n53; and touch 129n26;
idealized and monstrous 174; see also observation/observer;
illusion of 17, 114; loss of 108; seeing/being-seen; voyeurism
material (Levinas) 73; multiplicity similarity/similitude 91, 101, 117,
of 8; narcissistic 25, 125; negation 175; behind difference 156; fear of
of 60; and others 24; and shadow- 181–182; primordial 156; see also
existence 108; split 7, 80–81; resemblance
see also identity; individual; simulacra/simulacrum 150, 152–155,
personality; subject/subjectivity 157, 166, 168n9; age of 149, 151,
semiotic (Kristeva) 7, 77–78, 80; and 156–157; of femininity 156; and
abject 77–78; and mirror stage literature 167; of love 166; of
168n7; and symbolic 77; see also Others 165; and the real 150; and
maternal; mother; womb spectacle 156
3
1
2
Index 213
singularity 33, 157; and multiplicity/ 123–124; and multiplicity 4,

plurality 97, 103, 105; see also 125; and shadow 60; and split
“whatever singularity”; see also 6; see also identity; individual;
uniqueness personality; self, the
Sirens 71, 79 Sublime see Kant, Immanuel;
sleep 18, 72, 102; and darkness 14; romanticism
inability to 71; see also darkness; substitution 91–92, 99, 102, 184
night “suchness” (Agamben) 156;
Slethaug, Gordon E. 168n10 common 157, 177; of the lovers
society: consumer see consumerism; 158; see also “whatever”
homogeneous 177; of multiplicity suggestion 16, 34
or multitude 189; neohuman suicide 19, 25, 36, 72, 123, 141–143,
152; tribal/traditional/indigenous 152; see also death
153; Victorian 173; Western 136, Suleiman, Susan 127n8
149–150, 153, 168n10, 179; sunlight see light
see also culture superego 38–39, 45n37, 76
Socrates 111 Surrealism 126n8
solitude see Levinas, Emmanuel; symbolic 170n28; chain 32, 35, 40,
loneliness 44n34; exchange (Baudrillard)
soul 17, 23, 25, 56, 58, 68, 71, 77, 43n13, 153–154, 165; and
81, 113, 122, 154; and body 16, imaginary 168n8; order 31–34,
58, 75; see also spirit 40–41, 77, 85n17, 149–150; and
spectacle (Baudrillard) 155–157 semiotic 77; symbolization 6, 41
spectator 18, 94; narcissistic 112;
see also observation/observer; sight temporality 2, 113, 120; see also time
spirit 15, 49, 53, 56–57, 64, 67, 74, Thanatos see death drive
81; and body 153; and matter 65, theater 106–108, 110,
75; pure 60, 73; see also soul 128n21, 130n50
spirituality 19, 75, 80; material 65 theogony (Hesiod) 34
split/splitting 6, 41, 47, 51, 53–60, theory 4, 50, 58, 67–68, 112
62, 67–68, 70, 80–81, 91, 114, Thus Spoke Zarathustra see
122, 146, 158; active and passive Nietzsche
80; in consciousness 60, 65; time 5, 111, 114, 165, 189; see also
Deleuze on 123; and the double/ temporality
doubling/duplication 45n37, Todorov, Tzvetan 43n9
82n3, 97, 158; exterior and touch 58, 64, 67, 71, 96; and vision/
interior 57; Klein on 39; between sight/observance/gaze 58, 95, 110,
man and shadow 61, 63–64, 112, 129n26, 115; see also body
67–68; see also fragmentation Tournier, Michel 8, 161; see also
stability 105, 176–177; and love 138 Friday
Stevenson, Robert Louis 81n3 transcendence 74; self-  7, 112
stranger/strangeness 2, 14, 18, 29, transformation 6, 56–57, 100, 102,
37, 48–49, 52, 70–71, 73, 98, 155, 113, 120, 171; and love 97–98;
166, 198; see also alterity; Other/ self- 166; see also inversion
otherness trauma 100, 102, 110, 119–120, 158;
struggle for life and death see Hegel, and Duras 126n7; primordial 119
G. W. F. tumor 21, 42; see also cancer
Student of Prague, The (Ewers)
24–26, 33, 36 uncanny 16, 18, 37, 39, 45n37, 144,
subject/subjectivity 1, 3, 4–5, 30–31, 155, 158
72–74, 78, 96, 125, 148; and “The Uncanny” (Freud) see Freud,
alterity 16; and duplication 6; Sigmund
as an illusion 123; modern unconscious 26, 129n26, 186
4
1
2
214 Index
unicity 59, 61, 108, 153, 158, 185; Wanderer above a Sea of Fog
and multiplicity 151; and unity (Friedrich) 62
84n13; see also unity watching 64, 69, 94, 97; and being
uniqueness 59, 82n4, 187, 189; watched (Sartre) 80; see also
see also singularity seeing/being-seen
unity 61–62, 65, 84n12, 85n17; Western culture see culture
and multiplicity 122; and unicity Western society see society
84n13; see also unicity “whatever” (Agamben) 157; “love”
universality/universalism 58–59, 71, 158; “singularity” 156, 164;
177, 179, 181; see also German see also “suchness”
Idealism; wholeness wholeness 32, 35, 60, 154,
unrevealed, the 69–71, 96; and 176; see also universality/
otherness 71 universalism
Wilde, Oscar 167n3, 173–174;
Vardoulakis, Dimitris 9n2 Picture of Dorian Gray, The
Vertigo (Hitchcock) 128n15 167n3, 173; Dorian Gray 176
violence 9, 36, 40, 48, 84n15, will/willpower 17–18, 20, 24
180–181, 184–185, 187; chain of wind 15, 19, 35; see also air
180–181; cycle of 190n6; and loss womb 76, 161; maternal 109, 161
of differences 180; Nazi 190n6; writing 6, 21, 41, 52, 55, 58–59,
purifying 180; see also aggression/ 67, 103, 129n26, 132n69,
aggressiveness 133, 136, 141, 188; and
vision 51, 58, 62, 67–68, 78; and “dark shadow” 129n27; as
touch 58, 95, 110, 112; see also doubling 115, 167; feminine 89,
seeing/being-seen; sight; spectator 115, 126–127n8; and otherness
Visker, Rudi 86n41 115; poetic 77; re- 185; and
void 54; and identity 19; one’s inner reading 42, 168n8; and shadow-
175; see also emptiness existence 108; see also literature;
voyeurism 67, 100; see also reading
observation/observer; seeing/
being-seen; sight; spectator Yerushalmi, Yosef H. 192n36

Double Trouble The Doppelgnger From Romanticism To Postmodernism

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Double Trouble The Doppelgnger From Romanticism To Postmodernism

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i

The double, doppelgänger, is mostly understood as a peculiar

Eran Dorfman is Associate Professor and Head of the Department

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

California and the Melancholic American Identity in

Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the

Agamben’s Political Ontology of Nudity in Literature and Art

Conceptualisation and Exposition

Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning

For more information about this series, please visit:

First published 2020

1 The Double That Takes My Breath Away 11

2 The Shadow’s Gaze 47

3 The Double’s Lesson of Love 88

4 Islands of Doubles 133

Epilogue: “It’s Not Me, It’s You”: From the

This book is the fruit of a collective effort. For more than

Tel Aviv University, in which I received precious feedback from

Some people came to tell me I had a double hanging out there

Although my dream dates back more than 20 years, I have

This book is therefore a personal and intellectual quest for

I trace them in the following pages and discover other possibil-

To respect the nature of the double and its resistance to theory,

studies, and film studies. I propose, though, that the double is a

both stemming from the endeavor to deny alterity, lack, and

through extending the enclosing limits of the subject toward

of Nietzsche’s notion of the Eternal Return and Freud’s con-

To explore the possibility of individuals and groups admit-

257–​268; Claire Rosenfield, “The Shadow Within: The Conscious

1  he Double That Takes My

“I have no air”: my father kept pronouncing these words over

12 The Double That Takes My Breath Away

features –​exchange with the outside, passivity, invisibility –​

“The Horla” is constructed as the diary of a wealthy single

The Double That Takes My Breath Away 13

first lines of the story: “May 8. What a wonderful day! I spent

I sleep –​for a long time –​two or three hours –​then a dream –​

14 The Double That Takes My Breath Away

me, is climbing into my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking

This “someone” who tries to strangle the diarist remains at

The Double That Takes My Breath Away 15

Life is taken away by a vampire or a ghost, but who is this

16 The Double That Takes My Breath Away

The Double That Takes My Breath Away 17

influenced the young Sigmund Freud. The diarist is very skep-

18 The Double That Takes My Breath Away

controls all my actions, all my movements, all my thoughts.

Everything there was clear as in full daylight, but I could

The Double That Takes My Breath Away 19

that he was there, but that he would escape me again, he

20 The Double That Takes My Breath Away

Breath, as we saw, is the medium through which the outside

“I have no air.” I started this chapter with these words of my

The Double That Takes My Breath Away 21

form of a tumor, a result of an inner mutation that choked him

22 The Double That Takes My Breath Away

their lives, a double that gradually seized control of their bodies

Primary Narcissism and the Birth of the Double

The Double That Takes My Breath Away 23

principle, and only the inner realm is perceived as pleasurable

24 The Double That Takes My Breath Away

pleasurable to lie outside his estate. But he soon discovers its

The Double as a Narcissistic Compromise

257–268; Claire Rosenfield, “The Shadow Within: The Conscious

1 he Double That Takes My

features –exchange with the outside, passivity, invisibility –

I sleep –for a long time –two or three hours –then a dream –

and paranoia toward many other free-spirited women. These

ability at this pre-psychoanalytic phase of his career to expose and

2 The Shadow’s Gaze

racial, sexual, but also intellectual –immediately fell victim to