Behold the figure lost in the reverie of its own reflection, entranced by the image in the mirror.
When we speak of narcissism, we often summon the notion of love, that tender emotion.
Yet, what lies in the depths of Narcissus' true heart?
It is not the admiration of beauty,
but the sorrow of knowing that the radiant being in the water cannot be rescued,
cannot be drawn into the safety of the world beyond the surface.
It is the guilt born from the realization of his own powerlessness to save.
This is the loathsome feeling, cloaked in the most selfless of guises—the contemplation of guilt itself.
The Society of Excessive Mourning: The Selfishness of Guilt
Park, chan-Bean.
In the twilight of our era, a singular yet luminous destiny befalls the humanist: to diagnose the malaise of modern society. Even if the subject is taboo, one must speak without hesitation. Our silence marks our death, and when we lose all meaning in that silence, we dive into under the six feet. Thus, I shall speak. I shall not lose meaning, even in silence. Like stars suspended in the dark night, I shall observe. I shall listen. I shall cry out! I shall name our 21st century Korean society as one of excessive mourning. People have forgotten the true meaning of mourning. They know not the essence of lamentation.
I have previously alluded to my reflections on excessive mourning in my paper "A Psychoanalytic Contemplation of Death: Analysis of the Itaewon Crowd Crush Incident." Let us distill its essence. Many identify themselves with the deceased. Those who complete this identification, regardless of its validity, experience severe shock. The shocked masses strive to categorize these large scale death events as accidental occurrences. Subsequently, public opinion begins to sanctify the deceased. Through identification, the deceased and the public have already become one. Thus, like the superego suppressing the id, they begin to conceal any potential misdeeds of the departed. They also display an attitude of admiration, as if for one who has accomplished a Herculean task. However, this identification does not endure. To face new deaths and departed souls, they cease identifying with the fictitious world of the deceased and return to reality. Thereafter, save for the bereaved, many gradually erase the incident from their memory. In essence, we mourn the dead because our unconscious, unable to perceive death, feels a lack through the death of others and experiences separation anxiety. We create and believe various rumors to give death an accidental character, yet anxiety persists. To alleviate this, we attempt to resign ourselves to and acknowledge death. In this process, as death cannot be recognized in the real world, we identify with the deceased in a fictional realm. Advanced media aids this identification. This process unfolds in a fictional world. The deceased becomes me. Thus, the ego indirectly senses its own annihilation. Now, the death of others relates not to the demise of a disliked person, but to one's own extinction, one's own death instinct. Henceforth, people seem to express mourning not for the deceased, but to protect themselves by placing the departed in a sacred realm.
People no longer pray for the dead. They lament their own death. They vicariously atone for their sins through the dead. While the power of religion wanes and disappears, its role, the name of the atoning Lord, still operates in our society. Perhaps, then, human mourning inherently possesses this characteristic... Is it possible to truly grieve for the death of the Other? Even if inherently impossible, is it just that this is not problematized? Various questions orbit in my mind, tracing endless infinite circular paths. However, it may be premature to address the compulsory nature of mourning in social structures. I shall continue to discuss the selfishness of this mourning. Guilt. We tend to view this as the epitome of altruism. Is it truly altruistic? We must question ourselves. Do we truly feel guilt for the sake of others? Is guilt not another form of violence? I have already elucidated that modern society's mourning is not for others, but for our own death identified with others. We must broaden our perspective to contemplate guilt. We must consider whether it is not a sensation of our own sense of guilt identified with others.
In the depths of our psyche, guilt flows like a subterranean river, carving secret caverns of remorse. As we delve into this fluid landscape of conscience, we must ask: does guilt, like water, seek its own level? Or does it, perhaps, defy the laws of nature, rising in inverse proportion to our genuine empathy? Let us imagine guilt as a flame - not the purifying fire of redemption, but a consuming blaze that feeds on the very fabric of our being. This fire of guilt, paradoxically, does not warm the hearth of our relationships but instead casts long, distorting shadows on the walls of our interpersonal caverns. In the alchemical crucible of the human heart, guilt transmutes. It becomes a dense, metallic substance, weighing heavily upon our souls. Yet, in its heaviness, it provides an anchor - not to the Other, but to our own self conception. We carry this weight not as a burden for the Other, but as a testament to our own moral fortitude. Consider the house of the psyche, with its attics of aspiration and cellars of the subconscious. Guilt resides not in the communal spaces of this house, but in the secret rooms we keep locked, even from ourselves. It is in these rooms that we perform the rituals of self flagellation, mistaking the echo of our own voices for the judgment of the Other. As we navigate the labyrinth of human interaction, guilt becomes our Ariadne's thread. But does this thread lead us out towards the Other, or merely deeper into the maze of our own psyche? The topology of guilt is complex, its dimensions folding in upon themselves in non-Euclidean geometries of self-reference. In the end, we must confront the possibility that guilt, far from being a bridge to the Other, is a mirror - one that reflects not our empathy, but our narcissism. In its crystalline surface, we see not the face of the one we've wronged, but our own visage, distorted by the funhouse mirror of our conscience. Thus, as we continue our exploration of the phenomenology of guilt, we must remain vigilant. We must question whether our feelings of remorse truly reach out to the Other, or if they merely orbit the black hole of our own ego, trapped in the gravity well of self-absorption.
