Abstract
The contribution proposes to revisit a very well-known topos on an interdisciplinary carrefour: the relation between dandyism and narcissism. Our intention, situated in the intersection of literary criticism and psychoanalysis, is to raise questions about the complexity of this relationship on different strata of the two concepts, with their cultural and particularly their literary symbolisations.
In the light of Freud's metapsychology, and considering that the excessive preoccupation with self and numerous forms of aestheticism came to be a common denominator of both dandyism and narcissism, we also examine their incompatibility: while Narcissus develops his fascination with his image in isolation or reduces Alterity of the Other to Identity; Dandy, on the opposite side, maintains the visceral difference by adopting a stance of radical opposition. The dominant aspects of this pattern, not only the behaviour but also the psychic structure which has been transformed into an aesthetics and mainly represented in the fin de siècle literature, are analysed as models of duplication, a face to a mirror, considering both their differences and similarities.