Rage and Denials by Branko Mitrović

Author:Branko Mitrović
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

. . . And Scholarship

The discussion of appropriations and denials in chapter 3 presented a substantial number of examples of the historiographical manifestations of envy; we have seen that their common result was self-aggrandizing attributions. Grandiosity, implicit or explicit, often in the form of the exaggeration of or fantasies about one’s achievements, is the most pervasive manifestation of narcissism. Narcissistic narratives are often marked by a tendency to make self-aggrandizing attributions that enhance self-esteem.14 If a person says that Michelangelo was a Florentine, this is a simple fact and we should take it as such. If a person says that Michelangelo was from Ohio, it is fair to wonder how he acquired this false belief. If a person says that Michelangelo was from Ohio like himself, then this claim may be but need not be narcissistically motivated. But if we are dealing with a person whose education gives us grounds to believe that he knows where Michelangelo was born, and writes books for an educated public in which he makes great efforts to convince everyone of the false claim that Michelangelo was of his stock, then the passion and efforts invested in this enterprise can be reasonably taken to indicate that it is driven by a narcissistic motivation. One must certainly think that something has gone wrong if one reads, in a book by a professor emeritus at what was possibly the most prestigious European center of art-historical research, that Michelangelo was a Viking. Further, grandiosity is not always ultimately narcissistic, unless it is incongruent with one’s own achievements.15 Grandiosity based on the achievements of other members of one’s group, achievements in which one has not personally participated, belongs to this latter category. People “take pride” in something they have not achieved themselves because they feel the need to; arguably, “we” is one of the most dangerous and delusive words a historian may use. Pinder, for instance, in his Wesenszüge deutscher Kunst, uses it ad nauseam in order to identify himself with every minor innovation in European art that can be attributed to German artists, and to conclude that the Germans, including himself, are ahead of the rest of Europe in entire fields of artistic creativity.16 In chapter 3, we saw some impressive examples of the aggrandizing attributions of cultural achievements to one’s own group; such attributions enhance self-esteem by allowing one to participate, as in a mystical union, in the achievements of other group members. The person claims for him- or herself, by virtue of membership in a group, the achievements of other members of the group, and sometimes even falsely attributes to that group the achievements of the members of other groups. The claim of participation necessarily relies on a jargon of identity that conceives of groups as more than the mere sum of their members. Without the jargon of identity, there is no gratification; other people’s achievements cannot be used for the maintenance of one’s self-esteem. If groups are mere sums of individuals, then relationships within the

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