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41 C H A P T E R 2 From Universal Mimesis to the Self Formed by Desire Jean-Michel Oughourlian UNIVERSAL MIMESIS Martin Heidegger began his course in the summer semester of 1935 with the fundamental question of metaphysics: Why are there beings rather than nothing? I can do no better in introducing this chapter than to imitate him by posing what seems to me the essential question today in psychology: Why is there movement rather than nothing? How does one teach a small child to say “Papa” or “Mama” or “cookie”? How does one teach him to speak the language of those around him? Answering these questions does not require complicated experiments. There is no need for measuring instruments or for statistical calculation. Immediate observation, everyday experience, and plain good sense are sufficient to answer them. All one need do is repeat the word to the child enough times so that he repeats it. The procedure works perfectly, as everyone knows, and there is no other, known or imaginable, that could produce the same result. Why is the child moved to repeat a word we pronounce in his presence? The problem posed here is that of identifying what enables learning to take place. The essential condition is obviously that the child’s interest must be attracted, and his attention held, by the adult. Only that interest, that attention , that attraction are capable of arousing in the child the effort needed to 42 Jean-Michel Oughourlian reproduce the proposed phoneme, or indeed to learn anything at all. Is that sequence of events normal? Yes! Is it uniform? No! To see that it is not, one need only visit a center for child psychiatry to observe its difficulty in autistic children. What is the force that, from the beginning of life, draws the child into reproducing what an adult says or does? This force of attraction, interest, and attention is so much a part of the fabric of humanity that it is taken for granted. A young child has no power to resist that attraction. To feel such attraction is the child’s very nature, to the degree that he or she is “normal.” A child lacking this capacity would be deprived of something basic to his humanity; he would become isolated, autistic. That natural force of cohesion, which alone grants access to the social, to language, to culture, and indeed to humanness itself, is simultaneously mysterious and obvious, hidden in and of itself, but dazzling in its effects—like gravity and the attraction of corporeal masses in Newtonian space. If gravity did not exist, life on earth would be impossible. Similarly, if this remarkable force that attracts human beings to one another, that unites them, that enables children to model themselves on adults, that makes possible their full ontogenesis and, as I just said, their acquisition of language—if this force did not exist, there would be no humanity. This force, as fundamental for psychology as gravity is for physics, is what, following René Girard, I call mimesis. The attraction the child feels toward the adult, the attention he gives to what one says or does, this essential factor in all education is one with the force I am attempting to specify. The mechanism of learning—that is, imitation or repetition—is the objective translation of mimesis, its expression in activity. Taking as a model the theory of universal gravitation in physics, let us propose the hypothesis that there is a single principle at the foundation of all the human sciences: universal mimesis. In both psychology and sociology, the most basic and elementary manifestation of this principle is the force of attraction that draws people together and determines their interest in one another. Should we wish to pursue this analogy to physics, it could be said that the mimesis between two individuals is the force of attraction that each simultaneously exerts on the other and submits to. This force is proportional to the mass, as it were, of each, and inversely proportional to the distance between them. What, however, is it that one can refer to as “mass” in psychology? For a young child in his or her relation to an adult, the notion of “mass” can be interpreted almost literally: the mass of the adult in comparison with the child’s helps explain the child’s tendency to seek and submit to the adult’s From Mimesis to the Self 43 influence. Between adults, there...

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