Inside/Outside

Pickstock sees mimesis everywhere. There is a sort of imitation in the way a plant “returns inside itself to draw forth nutrients from the soil, to drink down the rain and transform these, with the sunlight’s energy, through photosynthesis.” Animals copy one another, and “some animals can also be initiated into some of the patterns of human behaviour.” Both animals and plants exhibit internal mimetic repetitions and external ones ( Repetition and Identity: The Literary Agenda , 34-5).

Above all, human beings are characterized by mimesis , and in the case of human beings imitation confuses “the boundary between internal and external repetition” more thoroughly than in animals. Pickstock elaborates:

“The individual person is not composed of micro-persons, as a house is composed of rooms, but rather he is composed of all the other people whom he has imitated from his unique perspective of natural endowment – the latter aspect of what Kierkegaard calls ‘the aesthetic’: ‘the aesthetic in a person is what by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is.’”

This is why individuals are “inherently double or multiple,” and the doubling and multiplication is such that “it is by no means obvious who is the real, original person and who the copy. For in one sense we are doubled by the shadow of our examples, our parents, or other figures; but in another sense, we are doubled by our own given ‘aesthetic’ self, since the primary self is the ethical self which duly performs its assigned social role as child, pupil, soldier, bureaucrat, and so forth” (35).

Are any of these roles me , or am I someone else who plays these roles, or am I perhaps the sum of all of them? Pickstock says the last of these (“inherently multiple”) but also wants to leave some aspects of indeterminacy here. After all, I can, in some circumstances, wholly identify with a role so that I become it – doing in real life what a method actor aims to do on stage.