Salvador en Trabelski abstract

If we are to take seriously Girards hypothesis, we will conceive of the self as constantly driven by a mimetic dynamics through which foreign elements of behavior, representations, emotions and desires are reproduced in a manner that should obviously threaten our identities.

We must therefore investigate the process through which we usually achieve this strong feeling of difference between self and others which is the very basis of our social identities in the individualistic societies of the Western culture.

Elaborating on William James distinction between self as object (the me) and self as agent (the I), my hypothesis is that we can tolerate a huge amout of similarity between the object self and others as far as we can remain confident that the agent self is the first cause of our desires and subsequent behaviors.

In other words, I will suggest that it is the agent self which makes the difference between self and others because we are deeply focused on it. In this perspective, the romantic view of self will appear as a blessing for our consumer societies for it helps maintain a sense of difference and originality for anyone when copycat desires are all over the place.

Of course, such an hypothesis rests entirely upon an understanding of what is the self as agent. Unfortunately, such a model is still missing in psychology as well as other social sciences. The main part of this paper will therefore be an attempt to address such a topic within the framework of mimetic theory.

Starting with James definition of object and agent self, we will take a historical and critical perspective on the « looking glass self » or « social mirror » conception which has been the mainstream approach of the object self ever since Hume and Smith. The mirror metaphor will be interpreted as a euphemism of a mimetic mechanism through which the attributions or judgments of significant others are interiorized in order to give shape to the object self which is therefore a genuine social self.

Being so reminiscent of metaphysical thinking, the agent self has long been « virtually ignored » by psychology. Many researchers have even proposed abandoning it to the realm of philosophy. This means that the agent self was not supposed to be in the least included in the social approach developped in order to explain the object self.

However, as soon as the social mirror metaphor is understood as the imitation of others attributions to the object self, we may conceive of the agent self as the product of these imitations of attributions along the causal dimension. The I, characterized by the feeling of being the first cause of ones own behavior, would therefore be of no less social origin than the me. Attributions of intention or causality made by others to the self, when mimetically interiorized, will feed the causal self, the I which therefore appears in the same position as the sacrificial victim, but in a positive fashion since the attributions of others are not destructive but constructive.

This model may contribute to the understanding of the vulnerabilities of the self by stressing its dependance on the attributional food provided by the social milieu. It will be hypothesized that a shortage of causal attributions could trigger a schizophrenic functioning while on the other hand, inappropriate attributions might result in anorexic attitudes.

Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Recherche en Didactique Education et Formation
Composante: Didactique et Socialisation - Équipe d'Accueil no 3749
C.C. 077
Université Montpellier 2
Montpellier 34095 Cedex 5
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