Helmuth Plessner et Roger Caillois: imitation et mimétisme

The paper refers to the virtual dialogue that it is possible to establish between Helmuth Plessner's thought and modern or contemporary French philosophy, developing in particular themes linked to expression and its anthropological implications. More specifically, the paper will comparatively analyze the different positions expressed by Plessner and Roger Caillois around the thematic plexus of mimesis, imitation and mimicry, showing their affinities and differences. On the one hand, the mimetic temptation that runs through all of Caillois' work initially took on the disquieting aspect of a zoomorphic identification with an aggressive, destructive principle and, at the same time, an assimilation with death and degradation, even beyond any defensive strategy, to the point of becoming one, through the progressive decay of psychic energy and loss of self, with a fundamental tendency of being to dispersion and cancellation in space, with the incoercible death drive. It is precisely in this essential reduction of the negative principle to something objectified and external that lies the reason why Caillois's penetrating ability to describe human phantasms and abjections has been inverted into a prescriptive, Luciferian adherence to a magico-sacred, activist and and theurgic of mimetic subversion, lulled into the illusion that it could assume violence with impunity and regulate its contagion. But once this paradox was fully experienced by Caillois and his thematic interest was able to complete its rotation towards an intramundane horizon, an abundant output of twenty post-war years was able to unfold, testifying to the richness of analysis in which his reading of animal mimicry took shape, and with it, the formulation of a particular phenomenology of culture and a mimetic anthropology, in which the meanings of mimesis involving play, disguise, mimicry, contagion, the various gradations of resemblance, from its degree zero, objectless resemblance, to imitation and mime, mask and metamorphosis, through which the “imagines agentes” and obsessions that animated Caillois's entire career returned to show their effectiveness in the modified context. On the other hand, as far as Plessner is concerned, it is possible to reconstruct his focus on the thematic plexus of imitation around lemmas such as: mimicry and gesture, similarity of expression and reaction, remaking, copying, involuntary imitation and psychic contagion, “doing with” and reproducing, imitative learning, emulation and imitatio, technical reproduction and assimilation, imitator and epigone, doubles and doppelgangers, the pleasure of doubling, mask and disguise, portrait and representation, actor and role, personification and incorporation, identification and conscious reproduction, image sketch and fiction. Always on the edge of the relationship between model and copy, all these notions nevertheless tend to open up increasing spaces for originality and creativity. More generally, the primordial importance of mimetic-reproductive processes, at the intersection of the fundamental categories of Plessnerian anthropology for the description and functioning of the liminal condition of the human being in his body and in society's system of prescribed expectations and behaviors, prevents Plessnerian imitation from being limited to the univocal relationship between original and copy, and to the very possibility of reproducing something given. Plessner's thinking is also effective in highlighting the ambivalences of mimesis, its “nocturnal side”, imitation as a form of homologation, as the predominance of social functions over individuals, as the unleashing of the passions of envy and jealousy “constant in social relations”, as a penchant for excess, as a stigma of the inhumanity installed in what is most properly human, and of the vocation of human beings to always also be the abject, the depraved modification of themselves.