The Self, the surroundings, the stroke (of genius)

Our discussion of Derrida’s différance today triggered an idea that has already been ruminating in my brain, ever since our discussion of Lacan’s “Mirror Stage”. Today we touched on the human idea of the self, what we perceive as a physically and mentally contained individual who is separate from the rest of the world. We talked about how the physical conception of the self is constantly being deferred and shifted, because as we sweat, shed skin or eat food, we are consuming and releasing various components of our body. We’ve all heard this statistic: “every [certain number] years our body is composed of completely different particles than it was [blank] years ago” (I’ve heard anywhere from six to ten years, I’m not sure if either is completely accurate, but you get the point). Our body is constantly interacting with the outside world, exchanging particles and moisture, and obscuring an essential notion of the body.

This reminded me of an idea that I found intriguing when we read Lacan’s “Mirror Stage”. Before a baby girl develops a sense of self, she may see a tiny hand move across her line of vision, but she does not understand it as a part of her “self”. According to Lacan, it is when we recognize ourselves in the mirror that we begin to understand ourselves as individuals, separate entities from the rest of the world. This is also perhaps what makes us human; you needn’t look far to see examples of animals who do not bear the same conception of the physical self. Have you ever seen a kitten hiss at its own reflection? Or a dog chase its own tail? They do not have the same human conception of a self who is physically separate from the rest of the world, an individual you can recognize in a mirror as “me”.

I recently stumbled upon a lecture by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who suffered a massive stroke and recovered years later to recount the extraordinary observations she made while her brain was deteriorating. It’s an absolutely incredible lecture, and I’d highly recommend that you watch the whole thing:



What strikes me about Taylor’s story is her description of her altered sense of self during the stroke; when she looked at her hand, her brain didn’t register it as a separate entity from the rest of her surroundings. She was reverted back to Lacan’s infantile, pre-Mirror Stage, before the baby understands herself as separate from the rest of the world. Taylor explains that one of her greatest motivations for recovering after her stroke (a long and very difficult process) was to share with the world her blissful feeling of being completely and utterly connected with the universe, with every living and inanimate object in the world.

Taylor believes everyone has the capacity to experience this sense of connectedness, albeit at a less intensive level than she experienced during her stroke. In fact, she thinks that tapping into this capacity for empathy and connectedness might bring about solutions to many of society’s problems. I can’t truly experience what she felt in that moment, but I still find her mission pretty fascinating. The human obsession with the self, the individual, is perhaps both our great strength and greatest weakness. It allows us to discover and achieve incredible things, but our egoism often leads to myopia, and a complete inability to see ourselves as part of a larger whole.