‘Image’ as Mediator: Finding the Self in Bakhtinian Writings Through Dmitri Nikulin (Working draft)
“Falsity and lie, which inevitably show up in the relation with oneself. The outer image of thought, of feeling, the outer image of soul. It is not I who is looking from inside with my own eyes at the world, but I am looking at myself with the eyes of the world, with the other’s eyes; I am possessed by the other. Here there is no naïve wholeness of the outer and the inner. To spot one’s own image at one remove. The naïveté of any fusion of oneself with the other in the mirror image. The surplus of the other. I do not have a perspective on myself from outside, I do not have an approach to my own inner image. Gazing out from my eyes are others’ eyes.”Dmitri Nikulin begins his essay “The Man at the Mirror (Dialogue with Oneself)“ with the above quote and uses this short piece of Mikhail Bakhtin’s writing as the foundation for the essay’s argument. Nikulin unpacks Bahktin’s formation of a dialogical and unfinalizable self through the imagery of a man looking into his reflection in a mirror. This mirrored other is not the man himself, nor is it a separate, independent existence. The reflections mimics the man’s gestures and the man, in turn, cannot seem to unglue his eyes from the fascinating creature who seems to both exist within and outside himself. The man has just met his other.
The relationship between self and other may at first glance to appear direct, but this immediate relation proves to be deceptive. Nikulin writes, “the sense of immediacy with my self as other is mediated by that other’s looking at me through the mirror image” (66). The mirrored self and the self interact positing that each one is independent of the other, however, irrevocably intertwined, the two sides enter into a dependent relationship from conception. An attempt to untangle the two through dialectic rhetoric proves futile, instilling both fear and hope.
Monographic 