197Greek) and the problem of the proper (oikeios) is self-evident. According to Wigley,
it has everything to do with the fact that the house represents a basic experience that
enables one to make a distinction between inside and outside. This distinction is in
the end fundamental to the forming of concepts in philosophy:The house is always first understood as the most primitive drawing of
a line that produces an inside opposed to an outside, a line that acts as
a mechanism of domestication. It is as the paradigm of interiority that
the house is indispensable to philosophy, establishing the distinction
between the interiority of presence and the exteriority of representation
on which the discourse depends.^103Put this way, it is clear that the house as a basic metaphor accommodates the hier-
archic distinction between presence on the one hand and representation on the
other, between a direct and primary presence and an indirect, secondary represen-
tation, between the truth as immediate presence and mimesis as mediated imita-
tion. (One should note that, once again, this distinction is being explained via a
mimetic gesture.)
The hierarchy accorded to these terms is responsible for the antimimetic atti-
tude that prevails in the philosophical tradition. This attitude has everything to do with
the threat that comes from the feminine. Plato associates the mimetic in the first
place with the tales that women tell little children. He considers their influence to be
dangerous because in these stories the clear distinction between truth and lies is dis-
solved. Lacoue-Labarthe argues that a sort of male urge to rebel against the primary
control of the mother is underlying Plato’s text at this point. A child’s first surround-
ings are defined by women who are by consequence always associated with the
stage in which the subject is not yet completely developed. As Lacan has shown, a
child, an infant (infansin Latin means without speech) gradually becomes a subject
by making its entry into language, by learning to speak. The human condition is such
that the emergence of ego-consciousness does not coincide with physical birth.
There is a considerable period in which a child is not yet a subject. The child is not
capable either of achieving the status of a subject all by itself: it has to go through
what Lacan calls the “mirror stage.”^104 It learns to see itself as an entity and as dif-
fering from its environment, due to the fact that it identifies itself with its mirror im-
age and with the name it has been given by its parents. The identity of the subject is
in other words not established in a completely autonomous way, but is formed on
the basis of elements that come from outside and that are mimetically appropriated.
According to Lacoue-Labarthe, here is the ground for the antimimetic attitude
that one encounters so often in philosophy. Antimimesis refers to nothing else than
the ultimate Hegelian dream of philosophy, the dream of an absolute knowledge, of
a subject that understands its own conception perfectly, thus also controlling it per-196