19A, §1: The Lure of Space
This book is about how we, as animals, can escape from the jaws of the environment and what happens when we fail. All organisms exist or stand out from that which they are not. They occupy space. Each animal is in its own way a unique degree of emancipation from its geological background—a unilateral distinction from a surrounding space. If nature is everywhere the same, meaningful distinction requires active assertion. Nobody precedes their own creation.
A self-portrait contains a designated figure on a ground; a self and a surrounding world. The form of self-portraiture is at stake in one of the most trenchant philosophical holdovers from the early Enlightenment: the tension between human freedom and natural necessity. The struggle between these philosophical ideas has haunted European thought since the “radical”1 materialisms of Hobbes and Spinoza, through to the impact of Darwinism and geological time, and all the way into the present day neurosciences. The component of this conflict that will serve as my entry-point is the “naturalistic self-understanding,”2 which is to say, representations showing that our everyday experiences of subjectivity, agency, and rationality may not be in line with the view of the world created by the natural sciences. At worst, the portrait of the human being as it is rendered by the sciences turns out to be incompatible with the social, cultural, and epistemic ideals of the Enlightenment which were built around notions of free, rational inquiry.
From physics to biology, the image of the human being—which forms the basis of the lived world that seemed foundational also to the methodological spirit of naturalistic inquiry—continues to be called into question in the course of a thoroughly “unanticipated twist in the trajectory of Enlightenment.”3 The human being, with all her artifices and conceptual resources, is threatened with reduction to “bald”4 nature, reducible to the same terms as the rest. It becomes hard to speak of a self-portrait if there is no ‘self’ to be found.
Philosophers who have identified a nihilistic and anti-humanistic tendency in Enlightenment philosophy have actually come close to a deeper problem related to space. The problem is fundamental enough to be worth calling the problem of space. The problem of space is the challenge of setting oneself apart from the environment; of being, in some functional sense, a place determinately different from that which one is not.
The French sociologist and theorist, Roger Caillois wrote an essay titled Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, which begins as an unusual interpretation of biological mimicry. According to this text, mimicry—understood here as the tendency of organisms to take on the appearance of particular objects or textures surrounding them—belies a primitive “attraction by space”5 that threatens the mimic’s freedom, luring it to renounce itself against its ostensible will to persist.
Mimicry systems are traditionally considered to include three participating roles: a model, a mimic and a target which is duped.6 The roles can be occupied by different species or objects in the environment, such as in the case of Batesian mimicry where hoverflies mimic the black and yellow striations of honeybees to ward off common predators, or Müllerian mimicry where wasps and honeybees converge on the same colouration to mutual benefit. In other cases, the same species or even organism serves as both mimic and model, such as in certain species of butterflyfish that have evolved spots resembling eyes on the posterior end of the body. Other situations involve the mimic’s behaviour in addition to its morphology, such as in Caillois’ favourite case of praying mantises that resemble swaying flowers. In fact, Caillois could likely have extended his analysis to encompass crypsis more generally, a concept that includes, besides outright mimicry, other ways that animals can blend into their surroundings such as through countershading or the active camouflage of cephalopods and chameleons.
Although biological crypsis encompasses a plethora of systems, it is commonly thought to provide some kind of adaptive benefits for its agent: it might help to avoid predators, enable hunting strategies or facilitate reproduction.
In stark contrast to the normal Darwinian interpretation which ascribes adaptive utility to crypsis, Caillois argues that it is an essentially “morbid phenomenon,”7 constituting a kind of failure to stand apart in the world, or even a kind of “dangerous luxury”8 or reckless expenditure. To prove his point Caillois uses striking examples like cannibalism in cryptic larvae whose coloration melds into the environment to such an extent that their conspecifics unintentionally devour them.9 He might also have thought of how the juvenile form of certain ground mantises mimics the ants that the mature individuals eat—and how easy it would be for mistakes to happen.10 In these less fortunate cases, dissimulation becomes a way of acquiescing to the environment on the environment’s terms, and the agent of dissimulation is subject to a series of risks to its life.
As an explanation for strategies of dissimulation like mimicry, Caillois’ theory is dubious at best, but the phenomena he points to are real. Morbid or sclerotizing incidences can and do occur as a result of blending in too well.
But the truly significant part of Caillois’ argument lies in his speculative extension of the problem of mimicry into human behaviour. He does not stop to note that mantises sway in a way that is reminiscent of plants in the wind. Instead he proceeds to the anthropological domain and considers forms of sympathetic magic, where like produces like and associations persist between two objects that have once touched as an instance of the same phenomenon. From there, he moves on to connect relapses in mimicry and magic to psychopathological disturbances between selves and their worlds. Caillois describes the relevant psychosis like this:
To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar.11
A typical formulation, according to Caillois is “I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I’m at the spot where I find myself.”12 To have such an experience is to live through an ‘inner night’ or to take the night into one’s inner being. The formulation is imprecise but the gestural articulation of the experience gives way to the analysis of the phenomenon to which it refers—a kind of legendary psychasthenia or weakening of the ability to stand apart, a term he adapts from Janet who used ‘psychasthenia’ to describe obsessional neuroses impacting his patients’ ability to claim authorship of their acts.13 On his part, Eugène Minkowski found evidence of a “morbid geometrism”14 in statements from patients of schizophrenia which he thought was indicative of a failure to properly live inside time.
Caillois treats mimicry in biology and magic together with the pathological experience of an inner night as variations of the same root theme.15 Importantly, even the proliferation of novel concepts of space from modern science and mathematics is associated with these relinquishments of the self into space, as Caillois believes that for science “everything is milieu.”16 Caillois’ speculations about the allure of space are useful due to his recognition that our self-representations can perform the sort of renunciation he attributes to mimicry. They can enact a kind of “depersonalization by assimilation to space,”17 in the sense of failing to stand apart from the strictures of nature. Caillois takes the possibility of such a failure seriously and resuscitates the danger of being comported toward exteriority. Conceptual representations of the subject in the natural world can be seen as renunciations of a piece with Caillois’ examples. A complete self-renunciation is a real possibility for thought and, moreover, a distinctive spatial phenomenon that should be studied in its own right. Caillois continues:
It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself. One can already recognize the characteristic scientific attitude and, indeed, it is remarkable that represented spaces are just what is multiplied by contemporary science: Finsler's spaces, Fermat's spaces, Riemann-Christoffel's hyper-space, abstract, generalized, open, and closed spaces, spaces dense in themselves, thinned out, and so on. The feeling of personality, considered as the organism's feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these conditions to be seriously undermined.18
Without needing to pay particularly close attention to whether the mentioned spaces, in particular, produce the kind of topotropism identified by Caillois, the underlying move is already significant. The topotropic tendency is extended from physiology into perception and now even into the sphere of conceptual representation. That the latter extension is proper to concepts rather than pictorial representations is a point worth pushing as it reveals how significant Caillois’ essay really is.
Before that, I want to note how these three levels correspond to Aristotle’s tripartite division of the soul: a nutritive capacity capable of desire, shared by all life; a sensitive capacity characterized by sensation and experience, shared among the animals; and a rational capacity possessed by beings such as ourselves. It only makes sense that each capacity comes with its own liabilities and characteristic manner of getting lost in space, from the mimetism of those who physically meld into the environment to the paradoxes of self-representation examined by philosophers to which I will now turn in pursuit of integrating them into a general account of topotropism.
Endnotes
1 Israel, Radical Enlightenment.
2 Rouse, Articulating the World, p. 3.
3 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 31.
4 McDowell, Mind and World, p. xx-xxiii.
5 Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, p. 32.
6 Pasteur, 'A Classification Review of Mimicry Systems'.
7 In a later work, The Mask of Medusa, Caillois likewise concludes that ‘mimicry’ in different variations like camouflage and disguise are dangerous.
8 Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, p. 25.
9 There are similarities between Caillois’ case studies and the specific relationships that Deleuze and Guattari call ‘becomings’, of which one paradigmatic example is co-evolution, such as between wasps and orchids Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Perhaps instances of mimicry could be interpreted as becomings that have crossed the threshold to become destructive, but I will not expand this connection here even though many geographers are familiar with Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I worry that adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s linguistic novelties without any intrinsic reason would obscure rather than clarify analysis, and there is already an established terminology attached to mimicry.
10 Prete, The Praying Mantids, pp. 297–298.
11 Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, p. 30.
12 Ibid.: 30.
13 Ibid.: 28.
14 Minkowski, Lived Time, p. 277.
15 Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, p. 32.
16 Ibid.: 28.
17 Ibid.: 30.
18 Ibid.: 28.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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