IMITATION, REPETITION AND ITERABILITY

Abstract

Are there affinities between the sociological theories of poststructuralist social sciences and Gabriel Tarde? What can be learned from Tarde? The article analyses Tarde's conceptions of imitation, repetition and invention, and then compares these main topics of Tarde's work with Jacques Derrida's and Judith Butler's theories of iterability, repetition and performativity. Such a context, and especially Derrida's theory of a ‘passive decision of the other in me’, is very important for the understanding of social changes; and it will therefore be brought into relation with Tarde's idea of invention. As the article makes clear, Tarde and poststructuralist social sciences share some basic assumptions: repetition is a social logic; social structures generate and exist because of repetition; these processes are not effects of the will of the individuals but are unconscious, unintended and beyond rational choices; because of the other, there are not only decisions, but also interrupting inventions and events, which are essentially super-social or transgressive and which are at the same time the condition of the possibility of sociability.