Cloning abolishes the mirror stage by eliminating all mediation and image

Evidence

The subject is also gone, since identical duplication puts an end to his division. The mirror stage is abolished in cloning, or rather it is parodied therein in a monstruous fashion. Cloning also retains nothing, and for the same reason, of the immemorial and narcissistic dream of the subject’s projection into his ideal alter ego, since this projection still passes through an image: the one in the mirror, in which the subject is alienated in order to find himself again, or the one, seductive and mortal, in which the subject sees himself in order to die there. None of this occurs in cloning. No more medium, no more image - any more than an industrial object is the mirror of the identical one that succeeds it in the series. One is never the ideal or mortal mirage of the other, they can only be added to each other, and if they can only be added, it means that they are not sexually engendered and know nothing of death. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 328

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the simulacrum logic: cloned identical copies are pure seriality with no original, mirroring the industrial object’s relation to its series. — connects to: Cloning’s regression to asexual reproduction expresses a death drive — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 325; Perfect resemblance destroys the imaginary because exact doubling erases the image itself — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 352; The mirror stage explains why images grant and destabilize selfhood — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 84 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies why cloning is not narcissistic reflection but serial addition lacking any image-medium.

Broader Connections

• The mirror stage explains why images grant and destabilize selfhood #complicates (0.78) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 84
• Mechanical reproduction of beauty destroys the unconscious idolatry that made beauty vital #corroborates (0.72)
• Reflection is an intermediate stage of nihilation between self-existence and existence-for-others #qualifies (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 513
• A perpetual failed synthesis keeps the in-itself and for-itself inseparable yet independent #complicates (0.70)