The Mirrors and the Reconstructed Image: What Enters a Self, and by What Mechanism

"We are made of everything around us" is true and useless, because it does not say where a self ends. I propose a criterion and derive it from a mechanism. I call mirroring the return to a system of its own states by what surrounds it, and I define it by two independent variables — contingency (how far the return depends on my state) and markedness (how far the return is transformed into something legible) — which can arrive on any channel: tactile, auditory, visual, affective, linguistic, normative. Three theses follow. First: mirroring is not a visual fact, and the constitutively strongest channels are not the most sensory. Second: what remains deposited in a self is not a self-image but a pattern, and the image is reconstructed at every mirroring — it is a hologram, not a portrait, and between one reconstruction and the next it does not exist. Third: from this follows a composition criterion — what composes a self is what enters the reconstruction cycle; what acts without ever being returned influences it and remains environment. I distinguish three non-interchangeable uses of the word "mirror" (geometric chirality, functional complementarity, marked return) and show why only the third is constitutive. I discuss the asymmetric case, in which the first mirror returns with high markedness and low contingency, and the ignition of the cycle: a self is not born from an act but from a loop of actions that repeats and mutates with the place and the time in which it turns. I close with a test case — artificial systems with something at stake economically, where a balance works as a metabolic variable — and with an explicit account of what the argument establishes and what it does not. This deposit contains both versions, Italian and English. The two texts have the same content.