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Mimesis: Paradox or Encounter

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 132; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2017.0091

1080-6598

Jane Bennett,

Diverse Education Studies and Reforms

Mimesis:Paradox or Encounter Jane Bennett "Everything changes." What does this truism say? It could mark the fact of human mortality, the "brief candle" of the life of an individual who, says Macbeth, "struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more" (5.5.23, 25–26). It could also attest to a broader, cosmic tendency toward metamorphosis, as when Ovid's Pythagoras exclaims "Nothing endures in this world! The whole of it flows, and all is formed with a changing appearance" (527). Nietzsche will affirm a version of this world of ubiquitous, perpetual change: "Do you know what the world is to me? A monster of energy, without beginning, without end … that does not expend itself but only transforms itself…[A] play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many… a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing" (Will 550). For Pythagoras and Nietzsche, let us note, the monstrous, death-dealing flow is also generative: it is by virtue of a basic tendency toward morphing that mortal life-forms exist at all. Metamorphosis destroys and creates: just as each wave is driven ahead by another, urged on from behind, and urging the next wave before it in an unbroken sequence, so the times flee and at the same time they follow, and always are new; for what has just been is no longer, and what has not been will presently come into being, and every moment's occasion is a renewal (527). Marcus Boon speaks here of "the inexorable processes of transformation by which we and everything around us are constituted as entities" (105; emphasis added). To these two senses of "everything changes"—one focused on the tendency toward death within an individual and one focused [End Page 1186] on a generative "sea of forces" that self-alters by individuating into shapes—we could also add a third. And this is neither the morphology of a mortal individual (ontogenesis) nor the morphology of cosmic process, but an inter-body morphology animated by encounter. Here (already emergent) shapes come into contact and become changed by virtue of contact, as each takes on and takes in something of the others. A body, porous in every phase of its existence, responds to others in a play of affecting and being affected. It is not that every thing is always at the precipice of dissolution, but that every thing is changing in relations with others—at speeds that are sometimes slow and gradual and sometimes fast and overwhelming. Thus is the fate of mimetic bodies. This productive-destructive inter-body affectivity, this third morphology by which things take shape by virtue of encounter, goes by many names: affectivity, susceptibility, impression, contagion, intersubjectivity, influence, sympathy, mimesis. In what follows, I will focus on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's human-centered exploration of that last term, before turning to a mimetic process understood to include non-human as well as human bodies. My aim in the first part is primarily exegetical, as I, unfaithful to Lacoue-Labarthe's own preference for an indirect, ventriloquized approach toward concepts, attempt to offer a concise distillation of what he has to say about mimesis. This is a challenging task, not only because of his deliberately circuitous mode of inquiry, but also because Lacoue-Labarthe takes up so many different treatments of mimesis—in Plato, Diderot, Hegel, Heidegger, and others. These versions range from a "passive" mimesis by which one submits "to the model of the other, … [as] a figure is impressed upon a malleable material when it is struck by a typos or 'typed,'" ("History" 220) to a "productive" mimesis that is the artistry by which one escapes time and place: "the capability of extricating oneself from the present, of breaking with the past, of living and committing oneself under the constraint of what has not yet happened. This mimesis does not admit any constituted model; it constructs its models. It is a creative mimesis. It is a 'poietic': it is great art itself" (227). Ultimately, however, Lacoue-Labarthe's encounters with different figures of mimesis yield two philosophical insights. The first is the "hyperbologic" of mimesis...