Mimesis: Paradox or Encounter

Jane Bennett

MLN, Volume 132, Number 5, December 2017 (Comparative Literature Issue),

pp. 1186-1200 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2017.0091

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686875

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
 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 transforma-

tion 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

MLN 132 (2017): 1186–1200 © 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press

 M  L N 1187

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 morphol-
ogy by which things take shape by virtue of encounter, goes by many
names: affectivity, susceptibility, impression, contagion, intersubjec-
tivity, 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 differ-
ent 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, that is to say, its structural feature wherein
the internal “contraries” of mimesis (as act or as concept) engage in an
“infinite alternation” (“Truth” 84) so intense that an “identity without
identity” (“Diderot” 263) is formed. Lacoue-Labarthe makes this point
via a close reading of Diderot’s claim that “Great poets, great actors,
1188 JANE BENNETT

and I may add, all great imitators of nature,” possess a strong faculty
of “judgment” (“Diderot” 253), that is to say, a developed capacity
to rank and select (rather than simply to absorb). As such, the great
imitators are, says Diderot, “the least sensitive of all creatures;” they
do not “have their inmost hearts affected with any liveliness” but act
as “an unmoved and disinterested onlooker” (qtd. in “Diderot” 254,
254). This picture of artistic mimesis as having all “penetration and
no sensibility” (254) expresses, says Lacoue-Labarthe, that ancient
disparagement of feminine receptivity, which goes under the names
sensibility, enthusiasm, pity, sympathy, compassion—whereby a self
loses control, gets carried away, and passively submits to the feelings,
passions, and inclinations of others1—in short, “feels vividly, and does
little reflecting” (253). Lacoue-Labarthe also rejects Diderot’s claim
that it is possible to choose between penetrating judgment and recep-
tive sensitivity: the “hyperbologic” of mimesis is such that no one
can stabilize its alternations between the selectivity of judgment and
the unconscious openness of sensitivity.2 These two contraries—of
expression and impression (to use terms that Lacoue-Labarthe does
not)—resonate so intimately, intensively, and infinitely that they form
an “identity without identity” (263). For Lacoue-Labarthe, what the
practice of acting must confront is this “paradox.”3 In falling back
upon an impossible ethics of sovereignty—on the fantasy of a self-
possessed self who can choose—Diderot tries (but must fail) to “halt”
the paradox (263).
The second philosophical insight that emerges from Lacoue-
Labarthe’s study of mimesis concerns the “infirmity” of the one who
imitates: there is a constitutive lack within human subjectivity. The actor
who takes on a character or role, who will make himself over in an
act of imitation, must himself be not quite a self. He is, rather, beside
himself, “infirm,” “dehiscent,” “desistant.” Here Lacoue-Labarthe fol-
lows Heidegger, for whom the “subject of the imitation” is
originally open to (ouvert à) or originally ‘outside itself,’ ek-static.... But this
ecstatic (de)constitution has itself to be thought as lack or as insufficiency...
The subject is originally the infirmity of the subject ... in a state of dehis-
cence. Or, in other words, differance is inherent in the subject, forever
preventing it from being ... a stable essent ... and essentially determining
it as mortal. Jacques Derrida has suggested that I should given the name

1
See “Diderot” 265.
2
See Lacoue-Labarthe, “Stagings” 60.
3
Mimesis resembles frenzy and differs from it; mimesis resembles judgment and
desists from it. See “Diderot” 265.
 M  L N 1189

desistance to this inherent infirmity, without which no relation (either to

oneself or to others) could be established and there would be neither
consciousness nor sociality. (“Truth” 82–83)

At the end of my essay, I will juxtapose Lacoue-Labarthe’s treatment

of mimesis as an intra- and inter-human problem of subjectivity-for-
mation to a figure of mimesis that concerns itself both with affective
encounters between humans and with those between human and
nonhuman forces. The example here is mimesis qua “sympathy,” where
sympathy names a natural force akin to gravity, a material tendency to
affect and be affected. For the antebellum Americans who invoked the
term, this natural sympathy could be harnessed as a moral sentiment
and put to political (Abolitionist) use. But before I turn that alterna-
tive figure of metamorphosis, let me first offer a synthetic account of
Lacoue-Labarthe on mimesis.

Reticence
I begin by noting that Lacoue-Labarthe’s utterances concerning mime-
sis strive to refuse the degree of settling required for any positive, sub-
stantive definition of it, as either concept or process. Indeed, most of
the sentences that include the word mimesis declare the impossibility
of any characterization of it. And this is because mimesis, as “something
like an infinity of substitution and circulation” (“Typography” 115) and
as “the indifferentiable as such,” (“Echo” 195) has no stable character
to depict. If readers find Lacoue-Labarthe’s writing “about” mimesis
to be convoluted—as having a coiled, twisted, or sinuous form—this
is because any (necessarily unfaithful) exposition of mimesis should
resemble the coiling, twisting sinews of the ever-retreating “mimesis
itself.” “If there were an essence of mimesis,” it would lie “precisely in
the fact that mimesis has no ‘proper’ to it, ever” (“Typography” 116).
Nidesh Lawtoo offers a less absolutist version of this claim when he
says, citing Plato’s Ion, that “Mimesis is a figure ‘just like Proteus,’
for it ‘twist[s] and turn[s], this way and that, assuming every shape’”
(xiv).4 Mimesis “desists” from attempts to repeat it as philosophical

4
In Conrad’s Shadow Lawtoo traces the “protean transformations” of mimesis as a
“chameleon concept” (xii): “Born from an ancient marriage between visual representa-
tions and bodily impersonations, reframed in terms of imitation of exemplary models,
central to the imitation of the ancients, mimesis continues to animate the imitation of
the moderns as well, albeit under different masks and personae: from psychic identifi-
cation to affective contagion, hypnotic suggestion to entranced possessions, restricted
mimesis to general mimesis, mimetic desire to mimetic pathos, mirror neurons to the
mimetic unconscious...” (xiv)
1190 JANE BENNETT

description, and this linguistic withdrawal is a function, for Lacoue-

Labarthe, of a Heideggerian withdrawal of aletheia.5
Lacoue-Labarthe’s writing is, as Derrida notes, full of “signs of
prudence, the vigilant circumspection, the insurance taken against all
the risks to which he does not fail to expose himself at every instant”
(“Desistance” 12). And yet, there do appear a few positive hints about
what mimesis is and what it does. I will explore three such hints offered
by Lacoue-Labarthe, one concerning mimesis as “pure and disquieting
plasticity” (“Typography” 115), a second concerning mimesis as the
experience of “vicariousness” (116) and a third that names mimesis
as a “gift of nature” (“Diderot” 259). With these suggestive utterances,
Lacoue-Labarthe begins to illuminate the effectivity of mimesis— what
imitation does to and with us—and also how it feels to be within it.

Disquieting Plasticity
In a discussion of Plato’s choice of the poet as “the privileged figure
of mimetism,” Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that Plato’s famous banish-
ment of the poets is not only a concern about the threats posed by
their unruly gods to the fixed political order idealized in the Republic.
It indicates as well Plato’s recognition of a larger and deeper threat
posed by “mimetism itself, that pure and disquieting plasticity which
potentially authorizes the varying appropriation of all characters and
all functions” (“Typography” 115 ). According to Lacoue-Labarthe,
Plato saw that mimesis has no “other property than infinite malle-
ability: instability ‘itself’” (115; emphasis added), and this ontological
plasticity disquiets. As Derrida describes it, this “pre-originary mimesis”
is a “disturbing and destabilizing power” (“Desistance” 28). The indis-
criminateness of mimesis upsets, for example, an individual’s belief
in his power to choose the models to imitate. (Filling in the argument
here, one could say that the deep danger Plato discerns is that the
pure and eternal eide will have no structural advantage over the shadows
in the Cave.) What is more, human participation in mimesis is not
optional: all men and women are embroiled in a process of repeti-
tion that is both endless and promiscuous with regard to the objects

5
Remarking upon the influence of Heidegger on Lacoue-Labarthe here, Philip
Armstrong says this: “Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy reconfigure the question of retreat
in quite specific relation to Heidegger,” for whom “all presentation … only takes place
in and as the concealment, dissimulation, or disappearance of what present itself” (49).
Lacoue-Labarthe argues that Heidegger’s “withdrawal” from National Socialism “traces
and draws out that from which it withdraws.” (Heidegger 84)
 M  L N 1191

repeated. Perfect repetition (homoiosis) does not exist. There is only

an endless circulation between “inadequate resemblance and resem-
bling inadequation” (“Typography” 121).6 This unregulated seriality is
disquieting for those committed to a Platonic model of a self who can
philosophize, as well as for any model of subjectivity as a stable form.7

Vicariousness
A second hint about the positivity of mimesis is what Lacoue-Labarthe
calls “vicariousness.” The “‘essence’” of mimesis (Lacoue-Labarthe
includes the scare quotes) is “absolute vicariousness, carried to the
limit... —something like an infinity of substitution and circulation”
(116). Let us veer from Lacoue-Labarthe’s own focus on the “absolute”
quality of vicarity and the “infinity” of its circulation, and dwell instead
upon what is distinctive to the feeling of vicariousness. Vicariousness:
the act of being a vicar or representative who takes the place, stance,
or stead of another—and repeats it. Vicariousness: not quite an appro-
priation of the other (with its connotation of domination or violence)
but a more appropriate mode of appropriation. As in: “I (vicariously)
feel the sadness on your face and in your posture, voice, and color.”
One stands in another’s stead and feels intimately a feeling that is
not quite one’s own. How can this be? What is the nature of the opera-
tive relationship here, between what is natively one’s own and what
is foreign but taken on? Addressing the question indirectly, Lacoue-
Labarthe turns to a passage in one of Nietzsche’s early notebooks.
Thinking about the tragic actor, Nietzsche speaks of a “capacity to
improvise on the basis of a foreign character”:
What is the capacity to improvise on the basis of a foreign character? As
such, it is not a question of imitation, for it is not reflection that is at the
origin of such improvisations. In effect, it is necessary to ask oneself: how
is the entry into a foreign individuality possible?

It is first the liberation from one’s own individuality, thus the act of immers-
ing oneself in a representation. Here we see how representation is able to
differentiate the manifestations of the will, and how every character is an
inner representation. This internal representation is obviously not identi-

6
Derrida says that “The desistance or destabilization of aletheia, within ... mimesis...
reintroduces an inadequation or instability belonging to homoisis, which resembles what
it nevertheless displaces.” (“Desistance” 27)
7
And yet, as Lawtoo notes, “Plato” himself, in his mimetic impersonations as
“Socrates,” transgresses in practice the stable forms he posits in theory. See Lawtoo,
Phantom, esp. 58–60.
1192 JANE BENNETT

cal to our conscious thought about ourselves. This entry into a foreign
individuality is also artistic pleasure… (qtd. in “Typography” 114)8

Nietzsche here juxtaposes “imitation” (as the undistorted mirroring

or “reflection” of a model) to “improvisation” (as an imperfect iteration
that continues to alter in relation to the scene at hand). Brian Massumi
seems to me to capture something important about the improvisational
when he speaks of playful repetitions or “esqueness.” To be cat-esque,
for example, is to playfully extract from one’s own body a feline tone,
tempos, scent, sound, stance. Esqueness is a “ludic gesture that marks
its qualitative difference from the analog gestures” (10).9
Nietzsche’s second point about improvisation concerns its liberating
power: it frees one from the model of self that, via acts of hyposta-
tization, one can imagine oneself to be. The actor lets himself go,
is here an “enchanted Dionysiac improviser” (Nietzsche, Notebooks
61).10 (Does Lacoue-Labarthe here hear Nietzsche affirm a constitu-
tive “infirmity” of subjectivity?) Finally, Nietzsche links improvisation
to a feeling—of artistic pleasure. This is presumably because it entails
not a mechanical repetition of the model but a creative interpretation
of it. In improvisation, the self, which always contains a multitude of
potential “characters,”11 is simultaneously receptive and, in produc-
ing something that is neither the original nor the foreign character,
also creative. (This is why, as Derrida notes, the middle voice best
captures the strange agency—liminal between active and passive—that
is mimesis) (see “Desistance,” 5).

Gift of Nature
Lacoue-Labarthe’s interest in “improvisation” illuminates how mimesis
can afford opportunities for human artistry. This point re-appears in
his discussion of “productive mimesis.” Lacoue-Labarthe distinguishes

8
See also Nietzsche’s Anschauung notes translated into English by Crawford.
9
Derrida writes: “Mimesis plays, there is some play in it, it allows some play and forces
on to play” (“Desistance” 25).
10
Lawtoo shows us that the Dionysian character of this improvisation is a central part
of this story, though Lacoue-Labarthe does not fully map the paradoxical movements
at play in Nietzsche’s notion of impersonation. Lawtoo explores the intricacies of
Nietzsche’s theory of identification, impersonation, and unconscious representation
in chapter 1 of Phantom, esp. 30–43, 65–68.
11
When Nietzsche says in that passage that “every character is an inner representation,”
he means that each role is a “differentiation” or “manifestation” of the “will” which
is both “inner” and not singular: “Character is a typical representation of the primal
One, which we only get to know as a diversity of manifestations.” (Notebooks 62–3. This
is the same passage Lacoue-Labarthe cites, but in a different translation.
 M  L N 1193

between two forms of imitative techne. The first, “a restricted form,”

is the “pure and simple imitation,” the mere “reduplication of what is
given” (“Diderot” 255) that Lacoue-Labarthe has already dismissed.
The second, however, is a “general” or “productive mimesis” that
“reproduces nothing given” (“Diderot” 255), but participates in—by
enhancing and fulfilling—phusis. “Productive mimesis” returns us to
Nietzsche’s “improvisation,” this time as an activity wherein humans
“supplement” and “perfect” nature’s own “energy” and thus render
phusis into poiesis. Productive mimesis refers to the acts by which human
beings present (by re-presenting) “something other, which was not yet
there, given, or present.” That great actors have an “aptitude” for this
creativity is a “gift” from nature: it is a human iteration (and eleva-
tion) of nature’s own productivity. People engage in “‘doing’ nature,
in order to supplement its incapacity and carry out ..., with the aid of
[nature’s] force..., what [nature alone] ... cannot implement” (259).
Notable here is Lacoue-Labarthe’s elision of the possibility of non-
human forms of artistry. For him, nature itself is not artistic in its
productivity: it cannot produce unanticipated novelty. Does Lacoue-
Labarthe imply that nature merely unfolds pre-existing patterns and
routines? I am not sure. But it is clearly stated that phusis, albeit “ener-
getic” and having “force,” must await the addition of human genius in
order to qualify as genuine poiesis. Nature’s vitality is an indispensable
“aid” to artistry, to, that is, the mimetic artistry of men and women:
the gift of nature ... is ... the poietic gift. Or, what is the same thing, the gift of
mimesis: in effect, a gift of nothing (in any case, of nothing that is already
present or already given). A gift of nothing or of nothing other than the
‘aptitude’ for presenting, that is for substituting for nature itself; a gift
for ‘doing’ nature, in order to supplement its incapacity and carry out or
effect, with the aid of its force and the power proper to it, what it cannot
implement – that for which its energy alone cannot suffice. (259)

Many scholars today, alert to the anthropocentrism of Lacoue-

Labarthe’s images of art and nature, have explored instead instances
of poiesis as practiced by animals, plants, and ecological or geological
systems.12 Lacoue-Labarthe does acknowledge that the performances
of stage actors are part of a more-than-human mimetic process:

12
See, for example, Kohn on “how forests think,” Margulis and Sagan on bacterial
“symbiosis,” Abram on the “speech of needled evergreens” (171), Doyle on how “a
humble cactus enables the news of our fundamentally nested nature” (12), Grosz on
how “sexual selection” in nonhuman animals is the exertion of “beauty, an aesthetic
force” (24), Connolly on “nonhuman force fields,” and Deacon on “teleodynamism”
in biological systems.
1194 JANE BENNETT

actors “implement” the proto-creativity of nonhuman nature. A step

further—one with radical implications for figures of the human, for
notions of agency, and for engaging with the “environment”—would
be to affirm a mimetic creativity at work in some nonhuman bodies
and processes as well. Here scholars in the humanities have sometimes
turned to traditions of phenomenology, process philosophy, or to
the new materialisms inspired by Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze explicitly
offers an alternative to the neatness of a “hyperbologic of contraries”:
creativity as an assemblage of human and nonhuman participants,
characterized not by “contraries capable of being transformed into
one another” but by different speeds and slownesses, by “this and
that—alternations and entwinings, resemblances and differences,
attractions and distractions, nuance and abruptness” (267).

Sympathy
Despite the impossibility of a clear and decisive choice between passivity
and activity, Lacoue-Labarthe acknowledges that the creative form of
mimesis—art—is nevertheless sometimes enacted. But because of his
focus on the hyperbologic of imitation, and also his acute awareness
of the historical facts of German fascism, Lacoue-Labarthe is extremely
wary of attempts to harness mimesis to an artistry of the self.13 We can
see this tendency to prioritize the exposé of paradox over affective
experimentations in subjectivity in Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of
Theodor Reik on dance in “The Echo of the Subject.” Dance is a
body’s rhythmic improvisation with music, but Lacoue-Labarthe veers
away from an exploration of what happens in the encounter between
flesh and sound, and away from an account of how these affective
transfers might be choreographed to induce a particular set of ethical
responses in dancer or audience.14 Instead, he hones in, once again,
on the paradox of mimesis: dance repeats music but “what is missing is
the repetition on the basis of which the repetition of the dance ... might
appear” (194). “The absence of that on the basis of which there is
imitation, the absence of the imitated or the repeated... reveals what
is by definition unrevealable—imitation or repetition” (194–95).

13
Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of fascism centers on Nazi Germany, but in “The Nazi
Myth” he and Jean-Luc Nancy also say that the “logic” of Nazism “belongs profoundly to
the mood or character of the West in general, and, more precisely, to the fundamental
tendency of the subject, in the metaphysical sense of the word.” (312)
14
Lacoue-Labarthe does engage the ethical effects of mimetic art on the audience in
“The Nazi Myth,” Heidegger, Art and Politics, and Musica Ficta.
 M  L N 1195

Other approaches to (what I called at the beginning of the essay) a

morphology of encounter do, however, focus in earnest on the task of
inflecting improvisational repetition in the direction of a particular
set of feelings and atmospheres. Take, for example, the Abolitionist’s
figure of (mimetic) sympathy. To opponents of slavery and the death
penalty in antebellum America, “sympathy” was a natural force that
could be harnessed for moral and political improvement. It had the
power to disrupt prejudices, heal antagonisms, and render explicit
the common ground between groups separated by differences in
appearance, manners, circumstance, or fortune.15 “And the stream
of sympathy still rolls on,” writes William Lloyd Garrison in 1836, “its
impetus is increasing; and it must ere long sweep away the pollutions
of slavery” (“Harsh” 131–32).16 Garrison’s call to sympathy was an
appeal to a moral sentiment, to, that is, an encounter with a suffering
other that provokes a subjective feeling of sadness and is combined
with the Christian injunction to love they neighbor as thyself. But
sympathy as sentiment was made possible by sympathy as a “stream”
or natural force out and about in the world, by that tendency by
which susceptible materials were attracted to one another and, once
in proximity, could trade elements and affects—in a kind of mimesis
of call and response. It is true that sympathy was undergoing a pro-
cess of psychologization from the seventeenth century on, but this
confinement within the bounds of subjectivity was never complete or
uncontested.17 Discourses of “animal magnetism” (Mesmer), “spirtuo-
sexual magnetism” (phrenology), and “neuromimesis” persisted and
accented sympathy’s more-than-human physicality. Neuromimesis
named a process wherein a healthy body involuntarily adopted the
symptoms of a disease after having viewed or read about them. Athena
Vrettos describes the neuromimetic reaction of the audience to a Sarah
Bernhardt performance of La dame aux camélias in 1881: as Bernhardt,
playing the part of a woman dying of consumption, coughs dramati-
cally, a contagious cacophony of “‘coughing filled the auditorium,

15
Elizabeth Barnes writes: “In American literature ... sympathetic identification takes
on a particular political significance. In writing spanning nearly a hundred years,
and including authors as diverse as Tom Paine and Harriet Beecher Stowe, sympathy
-- expressed as emotional, psychological, or biological attachment—is represented as
the basis of democracy, and therefore as fundamental to the creation of a distinctly
‘American’ character.” (3)
16
Garrison adds: “In the long, dark struggle with national injustice, through which I
have been called to pass, I have been cheered and strengthened by the knowledge of
the reformatory change which has taken place in the sentiments of thousands, through
... the Liberator,” which has “enlarge[d] the spirit of human sympathy.” (181)
17
See Lobis.
1196 JANE BENNETT

and during several minutes, no one was able to hear the words of the
great actress’.... Incidents like the Bernhardt performance seemed to
reveal a fundamental permeability not only between body and mind
but also between self and other” (qtd. in Vrettos, Somatic 81–83).18
Neuromimesis is an instance of what Nidesh Lawtoo calls “the elu-
sive sphere of intersubjective, psychosomatic, and contagious forms
of communication that are not under the control of consciousness
and lead the ego to reproduce, share, and assimilate the qualities of
privileged others …” (Conrad xxxvii)
Also marking sympathy qua mimetic contagion, but this time a flow
of influences between human and nonhuman bodies, the narrator of
Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) confesses to being affected by the
“heat” of the red fabric A as it made contact with his breast:
It seemed to me,— the reader may smile, but must not doubt my work,— it
seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physi-
cal, yet almost so, a sensation of burning heat; as if the letter were not of
red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon
the floor. (20)

There are of course many layers of mediation at work in what I am

calling a sympathy between colored cloth and human flesh. To name
just some key layers, there is the mediation of Hawthorne’s novelistic
depiction, the mediation by a culturally specific set of meanings sur-
rounding femininity and adultery, the mediation of the psychological
projection (by narrator and perhaps reader) of the “heat” produced
by a body-engaged-in-sex upon the less motile letter A. All of these
help to produce the red-hot effect or “sensation of burning heat.” But
it is important not to leave out, as another element within the mix,
the physicality of the fabric of the A—its scarlet color, haptic texture,
and even perhaps its pointed shape. These have a kind of material
force that, while entangled with the cultural, psychological, and nar-
ratological, is not wholly reducible to them. It matters, for example,
that the A is red, a color that, as Merleau-Ponty and others have shown,
carries and expresses a distinctive affective charge.19

18
See also Gordon, 78, 77. Gordon contrasts the sentimentalist sympathy of Stowe
with the model of “physical sympathy” that he and Baldwin detect as the aim of Nor-
man Mailer’s “The White Negro.” See also Gibbs. Gibbs uses the related notion of the
“corporeal unconscious” which “is animated by sympathy, a putative affinity between
certain things—including bodies and organs—which makes them liable not only to
be similarly affected by the same influence, but more especially to affect or influence
one another.” (135)
19
See Merleau-Ponty 209–228.
 M  L N 1197

Through awkward, cloudy notions such as a communicative transfer

between color and flesh or a mimetic relay of coughs, appeals are made
not just to sympathy as sentiment but also to sympathy as a kind of
geo-force, akin to gravity. The continued circulation of this sympathy
suggests that (what Foucault described as) the “the prose of the world”
(Foucault, Order 47) had not fully disintegrated. Walter Benjamin also
noted the durability of a non-modern physics of sympathy: “As we
know, the sphere of life which once seemed to be ruled by the law
of similarity used to be much larger. It was the microcosm and the
macrocosm.... It can still be maintained today that the cases in which
people consciously perceive similarities in everyday life are a minute
segment of those countless cases” that are “perceived unconsciously
or not at all” (“Doctrine” 65–69).
Let this brief sketch of a natural or onto-sympathy—as a process of
attraction, distraction, and responsiveness in which all kinds of things,
some capable of speech, some not, are caught up—stand to indicate
one alternative to Lacoue-Labarthe’s model of affectivity as mimesis. A
first point of contrast is that between an elaborated, exuberant rheto-
ric (of lively transfers between things) and Lacoue-Labarthe’s sober,
reluctant rhetoric (of that which perpetually evades articulation). A
second point of contrast concerns the role allowed to nonhumans.
Whereas a sympathetic physics is more liable to include nonhuman
as well as human shapes and bodies, the drift of Lacoue-Labarthe’s
treatment of mimesis tends to settle upon a self (or to be more
precise, it tends to circle around a self that is never quite there). To
return to Lacoue-Labarthe’s analysis of Reik, we see that it starts out
by marking the formation of a mimetic circuit whose parties include a
musical refrain, that is to say, a sound-field that arrives to the ear from
the outside—from air, strings, and their vibratory interactions. Likewise,
the question posed early in the essay—How does a refrain come to
be mimed and repeated – stuck in – one’s head?—does acknowledge
the productivity of encounters between subjective and objective forces.
But this attention to human-nonhuman relays is short-lived, and is
soon absorbed into a discussion of intra-self- or psycho-dynamics. As
the text proceeds, it loses interest in the part played by sound in the
mimetic process, as sound morphs into meaning via memory and the
goings-on of the unconscious.
This tendency to allow the question of mimetic encounter to be
narrowed down to the (admittedly still very wide) question of human
subjectivity reappears in Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay on Diderot and the
paradox of the actor. That essay carefully explores the quality of the
1198 JANE BENNETT

(mimetic) relationship between the actor and the characters he plays,

an exploration that is, however, oriented not toward marking the force
of currents of attractions and distractions between porous materials
that might include, say, the space of the theater and the props, but
rather toward exposing how the condition of possibility of miming is the
human experience of having taken a distance from oneself, of having
stepped outside of the illusion of having previously inhabited a positive
and aspirationally whole self.20 This state of mind exposes for Lacoue-
Labarthe the profound emptiness or impossibility of subjectivity: and
again that is the punch line. To mime, he concludes, is not the activity
of a subject copying a model, but the activity of a strangely empty self
being bounced around not by a stable other (the “model” of homoiosis)
but by inchoate prompts that are themselves echoes in an endless and
groundless series. Or, as John McKeane puts the point: mimesis is for
Lacoue-Labarthe “an absence (of subject) responding to an absence
(of model)” (155). But here one might push Lacoue-Labarthe to
explore the agency of the prompts and props within the mimetic
process. That is a theme pursued today by a variety of performance
theorists and artists, including Hito Steyerl, Adrian Heathfield, Andre
Lepecki, Lin Hixson, and Matthew Goulish.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s concern was to take a post-structuralist rather
than a non-human turn. Fair enough. And it is worth noting that the
two turns share a desire to present alternatives to the phantasmatic
image of self-possessed subjectivity. Lacoue-Labarthe does this by expos-
ing how nature’s gift to us is never our possession, never “proper” to
a human individual or group. It is, he writes, “the gift of impropriety,”
a gift that, despite being received and taken up by a self, is never
one’s own. And this for two reasons: first, because the gift depends
upon the vitality of something utterly beyond itself, it is constitutively
dependent upon the protean formative power of nature; and second,
because every act of artistic mimesis will differ from all blueprints and
inspirational ideas and dreams, insofar as the creative process always
differs from itself as it proceeds. Process or new materialist philosophy
also rejects—or perhaps the better verb here is elides—the model of
the autonomous human agent, highlighting instead the vibrancy and
effectivity of nonhuman bodies, forces, and flows and the ways in which
human agency is itself enabled and constrained by them.

20
Mimesis, in Lawtoo’s account of Lacoue-Labarthe’s mimetology, “turns the subject
into a person who is ‘no one’ (personne) in particular and, for this reason, is paradoxically
open to the mimetic experience of becoming—not one, but everyone.” (Conrad xxviii)
 M  L N 1199

Everything changes. It is not that everything is always at the precipice

of dissolution, but that every thing is changing in relations with oth-
ers—at speeds that are sometimes slow and gradual and sometimes fast
and overwhelming. This is the fate of mimetic bodies, human or not.

Acknowledgments: I am very grateful to Nidesh Lawtoo for comments

on this essay, and for inviting me to engage Lacoue-Labarthe’s work
and to juxtapose mimesis and sympathy. Thanks also to Bill Connolly,
Jennifer Culbert, and Katrin Pahl for their helpful comments and
criticisms of earlier versions of this essay, and to Naveeda Khan, Emily
Parker, and Anand Pandian for taking up Lacoue-Labarthe’s “Diderot:
Paradox and Mimesis” and Diderot’s “The Paradox of the Actor” in
our nameless but excellent reading group.

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