1

The Girardian Appropriation Mimesis, the Platonic Mimesis and Bhabha’s

Mimicry: The passion for controlling representation.

Patrick Imbert1, University of Ottawa.

1/ THE APPROPRIATION MIMESIS.

René Girard elucidates the dynamics of exclusion through what he calls the
appropriation mimesis. The appropriation mimesis refers to two groups or individuals in
competition for an object. They act as doubles, Girard argues, each imitating the other’s
attempt to triumph and prevail. Girard uses the example of two toddlers fighting over a
toy, even when an identical object is within easy reach, to illustrate this urge to express
economic or symbolic might.
The appropriation mimesis further leads to a breakdown in the type of dominance
observed in animal behaviour2. It leads instead to a conflictual world rooted in the
interplay of desires, where antagonists imitate each other’s attempt to grasp the object of
power. But what is the object of power? In a world where it is important to mold a
population ideologically, this object of power is linked to what is posited as “external” to
discourse. In a religious world, the external element is the Verb of God. Its control often
leads to exclusion, and sometimes to radical victimization and death through the process
of attribution3 because it arises from orthodoxies’ canonic pronouncements on what
constitutes revelation and truth. In the secular world, the external element is based on the
capacity to make people believe that they are communicated objective facts. This
capacity is coupled to ideological and scientific schools, and also leads to exclusion. As
Girard points out, in a religious world based on a sacred paradigm, the victim him/herself
becomes sacred and is perceived as the location of differentiated meanings. The process

1
pimbert@uottawa.ca http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/lettres/imbert.html
http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/lettres/discours_mondialisation. html
University Research Chair Holder: “ Stereotypes, cultural displacements, constructions of images
of self and other.”
2
For more on this subject, see Henri Laborit, Éloge de la fuite, Paris, Gallimard, 1976.
3
Patrick Imbert, « Le processus d'attribution », in Les discours du Nouveau-Monde au XIXe siècle
au Canada français et en Amérique latine/Los discursos del Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XIX en el
Canada francofono y en América latina (Couillard/Imbert, ed.), Ottawa, Legas, 1995, p. 43-60.
 2

of violence is thus organized and channelled through religious institutions that permit
meaning-production. This meaning remains strictly controlled by the institution’s
monosemic logic.
Girard emphasizes that within this context of violence and meaning, Christianity
introduced an essential new element : the rejection of the victimization process, as well as
the grasp that violence is an internal phenomenon, tied to deep ontological anguish4. In
other words, Girard argues that the Christian faith ultimately critiques the sacralization of
scapegoats. The Canadian novelist Antonio d’Alfonso expresses it well while citing Jean-
Claude Barreau, author of La reconnaissance : « La foi est reconnaissance de
quelqu’un… Le Christianisme n’est-il pas à l’origine une gigantesque “désacralisation”
de l’univers? Les Chrétiens refusaient toutes les idoles y compris l’idole qu’était l’état
impérial romain5. » [Faith is a recognition of someone... after all, isn’t Christianity the
origin of a massive “desacrilization” of the universe? Christians forbade all idols,
including that of the Imperial Roman Empire]. As Girard and d’Alfonso envision it, the
most important element in the Christian message is therefore its recognition of alterity,
which generates new significations. According to them, the victim or the potential victim
are at the origins of culture because culture is about recognition or non-recognition of
difference. Culture6 is a process of establishing relationships by either creating borders or
by crossing limits. In a culture of victimhood, with its interplay of sacredness and
dualism, what is needed is a recognition of a non-excluded third element based upon the
recognition of difference. This recognition transforms the dualism victim/victimized in a
process of creative change through which each element is altered7.

4
See the consequences of this anguish in any nationalistic ideology based on Plato and Hegel
such as it is shown by Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, New York, Harper and
Row, 1963. See also: Patrick Imbert, “Cartography, Dualism, and Identity”, in L’Interculturel et
l’économie à l’oeuvre, Ottawa, Legas/University of Ottawa, The Americas Series/Collection des
Amériques/Colleciòn de las Américas, vol 3, to be published (end 2003).
5
Antonio d’Alfonso, Avril ou l’Anti-passion, Montréal, Vlb, 1990, p. 159.
6
For our conception of culture as a permanent struggle for legitimation, see: Barth, Frederik
(1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization off Culture Difference,
Bergen/London, Universitetsforlaget/Allen & Unwin.
7
See Erin Manning, Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home, and Identity in Canada,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003 (particularly chapter 4 dealing with Levinas
and entitled ‘Face-to-Face with the Incommensurable”).
 3

The appropriation mimesis also functions in a secularized world. It is based on a

process of victimization that leads to war and to genocide committed in the name of
ideals such as nationalism, whether or not it is allied to a “civilizing” mission. Girard
argues that displacement of the sacred, without simultaneous integration of the Christian
worldview, leads the world and modernity to pile up casualties. Such a world does not
achieve efficient multiple-meanings production, or differentiation of its resources.
Nonetheless, a new element appears, because after an intolerable production of casualties,
after Auschwitz, the world can no longer remain the same. An inevitable change takes
place. This is especially the case if the survivors can attain sufficient symbolic and
economic power to force a reexamination of past violence. Films like Le regard d’Ulysse,
and Schindler’s List, a novel like William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice8, or Art
Spiegleman’s graphic novel Maus9, reflect such developments. Reflection over past
disasters, thanks to a third element, in this case the lynched victims’ discourse, leads to
the redefinition of paradigms. Violent discourse (Nazism or Stalinism) as well as
inefficient discourses (Humanism10) that lead to the explosion of the appropriation
mimesis are criticized. The great myths of legitimation suffer collapse and new
perspectives are communicated11. In this context, literature is no longer conceived of as
an identity-machine, linked to the cohesiveness of the Nation-State : « “literature” in the
vernacular, ever since its institutionalization as an academic discipline, has been
perceived primarily as an identity-machine” says Theo d’Haen 12.  There is an attempt to

8
New York, Random House, 1979.
9
Art Spiegelman, Maus, New York, Pantheon Books, 1973 and Art Spiegelman, Maus II, New
York, Pantheon Books, 1986.
10
see Camus’ critique of Humanism in La peste.
11
This is well evoked by Kundera, or by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.
12
Theo d’Haen, « Post-Scripts : Postnational Identities in Contemporary North-American
Fiction”, in Roman contemporain et identité culturelle en Amérique du Nord/Contemporary
Fiction and Cultural Identity in North America, (dir. Jaap Lintvelt et al.) Québec, Nota Bene,
1998, p. 29-43, p. 31.
 4

integrate the recognition of otherness through the theoretical musings of thinkers like
Girard, Polanyi13, Popper14, Lévinas15, Ricoeur16.
Moreover, through democratic (division of responsibilities), liberal (legitimation
of displacement)17, and economic practices displacing war-like conflicts and transforming
them into economic competition particular to the postmodern/postcolonial world,
democratic societies try to avoid the pitfalls of the concentration or deprivation of power,
both extremes that exacerbate rivalries. The transformation of conflicts into competition
prevents a culture from engaging in a deadly battle for status between its doubles.
Competition rests on the legitimation of multiple-meanings production, resulting not
from the corpse of the sacred victim, but from a recognition of the third element 18 that
escapes the battles for prestige between doubles.
For this escape to take place, it is necessary to evade dualisms easily reduced to a
monism19, that is, to a final agreement on the way one must interpret the role of the victim
in the social chaos he/she is supposed to have produced. Dualism leads, in the end, to a
monism that underlies, for example, the legitimization of statehood and of nationalism.
This agreement on representation typical of the logic of the Nation-States can be seen, for
example, in the conflict between Creon and Antigone20; or in the notion of technological
progress that takes no account of needs and cultures 21 other than its own growth. These

13
Michael Polanyi, La Logique de la liberté, Paris, PUF, 1989.
14
Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, New York, Harper and Row, 1963.
15
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority, Pittsburgh, Duquesne U.P.,
1969.
16
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, Chicago, Chicago U. P., 1992.
17
Patrick Imbert, « Déplacements épistémologiques dans les littératures et les médias des
Amériques », L'interculturel au coeur des Amériques, (dir. D. Castillo-Durante et P. Imbert),
Colecciòn de las Américas/The Americas Series/Collection des Amériques, Université d'Ottawa /
Université du Manitoba, Legas, 2003, p. 35-47.
18
A kind of dynamic of interpretance in which production of multiple meanings and the
recognition of otherness are at work. For interpretance see: Peirce, Charles Sanders (1982).
Writings of C.S. Peirce, Bloomington, Bloomington U.P., 4 vol.
19
« Le totalitarisme et le monisme vont de pair » : Michel Maffesoli, L’Ombre de Dyonisos,
Paris, Méridien/Anthropos, 1992, p. 128.
20
See Jean Anouilh, Antigone, Paris, Table ronde, 1952.
21
See for example : « L’invention des Amériques : de barbarie/civilisation à oisiveté/travail,
(avec M. Couillard), Revue canadienne de littérature comparée, vol. 27.3, septembre 2000, p.
437-461.
 5

types of agreements unite Capitalism and Marxism, pitting them against aboriginal
groups, as shown, for instance, in Youri Rytkhèou’s novel L’étrangère aux yeux bleus22.

2/THE PLATONIC MIMESIS.

A monosemic agreement on representation is tied to an institutional power that
presumes to reveal reality based on the capacity to show the only undeniable fact, the
passage from life to death. An institution’s capacity to show death tricks its audience into
believing in the objectivity of the discourse, which is contextualized with the presentation
of death. It tricks its audience into thinking that, through the discourse commenting on
death, a portion of reality has been communicated. The institution constructs a discourse
founded on the guarantee of objectivity based upon the undeniable fact that is the passage
from life to death. This discourse is a form of interpretation that through its various
attributions (knowledge about who is treacherous, or heroic23, and therefore an insider or
an outsider) constantly promotes the cohesion of the community. This discourse, that
sorts the good from the bad, because it is believed to be able to present the “outside of
discourse”, is believed to be objective 24. The cadaver is the guarantee of objectivity based
on noticing a disappearance, from whence real meaning can arise when constructed by an
institutional power25. From then on, the struggle against the reduction of multiple
meanings, and the struggle to maintain the binarism that will resolve into monism
legitimated by facts and by the access to the outside of discourse, becomes the essence of
the fierce determination deployed by the appropriation mimesis controlled for example
by the Nation-State.
22
Paris, Actes sud, 2001.
23
See on this subject not Anouilh’s rereading of Antigone but that of Antonio d’Alfonso, who
argues that Antigone represents not an oedipal complex between daughter, father and brother but
rather « personnifie l’espoir face à la dévastation de la guerre » (op.cit., p. 91) [personifies hope
confronted by the devastation of war]. We aknowledge that these divergent interpretations are
based on the choice of differing founding theories. Further on this subject, we could evoke the
mythocritical readings of Rue Deschambault by Gabrielle Roy, readings that occlude the novel’s
critique of racism; see P. Imbert, « Critique littéraire, lecture canonique, prise en charge de la
différence et exclusion » in Croire à l'écriture, (dir. Y.Lepage et R. Major), Orléans (Ontario),
Éd. David, 2000, p. 179-194.
24
The only undeniable element outside of discourse is in fact this passing of life into death, which
gives rise to modern dictatorships’ acute awareness of the necessity to ensure corpses disappear.
Corollary to this tension is the invention of a literary genre : The testimonio.
25
This permits the lynching party to believe that the victim was the true source of dissension
within the ranks, because the death ties its victim to a scapegoat’s function.
 6

The antagonism at the heart of the appropriation mimesis thus has an ultimate
goal : to control the Platonic mimesis that claims it is possible to copy reality. Platonic
mimesis aims to impose a discourse linked to a certain type of representation, a common
agreement on the facts. Appropriation mimesis in a contemporary society serves,
therefore, to anchor the underlying promises of improvement underlying all institutional
discourses, by closing the gap between discourse and that which is thought of being
independent of it but can be acted upon efficiently.
According to Platonic mimesis, we can suppose we have direct access to the truth,
to the world of ideas, of facts, and of reality. Consequently, the one who can establish
what is fact26 controls the symbolic world, the world of culture and identity and
economics, because he or she can convince others to behave in a way that reinforces
his/her power. These behaviours are generally controlled by a process of attribution that
defines an identity as stable, as a being. The Platonic mimesis and its capacity to
legitimize what is, and therefore what must be done is the primary challenge of the
appropriation mimesis and also constitutes its passionate link to violence. The Platonic
mimesis, through its capacity to generate belief in a stable world linked to an institution
that organizes a meaningful world, is omnipresent in dualistic conflicts that express
themselves along political, religious, ethnic, economic, or class lines and especially in
conflicts over interpretations27. The mastery of the belief in the possibility to establish an
equivalence with reality is contained within the context of mimesis appropriation and
ultimately results in the activation of the victimization process.
This mastery, in a democratic, liberal society which encourages its consumers to
become producers, distinguishes itself, however, from Antiquity and from dictatorial
regimes. In the case of a given democratic, liberal society, the symbolic or economic
goods desired are so numerous as to attenuate conflict. Rivalries are also calmed by the
division of power and responsibility, preventing the monopoly of decision-making and
the accretion of an orthodoxy around the ideal of a nation state 28. In the context of
26
See Alfred Korzybsky, Science and Sanity, New York, The international non Aristotelian
Library, 1933.
27
We differentiate, therefore, between interpretataion linked to modernity and the imposition of a
canon bounded by its nation-state, and the interprtation of individual readings leading to textual
competition, favouring encounters through recognition.
28
Erin Manning underlines that one should not fall into a kind of retorsion when faced with the
 7

postmodernity/postcoloniality, this contemporary process is linked to a form of

cooperation between Nation-States, multinationals and financial flux 29, systems of
education and civil society.

3/ BHABHA’S MIMICRY.

There are comparisons to be drawn between the appropriation mimesis and Homi
Bhabha’s notion of mimicry30. Bhabha’s mimicry is the expression of the not quite, that is
to say of a fight for identity between a valorized colonial model and a series of devalued
behaviours, because the colonized can imitate the model, but not quite attain it : « […]
mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power
and knowledge […] colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as
a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite 31. » In fact the colonized
person can never aspire to become a model in its own right because of its accent, the
colour of its skin, its relationship to women often doubly oppressed, its knowledge of
many cultures and many languages (at least its own and the colonizer’s).
In this light, to know more is negative, because it prevents a perfect copy of the
colonizer, who with his/her power does not need to know more, does not need to learn
more languages. The colonized is therefore, at best, only like. But in this like arises the
struggles of the appropriation mimesis, the violence of all those who have been rejected
as barbaric, and trapped, according to the colonizer, in their belief in esoteric signs, in

power of the Nation-State. Retorsion, in this case, looks like a negative mimesis appropriation:
We must become attentive, for example, to the ways in which we, as transnationals, are forced by
the very logic of the nation-state to become anti-national or anti-state, thus succumbing to the
vocabulary of the nation in its negative form, rendering ourselves captive within the very forces
we seek to undermine, and we find ourselves ventriloquating the language of the state even as it
is written as the counter-narration of the nation.” (Ephemeral Territories: Cross-cultural
Representations of Nation, Home and Identity, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
2002).
29
See Martin Wolf, « Countries still rule the world, » The Financial Time (London), Wednesday,
February 6, 2002, p. 12.
30
This is mimesis in the sense of mimicry, and should not be confused with the notion of mimesis
as Alfonso de Toro points out in A et F. de Toro (eds), El debate de la postcolonialidad en
latinoamérica, Frankfurt/Madrid, Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 1999, p. 47.
31
Homi Bhabha, « Of Mimicry and Man : The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse », October
1984, no 28, p. 126. See also: Homi Bhabha, “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical
Exploration of Some Forms of Mimetic in The Theory of Reading (ed. F. Gloversmith), Brighton,
Harvester, 1989, p. 93-122.
 8

their behaviour ruled by unpredictable emotions and irrational passions. They have been
and are excluded, killed, declared impossible to assimilate, or imprisoned out-of-bounds.
Bhabha’s mimicry theorizes the invalidation as desired by a colonial power 32 or by any
regime oppressing minority groups.
Mimicry shows that the appropriation mimesis aiming for control of Platonic
mimesis is always mastered by the same powers and that competition with them is
impossible. In a sense, colonization represents the capacity to establish a culture of
dominance instead of allowing the flourishing of a culture of mimetic appropriation in
which every person competes against any other person. Nonetheless, mimicry is also the
effect of the appropriation mimesis and of daily struggles to achieve legitimacy, a
dynamic that transform essentialism into more subtle strategies of affirmation. Bhabha’s
mimicry is also an indication of the failure of the invalidation planned by the colonizer
and the failure of the illocutory act, that is the promise of a better world for the colonized.

4/POSTCOLONIALITY.

Postcoloniality33 manifests a return of oppressed groups, who attempt to assert

their voices amongst other voices. The appropriation mimesis is the conflictual dynamic
that aims to appropriate the capacity to determine reality. From the moment a group
defines reality, it imposes its voice and its way, controls the process of representation and
asserts its own vision as valid, if not universal. Nowadays, mimicry in Bhabha’s use of
the term is a way to displace a colonial dynamic. It is the site of the fiercest power
struggles in certain regions of the planet. It is also a way to displace representations of

32
One must of course add that the actual results of colonization occasionally proved to be very
beneficial for the colonized. For example, in Pondicherry, the former French colony of coastal
India, a senior employee receives 6000F salary per month « alors qu’un citoyen indien, même de
haute caste, gagne péniblement 500 F par mois. » [while an ordinary Indian citizen, even of the
highest caste earns, with difficulty, 500F a month] (Grands Reportages, octobre 2001, p. 76-77).
33
As Alfonso de Toro has pointed out, in order to take into account this new dynamic by which
bi-cultural and bilingual minorities manage to transform their position, we would do better to
refer to postcoloniality rather than to postcolonialism, which has diverse meanings: "I will replace
it (postcolonialism) with 'postcoloniality' by which I mean an intellectual, social and cultural
attitude linking the periphery and the center in a pluralistic and internationalizing way in order to
produce dialogue”.De Toro, Alfonso (1997) "The Epistemological Foundations of the
Contemporary Condition: Latin America in Dialogue with Postmodernity and Postcoloniality", in
Latin American Postmodernisms (Robert Young ed.), Atlanta, Rodopi, p. 36.
 9

identity by seeing them as a historically unstable process 34, which stereotypes can be
deconstructed. These representations and stereotypes are deconstructed in a dynamic that
aims to master the important components of a particular cultural system caught in a
mimetic struggle for appropriation.

In the new postmodern/postcolonial dynamic, the mimicry of like is no longer

negative, because new symbolic and economic assertions have been and are being
produced every day. The relation to power is not solely negative for those who live in the
like and who partake of many cultures. This holds true for minorities that are often
subject to the imposition of additional forms of mandatory knowledge and to the effort to
communicate that has been seen, up until recently, as negative. Thus, a francophone
technical college in Ottawa, La Cité Collégiale, plays positively on linguistic difference,
no longer framing it as linked to an oppressed or dispossessed minority, but as the
capitalization of useful, supplementary knowledge that adds to technical mastery :
«FRENCH speaking students BILINGUAL employees ». This reversal of perspective is
effective, because it transforms the difference of the Francophone minority of Ontario
into an advantage, especially when it is attached to a learning process in technologies :
«the gateway to a broad range of regional, national and global opportunities35 ».
In the new context, mimicry is displaced by the legitimation of an appropriation
mimesis which is linked to competition more than to conflicts. Mimicry is no longer a
liability, while the capitalization of multiple knowledge, biculturalism and bilingualism
become an advantage. Objects to be desired are multiplied and identity becomes the
contextualization of various self-images. These self-images function as generators of
differentiated advantages because the socio-politico-economic background is no longer
monochromatic. It is itself multicoloured, as demonstrated in the novel entitled The
Global Soul by Pico Iyer. Mimicry becomes the efficient art of one who is in the
advantageous position of being at least bicultural. For this reason, the protagonist of
Yann Martel’s Self speaks of a context of anglophone students, artists, and of
francophone Québécois, and adds : « Je pouvais m'identifier à au moins trois de ces

34
This is emphasized by Frederik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization
of Cultural Difference, Bergen/London, Universitetsforlaget/Allen & Unwin, 1969.
35
Ottawa Business Journal, April 24, 2000, p. 11.
 10

groupes ce qui faisait de moi plus un caméléon qu'un hybride 36. » [I could identify with at
least three of these groups, which made me more a chameleon than a hybrid ].
This corresponds to an observation in Douglas Coupland’s novel Girlfriend in a Coma :
Scott, a production guy from Los Angeles, told us that they film everything here
because Vancouver’s unique : You can morph it into any North American city
or green space with little effort and even less expense, but at the same time the
city has its own distinct feel. See that motel over there? That was ‘Pittsburgh’ in
a movie of the week37.

It also evokes another instance, in Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul : 

Kazuo Ishiguro, “Ish,” as he is generally known […] seems in many ways a
quintessential global Soul, not quite apart of the Japan he left when he was five
and not really a part of England […] “Whenever it was convenient for me to
become very Japanese, I could become very Japanese,” he says, disarmingly.
“And then when I wanted to drop it, I would just become this ordinary
Englishman”38.

As postcoloniality is contextualized within postmodernism, it represents the writing

back39 of oppressed groups who endeavour to disseminate their voice among other voices.
The appropriation mimesis describes the dynamic of attempting to monopolize an object,
or of trying to control the discourse and the value system that communicate reality.
However, mimicry is no longer necessarily negative, nor is it blocked by an appropriation
process bound to fail, because in the new postmodern/postcolonial dynamic there exists
more than one discourse and more than one value system, each of which can
communicate an aspect of reality. The bilingualism/biculturalism differences of minority
groups are now seen as advantages in the context of globalization and of legitimized
symbolic and geographic displacements arising from the use of technology by educated
groups worldwide, a process that shrinks the planet and forces people from very different
cultures into close contact.

36
Yann Martel, Self, Montréal, Boréal, 1998, p. 204.
37
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma, Toronto, HarperCollins, 1998, p. 88.
38
Pico Iyer, The Global Soul, New York, Knopf, 2000, p. 20.
39
It is interesting to note the comments by Iyer about his review of Ishiguro’s book The
Unconsoled and Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory
and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures Bill (Routledge, 1989), in "The Empire Writes Back"
Time, Feb 8, 1993, p 46-51.
 11

5/THE ACCUMULATION OF ACTS AND OF EXPERIENCES.

In the new dynamic where speed, capitalization of knowledge and the capacity to
interconnect with different cultures is an advantage, the aim of the appropriation mimesis
is different from the aim at work during modernity. Nowadays, the question is less to
capitalize or control objects or refer to one single object but to accumulate acts of
desiring and acquiring objects (be they material or symbolic). In the eye of the
postmodern subject, objects lose value (at least symbolic value) and s/he needs to pursue
more. Consumer society, while also a society that validates production of multiple
meanings40, is all about action, about a subject driven to pursue multiple self-images
(having replaced the concept of identity linked to the Nation-State) in constant
displacement. This individual has realized that s/he no longer can control power and that
s/he is subject to constant competition. In such an environment, desiring and experiencing
a strong, positive life becomes most important.
The mimesis of appropriation, a mechanism linked to war-like conflicts because
objects and identities remained static, has now shifted through its link to a setting of
liberal competition, displacing the objects of desire. It is turning onto itself and to the
self-reflexive construction of self images in a context of intensified, complex
relationships. Experience becomes not only the act of accumulating objects in a
somewhat tamed rivalry, where models are more ludic or parodic than all-encompassing,
but also the dissemination of self-images through the production of multiple meanings or
scenarii. In this new world where reflexivity, as a popularized metalinguistic process,
subverts representation, productivity and recontextualization displaces monosemic and
objective definitions of reality.

CONCLUSION.
In a nutshell, the contemporary liberal dynamic displaces the desire for the object
and opens up to generalized competition, in which the division of responsibilities and the
segmentation of access replaces consensus and accumulation. The dynamic of the
mimesis of appropriation therefore no longer aims to control accumulation or to impose
40
Patrick Imbert, « Déplacements épistémologiques dans les littératures et les médias des
Amériques », L'interculturel au coeur des Amériques, (dir. D. Castillo-Durante et P. Imbert),
Colecciòn de las Américas/The Americas Series/Collection des Amériques, Université d'Ottawa /
Université du Manitoba, Legas, 2003, p. 35-47.
 12

an orthodox point of view, but allows each party a share of access. This is why Nestor
Garcia Canclini in La globalizacion imaginada41 says that the most important form of
exclusion now lies in being trapped into a local space without the possibility to displace
oneself geographically (tourism), symbolically (studies), and technologically (the Web),
or to sum up, in being unable to imitate various alterities.

SUMMARY.
The appropriation mimesis is oriented towards the possession of an object and the
assertion of power, and is filled with passion and violence. It operates between two
persons or groups behaving as doubles in their endeavor to triumph one over another.
This power is grounded in the desire to control what is presented as external to discourse.
In a religious world, this external object is God's word. In a lay society, it is represented
by scientific or ideological schools of thought. Through the attribution process, the
passionate desire to control the exterior leads to exclusion or to genocide. Christianity
introduced a new element into this mix, as is emphasized by Girard : the rejection of the
victimization process and the knowledge that violence is within the self and is coupled
with deep ontological anguish.
Through Platonic mimesis, one can assert that one has access to the world of
" ideas " or to reality. Therefore, those who can determine reality and facts control
symbolic and economic worlds as well as human behaviours. These behaviours define a
stable identity, a being. Platonic mimesis and its capacity to legitimate what is, and thus
what must be done, is the object to be appropriated in the conflict linked to the
appropriation mimesis. Its passionate link to violence becomes particularly evident in
conflicts of interpretation.
It is also possible to establish a comparison between the appropriation mimesis
and Homi Bhabha's conception of mimicry. Mimicry is the expression of the "not quite",
that is, of a conflict of identities between a valorized colonial model and a series of
negative behaviours, since the colonized can only imitate the model, but not quite: " […]
mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power
and knowledge […] colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as
a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite. " The colonized can never
become a model because of his accent, his complexion, his relationships to women who
are often doubly colonized, and his knowledge of at least two languages and two cultures
(at least his and the colonizer’s). To know more in a colonial context is negative because
it prevents one from perfectly copying the colonizer, who, though his power, does not
need to know the world of the colonized.
However, postcolonialism represents the writing back of colonized people who
endeavor to disseminate their voice among other voices. The appropriation mimesis is the
expression of a dynamic that leads to the control of the object, or basically to the capacity
to control the discourse that communicates reality. As soon as a group persuades others
of its version of reality, it controls the process of representation. However, in the new
postmodern/postcolonial dynamic, mimicry is no longer necessarily negative, nor is it

41
Buenos Aires, Paidos, 2000.
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automatically blocked by an appropriation process bound to fail. The

bilingualism/biculturalism differences of colonized or minority groups are now seen as
advantageous in the context of legitimized displacements (symbolic or geographic), as
technology shrinks the planet and forces people from very different cultures into contact.