Abstract
This thesis investigates the complicated relationship between mimesis and power. It shows how a theoretical concern with mimesis has been at the heart of critical efforts to understand and overcome the systematic and dominating thinking associated with Enlightenment culture. The central thesis of this study is that systems of power and domination are established on the basis of mimetic control. Conversely, due to the ‘essential non-essence’ or non-identity of mimesis itself, these systems of control are susceptible to forms of reversal.
The study considers important critical work that has sought to overturn the moral economy of the Enlightenment tradition. Nietzsche’s revaluation of values provides the watershed moment in which this philosophical tradition is reversed. The thesis charts Nietzsche’s reversal in terms of five important trajectories of critical thought: Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the relation between our mimetic faculty and the mimetic capacity of language; Theodor Adorno’s critical examination of the logic of identity; Maurizio Lazzarato’s analysis of neoliberal forms of mimetic control in terms of assemblages and diagrammatic signs; Homi Bhabha’s reconception of mimicry as an ambivalent and potentially subversive form of anti-colonialism; and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of seduction. The thesis shows how each of these thinkers has endeavoured to politicize mimesis as a way to oppose the exploitative dynamic of identity thinking associated with Western capitalist culture.
The thesis makes an important contribution to the tradition of critical theory and its critique of systems of power. It does this by reorienting theory to consider the permutations of a politics of mimesis. With this new critical insight, the thesis aims to facilitate new avenues for critical thought.