Beyond Imitation: Mimetic Praxis in Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida William Schweiker The Journal of Religion, Vol. 68, No. 1, (Jan., 1988), pp. 21-38. Stable URL htp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=( 122-4189% 28198801 %2968%3A 1% 3C21%3ABIMPIG%3E2.0,CO%3B2-Y The Journal of Religion is currently published by The University of Chicago Press. Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hupulwww.jstor.orgijournalsuepress html. ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ ‘Sun Aug 27 13:16:21 2006Beyond Imitation: Mimetic Praxis in Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida* William Schweiker | University of Iowa Some ideas continually spark reflection. They do so because they are bound up with thought and with our relation to the world. One such idea is “imitation,” or, to be precise, “mimesis.” In classical thought mimesis was a way (o speak about meaning and truth. Imitation denoted a continuous relation between things, a scale of being, so that thoughts, works of art, and words reflected or mirrored other layers of reality. The human existed and understood itself within this symbolic reality. Given this, there were no bumps or jolts, as William James might say, no radical plurality or difference in the human commerce with the world, Imitation gave us a universe of thought and thus satis- fied the constant desire of reason. ‘The appeal of imitation was that it provided unity to thought and ‘was a neat way to test ideas and actions: do they correspond to, imi- tate, or mirror the way things are? Imitation was one premodern answer to what Richard Bernstein has called “Cartesian anxiety,” that deep human desire for truthfulness and certainty in life.? However, the experience of a pluralistic postmodern world has raised the suspicion that there is no definite or set “way things are.” Reality is, in a measure, malleable and open to wildly different perspectives. Accordingly, Richard Rorty argues that itis simply wrongheaded to assume a mirror image of the relation of mind, language, and ideas to “reality.”’ There is no naked reality “out there” independent of what we say and think about it. So ideas, values, and ideals cannot somehow mirror re “+ This emay represents a larger work in progress I want to thank Julius, Jackson, Jr, David , Klemm, and Terence Marin, Jr. for valle comments on this estay snd my project a & hoe "William James, “On Some Hegelisms” Vion, 1956). "Richard Bernstein, Boond Obi and Relation: Sine, Hemenutics and Pais (Phil elphia: University of Pennsylvania Pree, 1983) > Richard Rory, Philswply end the Miron of Netere (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 1 1988 by The Univenity of Chicago, All ights reserved. 0022-4189/8/6801-0002501.00 ‘is Te Wil Ble (New York: Dover Publica: 21‘The Journal of Religion ‘We help make true ideas as much as find them written into the fabric of the world. Moreover, the experience of oppressive systems, like National Socialism, intransigent sexism, and economic colonialism, has confirmed fears about the ideological taint of all claims to how things are.” For us the mirror has broken. We do experience bumps and jolts, some so radical we call them abysmal.‘ Intellectually and experientially the realism of traditional mimesis is now contested and protested. Yet once we have given up, or escaped, a universe of mirrors, we must rethink what we mean by true ideas, right beliefs, and good actions. Our anxiety does not go away simply because we have rejected the traditional cure; rather, it returns with the vengeance of the repressed. Put differently, while the terminology and ideology of imita- tion are unusable, even dangerous, the problem of mimesis remains with us. Granted that we meet the world in jolts, gaps, and differences, how do we understand our being and acting? How do we understand our participation in a meaningful yet ambiguous world? These are the questions this essay pursues. The problem of mimesis again calls for reflection. The call has not gone unheeded. In particular, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida have reopened the dis- cussion of mimesis and its problems. This essay continues the inquiry through a critical reading and use of their texts.* I will argue that Gad- amer explores understanding and interpretation through the phe- nomenon of cultic mimesis, that Ricoeur interprets narratives as mimetic, and that Derrida deconstructs understanding and text through theatrical mimesis. Mimesis is important, I am contending, because of its presence in “ritual,” “narrative,” and “theater” as three metaphors for getting at our being in the world.® Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida provide a way to explore these dimensions of the human world, and they do so through mimesis. In ‘taking up mimesis, and especially Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida, we encounter a clash of positions. Most simply stated, the conflict is between those, like Gadamer and Ricoeur, who explore and hold to hermeneutical consciousness, and others, like Derrida, who chal- lenge reflexivity in consciousness and deconstruct the relation of self, world, and text. For hermeneutical thinkers, our way of being in the 4 The Jewish Holocaust has exposed the experience of rupture in our situation, See Arthur Coben, The Timea (New York: Crottoad Publishing Co., 1981). * Gadamer, Derrida, and Ricoeur read mimesis within its casial Platonic and Aritoeian context, cannot explore this background other than by passing relerence See Clif Geert, Laval Knarloe: Further Esayt i Ineprie Anthology (New York: Basie Books, 198). 22