The Shadow of the Symposium:Sameness and Difference Replayed Nidesh Lawtoo The shadow, the 'genealogy,' and the empty spaces are Nietzsche's [paths]. —Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, The Structuralist Controversy "There is no Symposium without its Shadow" (Macksey 319). With these ominous words, Richard Macksey drew the legendary symposium, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," to a close. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since this event shook the foundations of what the humanities were supposed to be, back in 1966; and in the meantime, the human sciences, as well as the humanities centers that host them, have continued to move further to the margins of institutional power—thereby remaining truthful to the decentring trajectory that was already at play in the symposium. And yet, the shadow of what became known as "The Structuralist Controversy" continues to haunt, phantom-like, the heterogeneous languages of criticism and theory, generating doubling effects that transgress the arbitrary walls that divide the human sciences in an increasingly specialized and precarious academic world. It is, I believe, this spirit of affirmative transgression, playful freedom, and rather stubborn resistance to power that, fifty years later, assembled contributors to this special issue to that mythic transdisciplinary space, then still called "The Humanities Center," to retrace, in singular ways, the moving contours of a shadow that continues to animate us. [End Page 898] Having been haunted by shadows and phantoms for some time, I could not resist the temptation to outline the silhouette of the shadow of the symposium by asking a double-faced question. Simply put: could it be that the symposium cast a shadow so long that it continues to haunt the present, and perhaps also the future of the humanities, because it controversially reframed a problematic that defined the language of criticism since its beginning: namely, mimesis? A shadow is, of course, a classical mimetic trope, but since its contours are, by definition, moving and destabilizing, we should be careful not to offer stabilizing answers at the outset. The shadow of the symposium was not one but plural in its manifestations; it can thus not be framed in terms of a classical conception of mimesis restricted to aesthetic realism and the representation of reality it entails. After all, Ferdinand de Saussure's insight into the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign that informed structuralism marked a radical break with a type of criticism confined to what Roland Barthes called "the totalitarian ideology of the referent" central to mimetic realism ("To Write" 138). Despite the controversy the symposium generated, the different participants tended to agree at least on one point: namely, that the human sciences could no longer rest on a stabilizing, homogeneous and transparent account of mimesis understood as representation, copy, or mirror of reality—an account that dominated the language of criticism from antiquity to the nineteenth century. And yet, this does not mean that mimesis, understood in its more heterogeneous, destabilizing, and shadowy manifestations was not secretly informing the participants' engagement with the human sciences, promoting a different, more playful, unstable, and transgressive conception of "mimetic criticism" for the twilight of the twentieth century—casting a shadow at the dawn of the twenty-first century as well. The Mimetic Re-Turn During the symposium, mimetic appearances were discrete but manifold: from Roland Barthes's account of structuralist activity in terms of "homology" ("To Write" 136), predicated on what he called an "activity of imitation" or "mimesis" ("Structuralist" 1197) to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic conception of the subject as a "divided," and thus doubled "essence" ("Of Structure" 192) structured by an "imaginary identification" with an imago; from Georges Poulet's phenomenological account of "mimetic criticism" attentive to what he calls a "possession of myself by another" or, alternatively "mimesis" ("Criticism" 61) [End Page 899] to Jean-Pierre Vernant's classical concerns with the "ambiguity of the pharmakos" ("Greek Tragedy" 277) that centers on a dramatic actor, or mimos, from which mimē derives its conceptual identity, to other supplementary redoublings that troubled the stability of an original and autonomous subject, introducing heterogeneous differences in place of homogeneous sameness, it would be possible to show that the problematic of mimesis...
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Jan 2, 2022
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