Page 249 - Cyberculture and New Media

240 Desistant Media
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The italicizing of the as signifies that the “subject”, as such, (de)constitutes
itself in this movement of desistance and is nothing other than the formation
of this movement. For this reason it also signifies that the subject cannot be
simply omitted or dissolved, or passed over in silence in the name of a
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deconstruction of subjectivity.
To “desist” is thereby more than “to oscillate”; it goes beyond any
formal structuring. Understanding desistance as a strategy for analysing
media, desistant media are by definition disappropriate and obsessive; also,
they produce a kind of realm that makes Friedrich Kittler, among few, to
wonder if certain basic assumptions remain unquestioned also in the
psychoanalytic verification of the fantastic – because it transfers poetry into
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science. But the incoherence, the excess, the lack of control, a mad
machine, as Lacoue-Labarthe calls a desistant mode, escapes mastery. Or
else, one must oppose it – arrest thought, or remove it, by a step back, from
this danger: draw back. And so, measure, maintain, economize: A
determinative mode means an economical mode. Save and safeguard: truth
against everything that could shake it. Nothing is accidental if its safeguards
some sense of truth, the very truth of aletheia in the sense of Heidegger – the
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master word.
Keywords in the quest for defining desistant mode of media, to
name a few explicitly, are mirror, mise-en-abyme, and mimesis. Lacoue-
Labarthe, with his colleague Nancy, teases out all the philosophical force of
the terms generated from within the tragic of the Greek word opsis: mimesis,
poeisis, techné – a whole theatrics of thinking, in other words, which falls
within the essential lexicon of the figure. Figure is a central theme in Lacoue-
Labarthe´s thinking, a suspicion concerning what he has called “onto-
typology”, concerning a figural and fictional assignation of the presentation
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of the being and/or the truth.
Within but few pages in a book about Heidegger and art, Lacoue-
Labarthe elaborates his ideas concerning mimesis and appropriation:

Since Plato, education or training, political Bildung, has
been thought taking the mimetic process as starting point:
Plato challenges this, dreaming precisely of a
(philosophical) self-grounding of the political, i.e. cutting
through the mimetological double bind – admittedly with
an idea of the Idea that is itself paradigmatic (and
belonging, in consequence, to the mimetological) […] the
programme emerges of what Schiller calls an ‘aesthetic
education’ of humanity […] The crucial point is that
Bildung is always thought on the basis of archaic mythic
paideia […] It is not by chance that the ‘myth’ of the cave –
a myth that has no ‘mythic’ source, a myth that is self-