Page 250 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 241
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formed and self-grounded – lays the foundations of Plato’s
political project. Identification or appropriation – the self-
becoming of the Self – will always have been thought as
the appropriation of a model, i.e. as the appropriation of a
means of appropriation, if the model (the example) is the
ever-paradoxical imperative of propriation: imitate me in
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order to be what you are.

After this important question concerning paideia Lacoue-Labarthe asks how,
and why, identity derives from mimetic appropriation:

Yet the question remains of how, and above all why,
identity (properness/property (la propiété) or being-in-
oneself/being-proper (être-propre)) derives from mimetic
appropriation. The speculative dialectic is eschatology of
the identical; and so long as this logic, more or less
explicitly, underpins the interpretation of mimesis, one can
only ever move endlessly from the same to the other –
under the authority of the same. Conceived more
rigorously, however, mimetologic (la mimétolologique)
complicates and de-stabilizes this schema: in the
dialecticization of mimesis, a subject is presupposed, albeit
a virtual one. However, by definition, mimetism forbids
such a presupposition, and Diderot has very convincingly
established this: no subject, potentially identical to himself
or related to himself, can pre-exist the mimetic process,
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except to render it impossible.

For Lacoue-Labarthe, philosophy’s true essence lies in its own
figuration. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of
the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the
being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go
through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in
this sense, is deferred presence. Whether we are concerned with the verbal or
the written sign, with the monetary sign, or with electoral delegation and
political representation, the circulation of signs defers the moment in which
we can encounter the thing itself make it ours, consume or expend it, touch it,
see it, intuit its presence. And this structure presupposes that the sign, which
defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers
and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate. Within
this classical semiology, the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both
secondary and provisional: secondary due to an original and lost presence
from which the sign thus derives; provisional as concerns this final and