Page 251 - Cyberculture and New Media

242 Desistant Media
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missing presence toward which the sign in this sense is a movement of
mediation. Still there is no justice to be found within these processes, but
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violence, and not just any violence; it is arche-violence.
According to Lacoue-Labarthe, the classical conception of figure or
fiction, that is, to a fictioning such as philosophy, from Plato to Christian
allegorism, from Dante to Descartes and Leibniz, has always opposed, under
whatever name, to the e-vidence of truth. This does not mean that it was ever
a question of excluding fictioning (even less of “repressing” it). It has always
functioned, on the contrary, either as a propaedeutic to the revelation of truth,
or, as in Cartesian thought, as an auxiliary to the presentation of truth, that is,
as a supplement to evidence. This is why fiction is never absolutely in the
class of error or lie (even in Plato), even if it is in the space of shadow, of
phenomenal Darkness, of indistinctness, of confusion, of veiling, and of the
veiled. There are – Lacoue-Labarthe now citing Leibniz – two kinds of
eloquence, there are two kinds of fiction, the “good” one, and the “bad” one;
the one that leads to truth, effaces itself before truth or even heightens it –
and then the other one, the one that resists, that does not efface itself, does
not lift the aberrant one. A double veil, two kinds of veil: transparency and
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the obstacle. Fiction, for Lacoue-Labarthe is always divided.
In an essay written by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “The Nazi
Myth” (originally “Le mythe nazi”, 1981), this thought culminates in a notion
that Nazism understands itself through the terms of aesthetic politics – not by
giving attention to aesthetic phenomenon but by being an aesthetic ideology.
Like Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe elaborates the figurative essence of politics
from the standpoint of identification, myth or mimesis. Their emphasis on the
figurative essence of politics and the political is fundamental to each moment
of treating the political (and beyond). This essence takes many names:
identification, poetry, mimesis, poeisis, mimetology, oeuvre, immanentism,
fiction, myth, a sacrifice, scène. One might say that this series is the very
lexicon of the political itself. It is not by chance that this can also be seen as
the lexicon of onto-theology itself, now rethought as onto-typo-logy or, what
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amounts to the same thing, onto-politi-ology.
Processes of identification Lacoue-Labarthe examines by creating
two specific categories of imitation. First one is

1) Mimetism, which paragon is heroism. The
question in mimetism is about identification and
commitment, appropriation of pre-given models, but
also about a myth as a way of identification.

Besides this traditional perspective on identification Lacoue-Labarthe has
created a mechanism he considers as