Page 252 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 243
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2) hyperbologic, where every exaggerated
construction of a model leads at the same time to its
own underway. Because the relationship stays
unsolved, it constantly erects itself again. Instead of
appropriating any model, the idea of hyperbology is in
an unstable repetition due to oscillation between two
figures without any final destination to this logic.

In Lacoue-Labarthe’s deconstructive reading of mimesis, it is not a
matter of simple imitation but in fact turns on a logic of endless reflections
following each other in an infinite chain. This is one disposition of mise-en-
abyme, reflective abyss. Abyss is a basic and speculative motif in his
thinking, from which he draws his own view concerning the subject of
philosophy and its mimetic agony, which derives from the incompetence of
mimetical movement to achieve the truth – and by so doing, remains within
the territory of speculation. For Lacoue-Labarthe, the same theoretical
speculation is typical of modern art, in fact, modernist art has provided
Lacoue-Labarthe with a method for elaborating the (fictive) constitution of
subject. Within this project it is not the passions that are “erected” by
memory, but an obsessive hunt for the closure that will itself never come (to
an end).
Insofar as hyperbology refers to structural oscillation, Lacoue-
Labarthe’s mimesis also reminds us of Derrida’s Writing – or Gram. But
where Derrida searches the motifs of Writing out from the margins of
philosophy, Lacoue-Labarthe scans for the very core of metaphysics, where
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its influence is essential because its context is illimitable.
Inasmuch as we think mimesis has always been led by processes of
truth, there still remain persistent types of Unheimlich of fictionnement that
could even be fragmentary. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy hold that fragments
are definitions of the fragment and this is what forms the totality of the
fragment as a plurality and its completion as the incompletion of its infinity.
The truth, then, of the fragment is not only in infinite progressivism, but also
in the actual infinity, by means of the fragmentary apparatus, of the very
process of truth. Purely theoretical completion is impossible because the
theoretical infinite remains asymptotic. Thus, work in progress becomes the
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infinite truth of the work.
By the virtue of difference, truth is delayed. This conclusion differs
from the theoretical assumption of truth that is shattered and fragmented;
what is noteworthy here is that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy locate the
fragmentary – the very fragment – earlier than Friedrich Kittler, for whom
Romanticism was a period of monograph, and modernism; simply put, a time
of polygraph. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy assume a mimetical account for
modernist art and its aesthetic values somewhat earlier, through a specific