Page 254 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 245
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borrowed it from the heraldic custom of crest design – l’abyme, literally
meaning abyss, refers to the interior space of the blazon or crest. Mise-en-
abyme might therefore be described as the Russian doll or Chinese box
principle in art. Mise-en-abyme participates in artistic reflexivity in the sense
that it draws attention to the constructedness of art, and in the sense that the
fragment en abyme acts as a kind of mirror image of the larger work. In
modernist art mise-en-abyme also constitutes a questioning of the concept of
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origin as it opens up the possibility of infinite regress. This technique of
reflection can reinforce the meaning and structure of a work and may even
function as a self-conscious intrusion of the author, who deliberately draws
attention to the fictionality – to the poetry – of art. Current literary theories
place emphasis on aspects of the term that remind the reader of the artificer
who has crafted the narrative, and therefore focus on the coming into being of
the work itself, in short, the mirror in the text concentrates on the process of
production of the text containing the mirror – possibly even as a
metanarrative level of the poetic self-consciousness.
Lacoue-Labarthe does not define the term mise-en-abyme in any
theoretically detailed manner but uses it strategically to present the idea of an
abyss in modernist art. In short, he means by the term more an infinite
imitation of the imitated. Mise-en-abyme, for him, means that a work reflects
what it is doing, its presence of “the already presented”: that is, re-
presentation as desistance.
For Lacoue-Labarthe, desistance has to be dealt within the limits of
imitation. For him, there exist at least two conditions under which this
imitatio is possible:

1) The subject of the imitation (subjective genitive) or, in
other words, the imitant, has to be nothing in and of itself
or must, in Diderot’s words have “nothing characteristics of
itself”. It therefore must not already be a subject. This
supposes an inherent impropriety, an “aptitude for all roles”
– on condition that this im-propriety or this aptitude should
not in turn be considered as subject or support. This could
comprise the “negative” variant – negative as in negative
theology – of onto-typology, of mimetology for which the
figural is the very presupposition of the identical.

2) The “subject of the imitation” therefore must be a
“being” in the sense of being something (which is, an
essent) originally open to or originally “outside itself”, ek-
static. This is precisely what Heideggerian Da-sein is. But
this ecstatic (de)constitution has itself to be thought as lack