Page 262 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 253
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For Lacoue-Labarthe, the more the tragic is identified with the
speculative desire for the infinite and the divine, the more tragedy presents it
as a casting into separation, differentiation, and finitude. Tragedy, then, is the
catharsis of the speculative. This is why Lacoue-Labarthe presents
disappropriation as that which secretly animates and constitutes it; tragedy
presents (dis)appropriation: from the moment the mimetic structure no longer
guarantees in principle the reconciliatory and reappropriating “return to the
same”, from the moment the tragic spectacle presupposes, behind it, the
irremediable loss of every secure position and determination on enunciation,
and sees itself condemned, as a consequence, to represent the process of
(dis)appropriation, everything then forces the dynamic and productive
successivity that structurally organized tragedy to give way to a mechanism
of pure equilibrium. The structure of tragedy itself becomes immobilized and
paralysed, although as I see it, there is still the desistant movement in the
mises-en-abyme of media art. Also Lacoue-Labarthe believes this does not
prevent this neutralization of the dialectical dynamic from being constantly
active – comes down to “disorganizing” tragedy in the strongest sense of the
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term: desystematizing it and disjointing it.
But why a question of pedagogy, there, in the history of philosophy,
where the essence of man is elaborated? For Lacoue-Labarthe the essence of
man, against the conventional tradition of philosophy, is not simply animal
rationale, thinking, sensible animal, but mimesis. Mimesis is not submissive
to reason: it makes thinking possible, not vice versa. It is a faculty to repeat,
reflect, change and generally produce, it is the original technai, the basis for
the essence of man. In a classical setting it might be explained as a faculty of
a soul, not a spirit; it does not contain information on good or bad but it is a
faculty for good and bad, true and delusion. Because mimesis does not
resolve questions between good and bad, or truth and delusion, such criteria
must be carried to soul from the outside – from reason, which in the theory of
education exists as an ethical model for good. Mimetic soul implies infinite
adaptability, and the purpose of education is to guide and direct this ability in
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a way that it would operate for good against bad.
Lacoue-Labarthe identifies at least two conditions for imitation:

1. The subject of the imitation (subjective genitive). In
other words, the imitant, must be nil of itself or must, in
Diderot’s words have ‘nothing characteristic of itself’. It
therefore must not already be a subject. This presupposes
an inherent impropriety (impropriété), an ‘aptitude for all
roles’ – on condition, however, that this im-propriety or
this aptitude should not in turn be considered as subject or
support. (This could be the ‘negative’ variant – negative as
in negative theology – of onto-typology.)