"On the Mimetic Faculty" (German: Über das mimetische Vermögen; 1933) is the second of an uncompleted trilogy of essays articulating a metaphysics or post-metaphysics of language, written by Walter Benjamin in the months leading up to and immediately following after the appointment of Adolph Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag Fire, and the inauguration of the Third Reich and sent as a letter to his best friend, the Librarian of Ancient Manuscripts at Hebrew University and Master of Kabbalah in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem.[1]

The first entry in this cycle of reflections on cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis and language, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" had also been written as a letter to Scholem in the year 1916. That essay speaks of language in and as the Name of God, referring both implicitly and explicitly to the Kabbalah. This series represents a cosmology based on language with formal and rhetorical aspects that are kabbalistic in character, and is opposed from the outset to the interpretation of being and time which appears in the work of their nemesis, "the great...indeed the only great Nazi philosopher," Martin Heidegger.[2]

"On the Mimetic Faculty" concentrates and distills certain aspects of the earlier eassy but also moves back further in time.[3] Whereas "On Language" speaks of the invention of the alphabet, and the introduction of the Name as the ontogenetic event, "On the Mimetic Faculty" moves back towards the earliest prehistoric development of human language as it arose and became increasingly distinct from gesture and pantomime—with areas of the essay reaching back even further than that. The piece is an attempt, "To read what was never written," as Benjamin writes, "Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars and the dances."[4]

Summary & Reception

In the extremely compressed three or four pages of, "On the Mimetic Faculty" Benjamin outlines connections between mimesis and sympathetic magic, imagining a possible origin of astrology and various other occult sciences arising from the basic ability of humans to interpret occult likeness or "non-sensuous similarity."[5] From these non-sensuous similarities, words seem to arise. But is there a priority of language predating even the earliest human intonations? Benjamin alludes to methods of astral conjuring, a subject into which he goes into more depth in the circle of paralipomena texts around the essay. The theme or concern of the piece that he develops is the evolutionary process by which the human capacity of mimicry both culminates in and is liquidated by language and especially in the written word.

As scholars have pointed out, "On the Mimetic Faculty" takes on a certain grim significance in the context of the Holocaust, when in the year 1941 Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels delivered an official 'mystical' or transcendent rational for the extermination of the Jews to the more elite cadres of the Nazis as the Final Solution began in the East entitled 'Mimckry.' Goebbels 'Mimickry' addresses itself to men who knew that most of the blood libel propaganda in the Nazi press was composed largely of opportunistic lies deployed to motivate and unify the German masses. They were merely cynically resigned to this strategy. The 'Mimickry' article appeals to those men amongst the ranks in a manner that strongly resembles a rhetorically inverted form of Benjamin's essay 'On the Mimetic Faculty.' "Goebbels certainly wanted to touch upon the crucial point: Hatred for the Jews did not depend on questions of history or doctrine, but went back much further to the time when Homo had developed his capacity for imitation to the point of assimilated himself to his earliest enemies: predators, because [the Nazis] were themselves primordial predators. National Socialists, unlike Jews, hadn't had to imitate anyone," Goebbels implies in the article. "They were always and only themselves...The Nazis [saw themselves as] the belated retaliation by the animal world against the species that had violated its order; and the Jews were the elected representatives of that species. ..Over the centuries, the most serious and shameful accusations had been heaped on the Jews: the condemnation of Jesus, foul customs, ritual killings, usury. But now all this dissolved and a single intact and sufficient charge remained--an offense that could even be mistaken for a talent: the Jew can imitate...No more was needed to establish the age old Jewish conspiracy. Goebbels, who was a showman, understood...the closer the 'terrible punishment' became for the Jews the more the accusation against them had to be reduced to its ultimate essence. And what could be more serious than to go back to that even, lost in the mist of prehistory? Almost everything was the consequence of it."[6]

Goebbels article had been released in the book Die Zeit ohne Beispiel, shortly after Benjamin's death. Nevertheless, a student, disciple, and literary executor of Benjamin's estate, Theodor Adorno's, cribbed the beginning and ending movements of his masterwork The Dialectic of the Englightenment—published in 1944 as Philosophische Fragmente while the war was still unfolding—from Benjamin's at that time still esoteric and unpublished material on language culminating in On the Mimetic Faculty, reading it against the sentiments broadcast in Goebbels 'Mimickry.' The book thus represents—within this specific dimension—Benjamin's retort to Goebbels from beyond the grave to the object cause proposed for the extermination of the Jews brought forward by the spokesman of the Third Reich, delivered during the commission of the Holocaust: Mimesis is not a ‘Jewish’, but a human capacity.[6]

Paralipomena

The paralipomena or partials drafts and early alternative versions of "On the Mimetic Faculty" include: A Review of the Mendelssohn's Der Mensch in der Handschrift (1928),[7] "Graphology Old and New"(1930),[8] "On Astrology"(1932),[9] "The Lamp"(1933),[10] "Doctrine of the Similar"(1933)[11] "Antithesis Concerning Word and Name"(1933)[12] and others.

References

  1. ↑ Scholem, Gershom; Benjamin, Walter (1989). "Letters 27-34". The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932-1940 (1st English ed.). New York: Schocken. pp. 60–79.
  2. ↑ Steiner, George. Martin Heidegger. p. 5.
  3. ↑ Rabinbach, Anson (1979). "Introduction to Walter Benjamin's "Doctrine of the Similar"". New German Critique (17): 60–64. doi:10.2307/488009. ISSN 0094-033X.
  4. ↑ Benjamin, Walter (1978). ""On the Mimetic Faculty"". Reflections : essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. pp. 333–336. ISBN 978-0-15-676245-8.
  5. ↑ Benjamin, Walter (1986). "On the Mimetic Faculty". Reflections : essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writing. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books. pp. 333–335. ISBN 080520802X. OCLC 12805048.
  6. 1 2 Calasso, Roberto (2015). ""The Vienna Gas Company"". The Unnamable Present. Adelphi. pp. 172–174.
  7. ↑ Benjamin, Walter. Selected Works vol. 2.1. Harvard University Press. pp. 131–134.
  8. ↑ Benjamin, Walter. Selected Works vol. 2.1. pp. 398–399.
  9. ↑ Benjamin, Walter. Selected Works 2.2. Harvard University Press. pp. 684–685.
  10. ↑ Benjamin, Walter. The Lamp. THe Harvard University Press. pp. 691–693.
  11. ↑ Benjamin, Walter. Slected Works 2.2. Harvard University Press. pp. 694–698.
  12. ↑ Benjamin, Walter. Selected Works 2.2. Harvard University Press. pp. 717–719.
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