Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

195

tending to be another, and that results in confusion and a disguising of truth. For the

same reason actors are also not welcome in Plato’s republic, and music is required

to be restrained and lacking in emotion.

Only in a much later chapter about art and censorship is the fundamental rea-

son for this exclusion stated. Here Plato compares the making of a painting or sculp-

ture with the way that reality is reflected in a mirror. The image that appears in a

mirror is not real; it is clear that what is involved is a derivative form, a copy of the

truth. Plato concludes from this that works of art are far removed from the truth and

that the wise man should therefore be on his guard against them.

Lacoue-Labarthe points out that something quite curious is going on in this

passage. Apparently Plato is able to defend his rejection of mimesis only by way of

the trope of the mirror—in other words, by means of a comparison, by a mimetic ges-

ture. The exclusion of mimesis, the control of mimesis, apparently can only be

achieved by appealing to a means that is proper to mimesis:

It remains fragile. And, in fact, if the entire operation consists in trying

to go one better than mimesis in order to master it, if it is a question of

circumventing mimesis, though with its own means (without which, of

course, this operation would be null and void), how would it be possible

to have even the slightest chance of success—since mimesis is pre-

cisely the absence of appropriate means, and since this is even what is

supposed to be shown? How do we appropriate the improper? How do

we make the improper appropriate without aggravating still further the

improper?^100

We are faced with a crucial dimension of mimesis here—namely its connec-

tion with the conflict between the self and the other, between the authentic and the

inauthentic, between the proper and the improper. If one does not succeed in un-

ambiguously separating the categories of truth and mimesis—without, that is, mak-

ing an appeal to comparisons or metaphors—then it is indeed difficult to determine

what it is that is “proper” about the truth. When mimesis is brought in to help

achieve an understanding of the distinctive features of certain entities, the specific

character of this operation consists in the fact that these features can be highlighted

only by means of a comparison with something else, something different. Therefore,

one can succeed in grasping the “proper” only by way of the “improper,” something

that inevitably complicates one’s notion of the proper.

Seen in this light, Heidegger’s caution with regard to mimesis comes as no

surprise. In Heidegger’s thought, the concept of authenticity, of what is proper, is a

decisive category, and it is precisely the stability of this category that is cast in doubt

by a reflection on mimesis.

Elsewhere, however, Lacoue-Labarthe points out that Heidegger’s interpreta-

tion of art basically remains a mimetology.^101 Heidegger certainly does not thoroughly

194