explore the theme of mimesis in any depth—he apparently understands it in a Pla-
tonic sense and sees mimesis as a secondary figure that is subordinate to the truth
in the sense of adequatio(identity between statement and fact). Heidegger never-
theless regards art as a privileged locus where a world takes on form and where the
truth is revealed again and again in an ever new way. Art gives shapeto truth and it
is in this giving shape—in this inscription of a form, in this typography—that one
finds a mimetic moment, even if Heidegger himself does not use this term.
Lacoue-Labarthe thus argues that mimesis is in fact the essential figure of Hei-
degger’s concept of truth as ale ̄ theia. Heidegger conceives of the truth as a game in
which the similarity of being to itself is exposed, a play of concealing and revealing,
a play by which something is exposed and becomes visible, whereas something else
withdraws or is concealed. Mimesis underlies this process of revealing and conceal-
ing because it has to do with elucidating similarities and differences.
The fact that mimesis is ineluctably linked to every philosophical claim to truth
is also a recurrent theme in the work of Jacques Derrida. In “White Mythology,” a
text from 1971, he discusses the scope and impact of metaphors in philosophical
thought. In the philosophical tradition that began with Aristotle, metaphor is seen as
a trope that produces a transfer between a noun that means something different and
a specific matter to which that noun is newly applied. Metaphor thus operates in the
realm of mimesis: it exposes a hidden resemblance that can be observed between
two entities which belong to different fields. The remarkable thing is that on closer
analysis all “concepts” would appear to derive from a metaphorical origin: they are
“faded” metaphors as it were, figures of speech in which the mimetic origin can no
longer clearly be read. In this text Derrida traces a number of fundamental philo-
sophical concepts, explaining their mimetic roots. As with Lacoue-Labarthe, the
question that inevitably occurs is that of the decidability of categories such as
“proper” and “improper”: if a metaphor tends to shed light on a matter in a way that
is improper (being figurative) and if one cannot but grant that concepts in the end are
reducible to faded metaphors, how then is it possible to explore the “proper” mean-
ings of a concept or the “essential” properties of some matter?
Derrida points out that in philosophical tradition a certain strategy is adopted
to avoid this difficulty. An axiology is set up by which a distinction between “proper”
and “improper,” between essence and accident, is postulated. This distinction,
which is not “proven” but merely elucidated by metaphors or similes, in fact props
up the whole philosophical discourse in the tradition of metaphysics.
As Mark Wigley shows, the figure of the house plays an important role in this
constellation. Derrida refers to the classical description of the metaphor in which it is
stated that the word used in the metaphor dwells, as it were, in a borrowed house.
This figure “is a metaphor of metaphor: an expropriation, a being-outside-one’s-own-
residence, but still in a dwelling, outside its own residence but still in a residence in
which one comes back to oneself, recognizes oneself, reassembles oneself, outside
oneself in oneself.”^102 The association between the figure of the house (oikosin
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Architecture as Critique of Modernity