The Critic as Mime: Wilde's Theoretical Performance

Mimēsis functions as a conceptual protagonist that is secretly at play in contemporary critiques of subject formation yet, to this day, it continues to remain at the margins of philosophy. Rather than restricting mimesis to aesthetic realism, this article focuses on an anti-mimetic artist such as Oscar Wilde in order reinscribe this concept in a more general theoretical/theatrical tradition that looks back, genealogically, to the ancients, in order to give an account of the imitation of the moderns. Building on deconstructive accounts of the double, paradoxical, and, pharmacological qualities of mimēsis (Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe), I argue that Wilde’s critique of mimesis provides a supplement that is at least double, for it as a critic and a theoretical side. On the critical side, a deconstructive reading of the “theoretico-theatrical” implications of mimesis reframes the dominant view of Wilde’s aestheticism as simply “anti-mimetic” and recasts him as a major advocate of the “imitation of the moderns” (Lacoue-Labarthe’s term). On the theoretical side, Wilde’s mimetic paradox whereby “life imitates art more than art imitates life” reframes contemporary accounts of “critique” as “poesis” in which the subject is both formed and forming (Butler) within a genealogical tradition that, from Nietzsche back to Plato, has always been concerned with formative power of mimesis. My wager is that as both the critical and theoretical sides of a Janus-faced critic as mime are joined, they not only mirror and reflect (on) each other; they also offer a timely answer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s untimely question, “who comes after the subject?”

Publication year:2018

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