Representation: Is it not high time we stopped telling fables? There is no representation except in the anthropological closure. Never does a tree come to represent another tree, a dog another dog. Everything in nature, and especially in the animal kingdom, considers itself, although “blindly,” as completely singular. But because it is in full possession of its own singularity, the being [l’étant] outside science never becomes aware of it. Only science makes singularity aware of itself, in the mode of the pathetic: precisely because it is what science leaves as remainder (see Science, Singularity); expropriates, literally and in every sense.
The Platonic error of the twentieth-century avant-gardes was the compulsive desire “to have done with representation.” This is why these avant-gardes ended up falling into postmodern parody, that is, the most deflationary form of the supreme form of the parodic called “play.” The politically “revolutionary” will to abolish representation, which so often went hand in hand with avant-garde art, has hatched nothing but monsters. In a filmed discussion, Lacoue-Labarthe defines totalitarianisms as regimes which claim that their gigantic representational installations are not representational, that they coincide with what they represent. Moreover, no political regime is entirely exempt from this professional vice. And this is not the least aspect in which politics is a parody of Science: “like” science, but with very different means and outcomes, it claims that the (mathematical, logical, neurocognitive) representative [le représentant] coincides with the represented [le représenté]. Both ignore the ontological differend that fractures them immediately already in their technomimetic envoi.
“Art,” says Lacoue in the same interview, “in other words, the critical distance with representation.”1 We will not surpass the death of the avant-garde and its artificial postmodern survival except through an active assumption of representation, our originarily-parodic-being. In other words, through play, in which the representational distance is both continuously maintained and continuously tempered by the fact that everybody takes part in it. Yes, Ducasse was absolutely right: poetry must be made by all, and not just one. The more representation is monopolized by one, such as the Savant, the Tyrant, or the Philosopher, who lays exclusive claim to the latter’s legitimacy, and hence hypertrophies it in what was only recently still called “alienation,” the more representation becomes the opposite of what it claims to be. The more it claims to stick to things and living beings, the more it moves away from them in reality, devastating them in almost always exact proportion to the distance that opens up as it is hushed up. On the contrary, the more representation remains close to that and those it represents, the more it will be conscious of the distance in principle that separates it from what it represents. It is this requisite that is fulfilled by the political utopia of play, already present among us, in an immanent manner, in all the actual games. Because each and every one fully takes part in play, only play is the aesthetical, hence destinally political form that is an assumption of the ontological differend (see below): a happy medium between representational accuracy [justesse] and distance with respect to representational being [l’être représentatif].
The Platonic Idea itsef, as Heidegger demostrated, is nothing other than the re-presentation of the being [l’étant]. It is this re-duplication, this schematic mimesis of the being (Kant will say: transcendental schematism) that is the pale copy of the always singular original, as such irrealized through the alleged universal archetype, and that, historically, ends up appearing pathetico-parodic. The SoN, by the deconstruction of “nihilism,” urges us to make one last effort to pull out of Platonism: it is a philosophy of mimesis.