Mimesis on the edge

ABSTRACT

In what follows I offer a perspective on how the ‘dialectical image’ might speak to what is revolutionary and catastrophic in our experiences and relations. It may be impossible to directly address the psychic and affective content of our moment of danger, or the pain, and perhaps ecstasy, of the constellations that might emerge from it. Here I approach these contradictions by way of mimetic invocation. I make an offering to an unspeakable passing, perhaps a space these things can move through, or reside. It comes out of my fraught yet potent attempts to inhabit such possibilities and limits and hopes to speak to these places in those who read it.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical care
• apocatastasis
• trauma theory
• daemonism
• militancy
• revolutionary praxis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kelly Gawel lives in New York and works on care and social reproduction.

Notes

1 Concepts can ‘save’ historical phenomena by bringing them into constellation, but they are also the historical presentation of these phenomena. Such knowledge cuts deep and cuts both ways: ‘On the concept of “rescue”: the wind of the absolute in the sails of the concept … ’ (ibid. [N9, 3]) and: ‘Being a dialectician means having the wind of history in one’s sails. The sails are the concepts … What is decisive is knowing the art of setting them’ (N9, 8).

2 Zhivka Valiavicharska in discussion with the author, November 2017.

3 … ’That terrestrial, deep, ancient energy has been unleashed, fueling the uprising (The 2017 International Women’s Strike, particularly in Latin America). Thus we know that ‘we are the granddaughters of all the witches they could not burn’, as was sung over and over in a multitude of plazas. The murdered women’s presence was felt with each shout: although tortured to death, they still live on with us’ (Gutiérrez 2018). Gutiérrez is speaking of current femicide, of struggle against it.

4 John Campion, personal correspondence with the author, 17 June 2018.