Sobre la noción de mímesis en la apuesta política y metodológica de Luce Irigaray

Abstract

In the philosophical, psychoanalytical, and linguistic framework of Luce Irigaray’s project, the notion of mimesis holds a fundamental place. Exhibited by the author as a methodological research resource and as a political praxis, it is a strategy that seeks to dislocate the discursive order that sustains our Western culture, eminently phallocentric and patriarchal. This antidote against uniformity and the original-copy logic that governs our tradition is deployed in her work by virtue of three dimensions (Schor, 1993): masquerade, sly mimesis, and joyful reappropriation or positive difference. In what follows, and articulating these three senses, I am interested in mapping this notion by virtue of some moments of Irigaray’s project, attending to its genealogical, ethical, and political aspects. Irigaray’s wager on the transformative and creative sense of the resource of mimesis, as opposed to the sense of specular imitation that runs through our single-subject tradition, reflects the double task of his endeavour: the profound critique of the foundations of the Western tradition of thought and the need to generate the conditions for transforming an entire culture.