Cecilia simulacrum
evoke and elide
appropriate and evade [or bury]
The machine to produce similarities: slavery, contact and mimesis in the Cuban novel Cecilia Valdés … Rev. Ib. XXXIV: 262 (ene.-mar. 2018): 221-233.
[What I found in my notes was completely different: being treated “as a servant” is what irritates me the most — I seem to define this as bald-faced attempts to manipulate; note how it involves not wanting to say no (to someone else) or yes (to what I want), staying on some kind of threshold.]
Kafka story: ape who has to imitate men to survive. He has to suppress own identity (his difference) to be like the Other. This is mimesis and it has to do with the master-slave relation as well as with insanity (seeing oneself as other, being aliené).
DARWIN emphasized difference between savage and civilized man, and the savage’s talent for mimicry. And Adorno-Horkheimer say that the modern subject is created when autonomy is imagined and imitation / mimicry left behind.
P. 224: If mimesis menaces the fixity of identities and differences, defying the classifying eye, we can understand the mixture of terror and fascination it could provoke in the lettered Latin American city (Rama), preoccupied with the rationalization of social space, the identification of deviants, and the meticulous discrimination among races, classes, and types in general; so narratives are about making the encounter with alterity palpable.
*This is what I have always noticed: fear of difference / denial of difference.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 