Sacrifice, mimesis, and the theorizing of victimhood (a speculative essay)

Representations

Volumn 94, Issue , 2006, Pages 131-149

  Chow, Rey ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249170994     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2006.94.1.131     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1998); see in particular part 2, chaps. 1-3
2. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 65. He is discussing Walter Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence."
3. See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" [1936], in Illuminations, ed. with intro. by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), 217-51
4. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; reprint, Princeton, 2003)
5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1970)
6. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978)
7. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 29; emphases his
8. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 141
9. Agamben's reflections on the testimonies about Auschwitz are similar: he holds that survivors bore witness to something to which it is impossible to bear witness. See Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York, 1999)
10. Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst, 1998), 120. For examples of French writings that elaborate the theatrical dimensions of mimesis in complex manners, see the collection Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor, 1997)
11. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, 1985), 131; emphases Irigaray's
12. See the extended discussion in Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 95-127
13. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markrnann (New York, 1967), 10; my emphasis
14. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), 40, 44
15. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977)
16. For related interest, see also Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (1965; reprint, Baltimore, 1976)
17. As Girard writes: "A radically mimetic conception of desire offers a novel approach to psychiatric theory, one as far removed from the Freudian unconscious as it is from any philosophy of consciousness camouflaged as an existential psychoanalysis"; Violence and the Sacred, 177
18. René Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Stanford, 1987), 65