Citation:
Date Published:
2 June 2020Abstract:
This article reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, from the angle of an increasingly influential conception of mimesis understood not as simple representation but as a conditio humana. Adopting genealogical lenses that trace continuities between ancient (Plato), modern (Pater and Nietzsche) and postmodern (Lacoue-Labarthe) accounts of mimesis, I argue that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde dramatizes an excess of affective forms of imitation whose implications are double, for mimesis has both a critical and theoretical side. I suggest that Wilde’s manifesto of anti-mimetic aestheticism continues to rely on a dramatic conception of mimesis that leads human lives to imitate Dorian, and thus, Greek models. A genealogy of mimēsis paves the way for contemporary theoretical concerns with performativity, affective contagion, and the power of fictional models to influence aesthetic lives. My wager is that once the two sides are joined, a new picture of Oscar Wilde will take form.
March 2020: Nidesh Lawtoo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and English at KU Leuven. His work is located at the intersection of literary theory, continental philosophy, and political theory, with special focus on theories of mimesis, contagion, and identification. He is the editor of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought (2012), and the author of The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (2013), Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory (2016; Adam Gillon Award 2018) and (New) Fascism: Contagion, Myth, Community (2019). This article is part of a 5-year project on mimesis funded by the European Research Council, titled Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism.