ABSTRACT
In a dizzying journey through insect biology, aesthetics of excess, theories of sympathetic magic, and miming body as a self-sculpting camera, Roger Caillois suggests that mimesis is a matter of "being tempted by space," a drama. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. Both Caillois and Cuna ethnography testify to an almost drug-like addiction to mime, to merge, to become other— a process in which not only images chase images in a vast, perhaps infinitely extended chain of images, but one also becomes matter. The radical displacement of self in sentience—taking one outside of oneself—accounts for one of the most curious features of Walter Benjamin's entire philosophy of history, the flash wherein "the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again."
