ABSTRACT
The writings of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard suggest a number of fruitful points of comparison which have yet to be fully explored by contemporary critics. Drawing upon Benjamin’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ and Baudrillard’s reading of Sophie Calle’s Suite vénitienne, this chapter takes as its point of departure one particular shared motif – the pursuit of a stranger through the labyrinthine urban environment. The complex interplay of pursuer and pursued is explored with respect to Benjamin’s understanding of the mimetic faculty and Baudrillard’s concept of seduction. It is argued that antithetical moments of mimesis are at play in these writings, namely, interpretation and imitation. The elusive and confounded hope of mimetic reading in Benjamin, to ‘read what was never written’, is counterpoised to the mimetic compulsion of seduction in Baudrillard, the enticing invitation to ‘please follow me’.
