ABSTRACT
Since "first contact" the chain of sympathetic magic courses through all worlds and the displacement of the image running along it has observed a strange history indeed. Its fabulous nature comes as much from its logic of development as from its chosen materials, and that logic is one that has been determined by the dictum set forth with considerable anxiety at the beginning of this work as to the two-way street operating between nature and history, in this case between the mimetic faculty and colonial histories, it being an assumption that in modern times the two are inseparable. Given the impossibility of any representational act being achieved without the intervention of the mimetic faculty—the nature that culture uses to create second nature—this is no small claim. With the trapped ape aping civilized humanity's aping, Kafka drew attention to the closed circle of mimesis and alterity in the modern age.
