ABSTRACT
Together with primitivism, alterity is a major component in Walter Benjamin's assessment of the mimetic faculty. Mimesis is not only a matter of one being another being, but with this tense yet fluid theatrical relation of form and space with which Roger Caillois would tempt us. This chapter expresses that the notion of "presence" as an invented space of which the mime is the convulsive possession. And as such, presence is intimately tied to the curious phenomenon of "spacing out"—this plasticity and theatricality to analyze as "mimetic excess" in late twentieth-century post-colonial time, and to consider in terms of the tasks facing human perception at the turning-points of history. This is the world of spirit mischief, if not worse, death or epistemic panic. Those in league with the spirits, the great healers and seers, have the power to arrest this riot and transform forms including those that lead to death.
