Mimesis as cultural survival - Judith Butler and anti-semitism

Focusing on Judith Butler's highly influential work on gender, this article draws attention to a certain feminist inheritance of an emphasis on mimesi s and imitation that resonates with the ways in which theoreticians respond ed to the calamitous events of essentialist politics and versions of belong ing that were central to the political vision of Hitler's National Socialis m and to the events of the Second World War. The intention is to point to t his trajectory, to give Butler's work a genealogy that traces the notion of mimesis back into work which employed the concept within socio-theoretical responses to anti-Semitism, in order to initiate a discussion of mimesis i n a new contemporary agenda. The question of mimesis in this new agenda is significant in its reutilization of the concept in a way that moves the foc us away from assumptions of the repressed natural process that underpinned Adomo and Horkheimer's thesis, and towards the complex manoeuvres of contin ued performances and continued 'tradition', a away from judgements of authe nticity and towards the reasons why people maintain certain embodied subjec tivities. Such a perspective raises the questions of generational relations , of foreclosed possibilities and of affective attachments to identity that reach beyond the Nietzschean sense of a wounded attachment. A focus on the responsibilities and pressures of 'cultural survival' seems fruitful as a guiding concept in this exploration of the connections between identificati on, affiliation and the power contexts within which mimesis, as a form of r epetition or 'citation', occurs.