Mimesis and Alterity

“But just as we might garner courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions- what a sociology that would be!- so a devouring force comes at us from another direction, seducing us by playing on our yearning for the true real. Would that it would, would that it could, come clean, this true real. I so badly want that wink of recognition, that complicity with the nature of nature. But the more I want it, the more I realize it’s not for me. Nor for you either… wihch leaves us in this this silly and often desperate place wanting the impossible so badly that while we believe it’s our rightful destiny and so act as accomplices of the real, we also know in our heart of hearts that the way we picture and talk is bound to a dense set of representational gimmicks which, to coin a phrase, have but an arbitrary relation to the slippery referent easing its way out of graspable sight.”

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledg, 1993: xvii.