Deconstructing mimesis is the syntagm of great hesitation. This hesitation, enormous if you will, is decided, hardline even: Lacoue-Labarthe does not hesitate to consider (as does Hölderlin) faithlessness as being the height of faithfulness. But to the end of what exactly need we go? To what do we still need to be faithful? “We would need to maintain to the end the philosophical thesis itself, according to which truth is – always – needed.”

“A symposium invariably applies itself to forgetting the risks to which it is exposed: of being nothing but one of those shows during which, in good company, are juxtaposed speeches or dissertations on a general subject. If this meeting were to have any chance of avoiding repetition, it would be to the extent that some imminence, or luck and peril both would exert pressure on us.”

Something is being decided, “something that impedes relinquishment.” The relinquishing of the inescapable Platonic determination of being and mimesis – “There is a philosophical urgency from which it is impossible to shy away from: the obligation is on us to rethink mimesis, to deconstruct all its interpretation”. And Derrida too hesitates: “It’s not sure that Lacoue-Labarthe deconstructs the inescapable Platonic determination of mimesis, – it’s not even sure that ‘deconstruction’ is the best word for the rewriting he makes in the structures of double bind, the abyss, the uncanny and hyperbole, etc.”; and Lacoue-Labarthe hesitates: “It would be necessary to practice something akin to (de)construction, something less critical than positive, so as to say something less negative”. And this is indeed why the title “Deconstructing mimesis” is the syntagm of a great hesitation.

And still there is this conditional, or rather this unusual unconditional: “We would need to maintain to the end the philosophical thesis itself, according to which truth is – always – needed.” What is this strange spacing out, the hyperbole of this conditional unconditional? Is it the sign of a decisive hesitation? Let us imitate, let us observe: “We need to maintain that we need truth”. There is a fine line, an impregnable distance, a step, the void of an articulation, the bare spacing of the stage, the whiteness of the page where the meaning of a thought plays itself out, almost faithful to unfaithfulness. What is it about the “altogether different thinking of mimesis” that Lacoue-Labarthe opens up? At best paradoxical, at worst absurd, it is “mimetic” because it should be necessary to maintain, without blindness but to the end, a thesis of being: some deconstructing mimesis that is the necessary task that we still need to pursue. And so we must go… to the end of Nietzschean demolition, Nietzsche having never gone so far – here too is that feeling of hesitation – if there can be such a simple inversion of Platonism; to the end of Heideggerian destruction, Heidegger not having a negligible role in this trembling vigilance that is taking hold of philosophical thinking today. It is always a question of getting to grips with Heidegger “despite him but because of him”, and let there be no doubt, Lacoue-Labarthe reads and rereads him obstinately.