"On the Mimetic Faculty" (German: Über das mimetische Vermögen; 1933) is the second of an uncompleted trilogy of essays articulating a metaphysics or post-metaphysics of language, written by Walter Benjamin in the months leading up to and immediately following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag Fire, and the inauguration of the Third Reich. It was sent as the postscript of a letter to his best friend, a Librarian of Ancient Manuscripts at Hebrew University and Master of Kabbalah in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem.[1]
The first entry in this cycle of reflections on cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis and language, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," had also been written as a letter to Scholem in the year 1916. That essay speaks of language in and as the Name of God, referring both implicitly and explicitly to the Kabbalah. The series of meditations that begins here represents a cosmology based on language with formal and rhetorical aspects that are kabbalistic in character, and is opposed from the outset to the interpretation of being and time which appears in the work of their nemesis, "the great...indeed the only great Nazi philosopher," Martin Heidegger.[2][irrelevant citation]
"On the Mimetic Faculty" concentrates and distills certain aspects of the earlier essay but the chronological horizon of issues being considered in the text also moves back further in time.[3] Whereas "On Language" speaks of the invention of the alphabet, and the introduction of the Name as an ontogenetic event constituting the perpetuity of human identity after death (c. 1300-1200 BCE), "On the Mimetic Faculty" moves back towards the earliest prehistoric development of human language as it arose and became increasingly distinct from gesture and pantomime(c. 30 millennia-200 millennia ago) —with areas of the essay reaching back even further than that. The piece is an attempt, "To read what was never written," as Benjamin writes, "Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars and the dances."[4]
^Scholem, Gershom; Benjamin, Walter (1989). "Letters 27-34". The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932-1940 (1st English ed.). New York: Schocken. pp. 60–79.
^Steiner, George. Martin Heidegger. p. 5.
^Rabinbach, Anson (1979). "Introduction to Walter Benjamin's "Doctrine of the Similar"". New German Critique (17): 60–64. doi:10.2307/488009. ISSN 0094-033X.
^Benjamin, Walter (1978). ""On the Mimetic Faculty"". Reflections : essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. pp. 333–336. ISBN 978-0-15-676245-8.
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