Abstract

This article revisits the case of Woody Allen’s mockumentary Zelig via Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnostic of mimicry in The Gay Science. It argues that the case of the “human chameleon” remains contemporary for both philosophical and political reasons. On the philosophical side, I argue that the case of Zelig challenges an autonomous conception of the subject based on rational self-sufficiency by proposing a relational conception of the subject open to mimetic influences that will have to await the discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s in order to find an empirical confirmation. On the political side, I say that Zelig foregrounds the power of authoritarian leaders in the 1930s to cast a spell on both imitative crowds and publics in terms that provide a mimetic supplement to Hannah Arendt’s account of the “banality of evil”. The philosophical purchase of Zelig’s cinematic dramatization of a mimetic subject is that it reveals how the “inability to think” characteristic of the case of Eichmann rests on unnoticed affective principles constitutive of the all-too-human penchant for “mimicry” the film dramatises. Thus reframed, the human chameleon reflects the dangers of mimetic dispossessions that reached massive proportions in the past century and continue to cast a shadow on the present century.