Abstract

This chapter establishes a so far largely unnoticed genealogical connection between new materialism and mimetic studies. It does so in view of promoting a new theory of imitation that goes beyond metaphysical binaries that, in the western tradition, tend to oppose mind and body, self and others, imagination and imitation, human and nonhumans, nature and culture among others. For this genealogical operation, the chapter focuses on the mimetic influences at play in Jane Bennett’s most recent book, Influx & Efflux (2020). In the process, it aligns a “porous” conception of the subject that is immanent, embodied, and phenomenologically open to human and nonhuman influences with a longstanding tradition in mimetic studies that—from Plato to Nietzsche, Whitman to D. H. Lawrence, Roger Caillois to Georges Bataille, among others—is currently forming and transforming the boundaries of individuation, turning the ego into what Nietzsche already called, a “phantom of the ego.”