Day FortyFour - Strategic Mimesis♠

DJ Yellow/King Britt - Tranzylvania
pressed in 2007










The possessed person, who no longer speaks, really is asked, in the course of the trance, to name the spirit and malefic power that haunts him. But in what form?




















In the form of mimetic speech in which the possessed person vaticinates, as Plato said of the poet-mimetician, "under the name of another." Hence, this speech is not a speech of dia-logue (with the spirit, with others in general); rather, it is a matter of "inspired" speech in which the "self" is indistinguishable from the "other" (even if, from the doctor's point of view and from that of the assembled spectators, it serves to put an end to that pathetic identification). By privileging the roll of speech in the trance, we consequently risk forgetting its very particular character, which is to indicate an experience that is lived outside of representation, and which by this very fact, can be communicated, in language, only in the form of the mimetic indistinction between "self" and "other." Speech is efficacious only if it is, first and foremost, speech of the trance, a speech enacted, heart and soul.



















In any case, the fact remains that the shaman himself is a formerly possessed person who has victoriously traversed the experience of the trance, or who at least has simulated it by the ingestion of toxic substances such as tobacco juice. The shaman cures all illnesses only because he has cured the illness par excellence, and thus, as 'technician of ecstacy' (Mircea Eliade), he can master the paradoxical operation of the trance.





















Hence it seems to me that it is rather the confidence accorded the power of the symbol which is largely archaic. As for the trance, which upset traditional societies just as much as it does our modern anthropology, perhaps we are in a better position today to approach it without guilt or mythology, as the magnetizers had begun to do: no longer as our part maudite but as a sleep of reason that no longer engenders any monsters - in short, as just as banal and beneficent as our nightly sleep - no longer, therefore, as a terrifying and mysterious Other but as our true mirror.
- Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (cut)