In this essay, derrida establishes that a text like mallarm's Mimique deconstructs the platonic

values of truth and reference of mimesis as subject to these values. If mimique does not simply
invert the platonic hierarchy between the original and the copy, mimetic art and the discourse of
truth, but undertakes a genuine deconstruction of these values as well as the very idea of hierarhy, it
is not because mimique would be characterized by what has been called literariness since the
Russian formalists, but because it is a text in a very particular way. In what follows, I will try to
determine as precisely as possible this particular notion of textualitywhat I will from now on call
the textual instance. According to derrida, the subjection of mimesis to a horizon of truth is radically
displaced at the moment when writing marks and doubles in a certain syntactical operation the
marks of the text by means of an undecidable trait. This double mark escapes the pertinence or
authority of truth: it does not overturn it but rather inscribes it within its play as one of its functions
or parts. In the context of the double session, the textual mark is determined as a double mark or
re-mark. But what is a re-mark?
Because mimique does not abolish the differential structure of mimesis in spite of its
deconstruction of the platonic distinctions, it is a simulacrum of platonism. Mimique achieves
such a simulacrum not only by means of an extraordinary formal and syntactical tour de force but
by thematic means as well. The event narrated by the mime of mimique is a hymen, the marriage
of Pierrot and Columbine. This marriage culminates in Pierrot's assassination of his wife by tickling
her to death (that is to say, by means of a perfect crime, which leaves no traces) and in Pierrot's
death in front of the laughing portrait of his victim (a death that will not show any traces either).
The two deaths, resulting from an orgastic spasm, represent Pierrot and Columbine's consummation
of their marriage. The miming of this event in which nothing has taken place exhibits the textual
structure of mallarm's mimique. As Derrida states, It is a dramatization which illustrates
nothing, which illustrates the nothing, lights up a space, re-marks a spacing as a nothing, a blank:
white as a yet unwritten page, blank as a diffference between two lines (p.208). Yet this
dramatization is nothing but a staging of the theatrical space itself. What remains when the stage
comes to double the stage, when the mimed hymen is nothing but an illustration of the theatrical
space itself, that is, a miming of miming, without referent, a miming that mimes only reference, is
what mallarm calls 'the pure medium, of fiction, a perpetual allusion without breaking the
mirror (pp.210-211).
A hymen, at first, names the fusion of two during the consummation of marriage. It signifies
the abolition of difference between desire and satisfaction. Moreover, it leads to the suppression of
the difference between image and thing, empty signifier and the signified, imitation and the
imitated. It leads to a complete confusion of exteriority and interiority. The hymen in mallarm's
writing produces, according to derrida, the effect of a medium...It is an operation that both sows
confusion between opposites and stands between the opposites 'at once.' what counts here is the
between, the in-between-ness of the hymen (p.212).
But second, for mallarm, the hymen, the consummation of differends, the continuity and
confusion of the coitus, merges with what it seems to be derived from: the hymen as protective
screen, the jewel box of virginity, the vaginal partition, the fine, invisible veil which, in front of the
hystera, stands between the inside and the outside of the woman, and consequently between desire
and fulfillment (pp.212-13). Derrida can thus conclude that with all the undecidability of its
meaning, the hymen only takes place when it doesn't take place, when nothing really happens, when
there is an all-consuming consummation without violence, or a violence without blows, or a blow
without marks, a mark without a mark (a margin), etc., when the veil is, without being, torn, for
example when one is made to die or come laughing (p.213). The manner in which the double
structure of the hymen relates to itself is that of a reflection without penetration: the entre of the
hymen is reflected in the screen without penetrating it (p.215). This reflection without penetration,
this doubling without overlaying or overlapping of the hymen, this is what constitutes, as the
fictional milieu of mallarm's mimique the textual mark as a remark.
If the mime of mimique only imitates imitation, if he copies only copying, all he produces
is a copy of a copy. In the same manner, the hymen that comes to illustrate the theatrical space

reduplicates nothing but the miming of the mime. Miming only reference, but not a particular
referent, mallarm keeps the platonic differential structure of mimesis intact while radically
displacing it. Instead of imitating, of referring to a referent within the horizon of truth, the mime
mimes only other signs and their referring function. Signs in the text of mimique are made to
refer to what according to metaphysics is only derived, unreal, unpresent, that is, to other signs.
Such a doubling of the sign, of a sign referring to another sign and to its function of referring, is
what derrida calls re-marking.
A copy of a copy, a simulacrum that simulates the Platonic simulacrumthe platonic copy
of a copy...have all lost here the lure of the present referent and thus find themselves lost for
dialectics and ontology, lost for absolute knowledge (p.219). This double sign, a sign referring to
another sign, reflecting itself in it without penetrating it and without overlaying it, is the textual
instance. The operation and re-marking that constitutes it is an operation by which what
traditionally was conceived of as a mark for a present referent becomes duplicated and refers ot to
itself but to something similar to it, another mark. This re-marking of the platonic simulacruma
scandal in the horizon of truthgives rise to a tertium quid. Tertium datur, without synthesis,
writes derrida.
The textual instance as illustrated by the hymen as a re-mark, as a reflection without
penetration, as a duplication without identity, escapes and precedes all ontology of the text. All
ontologies of the text, whether they determine text in terms of the sensible, the intelligible, or
dialectically as form, remain within the horizon of metaphysics and its platonic notion of a mimesis
subject to truth. The textual instance, on the contrary, as a mimesis of mimesis, as a hymen between
mimesis and mimesis, appears as no longer contained in the process of truth. Instead, it is the
horizon of truth that is inscribed in textual mimesis. Only an act of violence, either arbitrary or
conventional, can make the textual mark signify a referent.