The Human Chameleon: Zelig, Nietzsche and the Banality of Evil

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Abstract

This article revisits the case of Woody Allen’s mockumentaryZelig(1983) viaFriedrich Nietzsche’s diagnostic of mimicry inThe Gay Science. It argues that thecase of the“human chameleon”remains contemporary for both philosophicaland political reasons. On the philosophical side, I argue that the case ofZelig challenges an autonomous conception of the subject based on rational self-sufficiency (orHomo Sapiens) by proposing a relational conception of the subjectopen to mimetic influences (orhomo mimeticus) that will have to await thediscovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s in order to find an empiricalconfirmation. On the political side, I say thatZeligforegrounds the power ofauthoritarian leaders in the 1930s to cast a spell on both imitative crowds andpublics in terms that provide a mimetic supplement to Hannah Arendt’saccount of the“banality of evil”. The philosophical purchase ofZelig’s cinematicdramatization of a mimetic subject is that it reveals how the“inability tothink”(Hannah Arendt) characteristic of the case of Eichmann rests on unnoticedaffective principles constitutive of the all-too-human penchant for“mimicry”(Nietzsche) the film dramatises. Thus reframed, the human chameleon reflects(on) the dangers of mimetic dispossessions that reached massive proportions inthe past century and continue to cast a shadow on the present century.