Mimetic Economies

This article explores the entangled relationship between queer theory and political economy through a critical rereading of Plato’s metaphysics. Challenging Andrew Parker’s claim that Marxist productivism necessitates the “unthinking” of sexuality, the author argues that theatricality—often coded as queer—is not opposed to production but constitutive of it. Drawing on Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s assertion that “mimesis has always been an economic problem”, the analysis traces Plato’s repudiation of mimetic arts as a moral reaction to the destabilizing effects of market exchange in ancient Athens. Far from being a secondary distortion of “real” labor, theatricality emerges as the repressed condition of production itself: laborers must first performatively approximate Plato’s cosmological ideals of endogenous activity, exposing the inherent queerness of productive acts. Close readings of Ion, Sophist, Cratylus and Timaeus reveal how Plato’s horror of theatrical passivity mirrors his anxiety about market circulation and sexual receptivity. The article critiques Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato for neglecting this politico-economic substratum, proposing instead that queer theory might reorient itself toward the mimetic economies. Ultimately, the piece reimagines queerness not as production’s excluded other but as its hidden logic—a disruptive force within the very “abode of production” Marx sought to unveil.