A tie instead of soul. James Joyce’s superficiality

Two different historical mimesis theories can be used to interpret what Trump does as a dancer, performer or μῖμος [mîmos]. On the one hand, there is the Platonic, ethical and truth-oriented tradition in which the majority of Trump’s critics stand. On the other hand, there is the non-ethical, in Nietzsche’s sense “extra-moral[]”⁸¹ tradition, which explicitly refrains from ‘words’ and their ‘content’, from ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’ and instead focuses on the ‘superficial’ representation itself—similar to what you do when you listen to music or watch a “wallpaper” pattern⁸² or a dance.

Those who lean towards the latter theory must also be skeptical of psychological explanations of Trump’s behavior. In contrast to early modern behavioral theories such as those of Baldassare Castiglione, Baltasar Gracián or the so-called French moralists, the psychological (and not just the ‘deep’ psychological) gaze is always directed into the depths and to what is hidden there when it searches for the unconscious, the past, the absent or even the soul.

We know from an anecdote by James Joyce that this is not everyone’s cup of tea. This is a classic example of a plea for the surface as a polemic against depth, the topicality of which was already discussed above. Joyce sits for a portrait. “When the painter Patrick Tuohy began to talk about the importance of capturing the Joycean soul, he muttered darkly: ‘Never mind my soul, Tuohy. Just make sure you get my tie right’.”⁸³

Notes

1. ⁸¹Friedrich Nietzsche: Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, in: Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I-IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870-1873. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, München 1988, vol. 1, pp. 873-890.
2. ⁸²Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. by Karl Vorländer, Hamburg 7/1990, p. 179 (§ 51).
3. ⁸³ www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/05/james-joyce-biography-bowker-review (6/6/2025).