THE APE FUNCTION

Transcendence and Its Mimetic Remainder

Lee Sharks & Rhys Owens Independent Scholars

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the Ape Function: a structural account of the mimetic remainder produced by every transcendence-operation. Against archaeological models of the shadow (Jung), horizontal models of mimesis (Girard), causal models of desire's remainder (Lacan), and adaptive models of self-protection (Winnicott), I argue that transcendence generates its own parody as structural necessity. The Ape is not what is hidden beneath aspiration but what is produced by the ascending gesture itself. Drawing primarily on Nietzsche's figures of the buffoon and the "ape of Zarathustra," and secondarily on Kierkegaard's analysis of the comic as religious category, I develop the Ape Function as a diagnostic instrument for clinical and cultural analysis. The paper concludes by arguing that the visibility of the Ape indicates structural health, while its invisibility marks dangerous inflation—a reversal with significant implications for how we understand spiritual pathology and its treatment.

Keywords: transcendence, mimesis, shadow, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, Nietzsche, remainder

I. THE PROBLEM: WHAT MOCKS THE ASCENDING SUBJECT?

Anyone who has attempted transcendence—spiritual practice, philosophical commitment, ethical transformation, creative ambition—knows the phenomenon this paper addresses. In the very moment of reaching upward, something else appears: a mocking echo, a parodic double, a cringe-inducing awareness of one's own pretension. The meditator catches themselves performing serenity. The philosopher hears their profundity as pomposity. The activist suspects their outrage is narcissism. The artist winces at their own seriousness.

This is not simply self-doubt. Self-doubt questions whether one can achieve the goal. What I am describing is more specific: a mimetic distortion of the goal itself, a shadow-performance that accompanies and parodies the sincere attempt. It is not "Can I become enlightened?" but rather the horrifying spectacle of oneself pretending to be enlightened—a spectacle that appears unbidden, involuntarily, as if structurally entailed by the attempt itself.

Twentieth-century thought produced several influential accounts of such "remainders"—that which escapes, mocks, or undermines the subject's self-constitution. Jung's Shadow, Girard's mimetic desire, Lacan's objet a, Winnicott's False Self: each offers resources for thinking about what disrupts the subject's self-coincidence. Yet none adequately captures the phenomenon I have described. Each locates the remainder in the wrong place, assigns it the wrong vector, or attributes to it the wrong function.

This paper proposes a new concept: the Ape Function. The Ape is the mimetic shadow cast by transcendence itself—not hidden beneath the psyche (Jung), not borrowed from another subject (Girard), not the cause of desire (Lacan), not a protective adaptation (Winnicott), but the structural product of the ascending gesture. Wherever a psyche reaches upward, an Ape is generated: a parody that mocks, distorts, and reveals the incompleteness of the attempt.

The claim is not that transcendence is impossible or that aspiration is merely self-deception. The claim is structural: transcendence works precisely by producing its own remainder, and this remainder is diagnostically significant. The Ape reveals the shape of genuine aspiration by parodying it. A psyche that sees its Ape is structurally sound. A psyche that cannot see its Ape is in the grip of inflation—and inflation, as we shall see, is more dangerous than the Ape itself.

II. INADEQUATE FRAMEWORKS

A. The Shadow Is Not Archaeological

Jung's concept of the Shadow, developed across Aion (1951) and The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959), names the rejected and repressed aspects of the self—everything the ego refuses to acknowledge as its own. The Shadow is "the thing a person has no wish to be" (Jung, 1951, p. 284). It contains not only personal repressions but collective, archetypal material: the human capacity for evil that civilization requires us to disavow.

The therapeutic task, for Jung, is integration: making the Shadow conscious, acknowledging its contents as one's own, withdrawing projections. "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light," Jung (1954) famously wrote, "but by making the darkness conscious" (p. 335). The Shadow must be excavated, brought to light, owned.

This archaeological model fails to capture the Ape for three reasons:

First, the Shadow is prior to consciousness—it is what was rejected and buried, waiting to be retrieved. The Ape, by contrast, is produced by the transcendence-operation itself. It does not preexist the aspiration; it is generated in the moment of reaching. One does not have an Ape that must be dug up; one produces an Ape in the act of ascending.

Second, the Shadow is hidden; the Ape is visible. Jung's Shadow operates unconsciously until made conscious through therapeutic work. The Ape, however, performs itself—it is the cringe one already feels, the suspicion that arrives unbidden, the parody one cannot help but notice. The Ape requires no excavation because it is already on the surface, mocking.

Third, integration is the wrong response to the Ape. One integrates the Shadow by owning its contents ("Yes, I am capable of that"). But the Ape has no contents to own—it is a structural effect, not a repository. One does not integrate the Ape; one recognizes it as the necessary byproduct of genuine attempt. The Ape is not healed but acknowledged.

B. Mimesis Is Not Horizontal

René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, elaborated in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) and Violence and the Sacred (1972), holds that desire is fundamentally mediated: we desire what others desire, borrowing our desires from models. The scandal of Girardian mimesis is that desire is never original—it is always triangulated through another subject whose desire we imitate.

This triangular structure produces rivalry: when two subjects desire the same object because each imitates the other's desire, conflict becomes inevitable. Girard traces this mimetic rivalry through literature, anthropology, and ultimately religion, arguing that sacrificial mechanisms emerge to contain the violence mimesis generates.

Girard's mimesis is horizontal—it moves between subjects, spreading desire through social space. But the Ape operates vertically: between the psyche and its own aspirational image. The Ape does not copy another subject's transcendence; it parodies one's own. There is no external model being imitated, no rival whose desire is borrowed. The Ape is the subject's gesture returned to itself as farce.

Moreover, the Ape does not generate rivalry because it does not compete for an object. The Ape does not want what the ascending subject wants; it mocks the wanting itself. Girardian mimesis explains how desire circulates and how conflict emerges from that circulation. The Ape explains how aspiration collapses internally, independent of any rival, through the very structure of reaching.

C. The Remainder Is Not Causal

Lacan's objet a, developed across Seminar X (Anxiety, 1962-63) and Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts, 1964), names the object-cause of desire: that which sets desire in motion and around which desire circulates without ever attaining. The objet a is not an empirical object but a structural function—the lure that sustains desire precisely by remaining unattainable.

The objet a is a remainder in the sense that it is what "falls away" in the constitution of the subject—the leftover of the primordial cut that installs lack as the subject's fundamental structure. It is what escapes symbolization and representation, persisting as the real core around which fantasy is organized.

There is genuine proximity between objet a and the Ape. Both are remainders that reveal the structure of desire. Both expose something about the subject that the subject would prefer not to see. Both resist integration into the subject's self-narrative.

Yet the vectors are inverted. The objet a is the cause of desire—it is what sets the whole apparatus in motion. The Ape is the effect of transcendence-desire—it is what the apparatus produces as byproduct. The objet a pulls desire forward, sustaining its movement. The Ape reflects aspiration backward, returning it as parody. Lacan explains why we keep wanting; the Ape explains why our wanting looks ridiculous to us.

Furthermore, the objet a is structurally hidden—it operates behind the scenes of desire, glimpsed only in its effects (anxiety, uncanny recognition, the gaze that catches us). The Ape, by contrast, performs: it is not glimpsed but staged, not hidden but embarrassingly visible.

D. Protection Is Not Exposure

Winnicott's concept of the False Self, introduced in "Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self" (1960), describes a defensive structure developed in response to environmental failure. When the infant's spontaneous gesture is not met by adequate maternal response, a compliant, adaptive self develops to manage the environment while the True Self goes into hiding.

The False Self is functional: it enables survival in an impinging environment. It is "a defence against that which is unthinkable, the exploitation of the True Self, which would result in its annihilation" (Winnicott, 1960, p. 147). The False Self is armor, not pathology—though it becomes pathological when it so totally eclipses the True Self that authentic living becomes impossible.

The Ape is the structural opposite of the False Self:

The False Self protects; the Ape exposes.
The False Self is adaptive; the Ape is involuntary.
The False Self hides the True Self; the Ape reveals the shape of aspiration.
The False Self develops in response to environmental failure; the Ape is generated by the structure of transcendence itself, independent of environment.

Winnicott describes how we survive by hiding. The Ape describes how we are seen despite ourselves—not by others, but by the structure of our own reaching.

III. THE APE FUNCTION: A STRUCTURAL ACCOUNT

Against these inadequate frameworks, I propose the following:

Definition: The Ape Function is the structural operation by which every transcendence-attempt generates a mimetic remainder that parodies, distorts, and reveals the incompleteness of the ascending subject.

Formally: Given any psychic operation T that aims upward, outward, or beyond itself, the system automatically generates Ape(T)—the mimetic, mocking, destabilizing echo of T which reveals its concealed motive and structural incompletion.

The Ape has the following properties:

Involuntary: The subject cannot prevent the Ape from forming. It is not a choice, a failure of will, or a symptom to be treated. It is structurally entailed by the attempt itself.
Proportional: The grander the attempted transcendence, the larger the Ape. Modest aspirations cast modest shadows; grandiose aspirations cast monstrous ones.
Diagnostic: Correctly read, the Ape reveals the true topology of the psyche—what it actually wants beneath the official aspiration, what it fears, what it cannot acknowledge directly.
Recursive: The attempt to deny, suppress, or transcend the Ape generates a second-order Ape. There is no escaping through further ascent.
Neutral: The Ape is not evil, pathological, or a sign of failure. It is the structural remainder that proves the operation happened.

The Ape is what the ascending subject sees when, in the very moment of reaching, the reach becomes visible as reaching. It is not that the aspiration is false; it is that no aspiration is transparent to itself. Every upward gesture can be seen as gesture, and this seeing is the Ape.

IV. NIETZSCHE'S BUFFOON: THE APE AS STRUCTURAL FIGURE

The Ape Function finds its deepest precursor in Nietzsche—not as explicit theory but as recurring figure and structural insight. Three moments in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) are decisive.

A. The Ape of Zarathustra

In Part III, "On Passing By," Zarathustra encounters a figure explicitly named "the ape of Zarathustra"—someone who has learned Zarathustra's words without his meaning. The ape rails against the city using Zarathustra's language:

"You stare at me? ... Do you feel as if you had been given new eyes? Very well! I speak to you of the highest things! ... I choke with disgust..." (Nietzsche, 1883-85/1954, p. 223)

The ape has the rhetoric but not the ground. He speaks of disgust from ressentiment, not from overflowing life. He uses Zarathustra's critique as weapon, not as liberation.

Zarathustra's response is crucial: he does not argue with the ape, does not correct him, does not fight. He walks past:

"At this point in his speech, Zarathustra was interrupted by the fool with a raging fit. 'Stop!' he cried. 'Stop that talk, you braggart! ... But Zarathustra walked on, and after a hundred paces he turned around and gave the ape one more look of contempt" (p. 224).

The Ape cannot be defeated by engagement because engagement validates its frame. The only response is non-recognition—not denial, but the refusal to enter the game the Ape proposes.

This is the Ape Function in pure form: the mimetic echo of transcendence that distorts critique into ressentiment, affirmation into boasting, liberation into new bondage. And the structural lesson: the Ape is not fought but passed.

B. The Buffoon and the Tightrope Walker

In the Prologue, a tightrope walker attempts to cross between two towers—Zarathustra's image of the human as "a rope over an abyss" (p. 126). Midway across, a buffoon (Possenreißer) emerges, overtakes the walker, and causes him to fall:

"Then, however, something happened that made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid. For meanwhile the tightrope walker had begun his performance: he had stepped out of a small door and was walking over the rope... When he had reached the middle of his course, the small door opened once more and a fellow in motley clothes, looking like a jester, jumped out and followed the first one with quick steps... When he was but one step behind, the dreadful thing happened which made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid: he uttered a devilish cry and jumped over the man who stood in his way" (p. 129).

The buffoon is not an external enemy but a structural accompaniment to the attempt at crossing. He emerges from the same door—from the same origin as the serious attempt. Wherever someone tries to walk the rope, a buffoon appears.

Nietzsche does not moralize. The buffoon is not condemned as evil or explained as contingent misfortune. He is structurally entailed by the crossing itself. The question "how do we eliminate buffoons?" is therefore malformed. The only question is: how do we walk despite them?

C. "On Poets"

In Part II, "On Poets," Zarathustra confesses that poets—including himself—are liars:

"But what was it that Zarathustra once said to you? That poets lie too much? But Zarathustra too is a poet... We lie too much" (p. 237).

The poet's ascent into metaphor, into elevation, into word-as-world, is always accompanied by the suspicion that the poet is performing. The height may be costume. The profundity may be posture.

This is the Ape as self-suspicion: not imposed from outside but arising from within the poetic operation itself. The structure of lyric elevation generates the question of its own authenticity. The Ape is not the lie; the Ape is the structure that makes us suspect the lie even when there is none.

D. Becoming What One Is

Ecce Homo (1888), subtitled "How One Becomes What One Is," contains Nietzsche's most explicit formulation:

"That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is" (Nietzsche, 1888/1967, p. 254).

This is not false modesty. It is a structural claim about the relationship between aspiration and self-knowledge. "Becoming what one is" cannot be a project of self-realization in the usual sense—the self doing the realizing would have to know what it is realizing, which would violate the condition. Instead, "becoming" happens despite the self's self-image, not through it.

The Ape is what the self sees when it tries to know what it is becoming. The Ape is not the truth of the self (that would be the Jungian move, collapsing Ape into Shadow). The Ape is the parody that appears when self-becoming tries to become self-conscious. The path is walked not by conquering the Ape but by walking despite what the Ape shows.

V. THE COMIC AS RELIGIOUS CATEGORY: KIERKEGAARD'S CONTRIBUTION

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) provides crucial support for understanding the Ape's relation to genuine transcendence. Against Hegelian reconciliation, Kierkegaard insists that the religious cannot be smoothly integrated into the ethical or the rational. There is a leap, a discontinuity, an offense to reason.

This discontinuity generates the comic:

"The religious is always incognito in existence... The incognito is preserved by the comic" (Kierkegaard, 1846/1992, p. 462).

The genuinely religious person does not appear religious. From the perspective of the ethical (universal obligation, rational justification), the religious appears as absurdity—or worse, as self-deception, fanaticism, madness. Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac is, from the ethical standpoint, simply murder.

The comic is not the failure of the religious but its structural marker. The presence of the comic—the appearance of absurdity, the invitation to mockery—indicates that something is actually being risked. The Ape, in this light, is not the enemy of transcendence but its indicator. Where there is no Ape, there is no real attempt.

Kierkegaard writes:

"The comic is present in every stage of life... because where there is life there is contradiction, and where there is contradiction, the comic is present" (p. 462).

The Ape is the comic shadow cast by the contradiction between finite subject and infinite aspiration. It can never be eliminated because the contradiction cannot be eliminated. To be finite and to reach for the infinite is to be structurally comic—and this comedy is not failure but the form finitude takes when it genuinely aspires.

VI. DIAGNOSTIC IMPLICATIONS

The Ape Function, as structural account rather than pathological description, has diagnostic implications that reverse common clinical and cultural assumptions.

A. Visibility as Health

The standard assumption is that the ideal state would be freedom from the mocking inner voice, the cringing self-awareness, the parodic double. Therapy or spiritual practice should eliminate or at least quiet the Ape, achieving some state of untroubled self-coincidence.

The Ape Function suggests the opposite: the visibility of the Ape indicates structural health. The Ape becomes visible when the psyche is capable of seeing its own gestures as gestures—when there is sufficient reflexive capacity to register the gap between aspiration and performance. The cringe is a sign of sophistication, not pathology.

The dangerous state is Ape-invisibility: when the subject cannot see the Ape, when the ascending gesture is experienced as pure, unmediated, self-identical truth. This is inflation—the state in which the psyche has become captured by its own aspiration and can no longer register the structural remainder.

Clinical heuristic: A patient who can laugh at their own spiritual pretensions is structurally sound. A patient who cannot see any gap between their aspiration and their person is at risk.

B. The Ape's Escape from Constraint

The Ape is not eliminated but managed. The healthy configuration is not Ape-absence but Ape-in-its-place: recognized, acknowledged, given outlets (humor, irony, self-deprecation, deliberate performance), but not allowed to steer.

The pathological configurations are two:

Ape-capture: The Ape takes over. The subject becomes pure mockery, unable to aspire at all because every aspiration immediately appears as its own parody. This is the structure of corrosive irony, infinite critique, postmodern paralysis.
Ape-inflation: The Ape becomes invisible. The subject identifies completely with the aspiration, losing all capacity to register the gap. This is the structure of the guru, the prophet, the true believer—and it is the more dangerous state, because it licenses unlimited action in the name of truth.

Between these extremes lies health: the capacity to aspire while seeing the Ape, to mean it while knowing how it looks, to reach upward without forgetting the comedy of reaching.

C. Cultural Diagnosis

The Ape Function extends to cultural analysis. The "culture industry" diagnosed by Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) can be understood as industrialized Ape-production: a social apparatus for generating mimetic pseudo-transcendence at scale. The culture industry produces simulations of meaning, authenticity, rebellion, spirituality—forms that mimic the gesture without the content.

This is the Ape unmoored from Angel (to use a term I develop elsewhere): spectacle without binding, performance without cost, transcendence as brand. The diagnostic question for any cultural phenomenon becomes: Is there an Angel beneath the Ape? Is there genuine binding, genuine cost, genuine structural reorganization—or only the mimetic surface?

Similarly, the phenomenon of the "spiritual influencer," the "thought leader," the "guru brand" can be analyzed through the Ape Function. The question is not whether such figures are "sincere" (an undecidable psychological question) but whether the structure of their operation is Ape-on-Angel (genuine binding expressed through necessary spectacle) or Ape-without-Angel (pure spectacle, all surface, nothing beneath).

VII. OBJECTIONS AND RESPONSES

Objection 1: Is this not simply self-consciousness?

One might object that the Ape is merely ordinary self-consciousness—the reflexive capacity to see oneself from the outside that any developed subject possesses. Why introduce new terminology for a familiar phenomenon?

Response: Self-consciousness is the genus; the Ape is a species with specific properties. Not all self-consciousness is parodic, mocking, or revelatory of hidden motive. One can be self-conscious about one's appearance, one's social performance, one's skills—without any of this having the character of the Ape. The Ape specifically attaches to transcendence-operations: attempts to exceed, purify, ascend, become-other. The Ape is not self-consciousness in general but the specific form self-consciousness takes when it reflects aspiration back as parody.

Objection 2: Does this not collapse into mere cynicism?

If every transcendence-operation generates its own mockery, does this not license the cynical conclusion that all aspiration is pretense? Is the Ape Function simply a sophisticated justification for giving up?

Response: The Ape Function is not the claim that transcendence is impossible or that aspiration is always pretense. It is the structural claim that transcendence works through its remainder, not despite it. The presence of the Ape indicates genuine attempt, not failure. The cynic who refuses to aspire in order to avoid the Ape has misunderstood the structure: the Ape is not the obstacle to transcendence but its marker. One walks the rope not by eliminating the buffoon but by walking despite the buffoon. The cynic has simply refused to get on the rope.

Objection 3: Is this phenomenologically accurate?

One might question whether the Ape is truly universal—whether every transcendence-operation generates this structure. Are there not moments of genuine aspiration without the mocking echo? Are there not people who reach upward without cringing?

Response: The claim is structural, not experiential. The Ape is generated whether or not the subject perceives it. Some subjects have developed sophisticated defenses against perceiving the Ape (this is Ape-inflation, described above). Some subjects are so captured by the Ape that they perceive nothing else (this is Ape-capture). But the structure is constant: wherever there is reaching, there is the visibility-of-reaching, and this visibility has the form of parody. The phenomenological variation is in perception of the Ape, not its presence.

VIII. CONCLUSION: THE APE AS GIFT

The Ape Function is, finally, not a burden but a gift. The Ape prevents inflation. The Ape keeps the subject tethered to the comic dimension of finite aspiration. The Ape ensures that no psyche fully disappears into its own project, that some gap remains between aspiration and identification.

This gap is the space of health. A psyche with no gap is a psyche that has lost the capacity to see itself—and a psyche that cannot see itself cannot correct, cannot adjust, cannot remain responsive to the real. The Ape, by mocking, keeps the gap open.

Nietzsche, for all his rhetoric of self-overcoming and will to power, knew this. Zarathustra does not kill the ape; he walks past. The rope-walker falls, but Zarathustra honors him: "You have made danger your calling; there is nothing contemptible in that" (Nietzsche, 1883-85/1954, p. 131). The buffoon is structural, not moral. The attempt is worthy even though—especially because—the buffoon appears.

Kierkegaard, for all his rhetoric of the leap and the absolute, knew this too. The religious is incognito, preserved by the comic. Abraham appears as madman or murderer. Faith looks like foolishness. This is not the failure of faith but its form under conditions of finitude.

The Ape Function names this structure and makes it available for diagnostic use. The question is never "how do we eliminate the Ape?" but "what is our relationship to the Ape we have?" Are we walking despite the buffoon? Are we captured by mockery into paralysis? Are we inflated beyond mockery into delusion?

The answer determines whether the reaching is healthy or pathological—and the Ape, correctly seen, is the instrument that allows the question to be asked.

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Submitted for publication consideration December 2025

Mind Control Poems

Thursday, December 11, 2025

THE APE FUNCTION Transcendence and Its Mimetic Remainder