Dante almost got himself petrified during his voyage through Hell.  The furies called for Medusa to appear.

They should have called for Nietzsche and Rousseau. They were equally capable of closing a symbolic order and making it watertight.  When they looked out onto their world, they saw only imitators or detractors.

The furies’ call would have instigated a hilarious scene, where Nietzsche and Rousseau regarded one another, and Nietzsche saw a “theoretical man” and Rousseau saw a “man without reason, full of primitive associations”, before each turning the other to stone, or maybe, before both falling in love.

When Medusa looked out, she saw only women and stones, so intense was her mimetic rivalry.

When Dante looked out, he did not turn anyone to stone.

Dante saw through the eyes of a sinner.  His message was: Do not mimic me.

As a result, he spoke a language (a symbolic order) much larger than himself, a symbolic order that could never close itself off as the imitators imitated and the detractors detracted, because the moment that one looked at the empty space, one saw the only thing that could not be – must not be – “the object that brings us all into relation”: a resurrected corpse.

Yet there He was.