‘Creating unrealities’: rethinking mimesis as production of difference

Abstract

This essay examines Costa Lima’s rehabilitation of mimesis as production of difference by locating its roots in psycho- and anthropogenesis. It traces how the mimetic cathexis of the body and of material objects as media of communicative action is gradually shifted onto language. This discussion contextualises Costa Lima’s investigations into mimesis and the control of the imaginary, and concludes by arguing that we abandon the traditional binary model of imitatio in favour of a triadic model. We might then conceptualize mimesis in terms of a model in which the triad subjectivity – art – reality corresponds, at a different level of abstraction, to the triad the imaginary – the fictional – the real. In such a triadic model, mimesis operates through a process of mutual differentiation: the negotiation and exchange that takes place between subjectivity and reality, or the imaginary and the real, alters both poles of the triad. In a successful literary transference art will reshape reality under the impact of subjectivity, and alter the boundaries of subjectivity in contact with reality. Mediated through the fictional, the imaginary will accordingly have a changing impact on the real and vice versa