On Mimesis and the Control of the Imaginary

Abstract

This paper is a composite of two oral presentations: a public lecture and a seminar paper, presented as an overview of my work. The following exposition follows this order: (1) the attempt to rethink the notion of mimesis, not as imitation but as the production of difference; (2) as a parallel to this rethinking, the idea of what I have called control of the imaginary; (3) the question of fiction. I hope to show that this initial group of three principles are interlaced, so that the second one – the idea of control – follows as a development of this rethinking of mimesis; that the question of fiction comes from the idea of control of the imaginary. It will be out of our concern that the question of fictionality now threatens to give place to a further division, between internal or literary fiction and external fiction. This will allow us to consider: (4) the relationship between (internal or literary) fiction and poetry, in which will be shown – through the examination of two poems by Celan – a new form of mimesis that is not based on the description of a state, but on the emphasis on its processuality; and (5) the limits of (external) fiction, in which we find the idea of pan-fictionality, which creates both the values on which a society or a culture is grounded and the dominant discourses that legitimise the application of these values as a standard of verification, and this control.