Mimesis

The process Mimesis is important to Aristotle's theory of Art, because, as he asserts, all Art is imitative. But such a thesis hardly begins to exhaust the Philosophical significance of Mimesis. Despite the simplicity of that formulation, Mimesis is no determinate element in merely specialized Art. For example, an abstract impressionistic characterization of a subject is as imitative of it as is a 'realistic' portrait, so a wide range of processes can be called 'imitative'. Nor is Mimesis a process that is exclusive to the field of Poetics. Insofar as the reproduction of an object is involved in Cognition, Mimesis is significant to Epistemology, and the extent to which interpersonal behavior is imitative, or to which following a rule is an imitation of it, Mimesis is significant to Ethics. And, of course, the term 'ape' connotes a more general biological function. Now, while Plato makes Imitation an explicit theme in many of his works, especially in the Sophist and the Republic, despite its pervasiveness in the subsequent tradition, it seems to not appear again as a focus of investigation until the second half of the 20th-century, in the studies of Deleuze and Derrida, most notably. Mimesis is of great interest to Formaterialism, because it is a combination of the two central notions of that System, Sameness and Difference, so a further discussion will follow.