On Mimesis and the Control of the Imaginary.

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 ofmimesis, not as imitation but as the production of difference; (2) as a parallel to this rethinking, the idea of what I have calledcontrol of the imaginary; (3) the question offiction. I hope to show that this initial group of three principles are interlaced, so that the second one – the idea ofcontrol– follows as a development of this rethinking ofmimesis; that the question offictioncomes from the idea ofcontrol 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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]