Mimesis in Contemporary Theory. Introducción

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Introduction

Since the late 1960s, the death of the sign has been announced any num

ber of times, but the sign refuses to die.1The would-be reign of free-floating signifiers has not laid to rest the fundamental issues of the theory of

the sign and sign production, and in many ways they remain the same

issues that Plato broached in such texts as theCratylus, thePhaedrus,the

Republic,and theSophist:those associated with the concepts of imitation,

representation, adequation and simulation - i.e.,mimesis.But if there is

any way in which discussions of mimesis over the last two decades differ

markedly from earlier debates, it is in the centrality accorded the question

of power and the sociopolitical dimension of semiosis.2In volume one of

Mimesis inContemporaryTheory,contributors often addressed the issue ofpower and signs, but only as it related to the literary and philosophical

debates on mimesis. In this, the second volume ofMimesisin Contempo

rary Theory,all of the essays take as their primary concern the nexus of

semiosis, mimesis and power.

It is useful to distinguish two basic periods in the history of mimesis

and semiosis in the West, the first inaugurated by the Platonic articulation

of the representational theory of the sign, and the second by the advent of

modern structural and semiotic theory. Plato himself presents no system

atic theory of the sign,3but in his discussions of language, writing and literature he establishes the fundamental terms of the continuing debate on

mimesis in semiotics. In theCratylus,Socrates takes up the question of the

relation between names and objects and argues that "the name is an imita

tion [mimema]of the thing," that "names rightly given are the likenesses

and images [eikonas]of the things which they name" (430b, 439a).4Such

images are only partial imitations of things and not their doubles (432a-d),

and hence knowledge of names must be subordinated to knowledge of

things (439a-c), yet a natural relation still exists between them. Writing, by

contrast, is unnatural, says Socrates in thePhaedrus,a dead simulation ofliving speech which bears the same relationship to words as painting does

to actual things (275d-e).5In theRepublic,Socrates says that painting (as


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2 RONALD BOGUE

well as tragedy) is an imitation "of a phantasm" or "appearance as itappears" rather than an imitation of reality or truth (598b), and here he isclearly drawing on the distinction made in theSophistbetween the imageor likeness (eikori)that resembles the original it imitates and the sem

blance (phantasma)that only mimics or mimes its model without bearingany true resemblance to it (236a-c). Writing, like painting and tragedy, is aform of bad mimesis, a simulation that creates false resemblances, whereas speech exemplifies good mimesis, a true resemblance that is properlysubordinated to the model it copies. One may say in general, then, that for

Plato signs are of two sorts, images (or icons) and simulacra (or phantasms),and that both are governed by mimesis.

In this double sense of mimesis as faithful imitation and as deceptivemimicry one can discern the contestation of what Spariosu has usefullytermed prerational and rational mentalities in ancient Greece.6Mimesis inits older meaning seems to have been allied with ritual, dance, music andplay, with performances in which mythic and divine forces are not so muchrepresented as brought into presence through their (re)enactment. Mimesis in this prerational sense is one with "the non-imitative, ecstatic or 'dion-

ysian' movement of Being."7In Plato one finds a later, rational conceptionof mimesis as imperfect representation or imitation of inaccessible Being,as well as a negative characterization of prerational mimesis as hollowsimulation and misleading appearance. Far from being a disinterestedclassification of signs, Plato's differentiation of icons and phantasms marksa struggle for domination, an effort both to replace the unmediated,amoral power of prerational mimesis with the mediated, truth-grounded

power of rational mimesis, and to dislodge myth, poetry and rhetoric fromtheir positions of authority and establish in their place the sovereignty of

philosophy.In Plato, then, one can discern the trace of three different conceptions

of mimesis - as prerational unveiling, as rational representation, and as illusory simulation. The triumph of representational mimesis in Plato marksthe end of a power struggle and the inception of a tradition in which

power is seen as external to the proper use of signs. And although Plato'sthought on signs is modified and occasionally rejected by later writers, hisunderstanding of mimesis and its relation to semiosis remains dominant inWestern thought about the sign into the nineteenth century.8It is only with

Peirce, Saussure and modern structural and semiotic studies that the Platonic concept of the mimetic sign comes under systematic attack, and thatthe question of power's relation to the sign emerges as a pressing concern.


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INTRODUCTION 3

Within Peirce's classification of signs, limited space is provided for

mimesis (specifically, in the concepts of the sinsign and icon), but the rep

resentational model is decidedly challenged in his insistence that "a sign is

something by knowing which we know something more," i.e., that every

sign functions through its interpretant, which in turn is specified through a

second interpretant and so on in a process of unlimited semiosis.9 In a

complementary fashion Saussure undermines the correspondence theory

of signs by bracketing the question of reference, positing the arbitrary re

lation between signifier and signified, and proposing a differential conceptof the sign. Such fundamental postulates lead many contemporary semioti-

cians to conclude, as does Umberto Eco, that "semiosis explains itself by

itself:a sign does not "designate any object, but on the contraryconveysa

cultural content" which is determined by its relations with other cultural

contents, its referential or extensional purport being incidental to its func

tion as a sign.10The emphasis in such thought is on semiosis as signpro

duction, which may be seen as a demystified mutation of the prerational

conception of mimesis as unveiling or "monstration." This anti-representa

tional theory of the sign can lead to a quietistic formalism, but it alsomakes possible a critique of social codes as arbitrary impositions of cultur

al values and norms, and thereby reveals the centrality of the issue of rep

resentation as a mode of power. It is toward this end of social critique that

Roland Barthes' ground-breaking Mythologies(1954) is directed, and

much subsequent work in French semiology clearly follows this example.

Yet if the works of Peirce and Saussure make possible a non-represen

tational account of semiosis, they also problematize the very notions of

signs and sign systems, as Derrida and others have shown. If signs are rela

ted through unlimited semiosis, if sign systems are structures of differenceswith no positive terms, then there is no way to delineate the limits of a

semiotic system or to determine a center around which such a system

might be structured.11 The domain of general semiotics, as Eco argues,

must therefore be conceived of as a rhizomatic encyclopedia rather than a

hierarchical dictionary, as a labyrinth rather than a Porphyrian tree.12The

signitself,at least in its Saussurian guise, cannot remain stable, as Derrida

has argued at length. On the one hand, signifier and signified are as insep

arable as two sides of a single sheet of paper; on the other, the very exis

tence of a signified suggests "the possibility of thinking aconceptsignifiedin and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of arelationship to language, that is of a relationship to a system of signi-


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4 RONALD BOGUE

fiers."13 If one denies the existence of "transcendental signifieds," then

every signified isalsoasignifier,and thesigncanhave onlyaprovisional

coherence. Further, if the sign functions through itsdifferential relations

withinanunlimitedand shifting networkofsigns, thenit isneither identi

cal with itself nor present to itself, but always marked by the changing

trace of whatitis not, whereitisnot.

What Derrida's critiqueof thesign leadsto is a general semioticsof

Platonicbadmimesis,aconception ofsignsassimulations of themselves

that mime their identity while remaining other. What distinguishes the

Derridean simulacral sign from the structural-semiotic sign as arbitrary

product is its unresolvable yet unavoidable participation in the logicof

representation.ForDerrida,thesignis asuspect concept,but it is one we

cannomore dispense with thanwe can thenotionofrepresentation, for

botharepartof thevery fabricof ourlanguageand ourhabitsofthought.

The stability of the sign islike a Kantian transcendental illusion, some

thing that involuntarily asserts itself whetherwewishit to or not. Atbest

wecanadoptan interminable strategyofsabotaging identitiesandequiv

alences andturning faithful icons into duplicitous phantasms, finding piv

otal terms suchassupplement,diffrance,pharmakonandgram that infect

neat taxonomiesandunsettle hierarchical binary oppositions. Hence Der

rida arguesin aparallel fashion that mimesisisinescapablein ourconcep

tionoflanguageandliteratureandthatanyeffort toimagineapurely anti-

mimetic text will only reinstate further metaphysical presuppositions.

Mimesis,henotes, comesin twoforms (whichIhave labeled rationaland

prerational): as "a relation of homoisis or adaequatio between two

(terms)" and as "the presentation of the thing itself, of nature, of the

physis that produces itself, engenders itself, and appears (toitself) as itreallyis, in thepresenceof itsimage,itsvisible aspect,itsface."14 Litera

ture cannotbeentirely dissociated from mimesis,for ifthe conceptof alit

erary workas anadequate imitationofrealityisboundto ametaphysical

notion of truth, the alternative of an entirely self-contained and non-

mimetic workisequally metaphysical, sincethework then is self-present

and productive of truth in another guise - "not, of course, truth in the

form of adequation between the representation and the present of the

thingitself, orbetweentheimitatorand theimitated,buttruthas thepres

ent unveilingof thepresent: monstration, manifestation, production,al-

theia" (Dissemination,pp.205-206). Thus Derrida seesnoalternativebut

to followtheexampleofMallarm,whoinMimique"preservesthe differ-


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INTRODUCTION 5

ential structure of mimicry or mimesis, but without its Platonic or meta

physical in terpretat ion," and "maintains (and maintains himself in) the

structure of thephantasma as it is defined by Plato: the simulacrum as the

copy of a copy. With the exception that there is no longer any model, and

hence, no copy" (Dissemination,p. 206).

As commentators are increasingly recognizing, Derridean deconstruc-

tion is not a mere exercise in autoreferential play, but a form of critique

that regards metaphysical oppositions and referential codes as structures

of power which simulacra help undo (if only temporarily). In this treatment of representation as power, deconstruction shares common ground

with much poststructural theory, and the opposition of coercive signs and

destabilizing simulacra finds echoes in several well-known dichotomies,

e.g., Deleuze and Guattari's (re)territorialization and deterritorialization,

Kristeva's symbolic and semiotic, and de Certeau's strategies and tactics.15

This contestatory understanding of simulacra, however, is not shared by

Jean Baudrillard, who has perhaps done more than any contemporary

theorist to promote the concepts of simulation and simulacra. For Baudril

lard, simulation is not an unsettling force of critique but the central cultural fact of our postmodern condition. Ours is the age of the hypersign, he

believes, a postindustrial, information- and consumption-regulated culture

of universal mediation (most obviously through the media of television,

radio, film and print) in which the real has disappeared and been replaced

by signs that only point to other signs and thereby produce a simulated

reality effect, or hyperreal.

No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept.

No more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is thedimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units,from matrices, memory banks, and command models - and with theseitcan be reproduced an infinite number of times.... In fact, since it is nolonger enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is ahyperreal, the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatorymodels in a hyperspace without atmosphere.16

In Baudrillard's view, the celebration of simulacra does not subvert repre

sentational norms, but simply articulates what has already taken place.

And though he is attuned to the power of simulation and the politics of

postmodern dissuasion, he posits no privileged ground or activity that


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6 RONALD BOGUE

would make possible any challenge to the reign of hypersigns. For Baudril

lard, in short, Platonic bad mimesis is the only game in town.

With Peirce and Saussure, then, a systematic critique of the represen

tational sign becomes possible, but it is evident that such a critique does

not dispense with the question of mimesis. Mimesis as representation may

be challenged, but prerational mimesis as unveiling finds echoes in struc

tural theories of semiosis as sign production, and Platonic bad mimesis as

simulation figures prominently in poststructural thought on the sign. And

whether the concept of the sign reinforces or subverts referential semiotics, whether simulacra are tools of critique or symptoms of postmoder-

nity, whether we are trapped in the age of metaphysics or engulfed in the

hyperreal, the problematic of power and mimesis remains central to con

temporary theories of semiosis. The essays in this volume treat a diverse

range of subjects, from Greek rhapsodes and Renaissance painting to

Peircean semiotics and postmodern malls. The methods are varied and the

perspectives on many counts incommensurable. But in all of these studies,

the social force of signs and the complex manifestations of mimesis as

power recur as central preoccupations.The contest of prerational and rational mimesis is the subject of Spari-

osu's study of Plato'sIon,a dialogue in which, says Spariosu, "Plato mimics

orstagesa trial against poetry and in favor of rational philosophy, with all

the ambiguous, double effects that one can expect from such self-con

scious staging." The rhapsode Ion is the representative of the prerational

values of unmediated power, poetic enthusiasm and Dionysian frenzy;

Socrates, of course, is the spokesman for rationality. But what Spariosu

demonstrates is that Socrates not only understands but also acts in accor

dance with prerational values. It is Socrates who provides the dialogue'smost articulate account of poetic madness and its magnetic effect on audi

ences, and it is Socrates who assumes the rhapsode's role in reciting Ho

mer. More importantly, Socrates resorts to sophistic techniques through

out the dialogue, thereby honoring the very prerational mentality he seeks

to combat. Yet, suggests Spariosu, if Socrates does not see the contra

dictions between his position and his performance, perhaps Plato does.

Perhaps the dialogue's staging of the conflict between poetry and philos

ophy allows the two worlds of prerational and rational mimesis to coexist,

if only briefly and uneasily. Perhaps at least in theIon,Plato sees the poetboth as divinely inspired actor/performer and as imposter who simulates

others' thought and knowledge.


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INTRODUCTION 7

Whatever the ambiguities of theIon, the fundamental mimetic bias of

Plato is clear: language should be purified of the hypnotic distortions of

the rhapsode and rhetorician and used as a faithful vehicle for the devel

opment of a disinterested thought. In this sense the Petrarch that Mazzot-

ta presents is a decidedly anti-Platonic writer, even though Petrarch him

self recognizes Platonic philosophy, Roman eloquence and Christian dog

ma as the cornerstones of his work. Mazzotta states that his aim is to chart

Petrarch's thought "as well as to define his sense of the value of know

ledge, and how knowledge is related to power." Thought for Petrarch isnot selfless or inherently benevolent, but tied to an individual's subjectivity

and history, and hence a necessary component of a life of "steady moral-

intellectual self-examination." Rhetoric, far from distorting thought, con

stitutes the domain of history, moral choice and persuasive force within

which thought may proceed. But the force of thought, the force that puts

thought in motion, that serves as its outer limit and its inner orientation, is

love. What Mazzotta argues for, in short, is the existence of a Petrarchan

erotics of thought, in which love "brings about a provisional self-forgetful-

ness,induces self-analysis, threatens the order of the mind, is outside of allthoughts and becomes the object of all thoughts." That which binds the

elements of self and history in such erotic thought is language, whose

repository of figures of the will and figures of thought allows it to function

as "the voice of desire as well as the place of a common memory." Thus

for Petrarch, history, thought, the self and desire are all perfused with the

power of signs.

The limits of signs and their powers of intimation are the subjects of

Marin's study of three paintings of the Annunciation by Filippo Lippi, Fra

Angelico and Piero della Francesca. In these paintings Marin finds amutual interrogation of the visual and the verbal, an inquiry into the com

plementary boundaries of figuration and enunciation. The Annunciation is

an invisible speech-act, but also the advent of the miraculous Word that

can only point silently toward the mystery of its secret. It is the moment of

the Incarnation, when, in St. Bernardine of Siena's words, "eternity comes

in time ... the unfigurable in figure, the untellable in the tale, the ineffable

in words, the uncircumscribable in place, the invisible in vision." The three

quattrocento artists whom Marin examines paint that mystery by visually

representing ineffability and invisibility, thereby at once challenging andrecognizing the metaphysical dimension of the sign. All three are in Ma

rin's analysis theologians who treat images and words as divine revelations,


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but also semioticians who recognize the finite nature of signs. Paradox

ically, their representation of the limits of painting and speech, of the fail

ure of signs to figure the infinite, is what finally serves as the sign of divine

power.

Infinite semiosis and the limits of signs are also the topics of King's

study of Peirce, which approaches the mimetic relations of literature to

the world through an examination of binarism and the Peircean sign. King

sees in Peirce's semiotic realism an effective challenge to the stability of

any dualistic opposition, for Peirce's triadic conception of the sign, his

understanding of semiosis as ceaseless process, and his holistic "syn-

echism" serve "to expose binaristic categories for what they are, at least in

part - namely, rhetorical gestures." King argues, however, that if for

Peirce unlimited semiosis destabilizes all binarism, a surreptitious dualism

emerges in his evolutionary metaphysics. Peirce admits the fallibility of all

hypotheses within scientific discourse (the privileged domain of knowledge

for Peirce), and hence the infinite nature of scientific semiosis, but he

never entertains the possibility that science itself may be fallible. Thus he

can assert that the world is evolving from chaos to order and from the non-conscious to the conscious, and that semiosis has its limit in the eventual

establishment of a comprehensive scientific knowledge and, in Peirce's

words, "a complete reign of law." In Peirce's thought, then, the disruptive

power of the sign is finally harnessed by the dualistic opposition of science

and world.

If Peirce tries to constrain the unsettling effects of his theory of the

sign, the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze seeks to exploit

and extend them in his theory of cinema, which I discuss in my essay on

Deleuze's semiotics of le visibleand l'nonable, of "that which can beseen" and "that which can be said." Like Marin, Deleuze probes the com

plementary limits of images and words, both in his account of the power

relations that make semiosis possible and in his description of the sonic

and visual "matter" that filmmakers shape into individual films. In De

leuze's remarks on linguistics and his book on Foucault, one can discern

the contours of a model of sign production that posits two separate but

interacting planes of power configurations, one of which generates forms

of visibility, the other forms of enunciation. In his books on film, Deleuze

treats the visual and the verbal as separable levels, but as parts of "a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntactic matter" rather than configurations

of power. Peirce's classification of signs guides Deleuze in his description


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INTRODUCTION 9

of this matter, but by combining Peirce with Bergson Deleuze is able to

destabilize Peirce's categories and make experimental, non-representa

tional films the center of his entire semiotics of cinema. Although appar

ently unrelated or contradictory, Deleuze's two approaches to signs - as

elements of a semiotic matter and as products of configurations of power

- reinforce each other, the one describing the visual and sonic material

that semiosis may shape or fashion, the other the processes that work on

that material and give it a particular form.

Brooks' focus, in her study of the painter Anselm Kiefer, is less on theconfigurations of power that produce signs than on the signs of power

themselves - specifically, those that fascism marshals in support of its

regime and that Kiefer revives in his neo-modern art. The cult of the

strong personality, the hero as divine being, the iconography of lofty

superiority and aggressive, "blood and soil" nostalgia - all dominate Nazi

propaganda, and all reappear, Brooks argues, in a revival modernist trans

mutation in Kiefer's paintings. Through signs fascism seeks to simulate

power, to substitute for genuine authority a theater of might. Its nostalgic

myths serve as feverish attempts to counteract crises of mastery and beliefin cultural metanarratives. Our postmodern era lends itself to the aesthet-

icized politics of fascism, and Brooks cautions that any revival of modern

ist forms brings with it the danger of a resuscitation of fascist modes of

representation. Thus she concludes that "so long as artists like Kiefer take

ideologically loaded materials as the subject of their work, critics should be

prepared to practice the kind of nonformalistIdeologiekritik that such art

demands."

In certain ways postmodernism forms the background against which

Brooks' critique takes shape, and in the last three essays of this volumepostmodern art and culture come to the fore as the center of investigation.

Like Hal Foster, who distinguishes an "oppositional postmodernism" from

a merely relativist, formalist version of the movement,17Cornis-Pop insists

that the innovative fiction of postmodern writers such as Federman, Suke-

nick, Coover, Acker and Hauser is not simply self-referential, but also crit

ical of the ideologies of representation. Such fiction transgresses the

boundaries of the codes of the real, yet recognizes the unavoidable neces

sity of using those codes in the narrative process. These postmodern

works, Cornis-Pop argues, "dramatize a genuine crisis of articulation, asuspicion of mass-produced messages. The prevailing topos of recent fic

tion is not 'unanxious fictionalization,' but a queasy awareness of cultural


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fabrication." At once citation, critique and subversion of ideological cul

tural signs, such fiction employs a radical mimesis of process that interro

gates both the writer's production of literature and the social, semiotic

construction of the world. Hence for Cornis-Pop "postmodernism in this

version is not a flight from ideology, but a self-problematized ideological

construct."

How that ideology functions, i.e., what specific power effects the signs

of popular culture induce in the postmodern era, is the issue addressed by

Black and Herron, both of whom take the body and simulacra as their

point of departure. Black notes the emergence in contemporary culture of

two incommensurable representations of the body: one discursive and reg

ulated by the health and medical professions, the other visual and control

led by the media, fashion and advertising industries. In both cases, the

body is derealized, either converted into text or displayed as autorefer-

ential simulacrum. Yet the discursive and nondiscursive orders of repre

sentation remain separate (Dr. Ruth talking about sex while Brooke

Shields shows it) and at times contradictory (health experts warning about

AIDS and promiscuity while advertisement images sell through constant

sexual solicitation). In the postmodern age, the visual body dissolves into a

world of aestheticized and eroticized surface appearances, whereas the

textual body is absorbed by a post-transgressive order in which law and

transgression are not dialectically opposed but interchangeable. As a

result, concludes Black, "we inhabit a world of mixed signals where every

message is bound to be turned into its opposite, subverted by the very

medium that embodies it."

Herron, like Black, sees the media-generated images of the body as

central to postmodern culture, and he examines such images in the contextof the specific circuit of power represented by the shopping mall. The mall

is like television: immediately accessible and ironically egalitarian, a locus

of instant gratification and service consumption rather than deferred re

ward and object possession. What the mall offers its shoppers "is the body

itself,in the dress of its five senses," which shoppers receive as a message

through the services they consume. The mall, however, performs a dis

suasive violence on the body, converting all sensual experience into the

single medium of marketable and controllable visual images. Here lies the

function of simulacra, as components of a particular economy of imagesand violence, of bodies and power. And according to Herron the most

appropriate response to the reign of simulacra is not to be found in the


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INTRODUCTION 11

academic discourse of apocalyptic or celebratory anti-referentiality, but in

popular culture itself, where the collective imagination finds ways of hu

miliating vision and returning the body to the experience of all five senses.

The postmodern era has induced a crisis of the sign, one in which the

nature of representation and its participation in networks of power have

emerged as problems of pressing and obvious importance. In a sense,

these problems have long been with us, in Plato's Ion, in Petrarch's

thought, in quattrocento painting. But it is the age of mechanical repro

duction, of hypersigns and simulacra, that exacerbates these issues and

clarifies their contours. This crisis may induce a range of responses - fas

cist revivalism, cultural critique, popular resistance, contestatory artistic

experimentation - but the problem will not go away. The essays of this vol

ume offer no comprehensive solution to the question of power's proper

relation to the sign, but they do furnish local accounts of the continuing

problematic of mimesis and semiosis that has taken shape in contempo

rary culture and theory.

Notes

1. For a concise account of the attack on the sign, see Oswald Ducrot and TzvetanTodorov,Encyclopedic Dictionaryofthe Sciencesof Language, tr. Catherine Porter

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 349-365. For a reasonedresponse to this attack and a defense of the concept of the sign, see Umberto Eco,

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press,

1984),pp. 14-45.

2. The importance of power in contemporary thought about the sign is evident in

Marshall Blonsky's useful summary of tendencies in recent semiotic research inOnSigns(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), pp. xv-xix.

3. According to Tzvetan Todorov, the first true semiotician in the West is Augustine.

For an account of the history of the formation of a general semiotics, see hisTheo

ries of the Symbol, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), especially pp. 15-59.

4. All citations of Plato are from TheCollected Dialoguesof Plato,ed. Edith Hamiltonand Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Bollingen, 1961). For an illuminating history oftheories of the natural relation between words and their meanings, see GrardGenette,Mimologiques:VoyageenCratyle(Paris: Seuil, 1976).

5. Jacques Derrida of course has exhaustively examined the status of writing in Platoin his essay "Plato's Pharmacy," inDisseminations,tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:

Chicago Univ. Press, 1981), pp.61-171.


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6. See Spariosu's Introduction toMimesis inContemporaryTheory: AnInterdisciplinaryApproach. Volume I: The Literary and Philosophical Debate (Philadelphia andAmsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), i-xxiv, his forthcoming God of Many Names:Play, Art, andPowerinHellenicThought.From Homer to Aristotle,as well as his contribution to this volume.

7. Spariosu,Mimesis inContemporaryTheory,p. iii.

8. The Stoics, of course, seem to have developed a non-representational theory of thesign, but the influence of their thought has been limited and any reconstruction oftheir doctrines, given the minuscule corpus of extant Stoic texts and commentaries,

remains hypothetical at best. For a succinct account of the Stoic view of signs andmeaning, see Andreas Graeser, "The Stoic Theory of Meaning," inThe Stoics,ed.John M. Rist (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. 77-100.

9. On the Peircean interpretant and unlimited semiosis, see UmbertoEco,A TheoryofSemiotics(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 68-72. One of the clearestand most concise introductions to Peirce's theory of the sign remains David Savan's

An Introduction to CS. Peirce'sSemiotics,Part 1 (Toronto: Toronto Semiotic CircleMonographs, Working Papers and Prepublications, 1976).

10. UmbertoEco,A Theoryof Semiotics,pp.71,61.

11. I am of course summarizing Derrida's well-known argument in "Structure, Sign,

and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writingand Difference,tr.Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278-293.

12. Semiotics andthePhilosophyof Language,pp. 46-86.

13. Jacques Derrida,Positions, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981),p.19.

14. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of ChicagoPress,1981), p. 193. For further deconstructive explorations of the logic of mimesis,see also Derrida's "Economimesis," Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's "Typographie,"and Jean-Luc Nancy's "Le Ventriloque," inMimesis des articulations(Paris: Flammarion, 1975), pp.57-93,167-270, and 273-338, and Lacoue-Labarthe's L Imitation

des modernes(Paris: Galile, 1986).

15. See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari,LAnti-Oedipe (Paris; Minuit,1972) andMille plateaux(Paris: Minuit, 1980); Julia Kristeva,La Rvolution du langagepotique (Paris: Seuil, 1974); and Michel de Certeau,Artsdefaire: l'inventiondu quotidien, 1(Paris: 10/18,1980).

16. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," tr. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, inArt After Modernism: Rethinking Representation,ed. Brian Wallis (New York: NewMuseum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 254.

17. Hal Foster, ed.,The Anti-Aesthetic(Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), p. xi.

Mimesis in Contemporary Theory. Introducción

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