Mimesis and

Representation

For contemporary philosophy, representation is a great culprit. Some

philosophers even speak of a representative illusion, just as Kant
spoke of a transcendental illusion. This representative illusion alleg-
edly stems from the impossible claim of uniting the inferiority of a
mental image in the mind and the exteriority of something real that
would govern from outside the play of the mental scene within a
single entity or 'representation/ The illusory nature of this claim is
said to be even clearer if one says that the interior presence and the
exterior presence can be made present to each other through some
process of adequation which would define the truth of the represen-
tation. Representation, accordingly, it is said, should be denounced
as the reduplication of presence, as the re-presenting of presence.
My project will be to try to extricate representation from the
impasse to which it has been relegated, to return it to its field of play,
without, however, in any way weakening the critique I have just
mentioned. I shall attempt to do this by tying its fate to that of the
term mimesis, which seems to me less shut-in, less locked-up, and
richer in polysemy, hence more mobile and more mobilizing for a
sortie out of the representative illusion.
I do not think I am being arbitrary in giving myself the right to
appeal to a mimetic opening to the closure of representation. After
all, Erich Auerbach gave his important post-war book, Mimesis, the
subtitle: 'The Representation of Reality in Western Literature/ And
just recently, several intrepid French translators of Aristotle's Poetics
have not hesitated in translating his term mimesis by the term
'representation.'
What polysemic resources does mimesis have that may assist us in
emigrating from the closure oftorepresentation?
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by the Aristotelian use of the term in relation to the Platonic one is

already instructive. As is well known, Plato made an almost unlim-
ited use of this word and particularly one that is easily interpreted in
terms of a redoubled presence, works of art and of language being
taken for weakened copies of things, whereas the things themselves
borrow whatever tenor of meaning they have from their intelligible
models, the Ideas. In Aristotle, there is a twofold rupture with this
usage. On the one hand, for Aristotle mimesis takes place only within the
area of human action, or production, or poiesis. It is an operation, as is
indicated by the -sis ending that it shares with poiesis and with some
other terms that we shall consider below. Accordingly, for Aristotle,
there is mimesis only where there is poiesis. On the other hand, far
from producing a weakened image of pre-existing things, mimesis
brings about an augmentation of meaning in the field of action,
which is its privileged field. It does not equate itself with something
already given. Rather it produces what it imitates, if we continue to
translate mimesis by 'imitation.' This idea of a creative imitation will
be the central concern of my whole discussion that follows.
At the same time, this double break in the use of mimesis between
Plato and Aristotle offers a particularly noteworthy example of an
early fissuring of the specular model of representation. This muta-
tion in the meaning of the term mimesis is linked to its being applied
just to works of art and to its privileged application to such verbal
arts as Greek epic, tragedy, and comedy; that is, to those modes of
discourse which today we discuss in terms of the theory of narrative.
Within this one micro-universe of discourse, mimesis is the mimesis
of an action, and what makes such imitating a poiesis, i.e., a produc-
tive activity, is the activity of arranging incidents into a plot: the
activity of emplotment that Aristotle calls mythos. Here, too, Aris-
totle displaced the meaning of another Greek word, a pre-Platonic
one this time. He uses the term mythos strictly - at least in the Poetics
- to designate the working of mimesis, that is, the act of composing,
bringing together, and arranging the incidents into a unique and
complete action. Thus, chapter six of the Poetics defines mythos as
synthesis tdn pragmdton, the arrangement of the incidents.
Our problem has now become more precise: how is it possible that
the activity of emplotment constitutes at the same time the imitation
of an action? In other words, how may we bring together mythos and
mimesis, where mythos is the synthesis of incidents into one story
and mimesis is the imitation of action? At least one negative response
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may already be set aside. It cannot be a question of imitation as a

copy, reflection, replica, or however one might wish to state it. The
poet imitates or represents to the extent that he or she is a maker, a
composer of plots. The three terms poiesis, sustasis (which can be
substituted for mythos], and mimesis thus form a chain that has to do
with praxis, where each term must be understood in terms of its
relations to the others.
Once removed from the enchanted precincts of re-presented pres-
ence, mimesis may deploy for us, on the level of the modern theory of
narrative, a range of meaning liberated from the representative
illusion by its being qualified in terms of praxis. I would like to sug-
gest that we attempt to articulate this polysemy of mimesis in terms
of three moments, which I shall playfully, yet seriously, call mimesis^
mimesis'2, and mimesisr The pivot term is obviously mimesis2 -1 mean
the stage issuing from the split mimesis brings about within the em-
pire of poiesis, a term that, as we have seen, covers all artificial
fabrication and production. Word artisans, I shall say, do not produce
things but just quasi things. They invent the 'as if.' In this median
sense, the term mimesis is the emblem of that split [decrochage] that
opens up the world of fiction, or, to use current vocabulary, that
institutes the literariness of the literary work. Aristotle ratifies this
pivotal sense when he says, 'the plot is the imitation of the action.'
I in no way propose to eliminate this interpretation of mimesis as a
kind of simulacre, something 'quasi,' or 'as if.' For here is the birth of
the world of fiction, in the sense precisely that fiction isfingere, to feign
and figure, or better configure, if we keep in mind the operation of
composing - of the sustasis of - poetic discourse. My proposal is
rather to frame this leap into fiction with the two operations I am
calling mimesisl and mimesis2, which constitute, so to speak, the up-
stream and the downstream sides [I'amont et Vavcd} of mimesis as fic-
tion. By so doing, I propose to show that mimesis2 gets its intelligibility
from its mediating function, which is to lead the text from one side to
the other, to transfigure the one side into the other by its configurating
power.
In this, my enterprise differs from what many theoreticians of the
text call textural semiotics. In my opinion, these theoreticians build
upon an abstraction, that ofmimesis2, by considering only the inter-
nal laws of the literary work. It is the task of hermeneutics, on the
contrary, to reconstruct the set of operations by means of which a
work arises from the opaque depths of living, acting, and suffering, to
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be given by an author to readers who receive it and thereby change

their own actions. For a semiotic theory that abstracts from this
whole span of meaning, the work is constituted as an interior that
alone is relevant, while the two sides are the irrelevant exterior. The
antecedent side of fiction is referred to as merely the psychobiography
of the author, while the second side is taken as merely the psycho-
sociology of the reception of literary works. For this kind of textual
semiotics, in other words, the only remaining operative concept is
that of the literary text. For hermeneutics, on the contrary, which
seeks to reconstruct the whole arc of operations by which practical
experience is turned into works, authors, and readers, there is neither
an inside nor an outside to the work - the distinction of inside and
outside being a methodological artefact - instead, there is a concrete
process in which the textual configuration conjoins the practical
prefiguration and the practical transfiguration.
As a corollary to this, at the end of our analysis the reader will
appear as that operator par excellence who takes up the unity of the
whole traversal from mimesis\ to mimesis^ by way of mimesis^ through
his or her doing something: reading.

Mimesis1

Let us therefore begin by considering mimesisr Why should we claim

that understanding mimesis2 requires a side of the text that is already
a form of mimesis'? To see why, let us return to Aristotle's key ex-
pression which says that the poem is the imitation of action. He
makes this more specific by adding that it is not so much a question of
an imitation of human beings acting, as it is of their action, as such, in
so far as it leads to good or bad fortune. It is this acting that implies
the 'characters' of this or that quality and the 'thoughts' which are
given an appropriate language. Now the simple mentioning of an
action brings into play the pre-understanding common to the poet
and his or her public of what action, or rather acting, signifies. It is
this familiarity, this prior acquaintance with the order of action that,
by way of the mediation of fiction, will be intensified, magnified, and,
in the strong sense of the word, transfigured.
It should not be objected that there is nothing to be said about this
pre-understanding because it lacks form, structure, and meaning.
Instead, allow me to call our attention to three major traits of what I

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Mimesis and Representation 141

have just called the order of action, traits which we have always
already understood when we enter a fiction.
The first trait is that the intelligibility engendered by emplotment
finds its first anchorage in our competence for using in intelligible
ways such terms as project and intention, motive and reason for
action, circumstance, obstacle and occasion, agent and capacity to do
something, interaction, adversary and helper, conflict and co-opera-
tion, amelioration and deterioration, success and failure, happiness
and misfortune. All these terms mutually signify one another. To use
any one of them in an appropriate way implies having mastered the
whole network of practical categories by means of which the seman-
tics of action is distinguished from that of physical movement and
even from psychophysiological behaviour. This knowing how to do
something constitutes a 'repertory' common to the writer and his or
her reader, and it inaugurates between them a community of mean-
ing preliminary to any entering into fiction. This repertory attests to
the fact that the condition of action and suffering, far from being
ineffable, is always already understood.
A second trait allows us to understand what it is about such doing
something, such being able to do something, and such knowing how
to do something that makes possible, and even perhaps calls for, the
transposition into fiction. If human action can be recounted and
poeticized, in other words, it is due to the fact that it is always
articulated by signs, rules, and norms. To use a phrase from Clifford
Geertz, human action is always symbolically mediated. An inten-
tional activity of poetic representation can be grafted to these sym-
bolic mediations because they already confer a basic readability on
action. To understand a rite, for example, is to be capable of tying
together the structured set of conventions thanks to which a gesture
of the hand, say, counts as a salutation, a benediction, or a supplica-
tion. In this sense, symbols sometimes function as rules for interpret-
ing action. So, before being themselves submitted to interpretation,
symbols are sometimes interpretants - to use C.S. Peirce's term -
internal to human action. Properly representative symbols are added
to such constitutive symbols to augment their readability.
The third trait brings us up to the confines of fiction. The pre-
understanding of the order of action has temporal characteristics
upon which the narrative time proper to fiction grafts its own con-
figurations. Stephen Crites has even spoken in this regard of a

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'narrative quality of experience.' And, in the last chapter of

Heidegger's Being and Time, we find a phenomenological descrip-
tion of the first threshold that such temporality - even though still
inauthentic temporarily - crosses in going beyond the simple succes-
sion of 'nows' that characterizes the vulgar representation of linear
time. Without reaching the depths of the abyss of mortal time, this
time, which is the time of works and days, is the time with which we
count and measure, and we can measure only because we can first
reckon with it. It is the time for doing this or that, the time that can be
won or lost. In a word, it is the time 'in' which we live and act.
I have said that this temporal trait illumines the transition from
mimesisl to mimesisr It might be objected that it already expresses
the structuring action of narrative time on lived experience. Never-
theless, I shall maintain, without fearing the apparently vicious circle
involved, the thesis of a narrative or pre-narrative quality of experi-
ence as such. As evidence of this, I would like to refer to some
important forms of experience whose point is preserved in our
ordinary language. For example, we speak of a life story, as though
life were a story in search of a narrator. In the same way, Hannah
Arendt, in her magnificent work The Human Condition, distin-
guished action, properly speaking, from labour and from work by
means of the fact that action is what calls for narration, as though any
action worthy of the title expects no other confirmation than fame
and glory. Similarly, we speak of stories we are caught up in or
entangled in, and which we find it difficult to relate. Here I am
thinking of the fine title of a book by Wilhelm Schapp: In Geschichten
verstrickt. From such 'being implicated' in stories that happen to us
emerge from the depths of our lives the stories we tell. Whatever
may be the status of these stories which somehow are prior to the
narration we may give them, our mere use of the word 'story' (taken
in this pre-narrative sense) testifies to our pre-understanding that
action is human to the extent it characterizes a life story that deserves
to be told.
Mimesis^ is this pre-understanding of what human action is, of its
semantics, its symbolism, its temporality. From this pre-understand-
ing which is common to poets and their readers arises fiction, and
with fiction comes the second form of mimesis which is textual and liter-
ary. It is true that under the rule of fiction the pre-understanding of
the world of action withdraws to the rank of being a 'repertory,' to
speak as W. Iser does in his The Act of Reading, or to the rank of
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'mention' as opposed to 'use,' to use another terminology more

familiar to analytic philosophy. But it remains true that despite the
break [coupure] it introduces, fiction would never be understandable
if it did not configurate what is already figured in human action.

Mimesis2
With mimesis2 we enter the field where modern poetics and semiotics
apply. In part, but only in part, these prolong Aristotle's poetic
theory. For him poets and poems imitate action only on the condition
that they configure it according to specific rules of emplotment. Only
in invented plots do such-and-such actions count as a beginning, a
middle, or an end. Only in such plots does contingency count as
peripeteia, or a reversal of fortune. Only in such plots does some new
surprise count as recognition, or does this or that frightening or
pitiable incident count as a complication of the plot, while still others
count as its denouement. Mimesis, at this stage, signifies the produc-
tion of a quasi world of action through the activity of emplotment.
Far from being an effigy or a replica of action, this emplotment is its
intelligible schema [epure]. It imitates in that it is intelligible.
But what intelligibility is involved at this level of fiction? The
possibility or impossibility of traversing our three stages of mimesis
in a single movement depends on our answer to this question.
Modern semiotics offers one type of answer which rests solely on
isolating the text. It does so for good reasons. Thanks to writing, and
also thanks to emplotment, the narrative text acquires a semantic
autonomy that cuts it off in three ways: first, from the presumed
intention of its author; second, from the capacity of its first audience
to receive it; third, from the socio-cultural conditions of its genesis.
Mimesis2 is the emblem of this triple autonomy. In turn, this semantic
autonomy engenders a profound alteration in the process of com-
munication, as has been described by Roman Jakobson - an alter-
ation that provides the step to what Jakobson calls the 'poetic
function' at the expense of the 'referential' one, where the poetic
function in the broad sense of this term means accentuating the
message 'for its own sake.' Whereas ordinary language and scientific
language depend on the extralinguistic reality that they describe, the
poetic function suspends this concern for an external reference and
turns language back on itself in order to celebrate itself, to use one of
Roland Barthes's apt expressions. To accentuate this cutting function
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of mimesis2 following modern semiotics, we might say that the se-

mantic autonomy of the text and the poetic nature of language
turned in upon itself engender a new type of relation between texts,
an intertextuality which serves to cut fiction off from the world of
actual action, in such a way that texts, in completing, correcting,
quoting, and crossing out one another, form a closed chain, a library
[bibliotheque] in the precise sense of this term. It follows, then, that
the fiction of action, far from evaporating like a fleeting dream, takes
on the consistency of a distinct universe, the literary universe.
Then, too, the distinction between outside and inside returns in
force. Yet semioticians believe they have given up the representative
illusion by having constituted the text as an inside without an outside,
or rather as an inside whose outside (be it author, audience, or socio-
cultural circumstances) has become irrelevant. The referent of the
text has become a function of the text. Within the narrative field, it is
the narrated story as narrated and nothing more. Just as we can
speak of an implied author or an implied audience, we must speak of
a referential field implied by the text, which is sometimes called the
'world'of the text.
Having said this, we may again take up our question stemming
from Aristotle's Poetics: If the plot is an intelligible schema of action,
what intellegibility is involved?
Here, it seems to me, contemporary semiotics or poetics does not
give the appropriate answer. The rationality of its models -1 have in
mind Greimas's narrative semiotics - to my mind provides only a
simulation of the basic intelligibility preliminary to the activity of
emplotment. This intelligibility is closer to the practical reasoning
that Aristotle called phronesis than to the logical reasoning that may
be ascribed to theoretical thinking. It is the shift from the practical
understanding to which emplotment pertains to the theoretical
rationality which the 'logic of possible narratives' advocates that
requires the shift from the surface of the text towards its deep syntax.
This deep syntax is what governs the narrative codes that may be
constructed on the basis of logical requirements that are as indepen-
dent as possible of the surface narrative chronology. The transfor-
mative algorithms for moving from an initial state of affairs to a
terminal one that preside over such a narrative logic are well known.
Greimas, for example, holds that all the discursive operations of
narrativity, that is, the transformative algorithms that lead from an
initial state of affairs to a terminal one, can be engendered beginning
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from the relations of contrariety, contradiction, and supposition

inscribed upon his famous 'semiotic square.' Every transformation,
every interlinking of action segments, every conflict between narra-
tive programs, and every transference of a valuable object are con-
tained ideally in the one great topography that follows the semiotic
square's lines of force, to the point of bringing them back to their
starting-point and closing the square.
Hermeneutics, which I referred to earlier, is in no way opposed to
this enterprise with its laws, its restrictions, its rigour, and its fecundity
for research. It adds nothing to it. And it has nothing to teach it.
What it does do is to interrogate the conditions of intelligibility of the
rational process that presides over the whole process. It shows that
semiotic rationality actually produces a new text, one constituted by
the narrative codes inscribed in a new form of writing where the
concrete narratives are taken to be only a manifestation of this new
text. This new text does have its readers, but they are readers of
codes rather than of messages; readers for whom the message is
significant only as a 'display' of its immanent code. For these code
readers, mimesis is not just the emblem of the text's semantic au-
tonomy and its corollary intertextuality, but also the emblem of the
reversal that submits the level of manifestation to that of imma-
nence.
My thesis here is that this rationalizing operation stands in a
parasitic relation to that first-order intelligibility which alone is ca-
pable of mediating between the two sides of the text. It is this form of
intelligibility, this comprehending of narrative configurations, that I
should like to describe now in terms of the mediation between the
prefiguration of the world of action and its transfiguration - in other
words, in terms of the mediation between mimesis1 andmimesis3.
To convey some idea of this ordering comprehension upon which
the semiotician's codifying rationality is constructed as a metalan-
guage, I shall return to some of the traits of the plot, or rather of
emplotment, in an Aristotelian perspective. These are those traits
that give the initial intelligibility to the surface of the text which the
semiotician then tries to reconstruct in terms of the requirements of
another logical order.
The first one is that emplotment is an operation about which we
may say equivalently either that it draws an intelligible story from
the various events or incidents (what Aristotle calls thepragmata) or
that it makes these events or incidents into a story. The reciprocal
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prepositions 'from' and 'into' characterize the plot as mediating

between the events and the told story. An event, accordingly, must be
more than a singular occurrence. It is qualified as an event by its
contribution to the progression of the plot. A story, on the other
hand, must be more than an enumeration of events in a series. It has
to organize them into an intelligible whole.
Second, emplotment brings together such heterogeneous factors
as circumstances, agents, interactions, ends, means, and unintended
results. From this composition we get a synthetic comprehension in
the act of 'following a story,' or better, in the act of retelling a story,
to the extent that, in this second situation, we are less prey to the
unexpected and more attentive to the way, as Marx would have put
it, human beings make their history in circumstances they them-
selves have not made, and -1 would add - with results they had not
intended.
Third, emplotment mediates, from another point of view, the
temporality proper to poetic composition. This temporality inter-
weaves two temporal components: on the one hand, the pure, dis-
crete, and interminable succession of what we may call the story's
incidents; on the other hand, the aspect of integration, culmination,
and closure brought about by what Louis O. Mink calls the act of
narrative configuration. This act consists in 'grasping together' the
details, or what we have called the incidents, of the story. From these
diverse events it draws the unity of one temporal whole. We cannot
overemphasize the kinship between this 'grasping together' proper
to the configurating act and Kant's presentation of the operation of
judging, where the transcendental meaning of a judgment consists
not so much in joining a subject and a predicate as in placing some
intuitive manifold under one concept.
This configurating act entails two other new traits which defini-
tively mark the gap between the ordering comprehension at work in
narrative composition and the codifying rationality proper to narra-
tive semiotics. Still in a Kantian vein, we should not even hesitate in
ascribing the configurating act to the productive imagination. This
should be understood as a transcendental, not a psychological func-
tion. This productive imagination is not without its own rules and it
lends itself to the type of typology of emplotment used by Northrop
Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism. This typology of emplotment can-
not be derived from a logic of narrative possibilities which has to be
ascribed to a second-degree form of rationalization. The typology of
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emplotment arises rather from a schematism of the narrative func-

tion from which derives the categorical order semioticians use in
their constructions, with the help of a logic that is unaware of the
transcendental genesis of this schematism of emplotment.
In its turn, this schematism - and this will be the last trait with
which I shall characterize narrative comprehension - does not share
the atemporality of the logical and syntactical laws which the
semioticians appeal to. Instead, this schematism is constituted within
a history, a history that has all the characteristics of a tradition. By this,
I do not mean the inert transmission of some dead deposit but the
living transmission of an innovation that is always capable of being
reactivated through a return to the most creative moments of poetic
making.
This phenomenon of traditionally illumines the functioning of the
narrative paradigms. Through the interplay of innovation and sedi-
mentation, the production of individual works is revealed to be a
much more complex phenomenon than the simple manifestation of a
deep grammar indifferent to history. The paradigms that constitute a
typology of emplotment - or, as we put it, of its schematism - have
issued from a sedimented history whose genesis has been obliter-
ated. This is why individual works can enter into a variable relation
to these paradigms. The range of solutions is deployed between the
two poles of servile repetition and calculated deviance, passing
through all the degrees of systematic deformation. Folktales, myths,
and traditional narratives in general stand close to the pole of rep-
etition. This is why they constitute the privileged kingdom of struc-
turalism. In the metalanguage of semiotics they can be reduced
without excessive violence to the simple manifestation of the deep
grammar constructed by the semiotician. But as soon as we move
beyond such traditional narrative, deviance and a gap or separation
become the rule. Thus the contemporary novel, for example, may in
large part be defined as an anti-novel to the extent that disputing the
paradigms prevails over simply varying their application.
This play with the constraints of the paradigms is what provides
emplotment with its historicity. As a background to such play, the
combining of sedimentation and invention defines traditionally, as
such, on the basis of which we obey the models or experiment with
them.
Such is the realm of mimesis2 between the antecedence and the
descendance of the text. At this level mimesis may be defined as the
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configuration of action. This configuration is governed by a sche-

matization that is historically structured in a tradition or traditions,
and it is expressed in individual works which stand in varying rela-
tions to the constraints generated by this schematism.

Mimesis^

Now I should like to show how mimesis^ when led back to its first-
order intelligibility, requires as its complement a third stage which
also is worthy of being called mimesis.
This stage corresponds to what Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his
philosophical hermeneutics, calls 'application.' And Aristotle him-
self suggests this third sense of mimesis its praxeos at various places
in his Poetics, although he is less concerned with the audience there
than in his Rhetoric, where the theory of persuasion is entirely gov-
erned by the capacity of being received by the audience. Still, when
he says that poetry 'teaches' the universal, that tragedy 'arouses pity
and fear, effecting the proper purgation of these emotions, 'or even
when he refers to the pleasure we take in seeing frightening or
pitiable incidents which lead to that reversal of fortune that makes a
tragedy, he indicates that it is in the audience or the reader that the
process [parcours] of mimesis ends.
Generalizing beyond Aristotle, I shall say that mimesis^ marks the
intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or
reader. Therefore it is the intersection of the world unfolded by
fiction and the world wherein actual action unfolds.
Some may be tempted to refuse the problem, to hold the question
of literature's impact on life as irrelevant. But then, paradoxically, on
the one hand, we ratify the positivism we ordinarily struggle against -
that is, the prejudgment that the real is the given, such as it can be
empirically observed and scientifically described - and, on the other
hand, we lock literature up in a world in itself and when it breaks out
as subversion, it turns against the moral and social order. We forget
that fiction is precisely what makes language that supreme 'danger,'
about which Walter Benjamin spoke with such awe and admiration,
following Holderin.
Now the intersection between the configured world of the plot and
the transfigured world of the reader constitutes in itself a very
complex problematic. This is due first of all to the diversity of its
modalities. A whole range of cases is open, running from ideological
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confirmation of the established order, as in official art, to social

criticism, and even to derision for everything 'real/ Even the case of
extreme alienation from the 'real' is another such intersection.
Next, the shock of the possible, which is not a lesser shock than is
the shock of the 'real,' is required by the internal interplay within
works between the received paradigms and the production of gaps
by the deviance of individual works. In this sense, narrative literature
models practical efficacity by its gaps as well as by its paradigms.
So we may take up again each of the three traits by means of which
I characterized the pre-understanding of action: the network of
intersignifications among practical categories, its immanent sym-
bolic system, and above all its properly practical temporality. I shall
say that each of these traits is intensified, that it is 'iconically augmented.'
I shall not dwell upon the first two traits. The intersignification
among projects, circumstances, and chance is precisely what is put in
order by the plot in so far as we have described it as a synthesis of
what is heterogenous. As for the symbolization internal to action, we
may say that it is exactly this that is resymbolized or desymbolized
(or resymbolized through desymbolization) thanks to the schematism
which is, in turn, traditionalized and subverted by the historicity of
the paradigms. Most of all, however, it is the time of action that is
transfigured through emplotment. In this regard, we ought to con-
front Augustine's analysis of experienced time - the distentio animi,
the inner stretching out of the present - with the order inherent in
emplotment. We would then see this order by turns denying then
intensifying the distentio animi, without ever letting it come to rest.
But even today when Joyce or Robbe-Grillet or Marguerite Duras
mixes together all the ways of time, it is still always a more refined, a
more unmade and remade, modelling that produces the narrative.
And in this regard the paradox is that art skirts its own death
whenever its systematic subversion of paradigms leads the work of
art, by way of a resolute use of rule-governed deformations, to the
repetition of the alleged fragmentation of our modern sense of time.
Frank Kermode refers to this limit, which is doubtless never fully
attained, in his The Sense of an Ending. It would be the case where
the dissolution of every paradigm would lead to a situation that is no
longer one of rule-governed deviance but rather of systematic schism,
one where no schematization any longer appears to be at work. But
at least we can say that the work iconically augments the distentio
animi itself by making it over-signifying [sur-significant]. This again is
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150 A Ricoeur Reader

a limit case of temporal modelling, but perhaps it is then, as I shall

suggest in a moment, that the reader is invited to do the work that the
artist delights in undoing.
If, therefore, we accept, as I think we must, the problematic of the
reception of a work as an integral part of the constitution of its
meaning, the question arises how we are to understand this final
stage of mimesis and how we are to link it to the second one. This is
where the pitfalls of representation are the most redoubtable and
where the science of semiotics is least helpful to us. On the one side,
we may be tempted to look at the 'teaching of the universal' as a
description of what human action already essentially is. We then
come back to the 'imitation copy' at a higher degree of subtlety. It is
no longer what is accidental to action that is re-presented or made
present anew but what is essential. I would like to show that my
reinterpretation of mimesis2 as a structuring operation or as a
configurating act allows us both to escape this impasse of re-presen-
tation and to think of the passage from mimesis\ to mimesis^ by way
of mimesis2 as one continuous operation.
To do this, we must cling to the language of praxis from one end to
the other in order to escape the representative illusion. Mimesis is an
action about action. What it prefigures in the first stage and config-
ures in the second, it transfigures in the third. To transfigure is still to
do something. To use the language of Nelson Goodman's Languages
of Art, works of literature ceaselessly make and remake our world of
action - the first chapter of this book is entitled 'Reality Remade.'
Goodman also offers this maxim: think of works in terms of worlds,
worlds in terms of works.
Using another language, I shall say that the transformation of
action proceeds from what Francois Dagognet, in speaking of paint-
ing and writing, calls 'iconic augmentation,' by means of which the
world signifies something more and does so in another manner. This
transfiguration is the return on the prefiguration we spoke of in
discussing mimesisr What is thereby iconically augmented is the
preliminary readability that action owes to the interpretants that are
already at work in it. Human action can be oversignified because it is
already pre-signified by all the modalities of its symbolic articulation.
In an earlier work I said that poetry redescribes the world through
its plot or mythos. Today, in order to distance myself from the repre-
sentative illusion, I shall say that poetic making resignifies the world

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Mimesis and Representation 151

to the extent that recounting or narrating remakes action following

the poem's invitation.
But how are we to overcome the constantly reborn and apparently
invincible exteriority between the inside of fiction and the outside of
life? There is just one way - dissolve the opposition between inside
and outside, which itself arises from the representative illusion. We
must stop seeing the text as its own interior and life as exterior to it.
Instead we must accompany that structuring operation that begins in
life, is invested in the text, then returns to life.
To do this, we must balance the autarchy of a theory of writing
through a theory of reading and understand that the operating
[operativite] of writing is fulfilled in the operating of reading. Indeed,
it is the reader - or rather the act of reading - that, in the final
analysis, is the unique operator of the unceasing passage from mi-
mesis\ to mimesis^ through mimesisr That is, from a prefigured world
to a transfigured world through the mediation of a configured world.
This fulfilment of writing in reading is understandable only if we
articulate the act of reading on the basis of the structuring activity of
emplotment and not on the metalanguage of codifying rationality.
The subordination we have proposed of semiotic rationality which
thinks in terms of codes to narrative intelligibility centred on
emplotment, schematization, and traditionally may contribute to
our better hearing this connection of reading and writing.
The act of reading is what accompanies the configuration of the
narrative and what actualizes its capacity for being followed. To
follow a story is to actualize it by reading it.
And if emplotment can be described as an act of judgment and as
an act of the productive imagination, as I have suggested, this occurs
inasmuch as this act is the conjoint work of the text and its reader, just
as Aristotle said that sensation is the common work of sensing and
what is sensed.
It is also the act of reading that accompanies the interplay of
innovation and sedimentation of the paradigms that schematize
emplotment. In the act of reading, the recipient plays with the
narrative constraints, brings about deviations, takes part in the fight
between the novel and the anti-novel, and feels that pleasure Roland
Barthes called the pleasure of the text.
Finally, it is the reader who completes the work in so far as,
following Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser, we say the written

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152 A Ricoeur Reader

work is a sketch for the reader. Indeed, the written text may involve
holes, lacunae, and indeterminate zones which, as in Joyce's Ulysses,
defy the reader's capacity to configure the work which the author
seemingly finds a mischievous pleasure in defiguring. In this extreme
case, it is the reader, whom the work almost abandons, who bears the
burden of emplotment.
So I maintain that the act of reading is that operation that conjoins
mimesis^ to mimesisl through mimesisr It is the final vector of the
transfiguration of the world of action in terms of fiction.
To end this brief traversal of mimesis, I would like to raise the fol-
lowing questions and suggestions for further discussion.

1 / Can we keep the classical concept of reference - which I have

forbidden myself using until now - for speaking about the transfigur-
ing action of mimesisl Not if we take it in the sense of descriptive
reference. But yes if we admit that mimesis^ splits open descriptive
reference and suggests that we forge the notion of a non-descriptive
referential dimension. In that case, we must dare to form the para-
doxical idea of a productive form of reference. The advantage of this
paradox - which also has its drawbacks - is that it allows us to give
the notion of reference its full amplitude. It also allows us to affirm as
vehemently as possible that, in the final analysis, all discourse is
about... In other words, language never exists just for itself. Even
when it seems to withdraw into itself, it still celebrates what it lifts
above its confines.
2 / This shaking or breaking open of reference's claim to univocity
has another effect as its corollary. It also affects our concept of the
real. Earlier I also avoided as much as I could expressions such as the
real or irreal world. I preferred to use, instead, the notion of efficacity,
of effective action, keeping in mind one sense of the German term
Wirklich, which is related to the verb wirken. However must we say
that, at the stage of mimesis^ the poem still imitates real action? Not
if real means already there and available. But yes if real means that
human action is 'effectively' refigured through the fact of being
configured. Then the word real denotes the effectiveness of 'danger-
ous' speech, as when Soizhenitsyn's telling the story of the Gulag
shatters our conventional view of death and life, of hatred and love;
as when we say that the Word dwelt among us, was with us, and we
did not receive him.
This point once again makes us feel the force of attraction
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Mimesis and Representation 153

exercised on all our thinking by representation understood as re-

presented presence. But it is also at this point that the interpretation
of mimesis in terms of praxis resists most. According to this interpre-
tation, the real is everything already prefigured that is also transfig-
ured. The thought effort required here is considerable. We might
even go so far as to say that for thinking there is a vanishing-point
where invention and discovery can no longer be separated. And it is
vain therefore to ask whether the universal that poetry 'teaches/
according to Aristotle, already existed before it was invented. It is as
much found as invented. And once invented, it is recognized as that
which, in one way or another, had to be brought to language. It is this
kind of requirement in what must be said that torments and some-
times even tortures the artist.
3 / My last question - or at least one more question - is whether we
can still speak of truth at the level ofmimesisr This question is even
more redoubtable than those regarding reference and the real. Nelson
Goodman, for example, holds that reference occurs wherever a
symbolic system contributes to the making of a world. But he rejects
the term truth as part of his theoretical language, admitting only
'rightness' and 'fitness/ He thereby thinks he can account for the
artist's conviction that one way of 'rendering' the world is better than
another. But why should we not say that the univocity of truth is also
exploded by mimesis - to the point that it indicates this fitness, this
appropriateness? Is it not the model of truth as adequation, the
accomplice of the representative illusion, that blocks our way? I do
admit, however, that we lack a sufficiently multivocal concept of
truth, one that would fuse, at its margins, with the concept of right-
ness. It is not even certain that Heidegger's substitution of truth as
manifestation for truth as adequation responds to what mimesis
demands of our thinking about truth. For is it still a matter of
manifestation, there where there is a fitting production?
Mimesis, in this sense, is ahead of our concepts of reference, the
real, and truth. It thus engenders a need as yet unfilled to think more.
This is why I shall limit myself to a more modest conclusion, one that
I shall express in terms of a wish. It is the wish that my deploying the
meaning of mimesis be credited to representation's account; the wish
that the concept of representation, upon which converge philosophy's
most serious attempts to question itself, rediscovers, in turn, the
polysemy and mobility that will make it available for new adventures
of thinking.
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154 A Ricoeur Reader

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Mimesis and Representation 155

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