Semiosis and mimesis

Mimesis quite often serves as a means of communication between people or animals, and it should be compared with another form of communication, grounded not upon imitation but upon exchange of signs. The very notion of mimesis should be revised in order to re-place the mimesis of representation (artistic or not) by a mimesis of communication which takes place not between two objects (original and copy) but between two or more subjects (independent partners). Mimetic communication differs from the semiotic one by 1) its close, and not distant pragmatics, including in certain cases an im-mediate corporeal contact between partners or even an “excessive mimesis”, that is their identification, 2) a continuous syntactics of its messages, modelled in an analogous rather than in a digital way,3) a prevalence of energy over information in its semantics. These differences may be partly explained through the categories of exempli-fication and denotation, distinguished in analytical philosophy. Although mimesis of communication has not necessarily an aesthetic purpose, it can be observed in literary texts too, combining and making alternate semiotic and mimetic segments and effects.