From mimesis as difference to control of the imaginary

This article traces the reflections of Luiz Costa Lima regarding the interests which during the Renaissance sustained the translation of Greek mimesis as imitatio. To answer this question, the author analyzes the moment in which the relationship between world and language become problematic, coinciding with the passage of the word magico-religious to the word dialogue of the polis in ancient Greece. Costa Lima presents the debate on mimesis and returns to the Greeks the force of the concept which perhaps not necessarily there, became reduced to poetic discourse or simply to imitation. Through Costa Lima's concept of mimesis as engenderer of difference, we seek to understand the potentiality and the dangers of the imaginary when, in the modern world, the scholastic armour must live alongside other representational possibilities and interpretations of human actions. The translation of mimesis as imitatio and its mainspring: verisimilitude, according to Costa Lima, was a way to guarantee that mimetic imagination, with its potential for ambiguity and illusion, come to occupy the lowest scale of knowledge. The legitimacy of the poetic linked to the forms canonized by the Renaissance reading of ancient text guaranteed control of the imaginary