Like Unlike : Mimesis, Montage, Mimicry

Among the contemporary image theorists, perhaps nobody more intensely than Georges Didi-Huberman has explored the implications – both historical and categorial – of similarity and resemblance for the discourses on the so-called iconosphere. Throughout his impressive corpus of writings – from his first book Inventions de l’hystérie to the recent volumes of the series L’œil de l’histoire – Didi-Huberman has incessantly questioned the ambiguities and fragilities of the notion of the similar, offering us at the same time a very wide range of case-studies in which the concept of resemblance has been tested to prove its extreme resistance. In my paper I will try to give first a general outline of the major implications of a theory of resemblance in the aesthetic and aesthesic domain (briefly recalling the paradigmatic positions of Plato, Aristotle, Peirce, Goodman). With the theoretical tools obtained through such a path, I will then specifically focus on Didi-Huberman’s works, aiming at identifying three main directions in his discussion on similarity and resemblance: a) the critical analysis of the notion of mimetic imitation within the art-historical discourse (relation “image-real referent” in the theory of representation); b) the theory and practice of montage (relation “image-image” in the theory of comparison), and its possible justifications; c) the extreme cases of mimicry and camouflage (relation “organism-environment”, becoming the difference “figure-background” in the theory of perception), which radicalize the concept of representation to such an extent to make it definitively collapse. As we will see, this third case will make explicit the oxymoronic tension, within the Platonic tradition itself, between, on one side, the reductive definition of resemblance in terms of mimetic copy (Republic X) and, on the other side, the much more flexible notion of likeness admitted in the Parmenides: a tension which does not cease to interrogate the contemporary reflection on the constellation of concepts such as likeness/unlikeness, similarity/dissimilarity, resemblance/dissemblance.