Vita mimica. Etica e linguaggio dei mimi

A good number of sources inform us that the literary form of the Platonic dialogues could descend from the so-called “Mimes” of Sophron. According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato would have taken from the Syracusan poet the ways of portraying dialogical characters (ethopioiein). However, the relationship between mime and philosophy seems not to be confined to the Platonic poetics. It becomes explicit from Seneca, which understands human beings as a performance of a mime (mimus vitae). The life is a mime, and the mime allows life to take her natural course.  In recent times, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben have suggested that a mime retain the paradigm of a new ethical and political theory whose elaboration would be the task of coming generations. Nevertheless, a philosophical treatise on the mime still remains unwritten. Our study aims to discuss the hypothesis that philosophy, in this hitherto neglected relationship with the mime, has preserved the possibility to jointly thinking ethical and ontological traits. What is a mime, and what kind of ethics does it retain?