After the ancient concept of mimesis was set aside by modern genius aesthetics around 1800, it regained enormous significance with the development of new technical media throughout the 19th century. From Marx to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Tarde, Freud, Bergson, and Benjamin, similarity, repetition, and reproducibility became central cultural science categories that ultimately even challenge the ontological distinctions between life and death, human and animal, human and machine. This introduction traces the tumultuous history of mimesis from its Platonic rejection as an illusion, through its reevaluation in the Renaissance, to the digital contemporary culture characterized by diverse practices of remediation and a distinctly lesser mimesis.