Das Phantom von Ego: Nietzsche, Modernismus, und das Mimetische Unbewsste (2024)
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Tag Archives: mimesis
The Mimetic Turn, Special issue of MLN
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In this special issue of Modern Language Notes (Johns Hopkins UP) edited by Nidesh Lawtoo, contributors join literary and philosophical perspectives to further the interdisciplinary field of mimetic studies. After the linguistic and the affective turn, the new materialist and the performative turn, the cognitive and the posthuman turn, the issue argues for a re-turn to the ancient, yet also modern and still contemporary realization that humans are mimetic creatures, or homo mimeticus. Essays on Plato, Nietzsche, Wilde, Benjamin, Adorno, Borges, as well as on contemporary film and fiction, give theoretical and aesthetic substance to this claim. More information and OA articles available HERE.
HOM Videos 10: Ancient Foundations for Mimetic Studies
What a better place to conclude the Homo Mimeticus project than the ancient Agora of Athens were philosophy was born? It is in fact here that Socrates among many other philosophers conceived of philosophy not only as a love of wisdom but also as a way of life, as Pierre Hadot would say.
(Nieuw) Fascisme: Besmetting, gemeenschap, mythe
Kunnen we ons immuun maken voor het (nieuwe) fascisme (Noordboek 2024)? Nidesh Lawtoo betwijfelt het. Onze rationaliteit is simpelweg niet opgewassen tegen de besmettelijkheid van de mythe. Of we het nu willen of niet: we praten elkaar na (mimesis). En nieuwe media versterken de fascistische boodschap. Toch is er hoop. We kunnen ons bewust worden van ons mimetische gedrag. Als we onszelf doorzien, wordt het mogelijk om de mythe anders te framen en de angel eruit te trekken. Interviews in Trouw & Mare.
HOM Video 10: Ancient Foundations for Mimetic Studies I
In order to bring the Homo Mimeticus project to an end and launch the field of mimetic studies, Nidesh Lawtoo (prof. at Leiden University) re-turns to the place where theories of mimesis began. Shot on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, ep. 1 recalls that philo-sophia, or love of wisdom, is born out of a mimetic agon with a mythic wisdom that found in Athena a primary source of inspiration
Rebirth of Homo Mimeticus
In this discussion on the topic of “The Art of Imitation and the Desire for Violence: The Rebirth of Homo Mimeticus,” we have tried to grasp the emerging concepts around mimesis, new age violence, and the return of the homo mimeticus.
HOM Videos ep.9, The Neuroscience of Mimesis: Vittorio Gallese. II. Mirror Neurons Now & Then
In this second episode of HOM Videos on The Neuroscience of Mimesis, Vittorio Gallese discusses with Nidesh Lawtoo important precursors of the discovery of mirror neurons in aesthetics, phenomenology and the tradition of the mimetic unconscious: from Nietzsche to Lipps, Merleau-Ponty to Aby Warburg, Charles Féré to Pierre Janet, a number of fin-de-siecle philosophical physicians were sensitive to the mirroring relation between movement and sensation later confirmed by the discovery of mirror neurons.
HOM Videos 9, The Neuroscience of Mimesis: Vittorio Gallese. I History of a Discovery
As HOM Videos moves toward a conclusion, Nidesh Lawtoo travels to Parma, Italy, to interview neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese who, along with Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team, discovered mirror neurons in the early 1990s. In the first of four episodes on a major contribution to the mimetic turn, Gallese retells the history of the discovery of mirror neurons in nonhuman and human primates, discusses what more is known about mirroring mechanisms 30 years later, and begins to lay out the theoretical implications of embodied simulation for the transformations of homo mimeticus in the 21st century.
Shared Voices: Lacoue-Nancy’s Mimetic Methexis
What’s in a voice? And if the echoes a voice generates are neither
singular nor plural but singular plural, what shared voices are at play in
Jean-Luc Nancy’s untimely reflections on the affective participation, or
methexis, animating the agonistic confrontation between philosophy and
literature? Part of a dazzling collection of essays thinking with Nancy, in this chapter Nidesh Lawtoo reveals the partage des voix internal Lacoue-Nancy. Chapter available HERE.
Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis
In his latest contribution to mimetic studies, Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious (MSU P, 2023), Nidesh Lawtoo reframes current debates on (new) media violence by tracing the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical vicissitudes of the “catharsis hypothesis” from antiquity to modernity into the present via Aristotle, Nietzsche, Bernays, Freud, Girard, Morin among others. In the process, he outlines a new theory of violence, mimesis, and the unconscious that does not have desire as a via regia, but rather, the untimely realization that all affects spread contagiously and thus mimetically.
