Editors Nidesh Lawtoo and Willow Verkerk, along with contributors engage in conversations with Catherine Malabou to foster the connection between plasticity and mimesis central to the volume.
We have been taught the importance of originality, but can there be something original without a model that paves the way? In this talk, Nidesh Lawtoo, concludes the ERC project Homo Mimeticus , not so much by painting, but rather, telling the story of a single, marginalized, mimetic protagonist that has been relegated to the backstage of academic discussions in the past, yet deserves to be brought on the TED-stage to inspire the future.
Dodo Through the Looking-Glass: A Mirror for Modern and Contemporary Culture. Inaugural Lecture by Prof. dr. Nidesh Lawtoo on the acceptance of his position as Professor Modern/Contemporary European Literature and Culture at Leiden University on Friday, 14 November 2025. Video available here. Text available here
In this last dialogue for HOM Videos, Nidesh Lawtoo meets Judith Butler in Paris to account for the role a different, psychic, performative and troubling conception of mimesis play in their influential work. Taking a genealogical approach to Butler’s latest book to date, Who Is Afraid of Gender, Lawtoo asks Butler to revisit the role mimetic and expressive theories of aesthetic play in their influential book, Gender Trouble (I).
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.
In this last episode of HOM Videos, Nidesh Lawtoo returns to the place where mimetic studies begun: the Great Theatre of Dionysus in Athens. It is in fact here that mimesis was not simply represented but, rather, performed by actors on mimes endowed with the capacity to generate a mimetic, dramatic, or Dionysian pathos in the audience as well.
In this book launch of a diptych on Violence and the Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo, Marina Garcia-Granero and William Johnsen present the latest output of the ERC project Homo Mimeticus. Rather than entering the debate on media violence from a quantitative perspective, the book retraces the genealogy of the concept of catharsis that still informs, or misinform the popular imagination. The launch contextualizes the book within mimetic studies and discusses key thinkers of violence and the unconscious, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Freud to Girard, among others. More information here: https://msupress.org/9781628964851/vi…
In this book launch of Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (Leuven UP, 2023, OPEN ACCESS), HOM/GM PI Nidesh Lawtoo joins forces with his team (Niki Hadikoesoemo, Marina Garcia-Granero & Giulia Rignano) to sum up the main results of the HOM project and open up the new transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies Homo Mimeticus proposes.
In the eighth episode of HOM Videos, the philosopher and historian of psychoanalysis Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (University of Washington) discusses with Nidesh Lawtoo the genealogical foundations of psychic mimesis: from his studies at the University of Strasbourg with Lacoue-Labarthe to the birth of psychoanalysis (out of Charcot’s and Bernheim’s theories of hysteria and suggestion), from Freud’s account of identification to Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage to Big Pharma, mimesis turns out to play the leading protean role in the modern and contemporary pathologies of homo mimeticus.
To conclude the Homo Mimeticus Project, PI Nidesh Lawtoo takes the mimetic turn on the TEDx stage, where mimesis has been at play for quite some time. Addressing the timely question, “how to (re)structure the (de)structured,” Nidesh takes us on an untimely philosophical journey–from children’s mimicry to Socrates’ dialogues, emotions to emojis, the Greek stage to the TED stage–to show that imitation is constitutive of an original species he calls, homo mimeticus.
