In order to further mimetic studies the journal Tropos issued a call for papers that aim to further the mimetic turn. Interdisciplinary essays on any manifestations of homo mimeticus welcome. Deadline for submission August 31, 2026. More details here
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.
This is the third volume of a trilogy on Homo Mimeticus, edited by Nidesh Lawtoo and Willow Verkerk. In collaboration with the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, international contributors argue that plasticity—understood in its double capacity to receive form and to give form—plays a transformative role in the many lives of homo mimeticus qua homo plasticus. BLOG available here. FULL TEXT downloadable here.
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.
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.
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.
If, for a long time, mimesis has been restricted to the logic of visual representation, aesthetic realism, and the metaphysics of sameness it presupposes, the ERC-funded project Homo Mimeticus overturns this perspective to foreground a re-turn to an immanent, affective, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis at play in different processes of becoming other. This introduction to The Mimetic Turn Conference (April 2022) presents some of the concepts driving this new theory of homo mimeticus.
Jean-Luc Nancy is internationally known for launching the concept of “community” on the philosophical scene. But what is the mythic experience that gave birth to his community in the first place? Where was this scene set? And who are its protagonists? In this singular-plural Prelude shot in the summer of 2020, Nancy begins to narrate the myth of the Strasbourg community to Nidesh Lawtoo, addressing a world that “is soon going to disappear”…
The ERC-funded project Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism (HOM) hosted by the Institute of Philosophy and the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven, Belgium, is pleased to announce its final international conference titled The Mimetic Turn (April 20-22, 2022; ONLINE). Keynotes and Invited Speakers include Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Vittorio Gallese, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Henry Staten, among other internationally renowned theorists and critics. Recordings here
