Nidesh Lawtoo
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 389989 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Nidesh Lawtoo |
| NOMBRES | Nidesh |
| APELLIDO | Lawtoo |
| FIRMA | LAWTOO N |
| AFILIACIONES | KU Leuven |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0083-3208 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 14 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Mimetic Posthumanism
The art of imitation and the desire for violence
This conversation, under the garb of discussing Nidesh Lawtoo’s seminal book, Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (2022), attempts to comprehend various forms of fascist violence that emanate as a result of contagious mimesis. The sacrificial victim of these fascist forces is always the crowd, the herd that is vulnerable and volatile and an easy and disposable prey to psychic dis-possession and depersonalisation. Whether it is the majority …
Wilde avec Foucault
This article reframes Oscar Wilde’s letter from prison, De Profundis, now retitled Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, in light of ancient epistolary writings concerned with the ethical care of the self. I argue that Wilde’s epistolary account of his ‘spiritual experience’ should be reinscribed in what Michel Foucault calls ‘technologies of the self’ and Pierre Hadot calls ‘spiritual exercises’ central to ancient philosophy. This genealogical refra…
Steps to Planetary Mimesis
Modern and Contemporary Studies
Hypermimetic Police Violence
Extending the new field of mimetic studies to the racist somatechnics of police violence against minorities in the United States, this article focuses on the specific case of the police murder of Rayshard Brooks in 2020 (Atlanta, Georgia) to account for the complex interplay of somatic, technical, and mimetic factors that triggered his murder. I argue that this exemplary case calls for a diagnostic of the patho(-)logical vortex of contagious viol…
Nietzsche contra Girard
Friedrich Nietzsche's exemplary position in the history of philosophy owes as much to the untimely content of his thought as to the heterogeneous forms he used to express it. It is thus no accident that both his philosophical logic (logos) and the formal affect (pathos) that animate his writings are now a source of inspiration for mimetic studies as well—a transdisciplinary field that goes beyond antiquarian approaches to mimesis in order to deve…
The Insurrection Moment
The Storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 took many by surprise, yet mimetic studies had long warned against the powers of leaders that aspire to fascism to turn a mob contra democracy. This essay draws from a genealogy of immanent thinkers of mimetic contagion—from Nietzsche to Deleuze, Foucault to Charlie Brooker—to revisit the attack on the Capitol from the perspective of simulations that are false, yet generate all too-real intoxica…
Mimetic Inclinations
status: Published online
Inclining Mimesis
In this article, Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo resume a dialogue on mimetic inclinations in view of furthering a relational, embodied and affective conception of subjectivity that challenges homo erectus from the immanent perspective of homo mimeticus. If a dominant philosophical tradition tends to restrict mimesis to an illusory representation of reality, Plato was the first to know that mimesis also operates as an affective force, or patho…
Introducing Mimetic Studies
sponsorship: The birth of mimetic studies was made possible thanks to all the participants to The Mimetic Turn conference, the rich contribution to this and other special issues and volumes, and the generous support of the ERC which I acknowledge via the appropriate formula: this project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 71618…
Wilde's Mime Acts
Mimesis is not a minor literary and philosophical concept in western thought. Still, an immanent, marginalized, and in this sense minor conception of performative mimesis (from mimos , actor or performance) is currently informing the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies. Supplementing Deleuze and Guattari's account of Kafka's "minor literature," this article focuses on Oscar Wilde's dramatizations of performative mimesis revealing that not …
Homo Mimeticus
Homo Mimeticus
Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality. Many things have changed since the emergence of an original species called Homo sapiens, but in the digital age humans remain mimetic creatures: from the development of consciousness to education, aesthetics to politics, mirror neurons to brain plasticity, digital simulations to emotional contagion, (new) fascist insurrections to viral contagion, we are unconsciously formed,…
Posthuman Mimesis II - Connections
In this dialogue Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo join forces to cast light on the central role of embodied mimesis in the emergence of the posthuman subject. From Platonic abstraction to Turing’s imitation game, hypermimetic conspiracy theories to contagious processes of affective contagion that go viral online before infecting subjects online to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and microbiomimesis, the ancient concept of mimesis turns out to be, …
Posthumanism and Mimesis
A different, immanent, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis is currently informing the posthuman turn. Emerging from an ERC-funded project titled Homo Mimeticus, this opening essay introduces the mimetic turn in posthuman studies via three related steps: first, it differentiates aesthetic realism and the metaphysics of sameness it entails from a posthuman mimesis open to differential processes of becoming other; second it inscribes the …
Posthuman Mimesis I
A mimetic turn is emerging in posthuman studies. Taking as a starting point a recent re-turn to an immanent, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis constitutive of the ERC-funded project, Homo Mimeticus, this paper proposes three related conceptual foundations to further a “mimetic turn” already at play in sf simulations and now operative in embodied imitations as well. Building on pioneering work on the centrality of an “embodied” and “c…
The Human Chameleon
This article revisits the case of Woody Allen’s mockumentary Zelig (1983) via Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnostic of mimicry in The Gay Science. It argues that the case of the “human chameleon” remains contemporary for both philosophical and political reasons. On the philosophical side, I argue that the case of Zelig challenges an autonomous conception of the subject based on rational self-sufficiency (or Homo Sapiens) by proposing a relational conc…
Viral Mimesis
This chapter argues that the human, all too human vulnerability to mimesis (imitation) is a central and so far underdiagnosed element internal to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Supplementing medical accounts of viral contagion, the chapter develops a genealogy of the concept of mimesis – from antiquity to modernity to the present – that is attentive to both its pathological and therapeutic properties. If an awareness of the pathological side of mi…
Black Mirrors
Reflections on mimesis have tended to be restricted to aesthetic fictions in the past century; yet the proliferation of new digital technologies in the present century is currently generating virtual simulations that increasingly blur the line between aesthetic representations and embodied realities. Building on a recent mimetic turn, or re-turn of mimesis in critical theory, this paper focuses on the British science fiction television series, Bl…
The Excess of Mimesis
This article reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, from the angle of an increasingly influential conception of mimesis understood not as simple representation but as a conditio humana . Adopting genealogical lenses that trace continuities between ancient (Plato), modern (Pater and Nietzsche) and postmodern (Lacoue-Labarthe) accounts of mimesis, I argue that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde dramatizes an excess of …
The Critic and the Mime
In this interview, J. Hillis Miller and Nidesh Lawtoo take one of the most influential concepts in Western aesthetics, mimēsis, as an Ariadne’s thread to retrace the major turns in Miller’s career and, by extension, to promote a re-turn of mimesis in literary theory and criticism. Complicating standard accounts of deconstruction and rhetorical reading as simply antimimetic, Miller acknowledges the centrality of this ancient concept to his intelle…
The Case of Eichmann Restaged
This essay reframes Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of the “banality of evil” in light of Eichmann’s mimetic psychology, which Arendt intuited but did not fully articulate. Rather than considering the banality of evil as symptomatic of Eichmann’s “inability to think,” the essay foregrounds the affective, contagious, and, in this sense, mimetic tendencies at play in Eichmann’s personality (from Latin, persona, theatrical mask). This move is instrumenta…
(New) Fascism
Readers beware: this is not your usual academic book.It is a very forceful, thought-provoking, and timely intervention in a political context dominated by the rise of new forms of fascism, notably in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world.Nidesh Lawtoo does not shy away from the term "fascism, " but he doesn't use it lightly.Rather, he shows how our usual "enlightened" political categories and refl exes prevent us from recognizing fas…
The Powers of Mimesis
This essay establishes a first genealogical link between William E. Connolly's pluralist thought and a recent mimetic turn—or re -turn of mimesis—in critical theory. Crafting new connections between Connolly's diagnostics of affective contagion, crowd behavior, and aspirational fascism, on the one hand, and a Nietzschean diagnostic of the Dionysian powers of simulation, the mimetic unconscious, and the contagious intoxications it generates, on th…
Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious (Part Two)
sponsorship: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n°716181 (European Research Council|716181)
Bataille and the Birth of the Subject
After the recuperation of Bataille as a major precursor of the poststructuralist death of the subject by influential theorists such as Foucault, Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, recent developments in Bataille studies have begun to place mimetic, contagious affects at the center of the problematic of “sovereign communication” (Borch-Jacobsen, Ffrench). In this article, I extend this emerging line of inquiry by considering the role of laughter in Batai…
The Case of Eichmann Restaged
This essay reframes Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of the “banality of evil” in light of Eichmann’s mimetic psychology, which Arendt intuited but did not fully articulate. Rather than considering the banality of evil as symptomatic of Eichmann’s “inability to think,” the essay foregrounds the affective, contagious, and, in this sense, mimetic tendencies at play in Eichmann’s personality (from Latin, persona, theatrical mask). This move is instrumenta…
Posthuman Mimesis II - Connections
In this dialogue Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo join forces to cast light on the central role of embodied mimesis in the emergence of the posthuman subject. From Platonic abstraction to Turing’s imitation game, hypermimetic conspiracy theories to contagious processes of affective contagion that go viral online before infecting subjects online to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and microbiomimesis, the ancient concept of mimesis turns out to be, …
Posthumanism and Mimesis
A different, immanent, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis is currently informing the posthuman turn. Emerging from an ERC-funded project titled Homo Mimeticus, this opening essay introduces the mimetic turn in posthuman studies via three related steps: first, it differentiates aesthetic realism and the metaphysics of sameness it entails from a posthuman mimesis open to differential processes of becoming other; second it inscribes the …
Bataille and the Homology of Heterology
Definition of Heterology' illuminates sacred, heterogeneous experiences Bataille never stopped interrogating, in their throbbing movement of emergence. Furthering orthodox disciplines in the sciences of man, Bataille accounts for the ambivalent feelings of 'attraction and repulsion' at the heart of inner experiences that constitute the heart of his thought. In this paper, I further a mimetic line of inquiry in Bataille studies and argue that the …
The Plasticity of Mimesis
This article inscribes Catherine Malabou's recent philosophical account of brain plasticity in a genealogy that goes, from Lacoue-Labarthe, back to its mimetic origins in Plato's Republic
Bataille and the Birth of the Subject
After the recuperation of Bataille as a major precursor of the poststructuralist death of the subject by influential theorists such as Foucault, Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, recent developments in Bataille studies have begun to place mimetic, contagious affects at the center of the problematic of “sovereign communication” (Borch-Jacobsen, Ffrench). In this article, I extend this emerging line of inquiry by considering the role of laughter in Batai…
Dueling to the End/Ending “The Duel”
Joseph Conrad’s “The Duel” (1908) is a short story that is usually read as a “historical fiction” concerned with the violence that animated the Napoleonic Wars. But if this tale looks back to past, total wars, it also looks ahead to more contemporary, global wars. In fact, Conrad’s dissection of the intersubjective dynamic of the “duel” via the trope of the homo duplex outlines mimetic principles concerning the “escalation of violence” that reson…
Avatar Simulation in 3Ts
This article argues that James Cameron's Avatar (2009) represents contemporary preoccupations with the "reality" of virtual reality. Rather than reading Avatar as a wishful return to a state of nature, this article takes the computer-generated world of Pandora as a self-reflective anthropological, psychological, and ontological mirror of a network society haunted by the specter of what I call "hypermimetic" simulations. Neither fully human nor fu…
Poetics and Politics (with Lacoue-Labarthe)
sponsorship: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement: HOM 716181-Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism). (European Research Council (ERC) under European Union|HOM 716181)
The Plasticity of Mimesis
This article inscribes Catherine Malabou's recent philosophical account of brain plasticity in a genealogy that goes, from Lacoue-Labarthe, back to its mimetic origins in Plato's Republic
Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious (Part One)
status: Published
Bataille and the Homology of Heterology
Definition of Heterology' illuminates sacred, heterogeneous experiences Bataille never stopped interrogating, in their throbbing movement of emergence. Furthering orthodox disciplines in the sciences of man, Bataille accounts for the ambivalent feelings of 'attraction and repulsion' at the heart of inner experiences that constitute the heart of his thought. In this paper, I further a mimetic line of inquiry in Bataille studies and argue that the …
(New) Fascism
Readers beware: this is not your usual academic book.It is a very forceful, thought-provoking, and timely intervention in a political context dominated by the rise of new forms of fascism, notably in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world.Nidesh Lawtoo does not shy away from the term "fascism, " but he doesn't use it lightly.Rather, he shows how our usual "enlightened" political categories and refl exes prevent us from recognizing fas…
The Powers of Mimesis
This essay establishes a first genealogical link between William E. Connolly's pluralist thought and a recent mimetic turn—or re -turn of mimesis—in critical theory. Crafting new connections between Connolly's diagnostics of affective contagion, crowd behavior, and aspirational fascism, on the one hand, and a Nietzschean diagnostic of the Dionysian powers of simulation, the mimetic unconscious, and the contagious intoxications it generates, on th…
Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious (Part Two)
sponsorship: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n°716181 (European Research Council|716181)
The Shadow of the Symposium
sponsorship: European Research Council|716181
The Excess of Mimesis
This article reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, from the angle of an increasingly influential conception of mimesis understood not as simple representation but as a conditio humana . Adopting genealogical lenses that trace continuities between ancient (Plato), modern (Pater and Nietzsche) and postmodern (Lacoue-Labarthe) accounts of mimesis, I argue that in The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde dramatizes an excess of …
The Critic and the Mime
In this interview, J. Hillis Miller and Nidesh Lawtoo take one of the most influential concepts in Western aesthetics, mimēsis, as an Ariadne’s thread to retrace the major turns in Miller’s career and, by extension, to promote a re-turn of mimesis in literary theory and criticism. Complicating standard accounts of deconstruction and rhetorical reading as simply antimimetic, Miller acknowledges the centrality of this ancient concept to his intelle…
The Case of Eichmann Restaged
This essay reframes Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of the “banality of evil” in light of Eichmann’s mimetic psychology, which Arendt intuited but did not fully articulate. Rather than considering the banality of evil as symptomatic of Eichmann’s “inability to think,” the essay foregrounds the affective, contagious, and, in this sense, mimetic tendencies at play in Eichmann’s personality (from Latin, persona, theatrical mask). This move is instrumenta…
The Human Chameleon
This article revisits the case of Woody Allen’s mockumentary Zelig (1983) via Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnostic of mimicry in The Gay Science. It argues that the case of the “human chameleon” remains contemporary for both philosophical and political reasons. On the philosophical side, I argue that the case of Zelig challenges an autonomous conception of the subject based on rational self-sufficiency (or Homo Sapiens) by proposing a relational conc…
Viral Mimesis
This chapter argues that the human, all too human vulnerability to mimesis (imitation) is a central and so far underdiagnosed element internal to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Supplementing medical accounts of viral contagion, the chapter develops a genealogy of the concept of mimesis – from antiquity to modernity to the present – that is attentive to both its pathological and therapeutic properties. If an awareness of the pathological side of mi…
Black Mirrors
Reflections on mimesis have tended to be restricted to aesthetic fictions in the past century; yet the proliferation of new digital technologies in the present century is currently generating virtual simulations that increasingly blur the line between aesthetic representations and embodied realities. Building on a recent mimetic turn, or re-turn of mimesis in critical theory, this paper focuses on the British science fiction television series, Bl…
Homo Mimeticus
Homo Mimeticus
Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality. Many things have changed since the emergence of an original species called Homo sapiens, but in the digital age humans remain mimetic creatures: from the development of consciousness to education, aesthetics to politics, mirror neurons to brain plasticity, digital simulations to emotional contagion, (new) fascist insurrections to viral contagion, we are unconsciously formed,…
Posthuman Mimesis II - Connections
In this dialogue Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo join forces to cast light on the central role of embodied mimesis in the emergence of the posthuman subject. From Platonic abstraction to Turing’s imitation game, hypermimetic conspiracy theories to contagious processes of affective contagion that go viral online before infecting subjects online to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and microbiomimesis, the ancient concept of mimesis turns out to be, …
Posthumanism and Mimesis
A different, immanent, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis is currently informing the posthuman turn. Emerging from an ERC-funded project titled Homo Mimeticus, this opening essay introduces the mimetic turn in posthuman studies via three related steps: first, it differentiates aesthetic realism and the metaphysics of sameness it entails from a posthuman mimesis open to differential processes of becoming other; second it inscribes the …
Posthuman Mimesis I
A mimetic turn is emerging in posthuman studies. Taking as a starting point a recent re-turn to an immanent, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis constitutive of the ERC-funded project, Homo Mimeticus, this paper proposes three related conceptual foundations to further a “mimetic turn” already at play in sf simulations and now operative in embodied imitations as well. Building on pioneering work on the centrality of an “embodied” and “c…
The Insurrection Moment
The Storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 took many by surprise, yet mimetic studies had long warned against the powers of leaders that aspire to fascism to turn a mob contra democracy. This essay draws from a genealogy of immanent thinkers of mimetic contagion—from Nietzsche to Deleuze, Foucault to Charlie Brooker—to revisit the attack on the Capitol from the perspective of simulations that are false, yet generate all too-real intoxica…
Mimetic Inclinations
status: Published online
Inclining Mimesis
In this article, Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo resume a dialogue on mimetic inclinations in view of furthering a relational, embodied and affective conception of subjectivity that challenges homo erectus from the immanent perspective of homo mimeticus. If a dominant philosophical tradition tends to restrict mimesis to an illusory representation of reality, Plato was the first to know that mimesis also operates as an affective force, or patho…
Philosophy (24 obras) · Art (21 obras) · Epistemology (18 obras) · Psychology (18 obras) · Aesthetics (16 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · Literature (11 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (10 obras) · Psychoanalysis (10 obras)