Mapping Mimetic Studies

Leuven University Press Chapter Title: INTRODUCTION: MAPPING MIMETIC STUDIES Chapter Author(s): Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero Book Title: Homo Mimeticus II Book Subtitle: Re-Turns to Mimesis Book Editor(s): Nidesh Lawtoo, Marina Garcia-Granero Published by: Leuven University Press. (2024) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.16040333.3 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Funding is provided by ERC, KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access. Leuven University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Homo Mimeticus II This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms INTRODUCTION MAPPING MIMETIC STUDIES Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero Mimesis is integrated in the complex vision of humanity. It is thus true that to the notions of homo sapiens, demens, faber, or economicus, we can add the term homo mimeticus. —Edgar Morin in Homo Mimeticus With this epigrammatic affirmation reintegrating mimesis in the complex genealogy of Homo sapiens, the transdisciplinary thinker Edgar Morin (1921–) joined hands to bring the first volume of Homo Mimeticus to an end. This ending marked, in fact, a new beginning. Launching a new theory of imitation vital to facing the contemporary manifestations of mimesis that, under different masks, cast a long material shadow on the present and future, the goal of the first volume was to set new theoretical foundations for an emerging field we called mimetic studies, a transdisciplinary field now furthered in a planned trilogy on Homo Mimeticus. As the subtitle of the second volume already indicates, our goal is to promote a mimetic turn or, rather, a plurality of re-turns to a different, more plastic and protean conception of mimesis that is already informing different strands in continental philosophy, literary theory, and social and political theory, stretching to include the neurosciences as well. A re-turn is not quite the same as a turn, but includes it in a movement of repetition with a multiplicity of differences. Hence re-turns. Going beyond stable binaries that simply oppose innovation to imitation, originality to reproduction, the re-turns to mimesis compose a 11 This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero spiraling figure that turns back, genealogically, to one of the most influential, resilient, and longstanding concepts in western thought in order to propel it further into the present and future metamorphoses of homo mimeticus that will continue to occupy us in volume three as well. From a variety of contemporary perspectives that cut across the two-cultures divide, it is in fact clear now that mimesis can no longer be restricted to a realist copy, imitation, or representation of nature predicated on the logic of the same. Rather, mimesis turns out to be constitutive of the birth of a protean, embodied, relational, and eminently innovative species caught in an ongoing process of becoming other. From the affective turn to the ethical turn, the cognitive turn to the new materialist turn, the neuro turn to the posthuman turn to the nonhuman turn, some of the most influential turns in critical theory over the last decades have in fact been re-turning to the ancient realization that humans are thoroughly imitative animals. This confirmation, however, was often implicit, as mimesis appeared under different conceptual masks or personae constitutive of homo mimeticus’ protean identity. They go from identification to simulation, affective contagion to performativity, influence to inclinations, animal mimicry to biomimicry, plasticity to mirror neurons, to name but a few contemporary avatars of mimesis we now explicitly pursue. In the process, one of the general ambitions of mimetic studies is to redraw nothing less than the ever-changing contours of who humans are and can potentially become. Homo sapiens sapiens can, in fact, no longer be solely defined as a maker of tools (homo faber) or maker of profits (economicus), as a player of games (homo ludens) or a player of god (homo deus)—though humans continue to impersonate these roles with disconcerting efficacy in the digital age (homo digitalis). Nor is the qualifier “mimeticus” simply one more adjectival attribute in a long chain of qualifications of the genus homo that already include religiosus and aestheticus, academicus and empathicus, bellicus and ecologicus, among other masks adopted by a protean species—though we shall see that masks remain constitutive of mimetic personalities (from Latin, persona, mask worn in the theater). Rather, the overarching hypothesis internal to the Homo Mimeticus trilogy is much more radical and fundamental: it suggests that humans’ longstanding inclination for plastic transformations, chameleon-like adaptations, and technological innovations that allowed us to become, in a relative short time, the dominant species on Earth with the power to change not only ourselves but also the geology of the planet itself in an epoch many call Anthropocene—this striking power, or as we call it, pathos—stems, somewhat paradoxically, from an This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies all too human capacity to imitate others, be they human or nonhuman, real or artificial, offline or online. As we set out to further map the fast-expanding field of mimetic studies in view of opening up new paths for interdisciplinary exploration, it is thus important to briefly glance back to the ground covered thus far in order to go further.1 Despite a longstanding restriction of mimesis to the realistic logic of sameness, or its most recent attachment to a chain of linguistic differences, let us recall that the theory of homo mimeticus goes beyond sameness and difference. Its genealogy, in fact, originates in a long chain of Dionysian thinkers who, from Plato to Nietzsche into the present, were sensitive to the magnetic, contagious, and in this sense mimetic properties of a concept that originates in dramatic performances (mimēsis, from mîmos, performance or actor). Reframed from an immanent, embodied, and intersubjective perspective, it becomes quickly clear that mimesis, already for the ancient Greeks, went beyond visual representations to affect all the senses. It does so in a plurality of ways, both individually and collectively, consciously and unconsciously, rationally and irrationally, empathically and violently, and we should now add, analogically and digitally, online and offline, via human and artificial intelligence. This also means that mimesis does not simply generate phantoms or shadows of reality to be critiqued as illusory appearances from the idealist distance of the vita contemplativa. On the contrary, once animated by actors, phantoms have the power to spell-bind the audience: that is, to bind them via a hypnotic spell, generating phantoms of the ego living what we proposed to call a “vita mimetica” (Lawtoo 2022, 69–92). In the process, mimesis also generates contagious phenomena that go beyond good and evil in the ethical, political, but also diagnostic sense that it produces both life-negating pathologies—fascist movements, viral pandemics, escalating wars, and climate catastrophes being obvious examples—and, at the same time, and without contradiction, promotes life-affirmative diagnostics of the contagious logic of mimetic pathos, or as we call them, patho-logies. This overturning of perspectives that turns a pathology into a diagnostic logos on contagious affects is of modernist, Nietzschean inspiration. Its genealogy, however, harkens back to Plato’s insight that physicians “would prove most skilled […] if they themselves had suffered all diseases and were not of very healthy constitution” (Plato 1963, 3.408d). It also finds in the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne a key genealogical link between the ancients and the moderns. As he puts it in his final essay, “On Experience:” This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 13 14 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero Certainly medicine professes always to have experience as the touchstone of its performance [intervention]. Plato was therefore right to say that to be a true doctor [vrai médecin] would require that anyone who would practice as such should have recovered from all the illnesses which he [sic] claimed to cure and have gone through all the symptoms and conditions on which he [sic] would seek to give an opinion [juger]. (2003, III.13, 1225) Whether Nietzsche inherited this diagnostic insight from Plato or Montaigne is not the point, for he had read both. What matters for us is that for a tradition that goes from Plato to Montaigne, Nietzsche to mimetic studies, what applies to bodily sicknesses in general continues to apply to contagious sicknesses that affect the soul in particular: a first-person experience of imitative illnesses with one’s body is a first step vital to developing a diagnostic with one’s mind—if only because for these philosophical physicians the mind or, to use a more recent term, the brain, remains rooted in the body. As recent returns to affect, embodiment, and the brain suggest, this is a good moment to keep turning mimetic pathologies into patho-logies. As the conjunction between pathos and logos also indicates, this diagnostic method relies on the dynamic interplay between the logos of critical distance and inner experiences of mimetic pathos to diagnose what neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, in the Coda to this volume, calls “brain-body.” Returning to the dawn of mimetic studies in classical antiquity, as the Prelude that follows will also show, remains a necessary step back that will allow contributors to leap ahead to modern and contemporary manifestations of homo mimeticus. As Plato was the first to notice, and a number of contemporary philosophers and classicists will confirm in part 1, mimesis is a Janusfaced concept with the (im)properties of a pharmakon—both poison and cure. We classify the duplicity of mimesis not only as pharmacological but, rather, as patho(-)logical, for a reason that is at least double. First to propose a theory of imitation that includes but is not limited to desire or writing, if only because it finds in an all too human vulnerability to what we call mimetic pathos a more general, immanent, and embodied starting point. And, second, to stress that the pathological aspects of mimesis that infect and affect homo mimeticus do not simply oppose pathos and logos, affect and reason, bodies and minds, let alone brains. Rather, they generate a complex spiraling loop in which an all too human vulnerability to mimesis can be put to both pathological and patho-logical uses, generating diagnostic logoi on mimetic pathos. This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies The pluralist focus on different logoi informing mimetic studies, then, marks an open, flexible, and dynamic epistemological orientation that is not reducible to a single, totalizing, and universal theory of culture. As Morin reminds us, a “complex” (from complexus, weaving together) vision of humanity entails interweaving a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives—what Nietzsche also calls perspectivism. If these perspectives tend to be split in an increasingly hyperspecialized academic world, they need to be joined in order to face the complex challenges of the present and future. Mimetic studies opens up a middle path: it aims to sail past the Scylla of universalizing theories of imitation with the ambition to propose a single, universal, and totalizing solution to a protean problem on one side, and the Charybdis of fragmentary hyperspecialization that splits the protean masks of mimesis in disconnected rivalrous fields, on the other. Instead, it proposes a perspectival approach that brings different disciplinary threads together. The goal is to weave a complex tapestry in which each thread contributes to delineating the changing faces of homo mimeticus from distinct, innovative, yet interwoven perspectives qua patho-logies: from philosophy to psychology, sociology to anthropology, literary studies to media studies, political theory to environmental studies, posthuman studies to the neurosciences, among other emerging fields. Indeed, the re-turns to mimesis are currently gaining speed and momentum as mimetic studies enters in productive transdisciplinary exchanges with some of the most exciting areas of investigation in the humanities, social sciences, the neurosciences, and the earth sciences. This is a brief and partial genealogical reminder of methodological principles mapped in more detail in volume 1. Still, it should suffice to confirm that Morin’s concluding phrase was actually not an end; nor is he alone in thinking that mimesis needs to be integrated in a complex vision of humanity today. On the contrary, this conceptual affirmation from one of the most influential thinkers who spanned the entirety of the past century, reaching well into the present century, entails an open invitation; it also provides mimetic studies with a coup d’envoi that already set in motion a plurality of scholars across disciplines. Morin quite literally joined hands at the end of Homo Mimeticus to declare the field of mimetic studies officially open, for new generations of thinkers to follow up. This also means that the epigraph with which we started is not simply mimetic in the restricted traditional sense of constative, reproductive, and realistically descriptive of a pre-existing reality; rather, it is mimetic in our general sense that it is performative, productive, and geared to generating contagious effects. No wonder, then, that a second volume promptly emerged assembling a plurality of This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 15 16 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero perspectives with the shared intention to re-turn to homo mimeticus to expand the growing field of mimetic studies. As a complex, neuro-bio-psycho-anthropo-political phenomenon, mimesis is constitutive of the birth of Homo sapiens, manifests itself differently across periods and cultures, and is endowed with powers of adaptation that require each generation to keep up with its protean metamorphoses. These hypermimetic metamorphoses are now also intensified by a plurality of new digital media and artificial intelligence (AI) simulations that reload homo mimeticus with a 2.0 vengeance.2 Assembling an international network of scholars of mimesis who increasingly feel the need to build diagonal bridges across different disciplines and perspectives, this second volume affirms new beginnings in the never-ending processes of understanding who we are—and can potentially become. Mimetic Re-Turns Conceived as a sequel to further the mimetic turn, then, Homo Mimeticus II: Re-Turns to Mimesis is not deprived of methodological advantages that are at least double, or rather, multiple: first, coming second, scholars are now in a position to build on concepts, genealogies, and methods of analysis constitutive of mimetic studies that are already in place so as to go further and focus on new territories and unresolved problems; second, this advantage is multiplied by the collective nature of a volume that includes a plurality of thinkers working in different areas of specialization, including classics, continental philosophy, media studies, performance studies, literary theory, political theory, environmental humanities among other perspectives now informing mimetic studies. While volume 1 was primarily focused on the philosophical, aesthetic, and political manifestations of homo mimeticus, it cast as wide a net as possible for a single author. The goal was not so much to map the whole field in advance according to a predefined plan, model, or idea. Rather, it aimed high to open up a new field of investigation and invite supplements by scholars working on other areas. The aspiration was thus to pursue the “diagonal science” of mimesis pioneering figures like Roger Caillois already called for. Many responded to the call; more voices joined a chorus on homo mimeticus than we could possibly accommodate here, including figures who played a pioneering role in the re-turn of attention to mimesis across two-culture divides.3 This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies Mimesis, in fact, turned out to be central in building new bridges between “art, philosophy and science” (Gebauer and Wulf 1995, 2) as Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf ’s magisterial study first published in 1992, Mimesis, had already anticipated at the twilight of the past century.4 In fact, if a genealogist of the future were to date when the mimetic turn starts, one could do worse than pointing to the early 1990s as the period in which the re-turns to mimesis started to pick up speed.5 A discovery was in the air, promising new connections that would cut across art, philosophy, and science. In a striking synchronicity, a team of neuroscientists in Parma led by Giacomo Rizzolatti made a revolutionary discovery, first in macaque monkeys, and later in humans as well, that provided empirical foundations to the hypothesis of homo mimeticus: namely, that the drive to imitate others, including affects like empathy that generate a shared pathos, or sym-pathos (feeling with) might be rooted in “mirrors in the brain” (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008) that do not simply mirror or represent reality but, rather, mirror other people. How? On the basis of what Vittorio Gallese calls an “embodied simulation” that gives “birth to intersubjectivity” (Ammaniti and Gallese 2014) along phenomenological and unconscious principles, which, as we saw in volume 1, are resonant with the birth of homo mimeticus.6 We shall return to clarifying the genealogical continuities between the theory of homo mimeticus and the one of mirror neurons in both the Prelude and, in the company of Gallese, in the Coda as well. As any book on a subject as longstanding, influential, and above all resilient—for it spans nothing less than the entire history of culture—what applied to volume 1 equally applies to volume 2: although we aimed to cover as many areas as possible in terms of disciplinary perspectives, historical periods, and cultural as well as scientific manifestations of mimesis, our ambition was never to be exhaustive—obviously so, since mimetic studies is an emerging area of studies with fast-expanding, plastic, and porous borders. The aim was rather to provide new theoretical perspectives, conceptual tools, and critical discourses, or logoi, that both establish foundations for mimetic studies and serve as inspiration for further studies on homo mimeticus and the hypermimetic patho(-)logies it entails. Thus, if part 1 gives significant attention to re-framings of classical figures in mimetic studies such as Aristotle and, especially, Plato, it is for genealogical reasons in line with the re-turns to a vita mimetica that was well-known at the dawn of philosophy and is worth reconsidering in the digital age. Historical philosophizing, as Nietzsche understood it, is not the same as antiquarian history for it keeps a focus on problems vital for the present. It also calls for a type of modesty that leads genealogists of mimesis to acknowledge This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 17 18 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero influential precursors. To be sure, Plato and Aristotle are often considered responsible for framing mimesis in a stabilizing metaphysical mirror or aesthetic representation mimetic studies aims to go beyond. In the case of Plato, “he,” under the mask of Socrates, even dismissed mimesis as an illusory shadow or phantom without reality thereby staging “the programming of non-mimetic discourse” (Lacoue-Labarthe 1998, 123) that reached up to the past century.7 And yet, a careful re-reading of founding texts about mimesis like Republic, Ion, and the Poetics central to part 1, shows a more complex picture: Plato and Aristotle, in fact, set theoretical foundations for a more nuanced understanding of “technai,” as Henry Staten argues, as well as of “contagious” affects, as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen stresses—both of which are central to a genealogy of homo mimeticus that is rediscovered today. These classical figures also staged an agon between a critique of mimetic pathos and the pathologies it generates (Plato), on the one hand, and a defense of mimesis for the philosophical logos it entails (Aristotle), on the other. And yet, their drawing hands are not simply opposed via the violent logic of mimetic rivalry. Rather, they set in motion a mimetic agonism that, as we shall see, informs the genealogy of mimesis from antiquity to modernity and continues to inform the patho(-)logical tendencies of homo mimeticus in the present. More recent precursors of mimetic studies need to be acknowledged as well. As we move into the twentieth century, critical theorists like Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, and Theodor Adorno agreed that “the mimetic faculty” (Benjamin’s term) is central to the evolutionary development of Homo sapiens. Here, too, Nietzsche is a key influence, for he traced the birth of homo mimeticus back to animal mimicry, as we saw in volume 1.8 In Minima Moralia, Adorno is thus missing Nietzsche’s complex patho-logical diagnostic of the birth of consciousness as a social network as he unilaterally aligns his influential precursor with a celebration of “authenticity” and “genuineness” (Adorno 2005, 154). Nietzsche would have been the first to agree with Adorno, and thus with a long tradition in mimetic studies that goes back to Plato, that “[t]he human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings” (154). The agon between Adorno and Nietzsche is thus a mimetic one, if only because they both agree in tracing the birth of Homo sapiens back to an all too imitative principle.9 Beyond ancient and modern quarrels that, for a long time, simply opposed les ancients and les modernes, realists and modernists, this is, indeed, the fundamental hypothesis this volume continues to reevaluate and promote. This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies Closer to us, mimetic studies is fully informed by precursors sensitive to the imitative nature of human desire and the destabilizing improperties of writing; yet it should not hastily be confused with neither mimetic theory nor deconstruction. There is, in fact, a genealogical sense in which perspectival patho-logies drive a wedge between mimetic theory and poststructuralism, mimetic desire and the mime of nothing, scapegoating (pharmakos) and writing (pharmakon), as was also shown in volume 1. It does so to account for the immanent, material, and embodied manifestations of a homo mimeticus in need of supplementary theoretical foundations sensitive to both logical and patho-logical perspectives. Mimetic studies both draws on previous theories of mimesis while developing new concepts in order to promote a more encompassing, transdisciplinary, and collaborative field of investigation. Suffice it to recall that on one side, René Girard rightly stresses the anthropological foundations of mimesis by rooting them in triangles of mimetic desires and rivalry; yet the narrow focus on quasi-Oedipal triangulations that unilaterally lead to violence and scapegoating neglects the anthropological fact that mimetic pathos goes beyond good and evil in the sense that it operates for good and ill, generating pathologies and patho-logies. Hence the suggestion to incorporate mimetic desire in the more generalized concept of mimetic pathos, and the patho(-)logies it entails, a move that as was shown elsewhere is productively entangled with affect theory.10 On the other side, a poststructuralist tradition that finds in Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, J. Hillis Miller,11 and even more acutely, Philippe LacoueLabarthe, its major representatives, was very sensitive to the troubling and destabilizing pharmacological “improprieties” of mimetic subjectivity crucial to the critique of rising (new) fascist movements, for instance. Lacoue-Labarthe, for one, already announced that “mimesis returns to regain its powers” (1998, 138). Supplemented by feminist, decolonial, and posthumanist theorists like Luce Irigaray, Homi Bhabha, and Katherine Hayles, among other thinkers internal to this volume like Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and William E. Connolly, a number of influential figures have been contributing to launching mimetic studies on the international scene.12 This tradition also denounced ethnocentric and phallocentric tendencies that tend to project the troubling (im)proprieties of mimesis onto gendered, racial, and queer others via a move characteristic of what we call mimetic racism and mimetic sexism qua transphobia. While attention to the feminist implications of what we call, with Adriana Cavarero, “mimetic inclinations,” is already informing the re-turn to mimesis,13 there is still much to be done on the front of gender equality. Hence, we aim to return to this subject in Homo Mimeticus III in the company of Catherine Malabou.14 This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19 20 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero Since the general commitment to the linguistic turn dominant from the 1970s to the 1990s did not sufficiently emphasize the embodied, relational, affective, and mirroring qualities of subjects embedded in what an immanent tradition calls a “world of becoming” (Connolly 2011), a supplement to mimetic studies is needed. A theory of homo mimeticus is, in fact, not exclusively limited to humans—though it finds in our species distinctive features of mimesis; it also troubles a set of binaries that dominated rationalist accounts of Homo sapiens in the past, such as brain/body, pathos/logos but also human/nonhuman, mimicry/biomimicry among others, in view of propelling mimesis beyond nature and culture in the present and future. All contributing to the same forward-oriented gesture beyond aesthetic realism, the chapters that follow draw sustenance from a variety of disciplines that go from classical philosophy to the neurosciences, literary studies to the social sciences, new materialism to environmental studies, among other perspectives informing and transforming the mimetic turn via a plurality of re-turns. Let us thus outline the general trajectory of this gesture animating Homo Mimeticus II by paying attention to the plurality of voices that compose its tune in more detail. Program Given the genealogical orientation of the book, we shall follow a trajectory that draws selectively from a tradition in mimetic studies from antiquity (part 1) to modernity (part 2) into the present (part 3). In a way, Nidesh Lawtoo’s Prelude titled “The Discus and the Bow” condenses this threefold approach by following a mimetic agon that goes from Homer to Machiavelli, reaching, via grandissimi esempli, present generations as well. Its general goal is to flesh out new conceptual arrows for mimetic studies that will inform many of the chapters that follow. It also sounds the initial tune to launch the plurality of voices re-turning to an ancient mimetic agon reframed in light of modern and contemporary preoccupations. And yet, despite its threefold temporal division, we hasten to add that the volume does not aim to develop a linear historical argument based on a grand narrative of progress. On the contrary, each essay provides a different perspective on the spiraling patho(-)logies of homo mimeticus that keep turning and re-turning in a kaleidoscope of changing masks. We shall thus consider phenomena as This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies diverse as poetic inspiration and technical craft, coercion and domestication, mimetic nihilism and heterology, violence and theatricality, empathy and pedagogy, hysteria and the mimetic unconscious, the Anthropocene and biomimicry, among other concepts and perspectives that, once again, do not aim to map the entirety of a fast-expanding field; rather, they open up transdisciplinary paths for new mimetic studies to come.15 Across the shifts of emphasis and perspectives, all the chapters contribute to the re-turns to mimesis. They do so by shifting the focus from the dominant definition of this longstanding concept restricted to a visual representation or copy of reality, toward the immanent, embodied, and material foundations of a homo mimeticus who imitates with all the senses. This overturning of perspective proposes an alternative to what Adriana Cavarero calls a “videocentric” (2005, 40) tradition whose roots stem from ancient thought and will be subjected to a rigorous reconsideration in part 1. It also overturns the idealist privilege given to ideal Forms over and against base material copies by focusing on modern materialist theories that reveal how bodily drives are at the origins of thought. Lastly, the focus on mimetic pathos unmoors mimesis from Oedipal triangles restricted to mimetic desire and rivalry to affirm a pre-Freudian conception of the unconscious that was marginalized in the past century for it was untimely but, as genealogical lenses make clear, finds timely empirical confirmations in the neuroscience of the present post-Freudian century. The general aim of part 1, “Re-Framings of Classical Mimesis,” is to return to the Greek origins of mimesis to find the means to understand our present. Prominent and emerging classicists, philosophers and theorists join forces to display the still-standing strength of the Greek concept of mimēsis by relying on technical bows whose conceptual arrows—techne, enthusiasm, pathos, among others—reach into the present. In “Plato on Facebook,” Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen goes back to the problematic of the mimetic subject that already preoccupied him at the dawn of his career;16 he does so by inscribing this subject at the dawn of philosophy itself while showing its relevance for the present. In particular, he takes the Arendtian injunction to “think the present” as a starting point to diagnose our phantom-like condition in the digital age. To that end, he re-turns to a founding text for mimetic studies: namely, Plato’s Ion—a dialogue we already encountered in volume 1 now interpreted from the angle of psychic dispossessions reloaded by new media. This genealogical move allows Borch-Jacobsen to diagnose multiple variants of infectious mimesis and psychic dispossessions currently at the heart of today’s populisms, post-truth, and spell-binding social networks. In particular, This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 21 22 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero via the protean figure of the rhapsode, Borch-Jacobsen reminds us that already in Plato mimesis troubles the philosopher for its disquieting malleability—or, as we shall call it in volume 3, troubling plasticity. The magnetic chain of the Ion that goes from Apollo to the Muses, Homer to rhapsodes, reaching via new magnetizing media into the present, turns out to be a contagious and viral chain, or network; it includes digital networks where each one joins in turn in the dance to become other, the same as another. Rather than simply banishing mimesis, Borch-Jacobsen shows that Plato’s strategy consists in using “mimesis against mimesis.” In a paradoxical, patho(-)logical move the antidote (pharmakon) against the mimetic poison of mimesis—namely philosophy—turns out to be implicated in this very same poison (pharmakon, again) it attempts to cure. Furthering a reevaluation of mimesis as both poison and remedy, in “Techne vs. Mimesis in Plato’s Republic: What Socrates Really Says against Homer,” Henry Staten overturns the metaphysical foundations of the most influential text for idealist theories of mimesis—namely, Book 10 of the Republic—via an immanent techne theory that goes beyond the mirroring logic of representation. In particular, Staten shows that the notorious Platonic “imitation of a copy” schema is quickly left behind by Socrates in favor of an entirely new three-level schema of techne in which the concept of artisanal “use” replaces the level of abstract ideas. Showcasing an agon between Socratic techne contra Platonic mimesis, the chapter proceeds to uncover a Socratic theory of techne (or “techne theory”) sensitive to the immanent power of technai to give material form not only to artisanal objects but also to ethical subjects in the Greek polis. Rigorously focused on the tensions and aporias in Plato’s text, which is re-framed in the context of a consistent Socratic concern with techne haunting a plurality of Platonic dialogues, this chapter has far-reaching consequences for classicist and philosophy more generally. It shows that the Platonic metaphysics of ideal Forms that dismisses art as an “imitation of an imitation” rests on nothing more, but also nothing less, than the history of an interpretative error. In the process, Staten contributes to contemporary re-turns to different, more embodied, and immanent, Socratic-Nietzschean crafts of imitation that benefit from a down-to-earth technical supplement. Acting as a counterpoint to one-sided interpretations of Platonic mimesis as a dangerous pathology, in chapter 3, “Coercion and Mimesis in Plato: Compelling Someone to Change their Nature,” Carlos Carvalhar focuses on Plato’s diagnostic of the power of dramatic mimesis to form and transform subjectivity, a question known by classicists as “second nature” shaped by mimetic experiences. The chapter contributes to the mimetic turn by displaying Plato’s This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies ethical and pedagogical concerns with plastic subjects formed by mythic and literary models for both good and ill—a point central to mimetic studies in general that will re-turn in Homo Mimeticus III as well. In particular, Carvalhar foregrounds Plato’s patho-logical evaluation of mimesis geared toward “becoming-god” via a mimetic reenactment of positive models discussed in less-known dialogues such as Protagoras and Theaetetus. He also suggests ways in which this “becoming-god” impulse can manifest itself in today’s secular societies, for instance, as a striving for perfection, or as a pursuit of elevated virtues. In chapter 4, “Mimetic Resistance,” Teresa Casas Hernández offers a comparison between Plato’s and Aristotle’s foundational accounts of mimesis that does not focus on their often-repeated opposition but on their continuity instead. Caught in the paradoxical logic of mimetic agonism, Casas Hernández shows that the founding fathers of antithetical traditions in philosophy shared, across their opposed evaluations, a similar concern to move away from an oral tradition of mimesis rooted in mimos and performance. Since the telos of mimetic studies is to recover an oral tradition sensitive to the contagious powers of pathos, the chapter contributes to the mimetic turn by tracing the hidden reasons that lead Plato and Aristotle to replace oral mimesis via the visual trope of painting. The chapter ends with a return to the present, suggesting that oral mimesis is a potentially political and epistemic tool for social resistance, as shown by contemporary performative manifestations of passive forms of imitation that stress its power to steal, re-appropriate, and subvert. Mark Pizzato concludes this first part with a chapter arguing that Plato’s allegory of the cave can be reframed in light of the problematic of media violence. In “Behind Plato’s Shadows and Today’s Media Monsters,” he shows that the distinction between a visual mimesis based on representation and a bodily mimesis based on (imaginary) identification—both of which are present in the cave dispositif—helps understand the power of images to cast a spell on the ego generating what mimetic studies calls phantom egos. Drawing on a wide range of theories that go from anthropology to evolutionary psychology to the neurosciences Pizzato furthers a transdisciplinary re-turn to homo mimeticus that shows how ritual aesthetic experiences are not opposed to the findings of science, even on a topic as contested as media violence. In line with neuroscientists like Vittorio Gallese who engage with cave paintings from the dawn of Homo sapiens (Gallese and Guerra 2020, xv–xvii), Pizzato goes from Plato’s cave to prehistoric cave art to foreground an “inner theater” generated by neuronal networks that intersect patho(-)logically with media networks with the potential to trigger mass-shootings in the United States and elsewhere. In the process, Pizzato This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 23 24 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero emphasizes transdisciplinary genealogical continuities across nature/culture divides that support the hypothesis that our vita mimetica is born out of ancient caves. Be they prehistoric, philosophical, or mediatized, these caves set the stage for theatrical spectacles that are not only visual and exterior but affective and interior. This also means that they do not simply generate visual phantoms but phantom egos instead. Overall, these five chapters in part 1 mark a shift from a predominantly visual and realistic mimesis that cast a shadow on most theories of mimesis in the past toward a more embodied, relational, and theatrical mimesis, which provides the driving telos of the mimetic return oriented toward the present and future. Together, the chapters demonstrate that the Greek philosophical origins of mimetic studies do not merely serve as subjects of antiquarian interest. Instead, they open up philosophical genealogies and wellsprings of ideas to diagnose a plurality of problems, including viral mimesis in modern media, education, plasticity, performativity, and violence, among many others. Part 2 furthers the “Theorethical Re-Turns to Homo Mimeticus” by focusing on genealogical precursors of mimetic studies in modern and contemporary philosophy. In particular, they deepen our understanding of mimesis pathos and the multiple patho(-)logies of mimesis internal to contemporary preoccupations, including the modern nihilism first diagnosed by Friedrich Nietzsche, René Girard’s account of escalation of violence during war, George Bataille’s heterology as a science of the excluded or accursed share, an account of the mimetic unconscious via a reframing of hysteric women at play in dramatic spectacles, and a reevaluation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Luce Irigaray’s sensuous, theatrical mimesis which is not one. Given Nietzsche’s centrality in our genealogy of homo mimeticus, in chapter 6, “Nietzsche’s Nihilism and Mimetic Studies,” Marina Garcia-Granero studies the birth of nihilism out of mimetic relations. After contextualizing Nietzsche’s account of the different layers of nihilism, she argues that, like mimesis, nihilism has a Janus-faced nature, manifesting both as salvation and threat. As a mimetic affect, nihilism produces a crisis of difference and loss of the ego that Nietzsche himself conceptualized via the mimetic trope of the “shadows of God.” Garcia-Granero furthers an agonistic confrontation with Girard’s mimetic theory to show that its theological solution to the death of God reveals itself as a nihilistic “shadow of God.” Indeed, different strands of contemporary philosophy have focused on either side of nihilism: as a threat, like mimetic theory, or as a liberation, such as the hermeneutic school. Instead, mimetic studies This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies fosters a pluralist, comprehensive understanding of the patho(-)logical character of nihilism as a pharmakon. Picking up the discussion on Girard, in chapter 7, “Essential Violence and René Girard’s Mimetic Theory,” William Johnsen presents Girard’s theory of essential violence as a precursor of the mimetic turn for he shifted attention from mimetic realism to an anthropology of mimetic desire and violence. While Girard’s theory of desire, violence, and the scapegoat is well-attested in the scholarship, his early interest in cybernetics is not. Consequently, an entire area of research has been left unexplored. Johnsen begins to close this important gap. Thus, he recalls Girard’s alarms concerning radical violence and viral contagion in Battling to the End (Achever Clausewitz) to show that violence is a single subject for Girard, wherever it starts. He argues that competition over scarce resources is not the focal point of Girard’s own thinking—rather, the way violence spreads once fighting starts. To stop the reciprocal and escalating violence of the war—regrettably, a timely question—it is thus crucial to understand the logic of bifurcation that turns pathology into patho-logy. Demystifying the logic of contagion and polarization, Johnsen generates productive connections between mimetic theory (via Girard and Dupuy) and mimetic studies (via Morin, Lawtoo, and Gallese), furthering the productive dialogue between the two transdisciplinary fields. After Nietzsche and before Girard, Nidesh Lawtoo argues that it is Georges Bataille who went furthest in recognizing the centrality of mimesis in intersubjective forms of non-verbal communication mediated by affective contagion. Hence, in chapter 8, “Bataille on Mimetic Heterology,” he shows how multiple concepts now internal to mimetic studies emerge, phantom-like, from Bataille’s early and little-known theory of heterology he developed in the 1930s and the well-known later concerns with the sacred, eroticism, and affective contagion it foregrounds. Supplementing Durkheim, Plato, and Freud, Lawtoo presents Bataille as a transdisciplinary thinker avant la lettre who paves the way for mimetic studies. He does so by proposing heterology as a materialist science of troubling subject matters—from (new) fascism to ecstatic experiences internal to death and love—an idealist tradition tended to exclude in the past but are currently resurfacing via new turns to affect, materialism, and mimesis. Following the transgressive dynamic of “mimetic communication” that has been neglected during the linguistic turn allows Lawtoo to show that Bataille remains a powerful transdisciplinary ally to account for both the affective and hetero-logical foundations of the mimetic turn. This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 25 26 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero In “A New Logic of Pathos: The Anti-Oedipal Unconscious and Hysterical Mimesis,” María del Carmen Molina Barea further unravels the thread of a theatrical mimesis that cannot be restricted to realism but destabilizes the very notion of a proper subject. In particular, she develops a genealogy of the mimetic unconscious from an anti-Oedipal perspective on desiring mimesis that turns the dominant pathological view of hysteria into a patho-logical dramatization that escapes representation. Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s well-known anti-Oedipal theories of desiring production, in fact, cannot be dissociated from their less-known interest in “microimitation” that flows contagiously between self and others. Drawing on theories of hypnosis internal to both anti-Oedipal and mimetic accounts of the unconscious as well as on Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, Molina Barea turns to Robert Wilson’s theater as well as paintings and photographs to provide dramatic specificity to her diagnostic. In the process, she reframes the pathological stereotype of hysteric women as an active mimetic subject that explodes Oedipal schemas and goes beyond psychoanalytical theaters of the unconscious. What emerges in the end is an account of the mimetic unconscious driven by an anti-Oedipal desiring pathos that transgresses representational forms and opens up immanent possibilities for becoming other. In chapter 10, “Exhibition/Exposition: Irigaray and Lacoue-Labarthe on the Theater of Mimesis,” Niki Hadikoesoemo connects two prominent precursors of the mimetic turn, namely the French philosopher and critic Philippe LacoueLabarthe and the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, thus providing a feminist and gendered supplement to our mapping of mimetic studies. Hadikoesoemo argues that the double sidedness of Lacoue-Labarthe’s theatrical conception of mimesis bears the traces of Irigaray’s deconstruction of “two mimeses” already staged in Plato. Both thinkers join hands in this chapter to affirm a corporeal philosophy of theatrical/feminine mimesis that anticipates the rise of performativity. They also pave the way for a feminist theory of gendered mimesis that is internal to mimetic studies. In the process, Hadikoesoemo links femininity to theatrical mimesis thereby troubling the binary logic of theater (re-presentation of reality) and the feminine (re-creation of a masculine imaginary) in favor of a more sensuous, relational, and process-oriented display of mimeses. Part 3, “New Mimetic Studies from Aesthetics to Biomimicry,” provides present and future-oriented lines of inquiry for mimetic studies: a genealogy of negative empathy overcoming the aporias of current debates in post-critique; two patho(-)logical accounts of fiction—one on Fernando Pessoa, the other on Maylis de Kerangal; a revolutionary perspective on how technology can imitate nature—or biomimicry—to face the impeding ecological crisis; and, finally, a This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies call for a radical reassessment of our experience of time via a planetary mimesis in the epoch of the Anthropocene by one of the most influential political theorists writing today. Across their innovative perspectives central to new mimetic studies, these chapters also re-connect with the original, etymological understanding of aesthetics, that is, the science of sensation and feeling. Together, they confirm that the mimetic turn goes beyond autonomous conceptions of artistic representation that dominated the past century. They do so by engaging with the affective, bodily, technological, and immanent powers of art to break the wall of representation via a sym-pathos that reconnects, on new foundations, homo mimeticus to homo aestheticus.17 In chapter 11, “Negative Empathy in Fiction: Mimesis, Contagion, Catharsis,” Carmen Bonasera frames the concept of negative empathy as a mimetic, immanent, and contagious human behavior. By drawing on reevaluations of empathy central to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1873), this chapter defines negative empathy as a form of emotional contagion constitutive of complex aesthetic experience. Negative empathy encourages readers to oscillate back and forth between emotional identification and moral detachment toward/away from certain works and characters disturbingly portrayed as immoral and seductive. This oscillation between humans’ openness to pathos and the ability to set up a critical distance from it, parallels the Nietzschean concept of pathos of distance that set the theory of homo mimeticus in motion. Thus reframed, empathy is put back in touch with its aesthetic origins first theorized by the nineteenth-century aesthetic theorist Theodor Lipps, now reclaimed as a precursor of mimetic studies, affect theory, and the discovery of mirror neurons. Bonasera supplements current debates in post-critique that tend to privilege positive empathy with fictional characters generative of negative empathy instead. In chapter 12, “Fernando Pessoa and the ([P]Re)Birth of Homo Mimeticus,” Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling show that Fernando Pessoa’s poetic and philosophical fascination with protean identities and multiple personalities make him an important precursor of the mimetic turn. Pessoa’s literary language and multiple heteronyms give poetic and experiential lifeform to a vita mimetica that is constitutive of artistic creation, including the emulation of artistic models. Rather than generating envious rivalries that develop into sacrificial crisis and scapegoating, Keohane and Kuhling show that Pessoa and his multiple heteronyms imitate and emulate diverse models—from Shakespeare to Walt Whitman to Oscar Wilde—that resonate with one another joyfully, playfully, and above all, creatively. Located at the productive intersection of the Oedipal This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 27 28 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero and the mimetic unconscious, the chapter ultimately shows how Pessoa’s personas are not simply pathological; rather, they support the patho-logical embodied and phenomenological foundations of mimetic studies. In line with a diagnostic streak that started in modernism, in chapter 13, “Literature, Pedagogy, and the Power of Mimesis: On Teaching Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart,” Evelyne Ender reflects on the pedagogical powers of mimesis via stories that shape new generations of readers in the classroom. Given the origins of mimetic studies with Plato’s pedagogical concerns with the power of narratives to form and transform subjects, it is a welcome move to bring mimesis back in touch with the effects of a contemporary text in the classroom. Drawing on her teaching experiences at Johns Hopkins University with students exposed to the pathos internal to Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart, Ender argues for the cultivation of a mimetic, literary education. Her strategy is to progressively move from the pathos generated by the experience of reading to a type of patho-logy articulated on the delicate pharmacological balance between emotion and thought. More generally, establishing productive continuities between phenomenology, deconstruction, and mimetic studies, Ender argues that the rise of the novel and its influence on our modern sensibilities involves both a historical and an epistemic awareness that fiction triggers a resistance conducive to critical thought, providing its own antidotes and remedies in the reading process. The two final chapters complete the volume by opening up new mimetic studies to two major areas of investigation that take mimesis beyond nature and culture: biomimicry and planetary mimesis. In chapter 14, “The Biomimicry Revolution: Contributions to Mimetic Studies,” Henry Dicks unfolds the relevance of mimetic studies for the environmental crisis via the concept of biomimicry and the new philosophy it entails. Supplementing Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry (1997), Dicks proposes a “biomimicry revolution” (2023) that challenges the dominant conception of mimesis restricted to aesthetic creation in favor of a theory of techne based on the imitation of nature. His goal is to find points of convergence between biomimicry and mimetic studies while also broadening the reach of both fields. In particular, engaging mimesis from the angle of the object rather than the mimetic subject allows Dicks to expand the genealogy of mimetic studies beyond Plato and Aristotle (via Democritus of instance), to account for the shift to the imitation of God in the Medieval period (or theomimicry), while also reaching into the anti-mimetic foundations of modernism and hypermimetic inclinations of postmodernism central to mimetic studies as well. In the process, Dicks develops new patho-logical insights on how technology and its contemporary re-turns to the imitation of nature not This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies only goes beyond anthropocentrism; it can also help mitigate impending ecological crises and environmental catastrophes in the Anthropocene. In the concluding chapter, “Arks at Sea and Arcs of Time,” political theorist William E. Connolly re-turns to the myth of Noah and the Ark, as portrayed in the Book of J, to explore dicey relations between events of nature and mimetic relays in cultural life, where temporal interruptions periodically occur. Connolly considers the “evental register of time” as a fundamental feature of time itself, and, as a result, points to some necessary philosophical and cultural adjustments concerning the character of time, culture and nature relations, as well as mimetic processes. To that end, Connolly establishes a dialogue with Michel Serres, Joseph Conrad, and Nidesh Lawtoo, all drawn upon to help explore time as a multiplicity and think of time as composed of multiple temporalities moving at different speeds and trajectories. Each evental turn in an old trajectory carries pressure to adjust and revise old extrapolations misinforming our understanding and experience of time, traditionally influenced by both Christian religion and sociocentric tendencies that run deep in western culture. Such an exploration contributes to overcoming what Connolly calls “climate casualism.” It also gauges the relations between evental time and mimesis during the period of the Anthropocene, in line with mimetic studies’ environmental sensibilities underscored by previous chapters. Acting as a Coda to the volume, in “Beyond Brain and Body: A Dialogue with Vittorio Gallese,” Vittorio Gallese and Nidesh Lawtoo show that the mimetic turn finds in contemporary neuroscience a timely empirical supplement to promote a re-turn to homo mimeticus that cuts across the brain and body divide. Part of the original Parma team led by Giacomo Rizzolatti that discovered mirror neurons in the early 1990s, Gallese contributed to the (re)discovery that we are mimetic animals. He is thus a strong ally for the mimetic turn: he develops a theory of “embodied simulation” relevant for imitation, but also empathy, theory of mind, aesthetics, film studies, and emerging hypermimetic subjects central to mimetic studies as well. Thirty years after the discovery of mirror neurons, Lawtoo travelled to Parma in 2023 to meet Gallese and deepen the genealogical connections between neuroscience and mimetic studies. They first discuss untimely philosophical physicians like Nietzsche, Charles Féré, and Pierre Janet, who anticipated the contemporary association between “movement and sensation” (Féré’s phrase) via the insight that humans are embodied, relational, and intersubjectively attuned to the mind of others. As the dialogue unfolds ranging from phenomenology to mimetic theory, from critics of mirror neurons to the most recent experiments in the neurosciences on aesthetic experiences, Gallese provides new empirical evidence to support the mimetic This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 29 30 Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero hypothesis that we are embodied, social, and relational creatures whose behavior is shaped by mimesis, for good and ill. In conclusion, Gallese and Lawtoo join voices across old-fashioned two-cultures divides to call for new interdisciplinary bridges to tackle multiple social and technological challenges transecting new mimetic studies in the years to come, such as hypermimesis in the digital age. As the chorus of voices in this volume confirms, mimetic studies arises with force and attention to confront pressing social issues and challenges that require the awareness that we are, for good and ill, mimetic creatures. This ancient realization calls for new perspectives to reevaluate the patho(-)logical manifestations of mimesis in the past, present, and future. We are confident this further mapping of mimetic studies by a plurality of international scholars will provide coordinates to navigate this fast-moving field while also encouraging transdisciplinary and innovative diagnostics of homo mimeticus to come. Notes 1 2 3 4 In addition to vol 1 of Homo Mimeticus, mimetic studies has so far been the subject of special issues on “Poetics and Politics: with Lacoue-Labarthe,” MLN 132.5 (2017), “The Mimetic Condition,” CounterText 8.1 (2022), “Posthuman Mimesis,” Journal of Posthumanism 2.2 (2022), “Mimetic Inclinations with Adriana Cavarero,” Critical Horizons 24.2 (2023), and “The Mimetic Turn” MLN 138.5 (2023). For further mapping of “mimetic studies” see also Lawtoo 2023a, 1–34, 2023b, and www.homomimeticus.eu. For a collective volume on “homo mimeticus 2.0” exploring “posthuman mimesis,” see Lawtoo (ed.) 2024. This volume assembles only a small selection of more than 60 papers presented at an international conference titled “The Mimetic Turn” held at KU Leuven in 2022 to mark the conclusion of the Homo Mimeticus project and the beginning of mimetic studies. Other essays emerging from the same conference were published in a special issue of MLN on The Mimetic Turn (2023). Chapter 1, “Plato on Facebook” by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen was first published in MLN 138.5 (2023); chapter 7, “Bataille on Heterology,” is a revised version of an article that first appeared in a special issue of Theory, Culture, & Society 35.4–5 (2018) devoted to “Bataille & Heterology.” We are grateful to both journals for allowing us to reproduce them. All the other chapters are original works that have not appeared in print before. Wulf ’s and Gebauer’s contributions to mimetic studies appeared in CounterText 8.1. For other excellent introductions to mimesis in line with mimetic studies by contributors to the conference see Borch-Jacobsen 1993, Potolsky 2006 and Borch (ed.) 2019. For an informed praise of copying as essential to humans see Boon 2013. For a more recent study on the way “mimetic processes” at play in rituals, dance, play, performance, and gesture contribute to the transmission of “cultural heritage” and “identity formation” see Wulf 2022, 11. On the role of mimesis during the Covid-19 crisis, see also Gebauer 2022. This content downloaded from 46.114.198.103 on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:26:47 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mapping Mimetic Studies 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 As indicated in volume 1, signs of a re-turn of mimesis were already emerging in the twentieth century, paving the way for the mimetic turn. For an informed overview see Spariosu (ed.) 1984. As Ammaniti and Gallese put it: “the mirror mechanism may play a role in imitative behavior, even perhaps in unconscious mimicry of body postures, facial expressions, and behaviors of social partners” (2014, xi). Despite some psychoanalytical assumptions in productive tension with mimetic studies, the overall focus on maternal forms of empathic communication that foster “cooperation” more than rivalry and violence is perfectly in line with Nietzsche’s genealogy of homo mimeticus (see Lawtoo 2022, 51–67). Lacoue-Labarthe shows that Plato’s “refusal of mimesis” predicated on a “psychology of desire (epithumia) and aggressivity (thumos)” (1998, 98) leading up to the sacrificial “expulsion of the pharmakos” (103) qua sacrificial poet not only anticipates the fundamental building blocks of René Girard’s theory; it also entails a dramatization in which “‘he’, he who is named Plato, loses ‘himself,’” thereby anticipating a problematic central to mimetic studies. See Lawtoo 2022, 43–67. For a Benjamin-inspired account of mimesis understood as “the nature that culture uses to make second nature” (the latter being a concept as old as Plato) see Taussig 1993, 70 and Boon 2013. For recent accounts of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s critical theories in line with the mimetic turn see also Wolf 2022 and Durrant 2023. On the links between mimetic studies and affect theory see Lawtoo 2023a, 19–34. For Nancy and Miller direct contributions to mimetic studies see Nancy and Lawtoo 2022, and Miller and Lawtoo 2020. For dialogues on imitation including William E. Connolly, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-Luc Nancy, Katherine Hayles, Christoph Wulf, Gunter Gebauer, Vittorio Gallese, Adriana Cavarero, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and Edgar Morin, see HOM Videos, https://www.youtube. com/@homvideosercprojecthomomim971/videos See Cavarero and Lawtoo 2021. For a special issue on mimetic inclinations see also Lawtoo and Verkerk (eds.) 2023. Provisional title: Homo Mimeticus III: Plasticity, Mimesis, Metamorphoses with Catherine Malabou. Mimetic studies has been from the beginning sensitive to the “mimetic racism” and “mimetic sexism” (Lawtoo 2013, 101–130) projected onto gendered, sexual, and racial others. For readers interested in the relation between gender and mimesis from the angles of feminist philosophy, queer theory, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and others (LGBTQ+) studies see “Gendered Mimesis Project,” https://genderedmimesis. com/. While the link between mimesis and racist images of Africa has been investigated from the angle of “postcolonial mimesis” (Lawtoo 2016, 173–209) and influential studies on “mimesis and alterity” have helpfully revaluated the powers of “sympathetic magic” (Taussig 1993), a project on contemporary decolonial mimesis is still missing and would greatly benefit (from) mimetic studies. Borch-Jacobsen’s early work on the psychoanalytical subject was informed by deconstruction (Lacoue-Labarthe), mimetic theory (Girard), and a pre-Freudian tradition attentive to hypnosis, all of which are now internal to mimetic studies. For a good starting point into his early work on mimesis see Borch-Jacobsen 1993. 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