Böcker av Nidesh Lawtoo

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, deformed, and transformed by the all too human tendency to imitate¿for both good and ill. Crossing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, Homo Mimeticus proposes a new theory of one of the most influential concepts in western thought (mimesis) to confront some of the hypermimetic challenges of the present and future.Nidesh Lawtoo is professor of philosophy and literature at KU Leuven and principal investigator of the ERC project, Homo Mimeticus.

Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the contemporary political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo furthers his previous diagnostic of crowd behavior to account for the growing shadow cast by authoritarian leaders who have taken possession of the digital age. In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with various mimetic theorists to show that (new) fascism reloads the old problematics of mimetic contagion, community, and myth via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction.

Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths? Drawing on an anti-Platonic tradition in critical theory, Lawtoo adopts ethical, anthropological, and philosophical lenses to offer new readings of Joseph Conrad's novels and the postcolonial and cinematic works that respond to his oeuvre. He argues that Conrad's fascination with doubles urges readers to reflect on the two sides of mimesis: one side is dark and pathological, and involves the escalation of violence, contagious epidemics, and catastrophic storms; the other side is luminous and therapeutic, and promotes communal survival, postcolonial reconciliation, and plastic adaptations to changing environments. Once joined, the two sides reveal Conrad as an author whose Janus-faced fictions are powerfully relevant to our contemporary world of global violence and environmental crisis.