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oa The Mimetic Faculty Reloaded: Contagion, Immunization, Conspiracies in the Age of Viral Reproduction

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Abstract

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 and providing an alternative to theories of mimetic desire that treated epidemics metaphorically in the past century, I develop a genealogy of the concept of mimesis — from antiquity to modernity to the present — that is attentive to both its pathological and therapeutic or patho- properties for the present century. Part of an ERC project title , the chapter provides new conceptual foundations for a theory of mimesis that is vital to countering contagious crises that cast a shadow on the present and on the future as well.

Hardbound ISBN: 978-2-503-59892-5
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The Mimetic Faculty Reloaded: Contagion, Immunization, Conspiracies in the Age of Viral Reproduction*
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.STPH-EB.5.136414
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References

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  2. Ali, Kecia, Belser, Julia-Watts, Kao, Grace Y., Smith, Shiverly T. J., ‘Living It Out: Feminism During Covid 19’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 36. 2 (2020), pp. 107–16.
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  3. Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981).
  4. Benjamin, Walter, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Peter Demetz, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
  5. Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (2nd version), in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Media, ed. by Michael W. Jennings an others, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–55.
  6. Borch, Christian, The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
  7. Butler, Judith. What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).
  8. Butter, Michael, and Pieter Knight, ‘General Introduction’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, ed. by Michael Butter and Pieter Knight (New York: Routledge, 2020).
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  29. Lawtoo, Nidesh. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022).
  30. Lawtoo, Nidesh (ed.), The Mimetic Condition, CounterText, 1. 8 (2022).
  31. Lawtoo, Nidesh (ed.), Homo Mimeticus 2.0: Art, Philosophy, Technics (Leiden: Brill, 2024).
  32. Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002).
  33. Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen & West, 1966).
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  37. Morin, Edgar, (with the collaboration of Sabah Abouessalam), Changeons de voie: les leçons du coronavirus (Paris: Denoël, 2020).
  38. Mubi Brighenti, Andrea, ‘Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze on Crowds and Packs’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 10. 4 (2010), pp. 291–314.
     [Google Scholar]
  39. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Daybreak, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
  40. Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
  41. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
  42. Plato, Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 215–28.
  43. Plato, Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 575–844.
  44. Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
  45. Stano, Simona, ‘The Internet and the Spread of Conspiracies’ in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, pp. 483–96.
  46. Stein, Richard A., and et al., ‘Conspiracy Theories in the Era of Covid-19: A Tale of Two Pandemics’, The International Journal of Clinical Practice, 75 (2021), pp. 1–5.
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  47. Tarde, Gabriel, L’Opinion et la foule (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901).
  48. Tarde, Gabriel, Les Lois de l’imitation (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
  49. Viriasova, Inna, and Antonio Calcagno (eds.), Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018).
  50. Žižek, Slavoj, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World (New York: Polity Press, 2020).

References

  1. Agamben, Giorgio, A che punto stiamo? L’epidemia come politica (Macerata: Quodlibet 2020).
  2. Ali, Kecia, Belser, Julia-Watts, Kao, Grace Y., Smith, Shiverly T. J., ‘Living It Out: Feminism During Covid 19’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 36. 2 (2020), pp. 107–16.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981).
  4. Benjamin, Walter, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Peter Demetz, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 2007).
  5. Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (2nd version), in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Media, ed. by Michael W. Jennings an others, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–55.
  6. Borch, Christian, The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
  7. Butler, Judith. What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).
  8. Butter, Michael, and Pieter Knight, ‘General Introduction’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, ed. by Michael Butter and Pieter Knight (New York: Routledge, 2020).
  9. Cavarero, Adriana, Platone (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2018).
  10. Cavarero, Adriana, and Nidesh Lawtoo, ‘Mimetic Inclinations: A Dialogue with Adriana Cavarero’, in Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers: Stretching the Art of Thinking, ed. by Silvia Benso and Elvira Roncalli (New York: SUNY Press, 2021), pp. 183–99.
  11. Derrida, Jacques, Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).
  12. Eco, Umberto, ‘A Theory of Conspiracies’, Mint, (2014).
  13. https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/5lhODHqqZHUCqwOZcw2liL/Umberto-Eco--A-theory-of-conspiracies.html
  14. Ellenberger, Henri F., The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books Inc. Publishers, 1970).
  15. Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: protezione e negazione della vita (Torino: Einaudi, 2002).
  16. Esposito, Roberto. Immunità comune. Biopolitica all'epoca della pandemia (Einaudi: Torino, 2022).
  17. Gallese, Vittorio, ‘Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience,’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4 (2005), pp. 23–48.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Gebauer, Gunter, and Sven Rücker, Vom Sog der Massen und der neuen Macht der Einzelnen (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2019).
  19. Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture-Art-Society, trans. by Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
  20. Girard, René, ‘The Plague in Literature and Myth’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15. 5 (1974), pp. 833–50.
     [Google Scholar]
  21. Girard, René, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. by Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010).
  22. Havelock, Eric A., Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
  23. Heidegger, Martin, The Essence of Truth, trans. by Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002).
  24. Lawtoo, Nidesh, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).
  25. Lawtoo, Nidesh, ‘The Cooperative Community: Surviving Epidemics in The Shadow-Line’, in Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016), pp. 91–125.
  26. Lawtoo, Nidesh, ‘Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious (Part I), The Catharsis Hypothesis: Aristotle, Girard, Freud’, Contagion, 25 (2018): pp. 159–92.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Lawtoo, Nidesh, (New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019).
  28. Lawtoo, Nidesh, ‘The Mimetic Unconscious: A Mirror for Genealogical Reflections’ in Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society, ed. by Christian Borch (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 37–53.
  29. Lawtoo, Nidesh. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022).
  30. Lawtoo, Nidesh (ed.), The Mimetic Condition, CounterText, 1. 8 (2022).
  31. Lawtoo, Nidesh (ed.), Homo Mimeticus 2.0: Art, Philosophy, Technics (Leiden: Brill, 2024).
  32. Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002).
  33. Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen & West, 1966).
  34. Mbembe, Achille, ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’, trans. by Carolyne Shread, Critical Inquiry, 47. 52 (2020), In the Moment (blog),
     [Google Scholar]
  35. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/
  36. Morin, Edgar, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, trans. by Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
  37. Morin, Edgar, (with the collaboration of Sabah Abouessalam), Changeons de voie: les leçons du coronavirus (Paris: Denoël, 2020).
  38. Mubi Brighenti, Andrea, ‘Tarde, Canetti, and Deleuze on Crowds and Packs’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 10. 4 (2010), pp. 291–314.
     [Google Scholar]
  39. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Daybreak, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
  40. Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
  41. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
  42. Plato, Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 215–28.
  43. Plato, Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 575–844.
  44. Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).
  45. Stano, Simona, ‘The Internet and the Spread of Conspiracies’ in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, pp. 483–96.
  46. Stein, Richard A., and et al., ‘Conspiracy Theories in the Era of Covid-19: A Tale of Two Pandemics’, The International Journal of Clinical Practice, 75 (2021), pp. 1–5.
     [Google Scholar]
  47. Tarde, Gabriel, L’Opinion et la foule (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901).
  48. Tarde, Gabriel, Les Lois de l’imitation (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
  49. Viriasova, Inna, and Antonio Calcagno (eds.), Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018).
  50. Žižek, Slavoj, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World (New York: Polity Press, 2020).

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