The Urgency of Mimetic Studies: from Imitation to (New) Fascism
Fifth Girard Lecture by Nidesh Lawtoo
Date & Time:
November 28th, 2024
Reception: 16.30-17:15
Lecture: 17:15-18:30
Drinks: from 19:00
Location:
Lipsius, Lecture Room 0.11
Cleveringaplaats 1, Leiden
Language:
English
The lecture can also be attended by zoom - look here for the link.
Please register by sending an email to
On November 28th Nidesh Lawtoo will deliver the 2024 Girard Lecture at Leiden University, where he is holding the position of Professor of Modern Contemporary European Literature and Culture. With predecessors as Hans Achterhuis, Willem Jan Otten, Johan Graafland and Marcel Poorthuis, this will be the fifth lecture organized by the Dutch Girard Society.
In this lecture, Nidesh Lawtoo steps back to the insights that, as of 2016, lead him to use the term '(new) fascism' as a warning against Donald Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies. While these tendencies became fully manifest on January 6, 2021 for all to see, and the term 'fascism' became mainstream during the 2024 presidential elections that culminated in the re-election of Donald Trump on November 5, the powers of (new) fascist mimesis never cease to surprise. How could a convicted felon be democratically elected as President of the Free World, again—this time with the support of the popular vote? And why are far-right leaders gaining so much traction also in different European countries (The Netherlands included) and around the world?
While such questions do not point to a singular, unifying cause or theory, Lawtoo argues that the multiple masks of what the Greeks called mimēsis (imitation, but also identification, affective contagion, simulation) play an important role in the emergence of new forms of fascism today. Hence the urgency to develop new mimetic studies to address phenomena that René Girard helped anticipate (and perhaps also inspire) but did not fully theorize, including mimetic crowd behavior, hypermimetic social media, and the patho(-)logies of a homo mimeticus that is as vulnerable to the pathos of rivalry and violence as to sympathy and joy—depending on the models we imitate.
With his first major publication The Phantom of the Ego (2013), Nidesh Lawtoo already made himself known as a thinker of mimesis and his international reputation broaden via his EU-funded project, Homo Mimeticus, which gave rise to several publications, including Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (Dutch translation with Noordboek). Within his field of work, by now called ‘mimetic studies’, René Girard figures as one of the most important influences from the 20th century, but Lawtoo also steps further back in time to mass psychology in the 19th century and, via Nietzsche, all the way back to Greek thinking about mimesis in Plato and Aristotle in order to leap ahead to current manifestations of homo mimeticus 2.0 in the digital age.
The year 2016 marks a turning point for Lawtoo, in which his attention shifts from literary theory to more current themes, such as the rise of autocratic political leaders and the influence of new media on the internet. The immediate trigger was the 2016 election campaign of Donald Trump, a candidate who was initially hardly taken seriously by most commentators in both the US and Europe. While the concerns expressed in his book (New) Fascism (2019), recently translated into Dutch, were often seen as exaggerated or premature, we are now in a better position to see and feel the urgency of new mimetic studies to account for the world we live in—here and now.