ACLA 2025 CFP Mimetic Studies: New Theoretical Steps for the Mimetic (Re)Turn

Organizers: Nidesh Lawtoo & Mathijs Peters

The goal of this ACLA panel is to engage productively, critically and creatively with the mimetic (re-)turn to both deepen and further the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies. We are especially interested in the contemporary conceptual masks of mimesis that enable us to further explore the two “faces” of mimesis that go beyond good and evil: understood as a vibrant affect that destabilizes the boundaries of individuation, mimesis on the one hand generates life-negating pathologies and, on the other hand, produces life-affirmative patho-logies.  More here.

Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious: vol. 2 The Affective Hypothesis

Representations of violence have subliminal contagious effects, but what kind of unconscious captures this imperceptible affective dynamic in the digital age? In volume two of a Janus-faced diagnostic on violence and the unconscious, HOM PI Nidesh Lawtoo traces a genealogy of a long-neglected, embodied, relational, and highly mimetic unconscious central to the problematic of (new) media violence. Now OUT with MSU P!