![]() ![]() In this article, I extend this emerging line of inquiry by considering the role of laughter in Bataille’s theory of the communicative subject. ![]() It can be used in courses of modern and contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, literary criticism/theory, media studies, and new mimetic studies.Īfter the recuperation of Bataille as a major precursor of the poststructuralist death of the subject by influential theorists such as Foucault, Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, recent developments in Bataille studies have begun to place mimetic, contagious affects at the center of the problematic of “sovereign communication” (Borch-Jacobsen, Ffrench). Written in an accessible yet rigorous style, Homo Mimeticus appeals to both a specialized and general readership. 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. 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. Mimesis Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality. ![]()
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