5th Biannual Girard Lecture. The Urgency of Mimetic Studies : From Imitation to (New) Fascism (Leiden, Netherlands)
In this 5th biannual Girard lecture, organized by the Dutch Girard Society, 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, which culminated in an insurrection on January 6 already diagnosed. Despite many critical warnings and fascist actions, the efficacy of the affective and infective powers of mimesis never ceases 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.