Abstract
What is the meaning of violence in a world dominated by violent representations that appear to be utterly deprived of meaning? Does an affective participation in a violent scene—say a war movie or a computer game—serve as a therapy that purifies the subject of violent affects? Or do such representations contribute to spreading the violence they set out to simply represent or, perhaps, cure? These questions are far from new. If they have sparked controversies in recent times, their origins go back to the foundations of philosophy, in Plato and Aristotle. But for contemporary thinkers writing in the wake of psychoanalysis, the affect turn, and recent discoveries in the neurosciences the answer varies depending on the model of the unconscious one relies on. In this chapter I would like to articulate two competing interpretations of the (double) meaning of violence: one stages advocates of a psychoanalytical tradition that is aligned with Aristotle’s view of catharsis in the Poetics and finds its most recent representative in René Girard (Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); the other considers representatives of what I have called a “mimetic unconscious” such as Nietzsche and Bataille (Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), has its origins in Plato’s critique of mimesis in the Republic, and finds its most recent representation in the neurosciences (Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). The point of this confrontation is to lay the foundations for two different models of thinking about the meaning of violence in a world in which representations of violent actions and embodied reactions bleed into each other.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Stephen Halliwell notices that the ideas of Greek poetics “are part of the genealogy of arguments and attitudes in whose modern forms some of our own values may still be invested” (Halliwell 2011, p. 5).
- 2.
This chapter is a radically condensed version of a longer, two-part article that appeared in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. See Lawtoo, N. (2019) ‘Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious (Part I) The Cathartic Hypothesis: Aristotle, Freud, Girard’. Contagion 25, pp. 159–191; Lawtoo, N. (2019) ‘Violence and the Mimetic Unconscious (Part II) The Contagious Hypothesis: Plato, Affect, Mirror Neurons’. Contagion 26, pp. 123–160.
- 3.
The original formulation reads: “‘You ought to be like this (like your father)’…You may not be like this (you’re your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative’” (Freud 1960, p. 30)
- 4.
I offer a more detailed account in Lawtoo, N. (2017) ‘The Classical World: Sacrifice, Philosophy, Religion’. In Alison, J. & Palaver, W. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 119–126. See also the chapters in Parts I and III.
- 5.
What Nietzsche says of his genealogy of moral values applies to the genealogy of theories as well: it requires “a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances of their growth, development, and displacement,” a transdisciplinary knowledge that calls for “some schooling in history and philology, together with an innate sense of discrimination with respect to questions of psychology” (Nietzsche 1996, pp. 8, 5).
- 6.
See Derrida, J. (1981) ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. In Dissemination, Johnson, B, (tr.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 61–171.
- 7.
Hence Halliwell suggests: “The main reason in recent times for the irresistible and largely fanciful obsession with the term [catharsis] is undoubtedly the appeal of such speculations to a Freudian age” (Halliwell 1987, p. 90).
- 8.
This remains Girard’s final position as he writes: “We can escape mimetism only by understanding the laws that govern it” (Girard 2010, p. x).
- 9.
For a genealogy of the mimetic unconscious, see Nidesh Lawtoo, “The Mimetic Unconscious: A Mirror for Genealogical Reflections,” in Borch, C. ed. (2019) Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society. New York: Routledge, pp. 37–53.
- 10.
I discuss Bataille’s and Nietzsche’s take on the unconscious, violence, and mimesis more at length in Lawtoo, 2013, pp. 27–83, pp. 209–280 and Lawtoo, N. (2018) ‘Bataille and the Homology of Heterology’. Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5), pp. 41–68.
- 11.
For a confirmation of single-neuron activity in human patients, see Mukamel, R. Ekstrom, A. D., Kaplan, J. Iacoboni, M., Fried, I. (2010) ‘Single-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions’. Current Biology 20, pp. 750–756.
- 12.
Huesmann concludes his review of the literature on the subject with a similar diagnostic: “In summary, exposure to electronic media violence increases the risk of both children and adults behaving aggressively in the short-run and of children behaving aggressively in the long-run. It increases the risk significantly, and it increases it as much as many other factors that are considered public health threats” (Huesmann 2005, pp. 11–12).
Bibliography
Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2002). The Effects of Media Violence on Society. Science, 295(5564), 2377–2379.
Aristotle. (1987). The Poetics of Aristotle (S. Halliwell, Trans.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Bataille, G. (1962). Erotism, Death and Sensuality (M. Dalwood, Trans.). San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Bataille, G. (1998). Hegel, la mort, le sacrifice. In Oeuvres Complètes (Vol. 12, pp. 326–345). Paris: Gallimard.
Bernays, J. (2006). Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy (J. Barnes, Trans., A. Laird, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 158–175.
Cassin, B. (Ed.). (2014). Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
Else, G. F. (1958). Imitation’ in the Fifth Century. Classical Philology, 53(2), 73–90.
Else, G. F. (1967). Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Freud, S. (1923). Two Encyclopaedia Articles. In S. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XVIII. (1920–1922), pp. 233–260).
Freud, S. (1960). The Ego and the Id (J. Rivière, Trans. & S. Strachey, Ed.). London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (1955). Studies on Hysteria. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2. (1893–1895)). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Girard, R. (1972). Violence and the Sacred (Patrick Gregory, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Girard, R. (2007). Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture with P. Antonello and J. C. de Castro Rocha. London: Continuum.
Girard, R. (2010). Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Halliwell, S. (Ed.). (1987). In the Poetics of Aristotle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Halliwell, S. (2011). Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Havelock, E. A. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Huesmann, L. R. (2005). Imitation and the Effects of Observing Media Violence on Behavior. In S. Hurley & N. Chater (Eds.), Perspectives on Imitations: From Neuroscience to Social Science Vol. 2 Imitation, Human Development, and Culture (pp. 257–266). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hurley, S. (2004). Imitation, Media Violence, and Freedom of Speech. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 117(1–2), 165–218.
Iacoboni, M. (2008). Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (1989). Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (C. Fynsk, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lawtoo, N. (2013). The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Lawtoo, N. (2015). Avatar Simulation in 3Ts: Techne, Trance, Transformation. Science Fiction Studies, 125(41), 132–150.
Lawtoo, N. (2019). The Mimetic Unconscious: A Mirror for Genealogical Reflections. In C. Borch (Ed.), Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion: On Mimesis and Society (pp. 37–53). New York: Routledge.
Nietzsche, F. (1954). Twilight of the Idols. In W. Kaufmann (Ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (pp. 463–563). New York: Viking Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1996). On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (D. Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plato. (1963). Republic. In E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (Eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (pp. 575–844). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2006). Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions and Experience (F. Anderson, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
This chapter synthetizes a more general argument that is part of a book manuscript provisionally titled Violence and the Unconscious: Catharsis to Contagion, itself part of a broader transdisciplinary project, entitled Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 716181).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lawtoo, N. (2019). The Double Meanings of Violence: Catharsis and Mimesis. In: Lauwaert, L., Smith, L., Sternad, C. (eds) Violence and Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-27172-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-27173-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)