Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis
Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis
by Nidesh Lawtoo
Michigan State University Press, 2023 Paper: 978-1-61186-448-9 | eISBN: 978-1-62896-485-1 Library of Congress Classification BF575.A3L397 2023 Dewey Decimal Classification 152.5
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Representations of violence are often said to generate cathartic effects, but what does “catharsis” mean? And what theory of the unconscious made this concept so popular that it reaches from classical antiquity to the digital age? In Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo reframes current debates on (new) media violence by tracing the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical vicissitudes of the “catharsis hypothesis” from antiquity to modernity and into the present. Drawing on theorists of mimesis from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Bernays to Breuer, Freud to Girard to Morin, Lawtoo offers a genealogy of the relationship between violence and the unconscious with at least two aims: First, this study gives an account of the birth of the Oedipal unconscious—out of a “cathartic method.” Second, it provides new theoretical foundations to solve a riddle of (new) media violence that may no longer rest on Oedipal solutions. In the process, Lawtoo outlines a new theory of violence, mimesis, and the unconscious that does not have desire as a via regia, but rather, the untimely realization that all affects spread contagiously and thus mimetically.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Nidesh Lawtoo is an assistant professor of philosophy and English at KU Leuven in Belgium, where he leads an ERC-funded project titled Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism. He was previously visiting scholar in the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, and he is the author of Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory; The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious; and (New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction. Homo Mimeticus
Chapter 1. The “True Unconscious: Girard to Freud
Chapter 2. Birth of Psychoanalysis: Out of the Cathartic Method
Chapter 3. The Riddle of Catharsis: Aristotle’s Poetics
Chapter 4. Beyond the Cathartic Principle: Nietzsche on Influence
Chapter 5. An Attempt at Self-Critique: Contra Hyperspecialization
Coda: The End of a Method
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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