Complicating the standard interpretation of Habermas as a proceduralist, Mimesis and Reason uncovers the role that mimesis, or imitation, plays as a genuinely political force in communicative action. Through a penetrating examination of Habermas's use of themes and concepts from Plato, George Herbert Mead, and Walter Benjamin, Gregg Daniel Miller reconstructs Habermas's theory to reveal a new, postmetaphysical articulation of reason that lays the groundwork for new directions in political theory.
A multidisciplinary study of a term rapidly returning to the forefront of contemporary theory, Matt Potolsky examines the key issues surrounding the term 'mimesis', including an exploration of the work of Freud, Lacan, Girard and Baudrillard.
Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of "imitation" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics.
Mimesis, with its connecting concepts of imitation, simile, and similarity, has been cited since classical times in the exploration of the relationship between art and reality. In this major study Arne Melberg discusses the theory and history of mimesis through narratological analysis of texts by Plato, Cervantes, Rousseau, and Kierkegaard. Moving away from the relatively straightforward 'representation of reality' ideas in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946), Melberg brings the concept of mimesis into the context of the literary theories of de Man and others. Theories of Mimesis is a strenuously argued account of language and time, charting the movement of mimesis from the Platonic philosophy of similarity to modern ideas of difference.
In this ambitious and accomplished work, Taussig explores the complex and interwoven concepts of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and alterity, the opposition of Self and Other. The book moves from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, to the fable of colonial ‘first contact’ and the alleged mimetic power of ‘primitives’. Twenty years after the original publication, Taussig revisits the work in a new preface which contextualises the impact of Mimesis and Alterity. Drawing on the ideas of Benjamin, Adorno and Horckheimer and ethnographic accounts of the Cuna, Taussig demonstrates how the history of mimesis is deeply tied to colonialism and the idea of alterity has become increasingly unstable. Vigorous and unorthodox, this cross-cultural discussion continues to deepen our understanding of the relationship between ethnography, racism and society.
Drawing on the relationship between Derrida and Levinas and on the unresolved tension between their philosophical corpuses, this book aims to offer new possible interpretations on the future of democracy. What philosophical and political ideals can emerge from a parallel reading of these two acclaimed thinkers, and from their ‘philosophical alliance’? This volume attempts to re-imagine and to re-engage the realm of politics, by offering new perspectives on the multiple crises that traverse the contemporary age.
Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of "cutting through the clutter" of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, "sentiment analysts," and decision markets offer to help bodies of data "speak for themselves"—making sense of their own patterns so we don’t have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promise to peer behind people’s words to see what their brains are really thinking and feeling. New forms of information processing promise to displace the need for expertise and even comprehension—at least for those with access to the data. Infoglut explores the connections between these wide-ranging sense-making strategies for an era of information overload and "big data," and the new forms of control they enable. Andrejevic critiques the popular embrace of deconstructive debunkery, calling into question the post-truth, post-narrative, and post-comprehension politics it underwrites, and tracing a way beyond them.
After almost two hundred years of relative obscurity mimesis finds itself again in the limelight of Western theoretical discourse. In the Anglo-American tradition, mimesis or ‘imitation’ regained some prominence, at the turn of the century, through S.H. Butcher’s translation of and introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics, and , in the thirties, through the work of the Chicago school, also centered around Aristotle. More recently, mimesis looms large in the work of Auerbach, Burke and Frye. But it is only in the past decade or so, with the publication in France of the work of Barthes, Derrida, Girard, Genette, and some of their collaborators, that mimesis has again become an object of heated controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. The present collection is designed not only to bring fresh points of view to the current debate, by drawing in other theoretical developments beside the Anglo-American and the French, but also to explain why mimesis has so stubbornly haunted our civilization.
