Description: Representations of violence are often said to generate cathartic effects, but what does "catharsis" mean? And what theory of the unconscious contributed to rendering 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 mimetic theorists from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Bernays to Breuer, Freud to Girard to Morin, Lawtoo offers a new genealogy of the relationship between violence and the unconscious.
Brief description:
Nidesh Lawtoo is professor of Modern/Contemporary European Literature and Culture at Leiden University, Netherlands. He previously led the ERC project Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism, and he is the author of several books inaugurating a new theory of mimesis at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and politics, including The Phantom of the Ego (2013), Conrad's Shadow (2016), (New)Fascism (2019), and Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious (2023).