The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious

di Nidesh Lawtoo (Autore)

Michigan State University Press, 2013

The Phantom of the Ego is the first comparative study that shows how the modernist account of the unconscious anticipates contemporary discoveries about the importance of mimesis in the formation of subjectivity. Rather than beginning with Sigmund Freud as the father of modernism, Nidesh Lawtoo starts with Friedrich Nietzsche’s antimetaphysical diagnostic of the ego, his realisation that mimetic reflexes—from sympathy to hypnosis, to contagion, to crowd behaviour—move the soul, and his insistence that psychology informs philosophical reflection. Through a transdisciplinary, comparative reading of landmark modernist authors like Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Georges Bataille, Lawtoo shows that, before being a timely empirical discovery, the “mimetic unconscious” emerged from an untimely current in literary and philosophical modernism. This book traces the psychological, ethical, political, and cultural implications of the realisation that the modern ego is born out of the spirit of imitation; it is thus, strictly speaking, not an ego, but what Nietzsche calls, “a phantom of the ego.” The Phantom of the Ego opens up a Nietzschean back door to the unconscious that has mimesis rather than dreams as its via regia, and argues that the modernist account of the “mimetic unconscious” makes our understanding of the psyche new.

• Autore: Nidesh Lawtoo
• Editore: Michigan State University Press
• Collana: Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
• Anno: 2013
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 424 p.
• Dimensioni: 229 x 152 mm
• Peso: 490 gr.
• EAN: 9781611860962

Testo in English