Abstract

To Bill Johnsen, mimetic theorist and innovative editor.Have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and second nature in the body, the speech and the thought?Yes, we have observed the powers of mimesis. And if we reload Socrates's untimely observation for our contemporary, hypermimetic times, we cannot help but wonder yet again: What is the relation between violence, imitation, and the unconscious in a world increasingly dominated by virtual representations of violence, which, we are beginning to realize, may have contagious rather than cathartic effects? In Part One of this twofold argument, I traced a genealogy of the "cathartic hypothesis" via exemplary...