Maria Muhle | Mimetic Milieus und Insectoid Psychoses

07. Jan

6:00 pm, C40.530

In his early, short and brilliant text ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, published in the journal Minotaure in 1935, Roger Caillois investigates forms of excessive imitation using the example of insect mimicry while also opening up a line of flight to the mental state of human subjects and their spatial pathologies. In contrast to the thesis according to which the mimetic adaptation behaviour of insects to their environment is a defence mechanism, Caillois shows that it is by no means an articulation of the instinct of self-preservation, but rather an ‘instinct of self-abandonment’. Mimesis becomes pathology insofar as it dissolves the distinction between organism and environment. At the same time, Caillois describes morphological mimesis as an ‘actual photograph [...]: [a] sculpture-photography or better teleplastic’, as a kind of 3D print avant la lettre. The lecture aims to explore this connection between (insect) mimesis and photography, drawing on relevant Caillois readings (R. Krauss, J. Lacan, K. Silverman) that soften the concepts both of aesthetic and of the subject and thus provide clues for determining a ‘milieu aesthetic’ that proves productive for reading contemporary artistic practices and their techno-aesthetic implications.

Maria Muhle is a professor of philosophy and aesthetic theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She completed her doctorate in 2007 with a binational dissertation entitled ‘A Genealogy of Biopolitics: The Concept of Life in the Work of Foucault and Canguilhem’ in Paris and Frankfurt/Oder. From 2014 to 2020, she was a project leader in the DFG research group ‘Media and Mimesis’. From 2014 to 2020, she was a member of the advisory board of the German Society for Aesthetics and since 2017 she has been a P.I. at the International Doctoral College ‘Mimesis’ at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. From March to May 2018, she was a fellow at the ‘BildEvidenz’ research group at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is co-founder and editor of August Verlag Berlin. Since spring 2020, she has been a member of the DFG research training group ‘Media Anthropology’ at the Bauhaus University Weimar.

Her research interests include political aesthetics, media philosophy, biopolitics and concepts of life since 1800, strategies of re-enactment, media and mimesis.

An event organized by the Research Initiative The Disruptive Condition 
Contact: Anne Gräfe (anne.graefe@leuphana.de)