Desire among the ruins:
mimesis and the crisis of representation
Universidad Iberoamericana/ Colegio de San Ildefonso
June 26-29, 2024
Sponsored by Universidad Iberoamericana and hosted at the Colegio de san Ildefonso, COV&R’s Annual Meeting was organized by Board Member Tania Checchi.
Filled with palaces and museums, baroque churches and Art Deco buildings, Mexico City’s architectural history spans more than half a millennium, and new architectural discoveries are being made almost every year. San Ildefonso is located in the heart of Mexico City, just behind the cathedral and next to the archaeological site of what was the most important pre-hispanic religious center, Templo Mayor. Its situation at the crossroads of these two major cultural landmarks makes it the ideal venue for our conference. In November 2023, Time Out Magazine declared “Mexico City takes the crown as the world’s cultural capital right now.”
The theme, ”Desire among the ruins: mimesis and the crisis of representation,” opened up a dialogical and critical space for discussing what kind of motives, aspirations and even hopes are inscribed into our need for images, taking into account from a mimetic point of view not only their sacrificial origin and their concomitant problematic status, but also their almost infinite capacity for transformation and renewal.
The ”ruins” of the title evoke both the actual archeological sites that will surround us during the conference, with their archaic echoes and demands, and the actual “ruin of representation” announced by Levinas à propos the crisis of traditional epistemologies and, most importantly, the crisis of meaning experienced from the 20th century on.
Given this situation, we asked along with René Girard: is desire condemned to walk among the ruins of its mimetic failures or can it open up to the truly desirable, an alterity whose frailty no violence can reduce or silence? And finally, can Images be the vehicle of this conversion?
Keynote Speakers
David Freedberg is the Pierre Matisse Professor of History of Art and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. He was also Director of the Warburg Institute at the University of London from July 2015 to April 2017. Professor Freedberg is best known for his work on subjective responses to art, and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship. Taking up the main thesis of his grand oeuvre, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, he has recently been engaged in research and experiments on the relations between vision, embodiment, movement and emotion. This has led him to delve, alongside Vittorio Gallese, into the realm of neuroscience, particularly in regard to the role mirror neurons play in aesthetic experience.
Chris Fleming is a highly regarded philosopher, translator and cultural analyst. He is associate professor in humanities at Western Sydney University and is the author and editor of various books on mimetic theory, including René Girard: Violence and Mimesis and Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid, coauthored with Emma A. Jane.
Carla Canullo teaches philosophy of religion at Universitá di Macerata. She specializes in contemporary hermeneutics and phenomenology, mainly, the elucidation of vulnerability in all its different manifestations and the possibility of thinking Western ethos as translation. Among her books we find Male ingiustificable e metafisica della testimonianza (Unjustifiable Evil and the Metaphysics of Testimony) and L’estasi della speranza (The Ecstasy of Hope ).
Stan Declercq studied archeology at the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico City. He completed his master’s degree in Mesoamerican Studies from UNAM, with the project “Captives of the water mirror” on the Hueytlílatl spring, Coyoacán. This work obtained the “Alfonso Caso” award from the INAH in the area of Archeology, and obtained the “Alfonso Caso” medal 2013 in the Master’s Program in Mesoamerican Studies, FF and L, UNAM. In 2015 it was published as a book. He is currently a Doctor in Mesoamerican Studies from UNAM, where he graduated with a project on anthropophagy and ritual warfare among the ancient Nahuas. He teaches classes at ENAH on topics related to rituality and religion among Nahua groups.
Duncan Morrow is a lecturer in politics particularly in the fields of conflict resolution, the Northern Ireland situation, ethnic confrontations and the relationship between religion and politics through the lens of mimetic theory. His recent publications include Reconciliation and After in Northern Ireland: The Search for a Political Order in an Ethnically Divided Society and “Violence Unveiled” in Mimesis and Atonement.
Jean Pierre Dupuy is an internationally renowned philosopher and has been one of the foremost figures of mimetic theory for decades now. He has a background in mathematics and has widened the scope of his research into the fields of social, economic and political philosophy, epistemology and cognitive science as well as metaphysics and literary theory. His recent work deals with the issues of catastrophe and evil particularly in relation to the the paradoxes of time when free will and determinism are considered. Among his publications on mimetic theory, we find The Mark of the Sacred, How to Think about Catastrophe and Economy and the Future. During this annual meeting he will deliver the René Girard Memorial Lecture.
Geoff Schullenberger is a cultural critic and literary scholar. He has taught in literature, theory and writing in university settings for 15 years and is now a clinical associate professor at New York University. He is a regular contributor to publications like American Affairs, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Atlantis, Unherd and the Washington Examiner. His current work focuses on the circulation of critical theory outside of academia, especially on the internet, the sacrificial structure of social media and the relation between academic and conspiracy theories.
Stéphane Vinolo is a principal lecturer in philosophy at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. His research deals mainly with French phenomenology, French contemporary philosophy and modern political philosophy. His interest in mimetic theory permeates all of his work, particularly in its link with méconnaissance in societal liaisons and the problem of violence and difference. He has published on the topics of metaphysics and Girardian thought, negativity and the image in J.-P. Sartre and the animal as the limit of an anthropology of alterity.
Claudio Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Lomnitz was a Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Committee on Historical Studies at the New School in New York. His deep engagement with the study of historical and social structures in Latin America has produced quite a number of notable publications, some of which are Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism, Exits from the Labyrinth and Death and the Idea of Mexico. In 2020 he was elected member of Mexico’s El Colegio Nacional the highest honor for Mexican academics. His most recent book deals with the subyacen theology of the drug cartels in Mexico: Towards a Political Theology of Organized Crime.
Guilhem Olivier teaches at the graduate school of Mesoamerican Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He leads a research program on the sacrificial meaning of the practice of heart extraction in Pre-Columbian cultures as structuring ritual and has published widely on the anthropological implications of myth and the ritual uses of war and hunting. Professor Olivier has received numerous prizes and accolades for his research and museography achievements. His latest book Mockeries and Metamorphosis of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror”, deals with the enigmatic figure of the god of sorcery and excess that from the shadows keeps the cycle of violence alive.
Silvana Rabinovich is full professor in the institute for philological research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (unam). She has widely published on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and the possibility of engaging recent political thought through the ethical lenses of midrashic and biblical texts. Her recent work deals with counter-hegemonic forms of reading that embrace fragility as hermeneutical key and translation as a form of decolonial theo-logics. In particular, her book The Bible and the Drone integrates Girardian thought with biblical optics in order to overcome the political dangers of sibling rivalry among peoples.
Jorge Federico Márquez is an academic, researcher and professor of the postgraduate and undergraduate program at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, noted for his academic career and his commitment to teaching at a higher level. He has published more than 40 articles in Social Sciences journals and just over seven books of his own authorship and co-authorship with other academics, among which we can find Envy and Politics in Ancient Greece, Envy and Politics. From the Middle Ages to the 18th century, and Beyond Homo Economicus.
Zenia Yébenes Escardó has a degree in Social Anthropology from the National School of Anthropology and History, a professor and doctor of Philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM and a PhD in Anthropological Sciences from the Metropolitan Autonomous University. She has worked on the analysis of the processes of redefinition of religion, secularization and post-secularization, in anthropological theory and philosophy. Among her many publications we find Los espíritus y sus mundos: locura y subjetividad en el México moderno y contemporáneo, (Spirits and their worlds: madness and subjectivity in Modern and Contemporary Mexico), Travesías nocturnas: ensayos entre locura y santidad, (Night Crossings: essays between madness and sanctity) and Hechos de tiempo, (Made of Time).
Among the publications related to mimetic theory, there was a presentation and a discussion of Scott Cowdell’s book, Mimetic Theory and Its Shadow as well as the collective volume Girard and Western Philosophy from MSU.