Nidesh Lawtoo

Bio: Nidesh Lawtoo is an academic researcher from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The author has contributed to research in topics: Embodied cognition & Unconscious mind. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 34 publications receiving 147 citations. Previous affiliations of Nidesh Lawtoo include Johns Hopkins University & University of Lausanne.

The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious

Abstract: Picture yourself in the early twentieth century, fully alive and engaged with the modernist movement’s flowering in the arts, literature, and psychology. Here’s the catch: imagine that the Father of Modernism, Sigmund Freud, didn’t exist. How would our ideas of the unconscious mind, the modern psyche, look without Freud’s psychoanalytical infant/Oedipal/repressed configurations? Mind blowing, actually. In The Phantom of the Ego, Nidesh Lawtoo wants us to call into question everything we think we know about the human ego: how it developed, what purpose it serves, how is it influenced, etc. He points to newborns showing imitative reflexes—a self-other connectedness—at thirty minutes of age, and reminds us that Freud had many contemporaries working on competing ideas of the human psyche. Nietzsche, especially, took a wildly different path; what he called the ego’s “phantom.” Lawtoo explains Nietzsche’s premise: “this phantom is born out of an unconscious process of psychic ‘communication’ that spreads contagiously from self to others, one head to another head, depriving ‘the great majority’ of their own thoughts, values, and opinions and, thus, turning their ego into what he calls, once again, a ‘phantom of the ego.’” In addition to Nietzsche, Lawtoo pens chapters on other Modernist explorers, including Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Georges Bataille. Lawtoo’s purpose is not to knock Freud from his lofty place—but, obviously, human consciousness, the supposed pinnacle of the evolutionary process, as well as Eastern ideas of duality, may have some more ’splaining to do. MATT SUTHERLAND (Winter 2014)

Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe

Abstract: Acknowledgements Preface, Anne Luyat Introduction: 'An Emotion of Thought', Nidesh Lawtoo Prologue: Revisiting 'Heart of Darkness Revisited' (in the Company of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), J. Hillis Miller Part I: Mythic Darkness 1. Heart of Darkness Revisited, J. Hillis Miller 2. Modernism, Myth and Heart of Darkness, Michael Bell 3. Civilization and its Darkness, Jonathan Dollimore Part II: Conrad avec Lacoue-Labarthe 4. A Frame for 'The Horror of the West, Nidesh Lawtoo 5. The Horror of the West, Philippe Lacou-Labarthe 6. Philippe's Lessons of Darkness, Fran ois Warin Part III: The Affect of Ideology 7. "La lettre , Lacan, Lacoue-Labarthe: Heart of Darkness redux, Stephen Ross 8.The Voice of Darkness, Claude Maissonat 9. The Horror of Trauma: Mourning or melancholia in Heart of Darkness, Beth S. Ash Part IV: The Echo of the Horror 10. Conrad's Dionysian Elegy, Henry Staten 11. Sounding the Hollow Heart of the West: X-Rays and the technique de la mort, Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Roch re 12. The Horror of Mimesis: Echoing Lacoue-Labarthe, Nidesh Lawtoo Postface: A talk with Avital Ronell (about Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) Bibliography Index.

The Case of Eichmann Restaged: Arendt, Evil, and the Complexity of Mimesis

Abstract: This essay reframes Hannah Arendt’s evaluation of the “banality of evil” in light of Eichmann’s mimetic psychology, which Arendt intuited but did not fully articulate. Rather than considering the b...

The Human Condition.

Abstract: Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 2

Abstract: This is the first new translation of both volumes of Nietzsche's Human, All-Too Human to appear since the beginning of the century. The first volume appeared in 1878, just before Nietzsche abandoned his academic life. In 1886 it was republished, incorporating in a second volume two books of aphorisms which Nietzsche had published in the meantime. Subtitled 'A Book for Free Spirits', Human, All Too Human marked for Nietzsche a new 'positivism' and scepticism with which he challenged his previous metaphysical and psychological assumptions. Nearly all the themes of his later work are displayed here with characteristic perceptiveness and honest), - it remains one of the works fundamental for an understanding of his thought.

Human, All Too Human

Abstract: The basic premise of Dr. Carin Bondar’s Nature of Human Nature is that human behavior and intentions and the adaptive strategies of ants, birds, spiders, nonhuman primates, and fish can illuminate one another. After a brief introduction explaining natural selection and introducing the question, Are humans a part of nature?, Dr. Bondar puts this premise to work in a series of vignettes that are divided into two main parts, “survive” and “reproduce.” These are further subdivided into chapters, each of which focuses on a different aspect of survival or reproduction. Each chapter consists of twoto three-page unnumbered sections, each of which centers upon a different animal behavior. Dr. Bondar focuses on kinds of behaviors that might seem to us to be especially characteristic of our species, or perhaps unique to us. For example, surely there cannot be, in the animal world, behavior analogous to the human institution of dietary supplements and professional advice from dietitians and scientists? Dr. Bondar addresses this issue in “oxidatively stressed” (p. 50). No doubt human abilities such as reasoning and careful observation are required to discover that certain fruits and vegetables are high in antioxidants, believed to fight cancer and even aging itself. One important point that a dietitian would want to make to a patient is that fruits and vegetables high in antioxidants are dark in color, purples and dark blues having the highest levels. Not only can scientists discover what nutrients are good for us but they also can help guide us to those foods with that simple rule.

The tell-tale brain: A neuroscientist’s quest for what makes us human

Abstract: The Tell-Tale Brain by V.S. Ramachandran delivers a thought-provoking exploration of the neural basis of human cognition. Ramachandran, a prominent cognitive neuroscientist and practicing neurologist at UCSD, is well known for his studies on phantom limb, in which sensations seem to arrive from amputated body parts, and synesthesia, in which sounds may seem to have tastes, letters may have colors, or there may be some other combinations of actual and illusory events. These and other neurological oddities serve as a jumping off point for the book’s examination of the human brain, how it evolved, and what mechanisms might differentiate us from “lower” animals. Writing for a general audience as well as neuroscience specialists, Ramachandran attempts to go beyond what is known and speculate about what might be. He argues, “If every scientist were a brush-clearing, never-stray-beyond-established-fact type, science would advance at a snail’s pace and would have a hard time unpainting itself out of corners.” In an era in which shrinking availability of research funding induces greater and greater conservatism, Ramachandran’s open-minded approach provides a refreshing contrast. This book expands the realm of ideas and topics that seem tractable to scientific exploration. That this may be accompanied by some overreaching comes with the territory; indeed, in a work of this kind, failing to overreach would be the greater error. The book opens with the challenge of understanding what it is about our “three pound mass of jelly” that affords us our dazzling array of cognitive abilities. The accelerating pace of advancement over the last few thousand years, Ramachandran argues, requires some explanation. During this period, we have perfected cultural transmission of information, so that individuals can benefit from the hard-earned knowledge of others. What is it about our brains that allowed this to happen? Ramachandran points to two attributes of the brain as notable contributors. The first is that neural connections don’t just go where they are supposed to. As both phantom limb syndrome and synesthesia demonstrate, some of the connections in the brain are in the “wrong” place. The limb region of the somatosensory cortex also gets a whisper of input from the face, a pathway only revealed when the limb is missing. Synesthetes experience perceptual cross-talk between real stimuli and illusory, seemingly unrelated sensations. Ramachandran suggests that such anomalous connections reveal a propensity for forging ties between content of different kinds, a propensity that would serve us well in the development of new cognitive abilities. The human brain might have a kind of anatomical flexibility that could lead, on an evolutionary and perhaps on an individual time scale, to repurposing brain areas to perform new tasks. If the connections are already there, evolution needn’t build a whole new infrastructure for some novel cognitive function from scratch. The second major contributors to the evolution of human cognition, Ramachandran argues, are specialized neurons known as “mirror” neurons. These neurons were first discovered in the ventral premotor cortex in monkeys in 1992 by an Italian research group led by Giaocomo Rizzolatti. Mirror neurons show increased activity both when the monkey performs an action and when it watches someone else perform that same action. Ramachandran suggests that by lumping observation and performance, mirror neurons might provide us the basis for empathy, theory of mind, and the ability to predict the actions and motivations of others — vital elements of primate, and human, social structure. The last few chapters of the book shift focus to explore the neuroscience of art — why do we like to look at what we like to look at? Here, Ramachandran proposes that what we find pleasing follows some rules, similar to the Gestalt grouping principles. Our visual systems “like” to detect objects, to see contrast, to solve “peekaboo” problems, etc. One of the most intriguing ideas in this section is that our aesthetic preferences might be driven by canonical ideals representing extreme forms of real-world stimuli. For example, in the 1940s, Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen found that seagull chicks pecked at stimuli resembling the red dot on their parent’s bill, but they pecked even harder at an abstract representation of the bill. Ramachandran argues that a similar tendency could explain our enjoyment of caricatures and other exaggerated artistic forms. This idea suggests a path forward for investigating the neural basis of our aesthetic preferences — currently, very much an unsolved problem — by relating aesthetics to the tuning properties of neurons in the visual pathway. Not surprisingly, some arguments in this book have a better foundation than others (a section on autism is likely to be particularly controversial), but in the end, the most important contribution of this creative book lies not just in the particular ideas that Ramachandran offers, but in the ideas that he provokes his readers to come up with. Looking at things in a new way may lead us to unpaint a few corners, and, perhaps eventually, to clear brush in some new domains of neuroscience.