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Plastik Figürler: Mimesis, Metamorfoz, Benliğin Teknikleri

Year 2025, Issue: 9, 163 - 185, 23.10.2025
https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1799411

Abstract

Batı felsefesindeki baskın idealist gelenekler, mimesisi çoğunlukla ideal formlardan uzak, görsel temsillerle sınırlama eğilimindeyken daha azınlık ama dirençli bir maddeci düşünürler silsilesi, öznelik deneyiminin bizzat taklitçi doğasına odaklanma eğilimini sürdürmüştür. Homo mimeticus’un alabileceği plastik biçimlere duyarlı disiplinler arası mimesis çalışmaları alanına yaslanan bu makale, Catherine Malabou’nun formu yeniden değerlendirme girişimini ilerleterek hem form alabilme hem de form verebilme kapasitesiyle donatılmış dört plastik figürün yeni maddeci bir şeceresini çıkarmaktadır: “Figura,” “metamorfoz,” “benliğin teknikleri” ve “üst insan.” Antik (Platon, Homeros), modern (Montaigne, Nietzsche) ve çağdaş (Hadot, Foucault) düşünürlerin eşliğinde yeniden ele alınan bu kavramsal çerçeve, plastisite ve figura kavramlarının birbirini yansıtan nitelikleriyle estetik tarihinin kritik anlarından geçtiğini geniş soybilimsel hatlarla ortaya koyar. Öne sürülen iddia şudur: Plastik figürler, özne oluşumunun tekniklerinde merkezî bir rol oynayan edimsel güçlerle donatılmıştır ve bu güçler antik çağ ve moderniteden günümüze kadar uzanarak mimesis çalışmalarının ufkunu genişletmektedir.

References

  • Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Fields, Osgood & Co, 1871.
  • ———. La Divina Commedia, a c. di Natalino Sapegno. La Nuova Italia, 1991.
  • Auerbach, Erich. “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
  • ———. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton University Press, 2003.
  • Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words, edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Harvard University Press, 1975.
  • Foucault, Michel. “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique: un aperçu du travail en cours,” in Dits et Écrits II 1976-1988, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Gallimard, 2017.
  • ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1977.
  • ———. Histoire de la sexualité III: Le souci de soi. Gallimard, 1984.
  • ———. Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, translated by Michael Chase. The University of Chicago Press, 1993.
  • ———. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton. The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
  • Hadot, Pierre. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? Gallimard, 1995.
  • Homer. The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
  • Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “The Nazi Myth.” Translated by Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (1990): 291-312.
  • Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. La Fiction du politique: Heidegger, l’art et la politique. Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1987.
  • ———. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, edited by Christopher Fynsk. Stanford University Press, 1989.
  • Lawtoo, Nidesh, and Marina Garcia-Granero, eds. Homo Mimeticus II: Re-Turns to Mimesis. Leuven University Press, 2024.
  • Lawtoo, Nidesh, and Willow Verkerk, eds. Homo Mimeticus III: Plasticity, Mimesis and Metamorphosis with Catherine Malabou. Leuven University Press, 2025.
  • Lawtoo, Nidesh, ed. Mimetic Posthumanism: Homo Mimeticus 2.0 in Art, Philosophy and Technics. Leiden, Brill, 2024.
  • ———, ed. The Mimetic Condition. CounterText 8, no.1 (2022).
  • ———, ed. The Mimetic Turn, MLN 138, no. 5 (2023).
  • ———. “The Plasticity of Mimesis.” MLN 132, no. 5 (2017):1201-24.
  • ———. “Wilde avec Foucault: Technologies of the Self in Epistola.” Textual Practice 39, no. 9 (2025).
  • ———. (New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth. Michigan State University Press, 2019.
  • ———. “Nietzsche contra Girard: Agonistic Steps for Mimetic Studies.” Contagion 31 (2024): 145-176.
  • ———. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation. Leuven University Press, 2022.
  • ———. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.
  • ———. Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2023.
  • Malabou, Catherine. “Epigenetic Mimesis: Natural Brains and Synaptic Chips,” in Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene, edited by S. E. Wilmer, 280- 288. Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
  • ———. “From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?” in Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the works of Catherine Malabou, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller. Duke University Press, 2015.
  • ———. Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Polity, 2011.
  • ———. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Columbia University Press, 2010.
  • ———. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. Fordham University Press, 2008.
  • Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. Penguin Books, 2003.
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Homer’s Contest,” edited and translated by Christa David Acampora. Nietzscheana 5 (1996): 1-8.
  • ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • ———. Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufman. Vintage Books, 1954
  • Ovid. Metamorphoses, edited and translated by Charles Martin. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
  • Plato. Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Lane Cooper, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton University Press, 1963.
  • ———. Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Paul Shorey.
  • ———. Sophist, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by F. M. Cornford.
  • Staten, Henry. “Techne vs. Mimesis in Plato’s Republic: What Socrates Really Says about Homer,” in Homo Mimeticus II: Re-Turns to Mimesis, edited by Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia- Granero. Leuven University Press, 2024.
  • Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 4, edited by Josephine M. Guy, Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle. “Interview with Vittorio Gallese.” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011).

Plastic Figures: Mimesis, Metamorphosis, Techniques of the Self

Year 2025, Issue: 9, 163 - 185, 23.10.2025
https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1799411

Abstract

While dominant idealist traditions in western philosophy tended to restrict mimesis to visual representations far removed from ideal Forms, a minor, yet nonetheless resilient genealogy of materialist thinkers has tended to focus on the mimetic nature of subjectivity itself. Building on the interdisciplinary field of mimetic studies sensitive to the plastic forms homo mimeticus can take, this essay furthers Catherine Malabou’s re- evaluation of form by outlining a new materialist genealogy of four plastic figures endowed with the capacity to both receive form and give form: namely, “figura,” “metamorphosis,” “techniques of the self,” and the “overman.” Reframed in the company of ancient (Plato, Homer), modern (Montaigne, Nietzsche), and contemporary (Hadot, Foucault) theorists, the essay argues, in broad genealogical strokes, that the mirroring concepts of plasticity and figura traverse key moments in the history of aesthetics. My wager is that plastic figures are endowed with performative powers central to techniques of subject formation that reach from antiquity to modernity into the present, furthering the field of mimetic studies.

Ethical Statement

The author declares that no specific funding was received for this research.

Thanks

No AI-assisted tools were used in the preparation of this work. All content has been created solely by the author, who take full responsibility for its integrity.

References

  • Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Fields, Osgood & Co, 1871.
  • ———. La Divina Commedia, a c. di Natalino Sapegno. La Nuova Italia, 1991.
  • Auerbach, Erich. “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
  • ———. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton University Press, 2003.
  • Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words, edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Harvard University Press, 1975.
  • Foucault, Michel. “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique: un aperçu du travail en cours,” in Dits et Écrits II 1976-1988, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Gallimard, 2017.
  • ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1977.
  • ———. Histoire de la sexualité III: Le souci de soi. Gallimard, 1984.
  • ———. Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, translated by Michael Chase. The University of Chicago Press, 1993.
  • ———. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton. The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
  • Hadot, Pierre. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? Gallimard, 1995.
  • Homer. The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
  • Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. “The Nazi Myth.” Translated by Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (1990): 291-312.
  • Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. La Fiction du politique: Heidegger, l’art et la politique. Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 1987.
  • ———. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, edited by Christopher Fynsk. Stanford University Press, 1989.
  • Lawtoo, Nidesh, and Marina Garcia-Granero, eds. Homo Mimeticus II: Re-Turns to Mimesis. Leuven University Press, 2024.
  • Lawtoo, Nidesh, and Willow Verkerk, eds. Homo Mimeticus III: Plasticity, Mimesis and Metamorphosis with Catherine Malabou. Leuven University Press, 2025.
  • Lawtoo, Nidesh, ed. Mimetic Posthumanism: Homo Mimeticus 2.0 in Art, Philosophy and Technics. Leiden, Brill, 2024.
  • ———, ed. The Mimetic Condition. CounterText 8, no.1 (2022).
  • ———, ed. The Mimetic Turn, MLN 138, no. 5 (2023).
  • ———. “The Plasticity of Mimesis.” MLN 132, no. 5 (2017):1201-24.
  • ———. “Wilde avec Foucault: Technologies of the Self in Epistola.” Textual Practice 39, no. 9 (2025).
  • ———. (New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth. Michigan State University Press, 2019.
  • ———. “Nietzsche contra Girard: Agonistic Steps for Mimetic Studies.” Contagion 31 (2024): 145-176.
  • ———. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation. Leuven University Press, 2022.
  • ———. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.
  • ———. Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious: vol. 1, The Catharsis Hypothesis. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2023.
  • Malabou, Catherine. “Epigenetic Mimesis: Natural Brains and Synaptic Chips,” in Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene, edited by S. E. Wilmer, 280- 288. Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
  • ———. “From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?” in Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the works of Catherine Malabou, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller. Duke University Press, 2015.
  • ———. Changing Difference: The Feminine and the Question of Philosophy. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Polity, 2011.
  • ———. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Columbia University Press, 2010.
  • ———. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. Fordham University Press, 2008.
  • Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. Penguin Books, 2003.
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Homer’s Contest,” edited and translated by Christa David Acampora. Nietzscheana 5 (1996): 1-8.
  • ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • ———. Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufman. Vintage Books, 1954
  • Ovid. Metamorphoses, edited and translated by Charles Martin. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
  • Plato. Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Lane Cooper, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. Princeton University Press, 1963.
  • ———. Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Paul Shorey.
  • ———. Sophist, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by F. M. Cornford.
  • Staten, Henry. “Techne vs. Mimesis in Plato’s Republic: What Socrates Really Says about Homer,” in Homo Mimeticus II: Re-Turns to Mimesis, edited by Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia- Granero. Leuven University Press, 2024.
  • Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 4, edited by Josephine M. Guy, Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle. “Interview with Vittorio Gallese.” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011).
There are 43 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Literary Theory, Comparative and Transnational Literature, Literary Studies (Other)
Journal Section Research Article
Authors

Nidesh Lawtoo This is me 0000-0003-0083-3208

Publication Date October 23, 2025
Submission Date April 16, 2025
Acceptance Date September 24, 2025
Published in Issue Year 2025 Issue: 9

Cite

Chicago Lawtoo, Nidesh. “Plastic Figures: Mimesis, Metamorphosis, Techniques of the Self”. Nesir: Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, no. 9 (October 2025): 163-85. https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1799411.

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