The insurrection moment: intoxication, conspiracy, assault

Abstract

The Storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 took many by surprise, yet mimetic studies had long warned against the powers of leaders that aspire to fascism to turn a mob contra democracy. This essay draws from a genealogy of immanent thinkers of mimetic contagion—from Nietzsche to Deleuze, Foucault to Charlie Brooker—to revisit the attack on the Capitol from the perspective of simulations that are false, yet generate all too-real intoxications in the crowd. It argues that if modernism witnessed the “decay of the mimetic faculty” (Benjamin 1986) we are now witnessing its revival in the digital age—if only because new media disseminate hypermimetic conspiracy theories that go viral online and can be turned to (new) fascist practices offline.