Mimetic Theory in High School- by Eric Buys
Eric Buys has written an excellent piece imagining mimetic theory being taught as a high school course. Human beings are essentially crisis managers. According to Buys, in the face of any major crisis, humans ask three types of questions: Scientific Questions How do crisis situations in human life arise out of mimetic interactions? How are […]
Mimetic Theory and Islam: “The Wound Where Light Enters” – by Michael Kirwan & Ahmad Achtar
This volume explores mimetic theory and its shared ground between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the Abrahamic religions—which seems to have a spiritual and ethical breakthrough: a move away from scapegoating rituals and toward a concern for innocent victims. This is a move away from negative cycles of desire that lead to violence and toward positive cycles […]
Desire: Flaubert, Proust, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lana Del Rey – by Per Bjørnar Grande
“A common theme in films, novels, or plays is how desire works in characters and how it creates and changes their destinies.” So begins this work by Norweigen professor and Girard scholar Per Bjørnar Grande in this Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory series by Michigan State University Press, a series supported by Imitatio, a project of […]
Mimetic Martinis: Contagious Desire Explained, by James Bond
The drama of everyday life is that people are constantly seeking other people to imitate while simultaneously unaware that they imitate. I plan to order a beer from the bar, but my friend orders a gin martini first. Suddenly, I “realize” that I want a martini, too. (If I’m honest with myself, I didn’t want […]
Mimetic Theory – A Compendium of Videos
This is a complete list of every pedagogic video on mimetic theory and René Girard. This list will be updated weekly as new content arises. “When scandals proliferate, human beings become so obsessed with their rivals that they lose sight of the objects for which they compete and begin to focus angrily on one another.” […]
Mimetic AI—Mimesis and Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence and two of its sub-domains, machine learning and deep learning, often develop with the aid of mimetic algorithms. Financial engineers use mimetic algorithms to drive momentum trading in stocks and other financial assets; sex robots are programmed to mimic the facial expressions and flirtatious voices of their suitors; and even moral theorists and […]
Cancel Culture
So-called “Cancel culture” could be thought of as a modern-day form of bloodyless scapegoating—a scapegoating mechanism which, having lost its power because it has been exposed by Christian revelation, is a victim-making machine. No sooner than one person get cancelled and hashtags start trending on social media then another scapegoat is sought. Cancelled victims only […]
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Psychologist Abraham Maslow first published his famous “Hierarchy of Needs” in 1943. He illustrated the way that he believed human motivation moves—from the fulfillment of basic physiological needs to the fulfillment of the self. Maslow’s hierarchy gives the appearance that “physiological” needs and “safety” needs make up the foundational and largest set of needs for […]
Abortion as Ritual Sacrifice: A Girardian Take on the Scapegoat Mechanism in Sexual Politics
The following are excerpts from the essay Bernadette Waterman Ward called ABORTION AS A SACRAMENT: MIMETIC DESIRE AND SACRIFICE IN SEXUAL POLITICS The key elements of sacrificial religion, as Girard defines it, are the presence ofintolerable tension that must lead to social disruption; the choice of a victimwho cannot strike back to absorb the community’s […]
Mimetic Appetite
Mimetic appetite is a way to describe the power of mimesis as a kind of passion, to take a category from classical metaphysics. According to Thomas Aquinas, humans and the rest of creation have appetites that drive them toward their telos, or ultimate ends. Humans, though, are more complicated than any other kind of being […]