Positive Mimesis
The idea that there is such a thing as positive mimesis is a somewhat controversial one. Girard himself used the term “mimesis” (derived from the Greek) rather than “imitation” partly to disambiguate it from mere imitation. Mimesis is something that is usually, but not always, hidden. It easily and often leads to some sort of […]
Marxism and Mimetic Desire
Karl Marx in his work Das Kapital describes the fetishization of commodities that he thinks are typical in capitalist societies. At first glance, observes Marx, there is nothing extraordinary about commodities. But if we penetrate deeper, we find strange distortions. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of […]
Anorexia and Mimetic Desire
In 1995, televisions were introduced to a corner of the Fiji islands that had never had television before. Fijian culture has traditionally viewed a strong appetite and a strong, “full” body as positive qualities. But within only three years after the introduction of T.V.’s, 74% of the girls there reported feeling “too fat.” A full […]
A TL;DR Summary of Alex Danco’s Introduction to Girard’s Mimetic Theory
Alex Danco lives in Toronto, works at Shopify, and writes an excellent blog and newsletter on Substack. In April 2019, he posted a summary of Girard’s mimetic theory that is so good we thought it was worth giving a TL;DR version. Here it is. TRIANGULAR DESIRE Humans are imitative creatures. We are evolutionarily programmed to […]
Casting the First Stone – by René Girard
This piece is about the phenomenon of casting the first stone and its cultural relevance. The following essay compares two texts that revolve around the same unpleasant but highly significant subject, collective stoning. The first one, located in the Gospel of John, is the famous episode of an adulterous woman whose stoning is prevented by […]
Freud and Jung: Mimetic Rivals
By Mark Anspach Did a woman come between Freud and Jung? That was the irresistible pitch for the 2011 David Cronenberg film A Dangerous Method. Following the lead of a provocative book by John Kerr, the movie zooms in on Carl Jung’s fling with a female patient. It’s an absorbing side story, but it doesn’t […]
Economics of Mimetic Desire
The ideas that form the basis for the free market economy—ideas like “freedom” and “justice”—are at the heart of the market’s sacred aura. And few ideas have shaped Western economies like the notion of “enlightened self-interest.” Enlightened self-interest is the idea that people will naturally gravitate toward activities that further the interests of others in […]
Mimetic Decelerator
Things that decrease the speed and intensity of mimetic escalation and contagion: social distancing, human-centered technology design, and most long-standing cultural rules, prohibitions, and taboos. For the most part, democractic capitalism—at least when functioning well—has acted as a decelerant to mimetic violence to the extent that it has channeled mimetic desire into value-producing activities.
Mimetic Accelerator
Things that increase the speed and intensity of mimetic escalation and contagion: social media, addictive technology design, and the imprudent removal of necessary constraints such as long-standing cultural rules, prohibitions, and taboos. Certain forms of laissez-faire libertarianism act as mimetic accelerants.
Misrecognition
In mimetic theory, misrecognization refers to the tendency of people or groups caught up in the throes of mimetic desire to have their perception distorted and to misidentify people or things as the cause of their problems, as in the scapegoat mechanism. Girard uses the hard-to-translate French term méconnaissance. It means something like misrecognition, miscognition, […]