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 conflict. There is no doubt that there is a positive form of imitation—for instance, the imitation of virtuous people, the imitation of artistic masters for art students, or the imitation of Christ for Christians. The imitation of love, as in a healthy marriage, is another example of positive imitation. The current debate is whether “positive mimesis” is the best term for this. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who never writes specifically about mimetic desire and seemed to have more of an individualist version of desire than Girard, nevertheless refers to “emulation” — “the desire for a thing which is generated in us from the fact that we imagine others like us to have the same desire” (Ethics, Part 3, Proposition 27, Scholium). Notre Dame professor Ann W. Astell has a commentary on something that could be called positive mimesis with her essay “Saintly Mimesis, Contagion, and Empathy in the Thought of René Girard, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil.” The question of what to call the positive manifestations of mimetic imitation is an open one. Is there a better term than “positive mimesis”—like “emulation”? Others, like author Luke Burgis, has suggested that some imitate in a way that simply contains less of the negative mimetic components, and that they are anti-mimetic. This does not mean a lack of imitation, but a lack of the negative aspects of mimesis. In general, positive imitation, or positive mimesis, is thought to involved decrease envy, rivalry, and resentment. The model does not become an obstacle and scandal to the one imitating. They are pursuing a good which is not scarce or which will cause conflict.
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 it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. Karl Marx, Das Kapital In Marx’s view, objects take on a mysterious value in the eyes of consumers, one that is completely untethered from any kind of intrinsic value in the object itself. Price bubbles work like this. Market bubbles occur when there is escalating mimetic rivalry between people who want the same asset (art auctions, the stock market, and the housing market are full of them). Participants lose perspective on the value of the asset itself while they are caught up in the mimetic rivalry—beating the rival and claiming ownership becomes the real object of desire. Nobody likes to acknowledge the real mechanism behind a price bubble. Internal mediation is a world where our mimetic rivalries prefer to remain hidden. In 2005, while the housing bubble was expanding to the point of popping, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan famously refused to call it a bubble. “Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it’s pretty clear that it’s an unsustainable underlying pattern,” he said. Then, he told legislators on capitol that he saw “froth” in housing—not a bubble. A bubble is an acknowledgement that mimetic rivalries have spiraled out of control, and there has to be a reckoning. But by this point in the process, the distortions are so numerous and so powerful that it’s hard for anyone to clear his eyes and see reality for what it is. The genius of capitalism is that it channels mimetic desire and rivalries into a wildly generative process that fuels our economy. Objects are not scarce because there are not enough things to go around. Objects are scarce because we learned to want them from somebody else who wanted them first (who themselves learned to want them from somebody else). In the world of internal mediation, all objects are scarce. They have to be. We wouldn’t want them if they weren’t. Their entire value is derived from how much someone else wants them. The greater the rivalry, the greater value the object takes on in our eyes. Especially when the objects exist nowhere outside of our own imaginations.
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 69% had already went on a diet. But the most astounding number of all: 11% reported self-induced vomiting. In 1995, the number was zero. Since 1995, diagnoses of anorexia nervosa have been dramatically on the rise worldwide. What’s going on? Anorexia is an extreme example of how a person may distort reality due to the force of their desire. But all of us, in some way or another, are subject to the same forces as those suffering from anorexia—we just don’t take our mimetic rivalry as far. The medical name for the disease, anorexia nervosa (literally, “nervous loss of appetite”) is a curious one. An anorexic person does not initially have a “loss of appetite”; rather, he has a mimetic appetite that is so strong that it overrides even the most basic bodily needs for nourishment and sustenance. Bulimia, a cousin of anorexia, is the same. A bulimic person alternates between fulfilling his desire to eat by gorging on food and his stronger desire to imitate his model…and so he purges. Both bulimia and anorexia, in Girardian terms, are diseases of desire. The anorexic’s needs are no match for his desires. When they come into conflict, the biological parts of the brain can’t overcome the enormous power of the mimetic brain. The need for basic goods like bodily nourishment can’t restrain the desire to conform to a mimetic model—as found on the pages of Men’s Health, or Teen Vogue, or his Instagram feed. The biological brain totally subordinates itself to the stronger command: to be like the model. His needs have been transformed into desires. The power of mimetic desire pulls him into a vicious cycle of imitation for a model that eludes his grasp the closer and closer he gets. To understand the distortions of mimetic desire and rivalry in the world of internal mediation, we have to see the person suffering from anorexia as someone extremely kindred to us who is a far greater warrior in the battle of desire. It’s enough to examine our own relationship to food to see why. If you’re like most people, you have had a topsy-turvy relationship to food. You struggle to align your desires with your needs. You struggle to navigate the mimetic universe surrounding you. “Since food is the least dangerous drug,” says Girard, “most of us resort to a mild form of bulimia.” We medicate with food when we’ve had a bad day, and we exert our control over it when it becomes a tyrant. “Feeling in control again, we experience a psychological lift not unlike the exhilaration of the true anorexic.” We all suffer from anorexia when it comes to our desires. It might be called Anorexia Universitaria or Anorexia Musculosa. The Harvard valedictorian has taken the same path, and so has the fitness model with six pack abs, two percent body fat, and veneers. They’ve simply chosen different models. The most tragic outcome of all is revealed when someone driven by mimetic desire, locked in a mimetic rivalry, finally achieves the goal that he set out to achieve: to possess the object of his desire. The moment when he finally possesses it is exactly the moment when it no longer has any value at all. Its value was entirely derived from the rivalry—from the fact that there was an obstacle in the way blocking the pathway to the object, mediating its value by making it difficult (or impossible) to possess. The subject who comes to possess an object comes to find out that he was wrong. The object must not be the one that he was looking for. He finds another model. He becomes convinced that the object he’s looking for is hidden under a rock too heavy to lift. This is why the anorexic can never be satisfied no matter how much weight he loses. The object of his desire has long since ceased to exist. But there always another model, another obstacle to overcome. And so it is with us. Anorexia praestigia is the Eternal Diet. To learn more about anorexia and mimetic desire, see the monograph by Rene Girard here
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 imitate—to learn and copy from other people, starting with adults (and, as we grow older, people we admire). Aside from the basic needs (the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), desire for any particular object or experience is not hard-coded into our DNA; we’ve learned to want it by watching other people. The center of gravity of all desire, according to Girard, is not the object or the experiences we pursue. It’s the other person from whom we’ve learned to them. Girard calls these people the mediators or models for our desire. We are not so much acquiring a desire for an object so much as learning to mimic a model and striving to become them or become like them. Girard calls this phenomenon mimetic desire. We don’t want objects; we want to be—like someone else. This desire for being itself is what Girard calls (adopting a philosophical category) metaphysical desire. MIMETIC RIVALRY Mimetic desire naturally leads to conflict. Here, Danco nails it. we frequently see a kind of Hero’s Journey narrative manifest itself as a sort of ’two-dimensional’ plot: the Hero (good!) wants the Goal (object), and there’s an Obstacle (bad!). In order to succeed, the Hero must overcome the Obstacle in order to reach their Goal. The central relationship in this story is between the Hero and the Object; she will fight through any kind of Obstacle in between. These storylines can be entertaining, but they’re not how human conflict usually presents itself in the world. Alex Danco (alexdanco.com) In reality, conflict is three-dimension. There is always a hidden model. The subject (hero) wants some ideal that the model represents, and desires to ultimately BE like the model—all the while, disguising from himself how much he wants this. PEOPLE DON’T FIGHT BECAUSE THEY’RE DIFFERENT BUT BECAUSE THEY ARE THE SAME Girard believes that the distance between subject and model matters. Models who are a great distance away from subjects are called external mediators of desire (who live in a world Luke Burgis calls Celebristan). Models who are close to the subject—who are in their world, and who they can come into contact with—are called internal mediators of desire (they live in a world Burgis calls Freshmanistan). Danco explains the different “laws” of these two worlds like this: When our role model is far away, we continually praise them and draw comparisons between ourselves and them whenever possible. But when our model is close – if they’re our peer, or coworker, our neighbour, or even a family member – we do the opposite. We desperately hide the fact that they are the model for our admiration and jealousy. As our mimicry intensifies, we will progressively go to greater lengths in order to disguise our feelings, and what initially was a feeling of admiration will mutate into envy that we desperately try to hide. We begin to do all sorts of things that seem out of character – attack our model for all various reasons; slander them, sabotage them, do our best to ruin them. (I had a boss once who compulsively took positions, both personally and professionally, that were the exact opposite of one of his peers that was seen in the community as more successful than he was.) Furthermore, because they’re our peer, odds are that they will symmetrically feel the same things towards us: an initial desire to imitate and impress, which yields to envy and descends into symmetric hostility that mirrors and amplifies itself. SCAPEGOATING (BLAME) A mimetic crisis arises when everyone starts imitating everyone else—especially in a situation of internal mediation. In these situations, there is what Girard calls a crisis of difference. And the way this crisis is resolved is the scapegoat mechanism. Once mimetic conflict has been seeded and starts to escalate, what are our options to stop it if there is no justice system? If de-escalation isn’t an option, you really have only one move left: to find a scapegoat. Scapegoating is when the community on both sides of the mimetic conflict collectively decides to find someone to blame for all of this violence. If they can come up with a surrogate victim who is “responsible” for the conflict in the eyes of the community, then they have a rare opportunity to escape the violence: they can end the fighting in one decisive stoke by stating, before everyone, that “the true source of this fighting has been found, and we will kill him.” The community comes together by murdering the scapegoat victim, and as they do so, the conflict resolves. Two immediate questions: who is the victim, and why does the conflict end? First of all, tragically, the victim should ideally be someone neutral to the conflict; therefore someone who is innocent of any real culpability. They have to be neutral, because if the victim were assignable to one side or the other in anybody’s mind, then this killing would simply be interpreted by the community as another salvo in the back-and-forth conflict, which would demand a response just like all the others. Second, by assigning responsibility for the conflict to the victim and then killing them, we do two important things. First, we channel all of the violence in the conflict into one person, who is now killed and cannot return violence. Second, we’ve now created credible grounds for violence to cease: “We found the cause of the conflict! And we have stamped it out.” Everyone can now get what they want, which is a peaceful exit while saving face. Except the poor victim, of course, but they can’t respond because they’re dead. Nowadays, we’ve fortunately moved on from human sacrifice – but the instinct remains. When all else fails, we turn to blame as
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 Jesus. The early manuscripts do not contain this text. Many observers find it is more Lucan than Johannine. Whatever the case may be, its content is so unquestionably Christian that its scriptural authenticity is never questioned: The scribes and Pharisees led forward a woman who had been caught in adultery, and made her stand there in front of everybody. “Teacher,” they said to him, “this woman has been caught in the very act of adultery. Now, in the Law Moses ordered such women to be stoned. But you–what do you say about it?” (They were posing this question to trap him so that they could have something to accuse him of.) But Jesus simply bent down and started drawing on the ground with his finger. When they persisted with their questioning, he straightened up and said to them, “The man among you who has no sin–let him be the first to cast a stone at her.” And he bent down again and started to write on the ground. But the audience went away one by one, starting with the elders; and he was left alone with the woman still there before him. So Jesus, straightening up, said to her, “Woman, where are they all? Hasn’t anyone condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she answered. Jesus said, “Nor do I condemn you. You may go. But from now on, avoid this sin.” (John 8.3-11) The prescription that makes adultery a capital crime applied only to women. At the time of Jesus, it had become controversial and was not always observed. Jesus is in a difficult position therefore. He cannot condone the stoning without betraying his own principles but, if he opposes it, he will be accused of contempt for the Law. The sentence he finally utters when his questioners insist, is one of the most famous in all four Gospels: If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him cast the first stone. In all languages of old Christendom, such expressions as “the first stone,” “to cast the first stone,” are very much alive. What can they mean in a world where the practice of stoning has been discontinued? Is the idea of the first stone really significant? If we pose this question to the language obsessed critics of our time, they will come up with their usual answer. “The first stone,” they will say, is a “rhetorical,” a “purely rhetorical” device. We all thirst for significance and these critics’ greatest pleasure is to disappoint us and make it clear that we, too, must be deconstructed. To them, even though language is everything, it is also nothing at all; it only gives “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” We cannot repeat “the first stone” nowadays, without remembering the innumerable repetitions behind us. Let us call this self-consciousness rhetorical, if we like the term but can we thus empty it of all significance? I do not think so. The first stone is still as powerful today, I believe, as when Jesus first used the expression. How can we show this effectively? However great the Gospel text is, it will not suffice. The reason is simple. Because the sentence we want to explore was too influential, the first stone was never cast. The stoning did not occur. In order to understand the role of the first stone, we need a second text, preferably independent from the Gospels and from Christianity itself, a text in which the first stone is actually cast and the consequences become visible. Such a text will teach us perhaps, why Jesus emphasized the first stone. The second text I want to discuss is exactly what we need. It is thoroughly pagan. It portrays the actual stoning of an old beggar in the city of Ephesus. This horrible deed is supposed to have been instigated by Apollonius of Tyana, a famous spiritual leader of the second century A.D., a kind of guru we might say. Pagan circles found his “miracles” superior to those of Jesus. The most spectacular of these, undoubtedly, is the Ephesus stoning. Whereas Jesus cured only one individual at a time, Apollonius is supposed to have cured the entire city with one single trick which turns out to be the stoning of that poor beggar. The account of this collective murder takes up a whole chapter in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a book authored by Philostratus, a third century Greek writer of some merit: When the plague began to rage in Ephesus, and no remedy sufficed to check it, they sent a deputation to Apollonius, asking him to become physician of their infirmity; and he thought that he ought not to postpone his journey, but said: “Let us go.” And forthwith he was in Ephesus,…. He … called together the Ephesians, and said: “Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease.” And with these words he led the population entire to the theatre, where the images of the Averting god had been set up. And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore ranged the Ephesians around him and said: “Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.” Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged
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 explain the rift between Sigmund Freud and his star disciple. What really drove the two apart was the same thing that had drawn them together: Jung’s worshipful emulation of the master, which concealed a fateful urge to take the other man’s place. No woman needed to come between them; their friendship had been on thin ice from the start. This is the conclusion that emerges from a careful reading of Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method. “The devil made me do it” An early episode recorded by Kerr already foretells the way the relationship would end. In the period before he met Freud, Jung and a Zurich colleague conducted landmark word association tests that produced key experimental evidence for the existence of repressed sexual complexes. The tests were administered with a stopwatch in hand. A complex would betray itself through a delayed reaction to a certain stimulus word, as though the subject hesitated to tread on perilous ground. The association could not be haphazard. The same word would elicit the same response when the test was repeated. Yet, if asked to go through the list again and recall the responses previously given, the subject would draw a blank when faced with the complex-related word, thus confirming the existence of repression. In a majority of cases, the repressed complex had to do with sexuality. The test results had Freud’s name written all over them. But when they were published in successive issues of a prestigious psychology journal, Freud’s name was almost nowhere to be found. Many years later, Jung blamed the devil for his reluctance to give Freud proper credit: Once, while I was in my laboratory and reflecting again upon these questions, the devil whispered to me that I would be justified in publishing the results of my experiments and my conclusions without mentioning Freud. After all, I had worked out my experiments long before I understood his work. Despite repeating the word “my” like a mantra—my experiments, my conclusions—Jung does not claim to have reached his conclusions independently. He only says he didn’t understand Freud’s work at the time he designed the experiments, when the real point is that he used Freud to interpret the results. By Jung’s account, his better angel convinced him to ignore the devil’s blandishments: “If you do a thing like that, as if you had no knowledge of Freud, it would be a piece of trickery. You cannot build your life upon a lie.” With that, the question was settled. From then on I became an open partisan of Freud’s and fought for him. Jung did enlist under Freud’s banner, but not until after the 1904 publication of the word association experiments. The text “ran to nearly two hundred pages and four installments before Freud’s priority on the idea of repression was belatedly acknowledged in a footnote,” Kerr remarks. “The devil was doing more than whispering in Jung’s ear; he was guiding his pen.” A devil named mimetic desire Who is this devil that beguiled Jung into taking Freud’s ideas as his own? René Girard can help us make sense of Jung’s behavior without invoking supernatural forces. Behind talk about the devil, Girard finds something real. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, he suggests that the diabolical tempter of folklore and Scripture represents what he calls mimetic desire: a desire copied from a model who will soon be perceived as a rival and obstacle to the fulfillment of that same desire. At the deepest level, what the imitator wishes to appropriate is not just the model’s objects, but the model’s very being. Jung’s relationship to Freud is a case study in Girardian psychology. It wasn’t just Freud’s ideas that Jung copied, but the desire to be their author. Jung would dearly have liked to be the father of psychoanalysis himself. Freud had thwarted him by getting there first. The devil whispering in Jung’s ear was the voice of mimetic desire enticing him to usurp the position occupied by his model. Did Jung feel guilty about giving in to the devil? The next year he published a magazine article on the topic of unconscious plagiarism. Consciously or not, he had been repressing the source of his ideas on repression. His reluctance to cite Freud’s name was the symptom of an underlying condition that would soon explode into view. The diagnosis was clear: Jung had a Freud complex! When he finally made the pilgrimage to Vienna in 1907, Freud swept him off his feet. Jung found the master “extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether remarkable.” Of all the men he had yet met, “no one else could compare.” Not even in looks: years later, Jung still raved about how “handsome” Freud was. Six months after their first meeting, Jung screwed up his courage and wrote Freud to express “a long cherished and constantly repressed wish”: could he have a photo of the great man? To his delight, Freud obliged. Jung saw only one flaw in the portrait: it was too small! “I have a sin to confess,” he wrote Freud a few months later. “I have had your photograph enlarged.” Jung knew that his Freud obsession bordered on the pathological. It threatened to submerge his own identity. When Freud complained that Jung took too long to answer his letters, Jung invoked his instinct for self-preservation. Admitting “with a struggle” that his admiration for Freud was “boundless,” he stressed that he bore him “no conscious grudge”: So the self-preservation complex does not come from there; it is rather that my veneration for you has something of the character of a “religious” crush. Though it does not really bother me, I still
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 order to indirectly benefit themselves. For instance, people donate to the teachers union because they know the union will ultimately defend their rights in contract negotiations. They sell goods that other people want but which will also make them profit. Everyone wins. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” wrote Adam Smith, “but from their regard to their own interest.” An invisible hand—the unseen forces that guide the market—inevitably fulfill the best interests of society when people are free to act as they wish. But the force that Adam Smith never mentioned explicitly—the real invisible hand that we’ve been exploring throughout this book—is mimetic desire. As we’ve seen, people locked in a mimetic rivalry may indeed act out of self-interest; but they can also act for the purpose of self-destruction. Modern economics has little to say about this. Rene Girard sees Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from the Underground as a devastating take down of the idea of enlightened self-interest. The main character, a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg, is a paragon of selfishness. He has rejected conventional morality and mocks the philosophies of utilitarianism and pragmatism popular at the time. “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man,” says the nameless protagonist. “I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” He explains why he refuses to see a doctor: spite. “I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else,” he says. He announces to the reader that he will be a sign of contradiction to the prevailing philosophies of the day—both the doctrine of laissez faire capitalism, which lacks any rules and regulations, and the idea of enlightened self-interest. In the second half of the book, the underground man causes carnage and misery to everyone he encounters and to himself. “The underground hero is as selfish as he can possibly be, and this is precisely where his trouble lies: he cannot be sufficiently selfish,” writes Girard. “His intense mimetic desire compels him to gravitate around human obstacles of the pettiest kind.” His obsession with his rivals becomes the axis around which his entire world turns. The underground man ends up in even worse shape than we find him. By the end, he is a caricature. The story reveals the illusory wall between the Self and Others. When the underground man intends to be as selfish as he can possibly be, he is as mimetic as ever. He replaces enlightened self-interest with unenlightened self-enslavement. At first, mimetic desire can rest on enlightened self-interest. But mimetic rivalry very often leads to self-destruction because the growing obsession to desire what others desire amounts to an increasingly strong concern with oneself, which eventually enslaves the person. Enlightened self-interest is not sustainable in the context where mimetic desire exists.
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, or misreading in English. Philosopher and Girard scholar Paul Dumouchel translated it as misknowing.[2] “Misknowing” can sound like an oxymoron—if we know something, how do we “mis”-know something? But in mimetic theory, the relationship between knowing and wanting is precarious. Misrecognition is an important concept in mimetic theory because it represents the relationship between desire and knowledge. The extent to which we want something to be true determines our relationship to the truth. Consider the case of someone who holds a repugnant moral position—for instance, the support of Nazi ideology—whose misrecognition of the issue increases the more he gains true knowledge about the state of affairs. He bends all of that knowledge to his own ends. The phenomenon of misrecognition is at the heart of ideology. [2] For more on méconnaissance, I highly recommend Dumouchel’s book The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays.