Living with Robots —by Paul Dumouchel and Luisa Damiano
Living with Robots is a fascinating exploration of artificial intelligence that draws on mimetic theory to understand the phenomenon of social robots that exist in the real world, with real bodies, and interact with humans. The book is deeply philosophical and contemplates the possibility that we are at an inflection point in human evolution due to the ability of robots to have what the authors refer to as “artificial empathy.” What are the rules governing social behavior? Human desire, according to Girard, is one of the most powerful forces guiding human behavior. If that is true, then designers of AI cannot ignore the impact of mimetic desire and the role that it plays in making us uniquely human—and mimetic. This book is particularly concerned with the “moral behavior” and ethical concerns of robots, and explores the possibility of robots having agency. This is a fundamental text for any exploration of the relationship between mimetic desire and freedom.
The Humble Story of Don Quixote: Reflections on the Birth of the Modern Novel—by Cesáreo Bandera
The Humble Story of Don Quixote, written by a master of mimetic theory (Bandera), applies mimetic theory to better understand what is arguably the greatest novel ever written—or at least the first modern novel ever written. Don Quixote occupied such a high place in the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s opinion that he said this of it: “In the whole world there is no deeper, on mightier work. This is, so far, the last and greatest expression of human thought…And if the world were to come to an end, and people asked there, somewhere: “Did you understand your life on earth, and what conclusions have you drawn from it?”—man could silently hand over Don Quijote.” The epitaph which opens Chapter 1 of this book. Don quixote is the mimetic man par excellence. Everything he does is motivated by imitation, from his initial reading of novels of chivalry to the suggestions of his squire, Sancho Panza. This book is the best explanation of Don Quixote available, and it is thoroughly Girardian in nature. Of particular interest in this book is chapter 10: The Desire of the Obstacle. The chapter concerns itself with the self-inflicted failure that one caught in the cycle of destructive mimetic desire is subjected to, much like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. About the Author Cesáreo Bandera was Professor Emeritus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, former Director of the Program in Comparative Literature at SUNY at Buffalo, and former President of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion.
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature —by Erich Auerback
[Note: We chose to display the cover from the French edition from the 60’s rather than the modern cover.] Erich Auerback did one of the most extensive studies of mimesis in literature before Girard. Auerback, professor or Romance Languages at Yale University, makes a sweeping account of European literature from the Odyssey to Ulysses and includes passages from Virginia Woolf and Proust, Tacitus, Petronius, St. Augustine, St. Francis, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Standhal, Flaubert and Zola, among many others. His recounting of the story of Adam and Eve and the role of mimesis in original sin is particularly striking. This work was the forerunner to Girard’s much more complex Deceit, Desire, and the Novel where he goes beyond mere representation and explores the imitation, or mimesis, of desire in the characters of important works of Western literature. Auerbach’s book focuses more on surface-level artistic imitation; Girard on the imitation of desire, around which he constructed his anthropology of the human person. Auerbach is sure to still fascinate scholars of literature, though, and his work dovetails with Girard’s mimetic theory.
The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes — by James Alison
The Joy of Being Wrong is a work of theological anthropology that looks at original sin (in the Christian tradition) in light of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. James Alison, the author, is a Catholic theologian who is intimately familiar with Girard’s thought and so his anthropological perspective is thoroughly mimetic—he views mimesis as fundamental to what it means to be human. In one striking passage, Alison compares mimesis to gravity. Mimesis is to psychology what gravity is to psychics. Here he comments on the “draw” of a child to an adult (like its mother): “This draw, which is what enabled all of us to have access to language and human society, has the same relationship to humans as gravity does to planets. It is the mysterious movement which is nevertheless evidently there (evidently as soon, that is, as it has occurred to someone to ask why things are as they are) and without which there would be chaos. This movement, Oughourlian, following Girard, calls mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity is to psychics. It is made concrete in the imitation, learning, and repetition which is what enables an infant to become a socialized human being. “ The contents of the book are: Foreword by Sebastian MooreIntroduction Part IConstructing a Theological Anthropology 1.René Girard’s Mimetic Theory2. The Search for a Theological Anthropology3. The Search for a Soteriology Part IIStretching the Shape of Forgiveness 4. The Resurrection and Original Sin5. The Intelligence of the Victim and the Distortion of Desire6. Original Sin Known in Its Ecclesial Overcoming7. The Trinity, Creation, and Original Sin8. Hope and Concupiscence9. Reimagining the Symbol of Original Sin Part IIIIs This What the Church Believes? 10. Is this what the Church Believes? BibliographyIndex
Intersubjectivity in Economics: Agents and Structures – edited by Edward Fullbrook
The editor of this volume is Edward Fullbrook, who is founder and editor of the Real-World Economics Review and a research fellow in the School of Economics at the University of the West of England. The volume explores the notion of intersubjectivity in economics and explodes the is of neoclassical economics of an atomistic economic ma—one who determines his preferences and choices entirely on his own. Individuals are not monadic, isolated things but interdividuals who are relational creatures and whose being and subjectivity is dynamic because it is constituted in relationship with others. Only by understanding those relationships, and especially their mimetic forces, can we approach economics with a robust understanding of the complex forces at work in the world on both a micro and macro scale. In the introduction to the book, the authors set out the fundamental problem with a Newtonian, atonomistic concept of the human person on which most of economics was built beginning in the late nineteenth century. “Application of atomism to the economic realm means treating human desires and proclivities as fundamental data, which, like the masses of physical bodies in classical mechanics, are not affected by the relations being modeled.” In mimetic theory, in which every desire has a relational aspect, this construction of economics falls apart as absurd. “It often happens,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “that the universal belief of one age of mankind…becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.” This book unveils one such absurdity. The contributors to the volume include Frank Ackerman, John B. Davis, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Armin Falk, Ernst Fehr, Edward Fullbrook, Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Frederic Lebaron, Thierry Levy, Paul Lewis, Roger Mason, Anne Mayhew, Paul Ormerod, Ralph William Pfouts, Jochen Runde, S. Abu Turab Rizvi, Laurent Thevenot, and Peter Wynarczyk. Check out Intersubjectivity in Economics on Amazon
The Mimetic Brain – by Jean-Michel Oughourlian
The well-known psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, a collaborator with René Girard on the book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, referred to the Mimetic, or third, brain as the part of the brain which has the function of relationship, reciprocity, mimeticism. Obviously, every person only has one biological brain—but different functions of the brain have been recognized for some time. Oughourlian wrote this book in an attempt to highlight an often overlooked part of the brain which is responsible for the highly mimetic function of humans, which Aristotle noticed 2,500 years ago as the thing that sets us apart the most from animals. Oughourlian writes: “It seems to me that the misery of the human condition lies in the difficulty of accepting the otherness of one’s own being, of accepting that myself is an “other” and that this other who constitutes me is anterior to me. The tragedy of the human comes from denying having been created by the desire, the breath of God, out of nothing (or almost: dust) and that one is permanently re-created by the desire of the other at each instant of one’s life.” The Mimetic Brain explains this great mystery of desire through the lens of psychology, and Oughourlian has a profound grasp of philosophical and theological concepts to supplement his professional work. Check out The Mimetic Brain on Amazon
Mimesis and Economics: Self-Interest
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. 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. He talks about interdividual phenomena extensively in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but he never names the dynamic as Girard named it. The same truth is present in both thinkers, though: 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 takedown 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.
Intersubjectivity
Closely related to the term interdividuality, intersubjectivity is used primarily in reference to mimetic theory and its dialogue with economics to differentiate classical economic agents—who normally have their economic preferences determined solely based on their individual decision-making—from mimetic economic agents who only make choices in a reciprocal (and mimetic) relationship with other economic agents and actors. Intersubjective influences have profound effects in market outcomes from financial bubbles to simple decisions about whether or not to purchase a dress at a clothing store. Intersubjectivity is related to the concept of reflexivity in markets.
Interdividual Psychology
Interdividual psychology is a form of understanding human psychology that is grounded in the mimetic relationship and mimetic reciprocity of a subject to a model. It is based on the notion that we are not individuals but interdividuals who are always in relation to other human beings. The implication is that one cannot understand the psychology of a person without understanding that person’s relationships—and the mimetic nature of them—at a deep level. Dreams, for instance, can give insights into a person’s psychology. But their content is somewhat meaningless without an understanding of the relationships that the person has with others. Dreams do not exist in a monadic subject as products of a brain that is in isolation from other brains. Interdividual psychology is still in an early stage of development with few practitioners because mimetic theory is not yet widely known or understood. The French psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, one of the founders of this field of psychology, is one of the leading practitioners and has elucidated the ideas in his book The Mimetic Brain, among others.
Interdividuality
This concept, closely related to intersubjectivity, is a term coined by psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian (along with Guy Lefort and René Girard) in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World to express their conviction that a monadic, isolated subject does not exist and that the self can only be understood in relation to others. Therefore, there is no such thing as the modern notion of an “individual.” We are only interdividuals, our thinking and desires shaped by our relationships with others. The human person is, by nature, a relational being. Interdividuality refers to the dyadic structure of the human person in relationship to others and expresses this relational structure in a more accurate way. Through our interdividuality, mimetic desire is active in our lives in a dynamic way. The field of interdividual psychology arose from this understanding of interdividuality.