Mimetic
Therefore, is preferred to its Latinate synonym, “imitative,” in describing human relations, since the latter term most often implies an awareness and conscious choice to copy others’ behavior. This is rarely the case except in consumer fashion and advertising and in financial speculation; it is never the case for the human infant who learns by miming and matching gestures and sounds from adult models. Mimesis is much less conscious and deliberate than we imagine in our adult behavior with one another.
Metaphysical Desire
A desire not to possess what another person, the model, possesses (or wants to possess) but to be the model. Metaphysical desire is the type of mimetic desire that has moved beyond acquisitive desire—the desire to acquire something that a model wants—to metaphysical desire—the desire to be who the model is. This desire is a sickness unto death, in the words of Kierkegaard, because there is no solution to it. The subject can never be the model. He longs for a being that is not his own. Metaphysical desire, then, is the desire to be someone who we are not. It is a fatal attraction, a desire for something that is ultimately impossible to bring to fulfillment.
Mediation
Points to the fact that between any human subject and its object of desire, there is a mediator or model who designates the object– person, place, or thing–as desirable, attractive. When the model is beyond the reach of the subject, either because of unassailable priority in history or in stable hierarchical order, we have external mediation: the subject and the rival cannot come into conflict. If this model inhabits the same social world as the subject as an equal, we have internal mediation, in which subject and model interact in ways that can lead to rivalry and ultimately to conflict when they desire the very same object.
Apocalyptic
See apocalypse. Apocalyptic events bring about the destruction of the world and of humanity. In Girard’s mimetic theory, apocalyptic things happen as the result of human violence—specifically, the mimetic cycle which starts with Mimetic Desire, gives way to Mimetic Rivalry, leads to collisions, and eventually is resolved through either war (violence) or the scapegoat mechanism (all against one).