Origin of Mimetic Desire
The discovery of the phenomenon of “mimetic desire” was made by René Girard around 1959. The French professor, now teaching in America, had been asked to teach classes on European literature. He approached the texts like a good archeologist, looking to uncover some overlooked truth about human nature. In that respect, René Girard is similar to the archeologist Heinrich Schliemann who set out to find the lost city of Troy in 1871 with nothing but a copy of the Iliad under his arm. Schliemann believed that the text contained truths—if one was able to see them. But even more than see them, one had to actually believe that the texts were reliable roadmaps for finding truth in the first place. Schliemann did, and he was rewarded by finding the lost city of Troy two years after he set out to find it. In this regard, the French historian and social theorist René Girard is a lot like Schliemann. Giard’s colleague, Robert Pogue Harrison, has pointed out his similarities to the 19th-century archeologist, Schliemann, at least in terms of their method. “Like him, his major discovery was excoriated for using the wrong methods. The others never would have found Troy by looking at the literature—it was beyond their imagination.” Cynthia Haven, writing in her book “The Evolution of Desire”, a biography of Girard, states the following (taken here from Notre Dame’s ChurchLife Journal): Girard’s writings hold revelations that are even more important, however: they describe the roots of the violence that destroyed Troy and other empires throughout time. Like Schliemann, the French academician trusted literature as the repository of truth, and as an accurate reflection of what actually happened. Harrison told me that Girard’s loyalty was not to a narrow academic discipline, but rather to a continuing human truth: “Academic disciplines are more committed to methodology than truth. René, like Schliemann, had no training in anthropology. From the discipline’s point of view, that is ruthlessly undisciplined. He’s still not forgiven.” Girard took a completely different approach to literary texts at a time when deconstructionism and post-modern was “in.” He believed that the texts actually held meaning—that they could be used to find some universal truth. And he was rewarded for doing so. This was the discovery of mimetic desire on the part of René Giard. The origins of mimetic desire are another story. Where did it first arise? Who did it start with? Has mimetic desire always been a part of the human condition? In Chapter 3 of his Magnum Opus, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard implies that mimetic desires emerges from “The Process of Hominization” (the title of the chapter) or, to put it in simpler terms, the transition from animal to man.
Desire Definition
Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and Sovereign Self, but through imitation. That idea was unpalatable to me the first time I heard it. Are we all just imitation machines? No. Mimetic desire is only one piece of a comprehensive vision of human ecology, which also includes freedom and a relational understanding of personhood. The imitation of desire has to do with our profound openness to other people and to the world around us, which is one of the things that makes us uniquely human. Desire, as Girard used the word, does not mean the drive for food or sex or shelter or security. Those things are better called needs—they’re hard-wired into our bodies. Biological needs don’t rely on imitation. If I’m dying of thirst in the desert, I don’t need anyone to show me that water is desirable. But after meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the uniquely human domain of desire. And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need. Girard was interested in how we come to want things when there is no clear instinctual basis for it.[i] Out of the billions of potential objects of desire in the world, from mates to careers to lifestyles, how do people come to desire one of them more than others? And why do the objects and intensity of our desire seem to fluctuate constantly, lacking any real stability? In the universe of desire, there is no clear hierarchy. People don’t choose objects of desire the way they choose to drink a glass of water. Instead of internal biological signals, we have a different kind of external signal that motivates these choices: models. Models are people or things that show us what is worth wanting. It is models—not our “objective” analysis, our central nervous system, or any other biological mechanism—that shape our desires. The universe of desire is filled with models that fluctuate constantly, rising and falling in status and importance. And with these models, people engage in the secret and sophisticated form of imitation that Girard termed mimesis (mi-mee-sis), from the Greek word mimesthai (meaning “to imitate”). [i] Girard uses the word “desire” (or désir in French) because desire was a hotly debated category in philosophical circles in mid-twentieth-century France. After World War II, the question of “desire” dominated French literature and intellectual life. When Girard began exploring the topic, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexandre Kojève, Jacques Derrida, and others were already wrestling with it. So Girard took up their category (désir) and radically transformed it. For Girard, desire is the most salient feature of the human condition and imitation the most fundamental feature of human behavior.
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.
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