Desire: Flaubert, Proust, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lana Del Rey – by Per Bjørnar Grande
“A common theme in films, novels, or plays is how desire works in characters and how it creates and changes their destinies.” So begins this work by Norweigen professor and Girard scholar Per Bjørnar Grande in this Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory series by Michigan State University Press, a series supported by Imitatio, a project of […]
Mimetic Desire
Mimetic desire is desire according to another, or desire according to a model. Imitation is the force that shapes human desire. People desire things because someone else—a model—did first. When he was in early twenties, René Girard got his first glimpse into the structure of desire. During his university studies in France, he fell in […]
The Fyre Festival and Violent Mimesis
On April 27, 2017, the first attendees of the now-infamous Fyre Festival landed in the Bahamas. They expected a weekend of luxury and pampering, and to potentially rub shoulders with Instagram influencers such as Kendall Jenner and Hailey Baldwin. Instead, they were met with chaos. There were no luxury hotels or gourmet meals, just Lord […]
Individuality
Individual psychology is the first major attempt to formally apply mimetic theory to psychology. It rests on the notion of individuality, first articulated by the psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, to describe the way that human psychology can only be understood in the relation between individuals, or in the space between different human persons. The idea of […]
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 […]
Intimate Domain: Desire, Trauma, and Mimetic Theory – by Martha J. Reineke
For René Girard, human life revolves around mimetic desire, which regularly manifests itself in acquisitive rivalry when we find ourselves wanting an object because another wants it also. Noting that mimetic desire is driven by our sense of inadequacy or insufficiency, Girard arrives at a profound insight: our desire is not fundamentally directed toward the […]
For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth
by Sandor Goodhart, Jørgen Jørgensen, Tom Ryba, James Williams In his explorations of the relations between the sacred and violence, René Girard has hit upon the origin of culture—the way culture began, the way it continues to organize itself. The way communities of human beings structure themselves in a manner that is different from that of other species on […]
When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer – by René Girard
In this lively series of conversations with writer Michel Treguer, René Girard revisits the major concepts of mimetic theory and explores science, democracy, and the nature of God and freedom. Girard affirms that “our unprecedented present is incomprehensible without Christianity.” Globalization has unified the world, yet civil war and terrorism persist despite free trade and […]