Mimetic Theory
An explanation of social and cultural phenomena based on the role of imitation in human behavior—particularly, the imitation of desire (mimetic desire) and its consequences. The foundations of mimetic theory were laid by the French polymath René Girard in 1961 in his book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which described mimetic desire (what he usually referred to as “triangular” desire at the time). Girard’s initial insight into the structure of desire developed over the next several decades to include a unified set of ideas that came to be known as mimetic theory. The theory is built around a core set of interrelated ideas: mimetic desire, the mimetic nature of rivalry, mimetic desire as the origin of violence, the scapegoat mechanism, and the religious and cultural rituals, taboos, and prohibitions (the development of law) designed to prevent mimetic crises and resulting violence.
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.
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.
Texts of Persecution
Rene Girard identified what he called “texts of persecution,” or documents that recount phenomena of collective violence from the standpoint of persecutors—for instance, accounts of lynchings in the early twentieth century, or the medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut’s story Judgement of the King of Navarre, which blames the Jews for the Black Death and describes their mass murder—and compares these texts to ancient myths (like Oedipus), where Girard finds striking similarities. Both myths and texts of persecution hide collective violence because they have been written from the point of view of the persecutors. History has been written by the victors, not the victims. Girard did his own form of deconstruction of these texts by deconstructing the mythological structures that obscured the hidden truth of violence underneath. To paraphrase Girard: if you arrive at a crime scene covered with bleach and clear attempts to cover one’s tracks, you can be sure that a crime happened—even if direct evidence of the crime itself can never be fully recovered.
Prophet of Envy: Conversations with René Girard – edited by Cynthia Haven
Prophet of Envy: Conversations with René Girard is a bold new book that contains a carefully curated and well-edited collection of interviews that René Girard had given over the course of his life. Some of them are scholarly, others are fiery. All are tantalizing. Some of these interviews were formerly behind paywalls on obscure websites and in other hard-to-find places. Cynthia Haven has brought together some of the best work of Girard in the format that he liked best: a dialogical encounter where his ideas can be wrestled with and worked out in the company of others. The book contains: Introduction: Socrates in the Digital Age Cynthia 1 “There Are Real Victims Behind the Text” Discussion 2 Opera & Myth Philippe Godefroid 3 Technological Power in the Post-Sacrificial World Scott Walter 4 The Logic of the Undecidable Thomas F. Bertonneau 5 Violence, Difference, Sacrifice Rebecca Adams 6 “Revelation Is Dangerous. It’s the Spiritual Equivalent of Nuclear Power.” Michel Treguer 7 “What Is Happening Today Is Mimetic Rivalry on a Global Scale.” Henri Tincq 8 “How Should Mimetic Theory Be Applied?” Maria Stella Barberi 9 Shakespeare: Mimesis and Desire Robert Pogue Harrison 10 Why Do We Fight? How Do We Stop? Robert Pogue Harrison 11 “War Is Everywhere” Elisabeth Lévy 12 “I have always tried to think inside an evolutionary framework.” Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha 13 The J’Accuse of René Girard: The Audacious Ideas of a Great Thinker Giulio Meotti 14 A Passion Born of Rivalry Mark R. Anspach and Laurence Tacou Conversations with René Girard.i 15 Apocalyptic Thinking after 9/11 Robert Doran 16 “I am first and foremost a social scientist.” Pedro Sette-Câmara, Alvaro Velloso de Carvalho, and Olavo de Carvalho 17 “Christianity Will Be Victorious, But Only in Defeat” Cynthia L. Haven 18 Postscript: “René Girard Never Played the Great Man,” Says Girard Biographer Cynthia L. Haven
Compassion Or Apocalypse?: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of Rene Girard – by James Warren
Apocalyptic Future, Warren’s written a gem, a much-needed “comprehensive” guide to Girard’s thought. It does an excellent job of starting “in the beginning,” with Genesis, and moving all the way through what Girard worried would be a man-made apocalypse. The table of contents is sweeping: Part I: MIMESIS Chapter 1: Mimesis and DesireChapter 2: Mimesis in Genesis 2 and 3Chapter 3: Scandal and Desire in the Gospels Part II: THE SCAPEGOAT Chapter 4: Sacrifice, Founding Murder, and the Scapegoat MechanismChapter 5: Mimesis, Rivalry, and Rounding Murder in GenesisChapter 6: The Primitive Sacred and the Hebrew Scriptures in Travail Chapter 7: MythologyChapter 8: The Gospel Revelation of Myth and Murder Part III: Compassion of Apocalypse Chapter 9: The Gerasene DemoniacChapter 10: The Apostle PaulChapter 11: Paradigm for a New Humanity Chapter 12: Apocalyptic Future and the Contemporary Situation Check out Compassion or Apocalypse on Amazon.
Obituary Tribute to René Girard – Stanford News Service
Cynthia Haven, author of Evolution of Desire, a biography of René Girard, begins this obituary tribute after the 2005 death of the founder of mimetic theory with these words: “René Girard was one of the leading thinkers of our era – a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies and “isms” to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history and human destiny.” It begins a beautifully written ode to one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. By the time Girard died at his home in Stanford on Nov. 4, 2005–just a short time before the terrorist attacks in Paris—he had been inducted as one of 40 immortals into the Académie Française and dubbed by his colleague Michael Serres, a fellow inductee, the “new Darwin of the social sciences.” Girard, always witty despite the seriousness of his thinking, remarked during his induction ceremony into the Académie how funny it was to be called an immortal when, looking around at all of the deceased former members and current elderly members, it was clear that of all the things you could say about members of the Académie, immortal should not be one of them! Click here to read Cynthia Haven’s beautiful piece: René Girard’s Obituary Tribute
René Girard’s CBC interview – David Cayley
Since the beginning of time, humanity has been in constant conflict due to the mimetic nature of desire. In this televised interview, IDEAS producer David Cayley speaks with René Girard about the historical and biblical aspects of mimetic theory, scapegoating, and violence, from Cain and Abel through examples from contemporary literature. With the revelation of mimetic desire and its consequences, Girard hopes to protect humanity from the escalation of violence that is inevitable if the mimetic conflict is not recognized and ultimately renounced. Watch David Cayley’s incredible Interview with René Girard
Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük – René Girard
In 2008, René Girard gave a keynote lecture at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion about how the dynamics of mimetic desire were playing out thousands of years ago. With a focus on what he called “Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük”, he analyzes the rituals that are contained in humanity’s earliest forms of artwork. Çatalhöyük was a large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 5700 BC. Watch Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük