René Girard

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of French anthropologist and philosopher René Girard this December,

what remains of his work and his theory of “mimetic desire” and its consequences for explaining and analyzing the phenomena of collective violence,  its sacrificial rites and persecutions?

It’s quite clear that mimetic desire is still relevant today, and there’s no shortage of recent examples in France and the rest of the world to support its theory.

For the record, René Girard asserted that it’s not only our differences that lead us to oppose each other, but above all our similarities, our desire to be alike (Mensonge romantique et Vérité romanesque 1961).

The mimetic character of desire is the dynamic of mimetic rivalry.

Indeed, we resemble each other through an object that we all desire, to which we put ourselves in rivalry, and all means are deployed to achieve this aim.

This much desired object is to be able to live intensely its existence as René Girard says so well. Whether one is a citizen, a company or a state, a nation, the nature of this intense life is different according to the type of individual to which one belongs.

But we do not know our desire, in this sense what it is made of and where it comes from, it is in fact guided by an object held by a model, we desire the desire of our model. Through the object, it is the model, which Girard calls mediator, that attracts us; it is the being of the model that is sought. In short, we desire the existence of another and this is the genesis of rivalry.

Mediation is external when the mediator of desire is socially out of reach of the subject, either from a mythology or socially out of reach.

Mediation is internal when the mediator is real and at the same rank as the subject. It then turns into a rival and an obstacle for the appropriation of the object, whose value increases as the rivalry grows.

Sokdara AO