>be me >get asked, can someone provide a quick rundown on Girard? >make stupid arrogant-guy face >totally man, no problem, that's easy >be somewhat mistaken about that
This grew out of an earlier thread about Bannon (boards.Veeky Forums.org/lit/thread/9084193#p9095651) but doesn't really explain why I should have decided to spend eleven hours today thinking about Girard and Trump and so on. And honestly I still don't know. But in any case this was the result. And it has definitely raised my estimation for people who actually are capable of writing long, dense works of academic prose.
For a shorter version of Girard's work and throught, see here: faculty.arts.ubc.ca/pmahon/Girard.html. This has everything that you need. But for the Pseud's Guide to Rene Girard, read on!
1/4 Mimetic Desire
>All great aesthetic ideas are the same – narrowly, obsessively imitative. Our desire for originality ends in insignificant efforts. Instead of renouncing the notion of mimesis we should expand it to include desire, or, perhaps, desire should be expanded from mimesis. By separating mimesis from desire, philosophy has deformed them both.
What are desires, and where do they come from? For Girard, the answer to this question lies in mimesis. We are imitative, copying beings. We desire things because we desire our own being, and the origins of our being are social and cultural. Because our imitative capacity is what makes us who we are (and allows us to Become Who We Are), the ultimate horizons of these desires are infinite. There is no end of things that we might want so long as we are caught up in the process of becoming ourselves.
We desire things because others desire them also, and we can't always get what we want. The natural condition that emerges from this is rivalry. Girard does not come up with this theory entirely on his own; Hegel (the lord and bondsman), Lacan (the Big Other), and Heidegger (anxiety, Das Man, 'the world is not a matter of indifference for us') have done much of the heavy lifting. We do not desire an Oscar, for instance, because we have a material or rational need to own gold statue in the shape of a man; we desire it because it is an Oscar, together with all that that means. This goes the other way as well; we wish to avoid acquiring a reputation for sexual predation, or to be turned into a cockroach for similar reasons. True, we can conceal a reputation, and there are reasons beyond the social why we might prefer to be human beings instead of cockroaches. But in either way they are both going to impact our own self-perception and others' perceptions of us. But where do the desires of a culture, its models, come from?
>It goes without saying that the rite has its violent aspects, but these always involve a lesser violence, proffered as a bulwark against a far more virulent violence.
As a theorist of culture, Girard sees the origins of culture as being founded upon ritual. Mimetic crises break out when societies begin break down, when there is a dangerous loosening of order, hierarchy, and traditions which preserve the integrity of a culture and regulate these crises by means of ritual and prohibition.
>when the fearful adoration of power beings and all distinctions begin to disappear, the ritual sacrifices lose their force; their potency is no longer recognized by the entire community. Each member tries to correct the situation individually, and none succeeds. The withering away of the transcendental influence means that there is no longer the slightest difference between the desire to save the city and unbridled ambition, between genuine piety and the desire to claim divine status for oneself. Everyone looks on a rival enterprise as evidence of blasphemous designs. Men set to quarreling about the gods, and their skepticism leads them to a new sacrificial crisis that will appear – retrospectively, in the light of a new manifestation of unanimous violence – as a new act of divine intervention and divine revenge.
When differences between people shift back and forth the cultural order loses its stability by a constant exchange of places, and this inability to distinguish between differences prompts the sacrificial crisis. As doubles become interchangeable, and nothing seems capable of regulating mimetic conflicts between them, whenever there is an I and and Other caught in a constant interchange of differences, the sacrificial crisis is going to be near.
The adoration of power itself or the rise of ambition is not necessarily the only cause for the breakdown of order; it might also manifest as a symptom of that breakdown. It could just as well be a plague, a defeat by a rival culture, anything at all. The point is only that cultures are themselves fragile. The point here is that a sacrificial crisis involves a kind of a loss of trust in the transcendent, whether this is warranted or not. The collapse of the order of a culture can take many forms, and can occur for many different reasons. Moreover, as we will see, the reasons for the loss of the transcendent are not in fact as important as the methods which the society uses to repair the damages and restore that order, which is through the scapegoat mechanism.
Wyatt Jackson
3/4 The Scapegoat
>Here we are in the very midst of the crisis, when all the circumstances seem to militate against any unified course of action. It is impossible to find two men who agree on anything, and each member of the community seems intent on transferring the collective burden of the responsibility to the shoulders of his enemy brother. Chaos reigns. No connecting thread, however tenuous, links the conflicts, antagonisms, and obsessions that beset each individual.
>The universal spread of doubles, the complete effacement of differences, heightening antagonisms but also making them interchangeable is the prerequisite for the establishment of violent unanimity. For order to be reborn, disaster must first triumph; for myths to achieve their complete integration, they must first suffer total disintegration. Where only shortly before a thousand individual conflicts had raged unchecked between a thousand enemy brothers, there now reappears a true community, united in its hatred for one alone of its number. All the rancors scattered at random among the divergent individuals, all the differing antagonisms, now converge on an isolated and unique figure, the surrogate victim.
In the midst of a sacrificial crisis the the a structural unity that regulates mimetic desire through ritual and prohibition is lost. The calamity is not only that things will fall apart, but also that order can only become restored through an act of collective violence. Mimetic crises occur when nobody is capable of exercising authority without recourse to the very same violence which founded that culture, and which subsequently produces the rituals and prohibitions that culture subsequently lives by. The scapegoat allows the culture to unite around a threat, but this doesn't happen by accident: it requires a persecuting myth in order to enframe that violence as *just.* Girard is not cheerful about this because these rituals or myths of necessity have to hide the original nature of this violence, precisely because it is predicated on a fundamental injustice: that in the absolute sense there really is no difference between equals or twins, and this is what led to the breakdown in the first place.
There is a double-bind here. Violence resolves the problems of anarchy, but nothing except mythological concealment can solve the problem of the founding violence itself. So ritual selects and identifies certain aspects of violence and prohibits others, but what is concealed is the truth: that the scapegoat was a surrogate victim the destruction of which the society requires for culturally pragmatic reasons rather than the transcendental justice in the name of which violence is committed. When citizens are unanimous in their conviction that some other force is responsible for their woes, this will indeed become a reality.
Ryan Martin
God, it's 2am but I promise I'll have a quick readdown tomorrow.
Matthew Harris
4/4 The Logic of the Duel
>Antagonists then become caught in an escalation of frustration. In their dual role of obstacle and model, they become more and more fascinated with each other.
Much of this was prompted by thinking about the United States today in the era of Trump, which is rancorous to a degree we haven't seen in a long time. For me this conflict is rendered most explicit on the internet via the media, which seems to be trying to do everything in its power to present the most one-sided and uncharitable views of the other as possible (“It's all the fault of those liberal pussies;” “Did you hear what Trump said,” etc).
There is a reason for this, and what makes Girard relevant is that he understands exactly how this process works. Girard is neither a Freudian nor a Marxist, which is to me what makes his throught refreshing and important; you will not hear him talking about the (inevitable) crises of capitalism, nor will he have much sympathy for the tortured sufferers of our latent postmodern ideology of Enjoyment. This is not to deny the role that these play today; he understands very well that The Spice Must Flow. However, and to continue that analogy, the crises that subsequently ensue are for him are consistently mimetic in nature. What is of the most interest to him is not the self-reported rectitude or victim-logic of either of the sides in the conflict, but rather the higher logic, that being the logic of the duel, which drives and accelerates these conflicts themselves, and to which both sides become obedient.
Duels, whether between individuals or states, are reciprocal and mimetic processes. You can expect the other person to act in a certain way. The Golden Rule holds *in war and in peace.* Modern wars are violent because they are reciprocal, and the mimesis involved in any appropriation necessitates a *response*. The aggressor has always already been attacked (and as we can see, the aggressor then is empowered to present themselves as a victim; and this is what you see today, in the clash between liberals and conservatives: a clash of victims). This is why Girard writes about Clausewitz' discovery of the tragic clash of doubles which continually provokes and accelerates the trends to extremes: a unity of alternation and reciprocity, an accelerated oscillation of differences.
>We must not believe in the 'true history' that Hegel sees growing between the ups and the downs or 'apparent history', or the history that positivists describe as a national necessity or a process. The real principle that is latent behind the alternating victories and defeats, behind the 'philosophical trend', behind the 'pure logic' and 'nature of war' is not a ruse of reason, but the duel. The fight to the death is much more than a simple desire for recognition. It is not a master-slave dialectic, but a merciless battle between twins.
Nathan Perez
Bonus! Crusty Shitposting
The sacrificial crisis seems to appear everywhere today. Witness Rowling's unfortunate responses to her detractors on Twitter, calling them deplorables and anime-watching nerdoids. Witness Steve Bannon identifying himself as a Leninist. Witness the immediate response to “Dear White People:” “Why not Dear Black People?” All of these are very well explained as Girardian phenomena: it is not that people cannot be said to not be misunderstanding each other, but understanding each other all too well in ways that only accelerate the drive to extremes.
The last word belongs to Girard:
>No culture exists within which everyone does not feel “different” from others and does not consider such differences legitimate and necessary. Far from being radical and progressive, the current glorification of difference is merely the abstract expression of an outlook common to all cultures. There exists in every individual a tendency to think of himself not only as different from others but as extremely different, because every culture entertains this feeling of difference among the individuals who compose it.
>Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended. The hero sees himself in the rival he loathes; he renounces the “differences” suggested by hatred. He learns, at the expense of his pride, the existence of the psychological circle. This victory over desire is extremely painful. Proust tells us that we must forego the fervent dialogue endlessly carried on by each one of us at the superficial levels of our being. One must give up one's own dearest illusion.
Charles Ross
thanks bro, good stuff
Henry Brown
Very interesting
>The withering away of the transcendental influence means that there is no longer the slightest difference between the desire to save the city and unbridled ambition, between genuine piety and the desire to claim divine status for oneself. Everyone looks on a rival enterprise as evidence of blasphemous designs.
Maybe I misunderstand but could this be compared to how today it's very difficult to differentiate between genuine empathy and virtue signaling?
Kevin Adams
What is Girardfag's opinion on spengler
Joshua Williams
I'm OP. This is a good essay and I'm glad you posted it here. Joshua Landy is much more intelligent than I am.
So no doubt there are aspects of Girard's thought I disagree with. I don't necessarily think, for example, that all desire necessarily leads automatically to violence. Or of what he raises about choice. Girard belongs to the era of the great structuralists, there's no doubt about that. My interest in him is mainly derived from an absolute exhaustion with a poststructuralism that in media culture has metastasized into a kind of terminal and recursive mimeticism. Not seeing any further moves ahead in the direction of more deconstruction, I've chosen to take it back towards structuralism. I've written this before. Because beyond a certain horizon it seems we are fast approaching a point where we are going to be incapable of saying anything at all precisely because we are of necessity so freewheeling in our thought. Mitchell Heisman shot himself for this very reason. A solipsistic universe troubles me.
My main feeling is that the current trends - both on the left and on the right - are ultimately going to lead to disaster in precisely the ways that Girard expects them to. Is my own apprehension warranted? Is it even logical? I suppose not. I should be reading my Nietzsche and being prepared to go with the Dionysian flow of these things. I get that. I should manifestly not be trying to save the world.
>Is it really true, then, that exposure to Girard will make people better readers? Might it not tempt them, instead, into becoming cherry-picking, evidence-disdaining, overgeneralizing, plot-rearranging fabricators? Might they not start seeing every literary or mythical text as having more or less the same function as every other? And wouldn’t that be the textbook definition of bad reading?
Claims like this just strike me as being completely at odds with what he is actually saying. I can't imagine Girard ever actually encouraging people to cherry pick novels looking for his theory. This would seem to me at least to be exactly what he does *not* want you do. What would be the point of reducing literature to a series of boxes to be ticked off?
>the “all desire is mimetic,” “all violence is mimetic,” and “all culture comes from violence” claims reduce, at best, to something trivial
This is another one that puzzles me. Again, triviality seems like something he wants to avoid. How is the intimation that all culture proceeds from violence trivial? When is violence ever a trivial question? The very lack of triviality about violence and desire is exactly why I find this so fascinating. Is Clauswitz trivial? Is Bannon? I'm not saying we have to jump the window, but perhaps some degree of gravity is warranted.
So, just my own thoughts.
Jayden Thompson
>There exists in every individual a tendency to think of himself not only as different from others but as extremely different, because every culture entertains this feeling of difference among the individuals who compose it.
What is Girardfag's opinion on David Foster Wallace
Brayden Sanders
Pretty much. We don't need to get crazy about empathy, either. Beyond a certain horizon it really will just be Muh Feels, and that is the problem we're in today. Too many feels (and too much confidence in language to be able to express these).
Virtue signaling is pretty odious, as is cynicism. These can often go hand in glove. But my main issue is just how one form of virtue-signaling today prompts the counter-virtue signal, and this tendency makes it hard for there to be anything like a common ground. In fairness, maybe there never was a common ground, and I'm only discovering this now; but either way, I think it's going to lead to bad stuff. Who knows tho. Maybe this is stuff that just has to happen. Could be.
Plus he's about as close as literature will get to being an actual Space Marine. I have to give him points for that.
I think he's great. Dated, of course, but it's important to read people like that, to understand how people outside of our own time thought about things. If this is what the Winter Phase looks like, I'd believe it. I like Spengler.
I don't have one. Haven't gotten around to IJ yet.
Isaac Nelson
>Haven't gotten around to IJ yet. Thank you for not being a meme-man
Imo read The Pale King first, if you are actually planning on reading him at some point, it's a more concrete exploration of his ideas.
>Beyond a certain horizon it really will just be Muh Feels, and that is the problem we're in today. Too many feels (and too much confidence in language to be able to express these).
Nolan Carter
What is Girardfag's opinion on The Last Psychiatrist
Brayden Anderson
You should read his essay E Unibus Pluram, ASAP, faggot
Jackson Watson
Just found about him! Seems interesting...
Yes. Will read this tomorrow. Good call.
Nolan Young
God bless you, Girardbro. I'm just scratching the surface of Girard thanks to you (or your doppelganger). This summary has put Christian myth -- as always -- back at the fore as an archetype of human experience and begged me, a humble reader, to examine my own experience as just another lemming who may have something to say about our human failings. You're alright, user.
Gavin Martin
bump
Dylan Gomez
interest. someone smart say something smart.
>inb4 "lol avatar of Veeky Forums"
Robert Roberts
Cheers user. Good luck. I wanted to make this longer and include some more sections, but I'm glad at least something got finished and that it had something positive for you.
It was harder than I thought it would be, too. Shitposting on Veeky Forums is easy, but actually trying to arrange thoughts and present them in some kind of order and not just throw my own dumb thoughts around for a change is difficult. But, worth doing. Hope your reading and own reflections go well.
Joseph Hernandez
Great text Girardfag. What do you think of the conception of a nation in The Republic?
Landon Reyes
Cheers user, thanks for reading.
Maybe be a little more specific? It's been about six years since I read the Republic and my memory is a little hazy.
Brody Sullivan
It's just that the Platonic republic (I haven't read recently either) lacks the antagonism of the scapegoat system, maybe because it's an artificially modeled polis. Is that just idealism from Plato's part or was he into something?
Evan Rivera
The one thing that springs to my mind here - make of this what you will - is that IIRC the Republic is to some degree modelled on Sparta, and the Spartans actually had one of the darkest and strangest forms of scapegoating there is: the Krypteia. Read on for more interesting history there, because to my mind that kind of stuff is 100% Girardian ritual violence.
The Greeks also had ostracization as a form of punishment as well. I believe that Aristotle says somewhere that the man who lives beyond the walls of the city must be either a beast or a god. Exile is, even if it is not tantamount to actual death, sociopolitical death. Granted, because people can *vote* or cast lots the mechanism is perhaps somewhat more veiled, or it is simply the case that there is consent to the decision (which is hardly primitive, but rational): but either way the effect is the same. Some must be destroyed, exiled, or banished for the health of the city.
One other thing that I feel it's important to mention here: Girard is not a philosopher of the Warm Fuzzies. It's one of the things that I like about him. He doesn't necessarily say that all oppression is wrong, or bad; this would perhaps be a very easy position for him to slide into as a kind of a crypto-Marxist, but he never does. What he understands is that cultures, cities, and religions have these underlying processes or mechanisms which regulate them in a kind of macro-psychological way.
I would have to look into punishment in the ancient Greek world for a better answer to your question - and it's a very interesting idea! - but that's what comes to my mind at present.
Daniel Price
Girard's analysis of Shakespeare's work are absolutely fantastic. You should provide some examples of his literary analysis. Anyway, good thread.
Sebastian Hernandez
Girards concept of the scapegoat and this whole talk of ritual sacrifice reminds me of Adorno/Horkheimers chapter on ancient ritual sacrifice in the Dialectic Of Enlightment, ie. even though man thinks he is sacrificing something else, he always partly sacrifices himself. Now that I think of it, there actually seem to be a lot of parallels between them and Girard, they both trace civilzation back to the ritual and realize that something fundamental happened to the subject here.
Nicholas Nguyen
I don't know man, these seem like weak conceptual tools. The only reason I don't dismiss the guy is because Thiel likes him so much.
Dominic Foster
Cheers. And yeah, no doubt, I left a lot of stuff out. I'm not a scholar or an academic, just a random guy who likes books. My notes just for those four posts were sixteen pages long and all over the place. I wanted to have a section on Marx and Freud as well.
This thread came about because I wound up getting kind of carried away after an user in that other thread asked for a 'quick rundown' and I suddenly realized that in order to do that well I was going to have to go back and dig up all of the books and actually try and put my thoughts in some order instead of just being a blowhard shitposter. Which, of course, I am; but it's tedious just be to spouting off about your own opinions all the time. It really made me realize how hard it is to write clearly and communicatively.
I'm actually tempted now to make this an ongoing thing and write Total Pseud Guides to all of the guys that I like, just as a fun exercise. Even if it's only to refresh my memory a little bit. The Total Pseud's Guide to Lacan would be handy. As would one for pic related.
Aiden Gonzalez
I see, one of their solutions was to internalize the mechanism, in a way.
Mason Baker
I've just started The Girard Reader. This thread will come in handy.
The chapter on triangular desire characterizes Stendhal's "vaniteux" as one who is always striving for his mimetic desires without control. Is Girard's notion of an authentic person related to how they can priorize/suppress their desire?
And are sadism/masochism ritualistic mechanisms to redirect noxious desire?
Adam Flores
Yep. The origins (and evolution) of subjectivity. Those are deep rabbit holes.
>even though man thinks he is sacrificing something else, he always partly sacrifices himself.
This is huge stuff. One of the things about our post/modern sensibility lies in the effacement or disappearance of these ideas of sacrifice. Ritual sacrifice bound primitive societies together, potlatch was the symbolic *destruction* of wealth; and this is something we do not do today (or at least, not in such a direct and obvious form). This is not to make an apologia for modern societies, but perhaps to invite the question of who or what it is we become when we stop offering anything back to the gods. Even if that sacrifice was painful. Some guys to read on this topic are Baudrillard, Bataille, Graeber and Mauss. I'm not making an argument for paganism, but I do think there is something very powerful in the logic of capital accumulation (and the globalized individual who accumulates and reproduces it) that divides modern from premodern societies in powerful ways.
As you have said (and said very well!), it is not possible to sacrifice the other without sacrificing something of yourself. Hence the need for the text, to cover this up and render it politically or narratively free of the actual violence within it. At least, that's the Girardian view. There's a good book by Ruth Stein as well on the psychoanalysis of terrorism that gets into the logic of the suicide bomber as well.
There's also that segment on Odysseus and the Sirens as well, in which Odyseeus gets to have his cake and eat it too, avoiding the sacrifice altogether by having his men cover up their ears with wax. Shit like that drives Adorno nuts, since he sees in it the beginning of the cynical bourgeois mentality that evades this sacrifice by an act of cunning. He's not completely wrong about that, I think. It leads to the kind of anxiety that pic related talks about too, I think.
One thing I would want to look into as well are the degrees to which Confucian societies are founded on violence or human sacrifice and these other concepts. Those are the most ritualistic guys ever, and I do like Confucius a lot.
I haven't really done the best possible job of explaining them, I'll admit. Part of it is that stuff Girard talks about - mimesis, for instance - is connected with ideas I have been following in a bunch of other guys for a while. Taken by himself it's like one guy playing bass guitar. He makes more sense when read in context with the other guys who are saying the same things: Heidegger, Lacan, Zizek and so on. When you have the band together, so to speak. But hey, at least he's got the Thiel endorsement.
Jordan Evans
100%. Externalization - literal human sacrifice, whatever - is what you see in primitive *and medieval* societies. Things begin to take a turn for the psychological with the modern period, around the Enlightenment. As Foucault says, when states begin taking an interest in the prevention of crimes rather than just in their explicit and violent restitution. But it doesn't mean that the scapegoat mechanism has disappeared.
Just briefly, and because I was going to write this yesterday, it's important to note also that there's no need to go on a Molyneux anti-statist direction either. The law, modern law, is not always going to be an instrument of the scapegoat mechanism. Of course, there are kangaroo courts, and the Nazis and the Soviets were ruthlessly bureaucratic and able to use the law, as well we know, for their own reasons. Laws too belong to cultures, with all that that entails. But yes, absolutely, this can be internalized. It happens all the time.
It's an interesting question. I would say that his heroes are not the ones who prioritize or suppress desire, but transcend and overcome it: these being the great novelists themselves, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Proust (and I would add Melville to that list). Great novelists *teach* us something about desire that can, arguably, be taught by no one else. It is that overcoming of desire which produces the greatest literature, but it is, to quote that other great thinker, Bane, going to be extremely painful. The most authentic people for Girard are those great novelists, because they are great teachers in something that can be communicated in no other form but literature. There is no one true way to doing it, but we know when we are reading someone who has done it. Because we feel that we are not dealing with someone who is full of shit and signalling cues at us.
>And are sadism/masochism ritualistic mechanisms to redirect noxious desire?
This question I'm actually *not* going to get too much into because Girard actually does have a kind of complex relationship with Freud that I would want to be more clear on before I respond. Hold that thought for now.
Suffice it to say that SM is going to have a very complicated relationship with Girard's mimetic theory, since to some degree it may be predicated on wanting to not get what you want, and so on. Girard already has issues with the Oedipus as it is but...yeah. For now it would probably be better if I kind of shrugged at that one.
Zachary Sanchez
>There's also that segment on Odysseus and the Sirens as well, in which Odyseeus gets to have his cake and eat it too, avoiding the sacrifice altogether by having his men cover up their ears with wax. Shit like that drives Adorno nuts, since he sees in it the beginning of the cynical bourgeois mentality that evades this sacrifice by an act of cunning.
Someone recently here posted a quote of sloterdojk mocking that the bourgeois subject was born the myth as crazy. But Adorno actually goes even further, much further. For him the cunning of the trials is the key point, the seperation of subject and object, the start of man's addiction to the domination of nature, he already sees facism on the horizon. I was going to write Auschwitz, but it was published in 42 so they didn't even know at the time. Jeez, and the book is already that depressing.
Mason Moore
>There exists in every individual a tendency to think of himself not only as different from others but as extremely different, because every culture entertains this feeling of difference among the individuals who compose it. untrue, not all cultures are individualistic
Thomas Perry
Somehow I doubt the context Thiel reads him in is Heidegger and Lacan.
How does he connect to Nietzsche or Land?
Benjamin Ross
I read that Sloterdijk quote too, I know the one you mean. Not sure if it was here or elsewhere. The sirens are like the Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams of DoE. It's like a philosophical meme, you can't unsee it afterwards.
Adorno has a bad reputation on Veeky Forums because he gets blamed for cultural Marxism, but of course this is misguided. Many of his own students hated him, and he hated them as much, because he thought that they were only playing or gesturing at their opposition to the system while playing into its hands. The idea of some topless naiad stringing a garland of flowers over his head and then him having a heart attack two days later is one of those things that I never forgot. What he would have made of the present state of academia I can't even fathom.
We've got Sloterdijk, though. He's in that echelon. I think the problem is that, in a way, we're all so attuned to the presence of ideology that we have stopped becoming individual: what Doug Smythe calls Universal Person, the ultimate ideological non-subject. Hence the attraction of a guy like Peterson, or a utilitarian like Harris, or a Nietzsche guy like Sloterdijk.
The thing with fascism and Marxism for me is that they are both outgrowths of a kind of a liberalism that actually isn't really all that liberal anymore, it's simply the default ethic of globalization. The conservatives today are channeling the legacy of classical liberalism, while the liberals are morphing into these ideological egalitarian fanatics who unironically champion violence and are basically on perpetual witch hunts that increasingly seem to echo the very things they claim to be opposing.
Fascism is real, there's no doubt about it. It is a real phenomenon. But the way to combat it is to my mind not through an anti-fascist ideology, but by actually overcoming the temptation to despotism within. That's there in the best parts of the poststructural tradition, but it seems like a lot of that has been weaponized in rather horrible ways.
Anthony Perez
>The sirens are like the Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams of DoE. It's like a philosophical meme, you can't unsee it afterwards.
lol. yeah, that seems kind of true.
I've never read any Sloterdijk, I should probably give him a try. It's funny you mention him, because I think Adorno would have hated him. Sloterdijk has a bit of a bad reputation among the german left for doing these overly polemic, lazily written op-ed pieces on how he should pay less taxes etc. But Adorno was a bit of a loudmouth aswell, he was kind of the first big postwar public intellectual in germany.
Mason Ross
Here's one way I might connect the dots.
I would say that the logic of technological acceleration driven by the capital accumulation inevitably leads to political crises and corrections. I don’t believe that there are crises of capitalism per se but political events and counter-events which are necessary aspects of the continual growth and development of technology fueled by the mimetic desires of a consumer society. Those events, resolved by political violence, allow the process of capitalization to continue.
Marxist theory formerly might have posited an end to this system but I feel that this is an impossibility today. Like any good postmodern disciple I admire Austrian economics but don’t really believe in marginal utility. People buy things because it makes them feel good, and ultimately because they submit to the irresistable ideological programming inherent to advertising and commodity fetishism. Land understands where all of this is headed, and what underlies it: the will to a totalizing and planetary technological knowledge, which is an extension of the will to power, freedom, enjoyment, and happiness which propels both production and consumption. Girard is the guy who will be found standing at the edges of the smoking ruins where those corrections will perennially be taking place.
I don’t think any of this is a good thing; indeed, it’s more than a little bleak to see it looking like that. I just find myself on the outside of a system looking in.
That's true, but the point that Girard is making here isn't related to whether or not a culture prefers individualism versus collectivism. People can considers themselves to be different in an individualistic culture or in a collectivist one. Superficially there may be differences between how this is expressed, but Girard perceives there to be a more fundamental logic - mimeticism - which is in effect regardless of what context you are in.
Collectivist societies are perhaps better at regulating internal conflicts than individualist ones, but individuals differentiating themselves is going to happen regardless.
Zachary Wood
Do a total pseuds guide to Peterson because I can't be fucked trawling through hours of his youtube videos
Asher James
Sloterdijk is tremendous.
I agree, Adorno probably wouldn't have liked him, but I think they would at least have respected each other.
Gabriel Green
That's a good suggestion! I'll keep that in mind. I'm stating to like this Total Pseud's Guide idea more and more.
Speaking of which, did you guys watch this? I got about halfway through last night and it was okay. Mostly Peterson talking and Molyneux smiling. Not quite as much fun as the Harris/J-Pete one.
Do a pseud's guide to a philosopher you like. post a link to amazon that sends you bitcoins or whatever when people make purchases. profit. i've bought a couple of girard books cuz of you, and most of 4chins is lurkers. or put up a patreon. you're creating good content, user, you deserve something for it. (yea yea i know you already earned the satisfaction of a job well done and the skill increase in your writing ability but capitalism isn't a sin)
Ryder Russell
Girardfag.
How does one reconcile girard theory of the mimetic process (imitation) with Hegels dialetic (action, reaction and synthesis): Is one framework deducible from the other, Is there a possible middle ground or are the two processes mutually exclusive?
Asking for a pseud
Leo Gutierrez
>the will to a totalizing and planetary technological knowledge, which is an extension of the will to power, freedom, enjoyment, and happiness which propels both production and consumption.
What an awesome question! I'm not a strong Hegelian myself, so feel free to correct me where it seems appropriate. But here are my thoughts.
Girard is skeptical about Hegel, particularly in BttE (), since he prefers the notion of a Clauswitzian death-struggle between twins, under the logic of the duel, rather than the one between the lord and bondsman. Hegel's master lacks self-consciousness; Girard's twins are trapped in a kind of a mutually destructive self-consciousness.
in terms of reconciling the two, it might be a tall order simply because I think Girard is going to reject any notion of a One or a Spirit precisely because it obviates *of necessity* the role played by the surrogate victim in bringing to bear in a historical sense. God is *always* going to be on the side of the victor, but this is exactly why Girard privileges the Gospels: because they are unique as a text in taking the side of the *victim* rather than the persecutor - who is also the magistrate, the historian, the writer of the legitimizing deed. Hegel of course notes that it is indeed the bondsman who acquires self-consciousness through his appropriation by the master, but I think for me the question would be: how does one act on behalf of the Spirit in such a way that does proper justice to the victims who are of necessity destroyed in the struggle for freedom?
What Girard is objecting to in his works is I would say the *ease* with which this is done: sheer pragmatism, but even more than this a kind of *cultural inevitability.* *Of course* people had to be killed; this is the founding murder, which conceals the violence mythologically. Granted, it's not necessary to always read Hegel in terms of warfare or revolution...but it's also hard to avoid the question of warfare eventually.
Girardian theory is going to have serious problems with anything that might be called the *divinization of violence.* But in a less dramatic sense, I'm sure there are other ways to consider the PoS in terms of mimesis and vice-versa. Certainly the acquisition of self-consciousness is going to require models. I just think it comes down to the fact that Hegel's Spirit is a profoundly romantic idea (I like it too, don't get me wrong) that would probably some friction with Girard's rather more Catholic sensibilities.
Hudson Collins
Just one more thought, and to connect it to what is asking: isn't there a kind of a tragic underlying sameness between Jensen and Beale in this scene? It would stand to reason that if Jensen was *pleased* with this state of affairs, he wouldn't be so furious, or feel so trapped, within the very situation which places him at the top of the social order. Jensen isn't gloating over any of this, he isn't relishing giving this speech: he understands that he too is ultimately still just a kind of higher-order functionary. There is, as you have intuited, a higher logic - capital itself - which is pre-determining both of their roles in this regard. Beale is sent back to take his place, and Jensen will return to the boardroom, life will go on; the scene is cathartic but also incredibly sad. Despite their differences in class, they are still both trapped by the Primal Forces of Nature, which require their just due and payment: You Will Atone. The balance is restored, in the end, by crushing and converting Beale, but of course, Chayevsky is far too sensitive to simply have this story end happily because he has been exposed to the truth. The truth is both far greater and at the same time *far more banal* than he suspected, and it is that very banality which is really the worst part of all.
>all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused >because you're on television, dummy
recommended the Wallace essay, which is about these same things:
>only a certain very rare species of person, for Emerson, is fit to stand the gaze of millions. It is not your normal, hard-working, quietly desperate species of American. The man who can stand the megagaze is a walking imago, a certain type of transcendent freak who, for Emerson, carries the holiday in his eye. >the self-conscious appearance of unselfconsciousness is the grand illusion behind TV's mirror-hall of illusions: and for us, the Audience, it is both medicine and poison.
This is what is happening to Beale in this scene: he is actually being transformed into a kind of a willing scapegoat for the system, being compelled to surrender his desperation in exchange for becoming a Messiah: and we know (and Chayevsky certainly knows) what happens to Messiahs. But he does this, with an incredible perversity, out of his desire to continue to serve a Good which Jensen knows is not to be found in the realm of illusion. Only appearances and images of the Good.
It really is one of the greatest scenes in cinema.
Joshua Phillips
>Just found about him! Seems interesting... He was good at what he did. With the exception of Nick Land, I would say he was one of the only post 2008 "reactionary" bloggers to produce work that was actually readable. Possibly because he never really cared much about being a part of that scene. He reminded me of zizek, only with a more existential bent. Instead of Ideology, he sees the world as being made up of masturbation and laziness and narcissism as psychiatric disorder. Kind of like peterson, if he was a misanthropic alcoholic. If I had to recommend any of his stuff I'd tell you to start with his deconstruction of the dove sketch ad. >thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/05/dove.html
>The obvious retort is that ads are everywhere, you can't ignore them. But there are rats in the ceiling of your favorite restaurant, and you ignore them no problem, you don't even look up. That's the real Matrix you make for yourself continuously, in analog, not digital-- overestimate this, disavow that, a constant transduction of reality into a safe hue of green, until by the time you get to bed you're physically exhausted but your brain can't downshift. "I have insomnia." Time for a Xanax. Yes, it's Blue.
To tie it back, tlp seems to touch upon mimesis in this particular article as well, interestingly enough. >One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won't. That's not just okay, that's the point.
Isaac Morales
bump
Michael Brooks
are you some english who reads french or some french who writes english or some Canadian?
Logan Evans
I'm mexican
Henry Martin
*cue wall jokes*
Aiden Stewart
That guy really writes some terrific stuff. Thanks for posting this.
>Self esteem is sold to you as an inalienable right, not something to be earned; and if you don't have self-esteem it's because fake society made you feel bad about yourself.
>You can't see it, but since this is America, the problem here is debt. Not credit card debt, though I suspect that's substantial too, but self-esteem debt. They're borrowing against their future accomplishments to feel good about themselves today, hoping they'll be able to pay it back.
And that quote you mentioned ('You never really want an object, you only want the wanting'). Analysis really understands the present age, the angst and guilt of the individual, how existential consumption works.
>Possibly because he never really cared much about being a part of that scene.
That makes sense. When you don't care so much I think you do produce better work.
>He reminded me of zizek, only with a more existential bent. Instead of Ideology, he sees the world as being made up of masturbation and laziness and narcissism as psychiatric disorder. Kind of like peterson, if he was a misanthropic alcoholic.
Yeah. To some degree I think it does work like that. I mean, any comment about 'the world' is going to be solipsistic, but it's not like the science of advertising isn't getting pretty well-refined at this point. It might even be part of that age of total management anons were talking about in that other thread. Where the final meaning of liberalism and the law is a pragmatic-business sense of management, because the consumer society itself is just based on the management of people's anxieties which capital learns how to sell back to them, how people learn to teach the system to seduce them.
I think mob politics are probably seductive in the same way that consumption is seductive. The world makes sense, you know what team you're on, and so on. It's identification with a brand. It's harder to be a sane individual, but in the end it takes you better places.
I'm a leaf and my French sucks.
Christopher Barnes
So where do I start with Girard? Someone should make a flowchart t.b.h.
Luke Edwards
So I've participated a bit in the threads related to this and I dislike this type of continental philosophy or whatever one calls it, but I know some books that you guys might like (maybe not)
- Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy - The Quadruple Object by Graham Harman - Staying with the trouble - Donna Haraway
Jose Turner
The four books that I looked at to write those earlier posts were Desire, Deceit and the Novel, The Scapegoat, Violence and the Sacred, and Battling to the End. In a way, they kind of describe the early, middle, and late parts of his work, but also I think can be used to show how his ideas extend from the micro-level (individual psychology) through culture (group psychology) to the macro (conflicts between or across cultures). Girardian mimesis is a kind of Theory of Everything. Like all such theories, these are worth evaluating critically, and do not need to be taken chapter and verse.
The Girard Reader and the Palaver guide are both helpful introductions and overviews. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is perhaps the best single-volume book for understanding his work.
So it kind of depends on how much time you want to dedicate to the man, and also whether you are more interested in the literary aspects of his work or the cultural aspects. He evolves mimetic theory from literary studies, so if that's where your interest lies, start with DDN. If you're more interested in the cultural anthropology, begin with The Scapegoat, V&S, or Things Hidden. Finally, if you're interested in seeing his relevance for the world as it is today, you can read Battling to the End. Being his last book, he doesn't review mimetic theory too much, but it's quite accessible and I think very interesting. Clauswitz is never boring. Violence, warfare and conflict in general are rarely boring, and are often aestheticized as well. For me at least, that's what keeps me coming back to them as topics of interest.
>I dislike this type of continental philosophy or whatever one calls it Guards, Seize This Man
Jk. Harman's cool. It would be a cool idea to do a Total Pseud's Guide to speculative realism/OOO too.
Benjamin Anderson
Also thanks very kindly for this thought, it's much appreciated. I will keep that suggestion in mind.
Parker Parker
I really hope you posted that comic ironically.
Daniel Ross
bumpo
William Kelly
Thanks. How much time should I devote to Girard in your opinion?
Ian Harris
It really depends. My approach is pretty simple: find someone who is asking questions you find interesting, then read everything of their work that you can get your hands on. Drive your friends and loved ones insane. Fill up notebooks. Throw those notebooks away. Shitpost. Be That Guy about it (it's sometimes unavoidable). How long that takes is ultimately up to you.
What's more, the chances are good that by the time you've read enough of that person, you're going to want to see where they go from there, who they were influenced by, who they influenced in turn. Eventually, you're going to wind up getting to know all the usual names that you see and hear people talking about. Nobody can really be an expert in everything, which is why scholars tend to settle down and focus on one or two guys they're good with. And even the heavyweight guys tend to have little constellations of guys that they go to in turn. It's kind of interesting, really, the question of influence.
So I only got to Girard after intense periods of thinking more or less exclusively about other guys. And because I was at least conversational in those other guys, having read some of the books and thinkers that he talks about, I found myself being more or less comfortable in just getting into his work. And finding that I agreed with him mightily on a lot of it.
So long story short...the only real answer is, as much as you like. If you're enjoying his ideas and find them illuminating, then of course you should take as much time as you need! But if not, I would say it's probably better just to move on to some other place where you're getting the kinds of answers you're looking for. This is, in a sense, the advice of a dilettante; but I actually think it's not all that crazy. The important thing, I would say, is for you to *feel like you're getting the answers to the questions that are most important to you.* If you're feeling cheated, that's a bad sign. So my thought there would be to just keep poking around until you encounter that book or that author that absolutely works for you, that isn't full of shit. For sure, it's out there somewhere. It's important that you enjoy the experience, though.
Wyatt James
Who were the "other guys" for you?
Brody Morris
Before I got into philosophy I liked history. I read a fair bit of that, but just sort of all over the place. I was into medieval and Victorian history: Hobsbawm, Norwich, guys like that.
With philosophy I started with the Stoics: Epictetus, MA, and Seneca. Then Plato: mainly just the Republic.
Then Nietzsche and Baudrillard. Those two guys pretty intensely. Somewhere in there Spengler. Marx I felt I already had a kind of intuitive sense of. I have a relative who was a big Derrida guy who was a big influence on me but I never really liked Derrida. I just couldn't quite articulate why.
That led into Heidegger and the phenomenologists: Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. Heidegger really worked for me, I couldn't shut up about him. Sartre never did it for me.
Then Lacan and Zizek. Also Sloterdijk.
That led into Deleuze, who seemed to me to basically blow the doors off of the psychoanalysis that to me explained the West, and which was based in turn on Heideggerian phenomenology that had also explained it, and which was in turn a response to Nietzsche, who is and always will be the Sorcerer Supreme. At least in the post/modern era.
Deleuze roflnuked the philosophical universe. That was actually kind of a good feeling, because I was getting super-ultra hung up on capital and representation.
And in that upside-down universe, the Chinese started to make a lot of sense too. So I read the shit out of those guys. All of them: Confucius, Laozi, Xunzi - I like him - Han Fei, Mozi, the whole shebang. Japanese stuff too: samurai stuff, Ritchie, stuff about mono no aware. There's a rich correspondence between those guys and Heidegger.
And I was in kind of a happy place like that, for a while, in Eastern philosophy land. And I was feeling more or less good about things, except that I never could kind of make peace with the world of industrialization.
Politics and migrant stuff made me want to think about philosophy again, if only because I held on to a kind of naive belief that politics was the ultimate horizon of meaning, that somehow politics could be made to make sense. The philosophers seemed inarguable to me, and I kind of thought that a sufficiently rich philosophical consciousness could explain the way things were. I still feel this, in a certain sense. But things are moving pretty fast today, and some of the flashpoints around which conflicts are situated can be explained, perhaps, with reference to philosophical vocabulary, but not I think be resolved. And I found this kind of distressing,
So my head has kind of been like a big hotel for thinkers who are passing through and perhaps reserving permanent suites (of varying sizes) for themselves. The most recent, and perhaps the last, guy in was Girard. Girard brought it all back home to that which everything else had been a response to, this mega-event called Christianity.
William Morris
Incidentally, in that hotel I basically consider myself to be a combination of kind of Faulknerian halfwit janitor and night manager whose job it is to occasionally go and get coffee or unplug the toilet and so on. I'm a pseud and not a philosopher myself. I have to sort of try to remind myself of this sometimes, because the most odious habit to me is to set oneself up as The Great Explainer.
I think it's best to understand analysis, for example, as a kind of a psychic dentistry. Deconstruction is what I think I am really opposed to, because it seems to me like a kind of stance or attitude towards philosophy that confuses bewilderment with understanding, like a Socratic aporia that begins at the end and works backwards, infinitely re-confirming itself, rather than proceeding from the beginning towards those places where we have to leave things unfinished and mysterious.
The thoughts of the big philosophers are kind of like big machines: I like that. They're Big Guys because their thought is so totalizing and complete, but there really is to my mind no way of resolving all of this stuff into a total ethos: there is no really or genuinely postmodern want to live. What we have are these relics or artifacts, these big thinkers - and they're not all dead, there are some really interesting people living and working and writing today, right now - but there's so goddamn much to sift through that the idea of 'reaching the end' is naive, even counter-productive.
It's why I like the idea of writing Total Pseud Guides: just kind of sketches of how some of these guys work. They do have answers to everything, but in the end you're always going to be left to yourself, I think, to decide which questions you like and which you don't. They all have a kind of circular logic in them. It's mostly a question of tracing those circles.
Anyways, that's my own pontificating.
Zachary Baker
Fascinating. You should look into and consider going into philosophy though.
Nolan Ward
Praise Girardfag
Dominic Smith
>Loves Heidegger >Doesn't like Derrida
Does not compute. Oh, it's a political thing. Gotcha!
Nolan Jones
Back at you, kind user.
Pretty much.
So why the rise of the alt-right today? That's my question. Because clearly, however brilliant Derrida is as a thinker - and he is - something has re-emerged in Western society that seems to refuse him.
Increasingly people are feeling, consciously or otherwise, and in ways that are both liberating and constrictive, the aftereffects of a culture based on irony and difference (just as indicates). It is interesting to ask if New Sincerity may (is this ironic?) end up having more of an association with the right than the left. Things rarely lack for sincerity on the right, there is not much irony there; rather, there is a gigantic vein of old-school romanticism and pagan lyricism and unapologetic phallologocentrism, in entirely unironic and anti-deconstructionist forms. And it is not hard to imagine what Peterson would make of this.
Nicholas Thompson
Essentially, unlimited deconstruction (combined with, although this is not a Derridean point, technological acceleration and capital accumulation deprived of anything like a universal social project) seems to me to lead to unlimited *paranoia* rather than inclusivity.
Unless you go the Deleuzian route - and I think this is a good idea - difference must ultimately be predicated on *something.* Zizek and Badiou are the only guys who seriously believe in the Marxist project anymore. Everybody else - and this is understandable - is looking for a sense of identity, something to ground that sense of difference in.
This is what Doug Smythe talks about when he describes the appearance of the Universal Subject, the subject as tabula rasa for any ideology at all, *so long as it is universal.* Which identity politics, regardless of which side of the spectrum they are on, always are: they cross all lines, all boundaries, all horizons, and see only the same thing: themselves, or lack of themselves.
And of course doubling down on ideology is not going to fill this in. Ideology continually moves the goal posts in order to remain at the centre of the universe. Hence the constant war, the struggle, the fight, and so on - the Clauswitzian battle between twins.
Girard is not a Hegelian and neither am I. To me the scenario on the horizon looks like less like anything that could be called revolution and more like the Thirty Years' War: a long and messy and fractious struggle that more or less ended an age in Europe and inaugurated a new one (happily, that was the Enlightenment). And something like that, in a sense, can probably be expected: a kind of a higher rationalism, and a sense that, after all of that conflict, things are moving forward, once again, to better and brighter days.
Capitalism was supposed to be a check on the ambitions of princes, originally; a second version of that, I think, will eventually follow. Perhaps people will come round, wiser but sadder, to the realization that economic logic really is the only logic that runs the whole world round, as they try and stay a step ahead of automation, or the wasteland. Human beings always find a way. I just see a lot of rather pointless and well-meaning destruction between now and then.
Hopefully I'm wrong!
Nicholas Reyes
So when are you going for your PhD in philosophy Girardposter?
Jeremiah Bell
What in Davy Jones’ locker did ye just bark at me, ye scurvy bilgerat? I’ll have ye know I be the meanest cutthroat on the seven seas, and I’ve led numerous raids on fishing villages, and raped over 300 wenches. I be trained in hit-and-run pillaging and be the deadliest with a pistol of all the captains on the high seas. Ye be nothing to me but another source o’ swag. I’ll have yer guts for garters and keel haul ye like never been done before, hear me true. You think ye can hide behind your newfangled computing device? Think twice on that, scallywag. As we parley I be contacting my secret network o’ pirates across the sea and yer port is being tracked right now so ye better prepare for the typhoon, weevil. The kind o’ monsoon that’ll wipe ye off the map. You’re sharkbait, fool. I can sail anywhere, in any waters, and can kill ye in o’er seven hundred ways, and that be just with me hook and fist. Not only do I be top o’ the line with a cutlass, but I have an entire pirate fleet at my beck and call and I’ll damned sure use it all to wipe yer arse off o’ the world, ye dog. If only ye had had the foresight to know what devilish wrath your jibe was about to incur, ye might have belayed the comment. But ye couldn’t, ye didn’t, and now ye’ll pay the ultimate toll, you buffoon. I’ll shit fury all over ye and ye’ll drown in the depths o’ it. You’re fish food now.
Asher Nelson
bump
Jaxson Bell
I laughed. Why though?
Ayden Foster
is not me. We've been boarded by pirates! Yarr.
>So when are you going for your PhD in philosophy
Probably never. I like the reading but I'm reluctant to commit to the debt, together with the competitiveness of the job market. Also laziness.
My master plan is to tend some kind of blog at some point whilst going quietly insane somewhere in Asia.
Dominic Watson
Why Asia? Yellow fever?
Andrew Hughes
There's that. And there are other aspects of Asian culture that I like too.
I taught overseas there for a while and was tolerably happy. I've been back for a bit and ever since I've been losing my mind over politics, the migrant stuff, the election. To be sure, none of it has really affected me personally, beyond a psychic derangement which is entirely voluntary: I choose to dwell on stuff that makes me feel kind of internally dissonant. But I think I preferred the pace of life over there.
