>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?
