The work of theorist René Girard, who elaborated a mimetic theory of desire, is finding a prominent place in modern discourse. He has been a popular thinker since the 1960s, through the twenty-first century, branching out from literary studies into areas of economics, theology, social sciences, conflict resolution and peace studies, communications, and neuroscience, and even to entrepreneurs who hope to profit by anticipating what people want.
Michigan State University Press is a publisher of several translated Girard works available in the United States and of books exploring mimetic theory. The press has two series that focus on Girardian theory: Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (SVMC) and Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory, both edited by William A. Johnsen.
Jonsen shared some of Girard’s literary history to give context to his resurgence in popularity, since he was named an influential speaker by modern politicians, and discussed the four books on the topic, set to release this year.
History of Girard
By William Johnsen
Girard’s first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961), was translated just before a conference he convened at Johns Hopkins University (“The Structuralist Controversy”), which introduced French structuralist theory (and Jacques Derrida) to America. For the translation, Girard added a few introductory pages outlining how a dynamic triangular structure emerges when close friends who share everything become rivals when they both desire what cannot be shared. What is distinctive about Girard’s structuralism in the sixties is that he proposed an origin and a motive more pertinent than Levi Strauss’s summary that “structuring is what the MIND always does.”
Girard could have stopped after offering a plausible refutation of the sole or existential self, having offered a compelling reorientation of literary criticism at that time. But there was more to see in human imitation and its consequences. After the clinical psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian read Deceit, Desire and the Novel, he flew from Paris to New York to meet Girard, and the two later coauthored Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978). When I asked Oughourlian why he became interested in Girard, he answered simply that Girard’s ideas helped him better understand his patients’ problems.
As Aristotle suggested, to be more imitative than other living beings is to be hypermimetic. To imitate others is to knit into a group fabric, which is then threatened by those imitations, leading to rivalry and potential dissolution into all-versus-all violence. The greatest danger for the survival of this hypermimetic human species is other humans—interspecies violence.
Girard remains pertinent in our moment because he pursued basic questions, battling to the end: What follows from his discovery of this recurring triangular model of rivalry? Where does this mimetic structure come from, how does it emerge, what follows from its presence and, perhaps most importantly, how does humanity survive this seemingly inevitable conflictual rivalry which could easily spill over into everyone taking sides, becoming all against all?
New Books
This year, SVMC has released four books that advance developments in the multiple threads of René Girard’s mimetic theory. In Cormac McCarthy: An American Apocalypse Markus Wierschempresents a thoughtful, long-meditated, and well-developed argument for reading McCarthy’s works as a whole, persuasively exploiting the many-sidedness of mimetic theory to engage literary analysis with mythography, information science, and thermodynamics, without sacrificing a fidelity to McCarthy’s own voice. Wierschem’s book is a fine example of connecting the continued pertinence of Girard’s work to an important author of the current historical moment.
We have translated Nadine Dormoy’s recently published extended interview/conversation with Girard in The World of René Girard: Interviews. Like Girard, Dormoy came to America to teach French, and she is a spirited interlocuter on the topics of comparing higher education in America and France. These interviews, conducted in the late 1980s, took place at a pivotal moment for Girard, after his encounters and exchanges with the researchers investigating self-organizing systems, including such well-known figures as Ilya Prigogine, Isabel Stenger, Francisco Varela, and Heinz von Foerster, mediated by his longtime fellow researchers Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Paul Dumouchel, and Michel Serres. Girard also discusses his then-forthcoming book on Shakespeare, Theatre of Envy, his first book written in English.
In René Girard and the Western Philosophical Tradition, Volume 1: Philosophy, Violence, and Mimesis, Andreas Wilmes and George A. Dunn have organized an important collection of highly regarded and accomplished Girardians to begin placing Girard in the context of Western philosophy through contextualization with Plato, Augustine of Hippo, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Alexis de Tocqueville, Søren Kierkegaard.
Martino Doni and Stefano Tomelleri’s Playing Sociology: Theory and Games for Coping with Mimetic Crisis and Social Conflict brings more strong work from Italy. Gianni Vattimo’s deep interest in Girard is well-known, but Maria Stella Barbieri and Giuseppe Fornari worked tirelessly to nurture an advanced interest in Girard in Italy early on through publication and mentoring students. The fruits of their work can be seen in the constant presence of distinctive research from Italy in SVMC, Breakthroughs, as well as the journal Contagion. Doni and Tomelleri bring us back to the rich connection of mimesis and play as essential research topics for Girardians (see also Tomelleri’s Ressentiment in our Breakthrough series).