by Xmd5a | 2025-06-21 12:58:52+00:00
René Girard – The One By Whome Scandal Comes

The Platonist ontology of imitation and the philosophical and psychological conception that, following Aristotle, limits imitation to external behaviors, to ways of acting or speaking, must therefore be rejected. In both cases, the essential point is evaded. Modern romantic philosophy despises imitation, and the nearer one comes to the present the more pronounced this scorn becomes. Oddly, it is based on the supposed inability of imitators to challenge their models. Mimeticism is supposed to be a renunciation of true individuality, with the result that the individual is beaten down by “others” and forced to yield to the common opinion.

Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.

When we imitate others, as it is usually said, we are being unfaithful to ourselves. The outstanding characteristic of imitators is not violence; it is passivity, herd behavior. This is what I call the romantic lie, which in the twentieth century was most famously described by Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time, the “inauthentic” self is identical with the “they” (das Man) of collective irresponsibility. Passive and conformist imitation abandons the struggle to affirm one’s true personality. It is opposed to the authentic self of the philosopher himself, who has no fear of going to war against adversaries who are worthy of him, in the Heracleitean spirit of pólemos—the violence that is “father of all and king of all.” Struggle and conflict are seen as proofs of authenticity, of a will to power in the Nietzschean sense of the term.

I maintain that passion and desire are never authentic in the Heideggerean sense. They do not emerge from the depths of our being; we always borrow them from others. Far from seeing conflict as a sign of mastery, as Heidegger does, we must see it as exactly the opposite, a confirmation of the mimetic nature of our desires.

Individualists, as all of us imagine ourselves to be, have the impression that they no longer imitate anyone once they have forcibly overcome their model. Far from being incompatible with imitation, Heracleitean violence is an idealized version of mimetic rivalry. A more penetrating critical eye detects in it the romantic lie of which I just spoke.

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René Girard – Deceit, Desire & the Novel

In The Past Recaptured Proust emphasizes that self-centeredness is a barrier to novelistic creation. Proustian self-centeredness gives rise to imitation and makes us live outside ourselves. This self-centeredness is other-centeredness as well; it is not one-sided egotism; it is an impulse in two contradictory directions which always ends by tearing the individual apart. To triumph over self-centeredness is to get away from oneself and make contact with others but in another sense it also implies a greater intimacy with oneself and a withdrawal from others. A self-centered person thinks he is choosing himself but in fact he shuts himself out as much as others. Victory over self-centeredness allows us to probe deeply into the Self and at the same time yields a better knowledge of Others. At a certain depth there is no difference between our own secret and the secret of Others. Everything is revealed to the novelist when he penetrates this Self, a truer Self than that which each of us displays. This Self imitates constantly, on its knees before the mediator.

This profound Self is also a universal Self. The dialectic of metaphysical pride alone can help us understand and accept Proust's attempt to reconcile the particular and universal. In the context of the romantic's mechanical opposition between Self and Others, such an attempt would be absurd.

This logical absurdity no doubt struck Proust and he occasionally gives up his attempt at reconciliation and slips back into the cliches of twentieth-century romanticism. In a few isolated passages of The Past Recaptured he declares that the work of art must permit us to grasp our "difef rences" and makes us delight in our "originality."

These scattered passages are the result of Proust's lack of a theoretic vocabulary. But the attempt at logical coherence is quickly swept away by inspiration. Proust knew that in describing his own youth he was describing ours as well. He knew that the true artist no longer has to choose between himself and Others. Because it is born of renunciation, great novelistic art loses nothing and regains everything.

But this renunciation is very painful. The novelist can write his novel only if he recognizes that his mediator is a person like himself. Marcel, for example, has to give up considering his beloved a monstrous divinity and seeing himself in the role of an eternal victim. He has to recognize that his beloved's lies are similar to his own.

This victory over a self-centeredness which is other-centered, this renunciation of fascination and hatred, is the crowning moment of novelistic creation. Therefore it can be found in all the great novelists. Every novelist sees his similarity to the fascinating Other through the voice of his hero. Mme de la Fayette recognizes her similarity to the women for whom love has been their undoing. Stendhal, the enemy of hypocrites, recognizes at the end of The Red and the Black that he is also a hypocrite. Dostoyevsky, in the conclusion of Crime and Punishment, gives up seeing himself alternately as a superhuman and as a subhuman. The novelist recognizes that he is guilty of the sin of which he is accusing his mediator. The curse which Oedipus hurls at Others falls on his own head.

This is the meaning of Flaubert's famous cry: "Mme Bovary, c'est moil" Flaubert first conceived Mme Bovary as that despicable Other whom he had sworn to deal with.