But the more profound lesson of desire is that the accomplishment of the form requires the tragic sacrifice of its worldly subject. The artwork realizes as experience the paradox that otherwise might seem a plaything for philosophers. The heart of interpretation is examining how the work's form is generated by its content, which generates the mimetic crisis out of which form emerges as its resolution. Hence Girard denounces tragedy as sacrificial, an act of arbitrary scapegoating. The minimal hypothesis of generative anthropology is an attempt to tell this story minimally as a hypothesis.
Esthetic interpretation is the construction of an anthropology.
Our reading of the artwork formulates an originary hypothesis because, to turn things around, the originary scene is the minimal model of all future scenes, narrated as the minimal model of all future stories. We tell the story so that we can experience once again how the sign can emerge from the thing, how the reality of appetite can take on the meaning of desire. The popularity of Freudian hermeneutics reflects both our need for a generative model that relates cultural phenomena to the fundamentally, minimally human, and our discomfort with such models outside the realm of individual development. Hence we prefer the mirror stage to the primal horde. But human language and culture were not created by babies.