“All Desire is a Desire For Being” by Rene Girard

This is a posthumous collection of Girard’s essays, interviews, and speeches chosen by his biographer, Cynthia Haven. True to form, almost all of the selections center around Girard’s themes of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. Girard suggests, “Even the most passionate among us never feel they truly are the persons they want to be. To them, the most wonderful being, the only semi-god, is always someone else whom they emulate and from whom they borrow their desires, thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”

One of Girard’s essays revolves around Nietzsche and his concept of the death of God, while also discussing the eternal return, organized religion, and the scapegoat function. “Nietzsche defines in rigorous fashion the passage of disorder to the sacrificial order through the mediation of the collective murder and the rituals which spring from it. One cannot kill the gods, any gods, without engendering new ones…. Nietzsche designates it as ‘the most elevated philosophy,’ the philosophy of eternal recurrence…. The philosophy of the eternal recurrence is a reflection on the identity of the forces of life and death in antique and primitive religion. Every dissolution is a new creation…. One must lift oneself above current history to see the totality of cycles and to recognize linear time as illusory.”

Girard admired Freud’s conceptual framework, while considering his theories to be incomplete, if not off-base. Here, Girard riffs on the dance of Salome, “Contrary to what Freud believes, to what we all believe, there is no preordained object of desire. Children in particular have to be told what to desire…. Children are taught desire through example or speech, or both. Children imitate the desire of prestigious adults…. The imitation is fiercer than the original…. The child asks the adult, not to fulfill some desire that would be hers, but to provide her with the desire she lacks…. Our sacrosanct cult of desire prevents our recognizing this sameness. Desire is supposed to generate differences…. Far from individualizing its victims, as our modern cult of desire demands, mimetic desire makes them interchangeable…. As desire intensifies, it renders its victims increasingly interchangeable…. Desire has no worse enemy than its own truth. Desire does its best to turn the truth into a scandal…. The child inevitably takes the nearest adult as his model. If he encounters only people already scandalized, too busy with their scandalous desire to respond positively, he takes their behavior as a model and turns him- or herself into a mimetic reproduction of it, a grotesque caricature.”

In a digression from his usual hobbyhorses, Girard discusses constancy in the thought of the intellectual. “We live in an age of middle-class ‘individualism’ in which self-consistency is rated as a major virtue. But a thinker is not bound by the same rules as a statesman or a banker…. Progress in matters of the spirit is often a form of self-destruction; it may entail a violent reaction against the past.”

Haven ends by selecting a few choice maxims coined by Girard. Girard had little time for politics. “Democracy is one vast middle-class court where the courtiers are everywhere and the king is nowhere.” On society being enraptured by violence, he states, “Violence, far from serving the interests of whoever exerts it, reveals the intensity of his desire; thus it is a sign of slavery.” He pontificates on the tendency of all to scapegoat, “The best way not to be crucified, in the final analysis, is to do as everyone else and join in the cruxifixction.” He elaborates, “The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.” Girard suggests, “Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them.” He continues, “The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival.”

“Thinking and Being” by Irad Kimhi

This type of formal philosophy is a little above my pay grade. Most of the logic and technical terms I had to push through to get even a sliver of understanding. Nonetheless, since this is a short book and Kimhi is seen as such an influential contemporary philosopher, I tried to slog on. It helps that Kimhi grounds his thoughts in philosophical history, particularly the logic of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato. Kimhi also uses Frege as a foil. Or better put perhaps, this book seems to be an attempt to show that Frege and his disciples’ conception of philosophy is completely wrong. Of the modern philosophers, Kimhi most often builds upon the foundations laid down by Wittgenstein to assert his own conceptions of the nature of being and thinking.

Kimhi begins by asserting that Parmenides’ poem “On Nature” is the first work of philosophy, “where this is to be understood as the logical study of thinking and what is (being)…. Philosophical logic, so understood, is a first-personal engagement from within the activity of thinking.” Much of Kimhi’s work deals with differences (and similarities) between judgment and truth. “The transition from a judgment to a truth-assessment of that judgment is not based on a recognition of any new fact. A proper philosophical account of this matter must allow us to say that the assessment of one’s judgment as true is internal to the very act of judging…. The overarching unity internal to any judgment is its compossibility with other judgements in a single consciousness…. Here, thinking, in the first instance, means judging or asserting that such-and-such is the case, or that such-and-such is not the case…. A major concern of this book is the different ways in which philosophers have failed to acknowledge—or even denied—the uniqueness of thinking in philosophy…. In coming to appreciate this difference between thinking and acting, we are able to detect the logical uniqueness of thinking.”

One of the differences that Kimhi keeps going back to is between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions. “A categorematic expression can be a component of a predicative proposition, whereas a syncategorematic expression cannot be a component of a predicative proposition. The basic syncategorematic expressions are predicative propositions themselves…. The difference between “p” and “I think p” (and hence the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness) is syncategorematic—and so too is the difference between p and not-p.” To put it another way, the basic difference between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions “can be described simply as the difference between expressions that can and cannot be functionally embedded as part of a larger significant expression…. Among the candidates for being classed as syncategorematic are logical connectives such as … and__, and …. or__, expressions of propositional attitudes such as … believes__, and truth-value predicates such as … is true and … is false. We can describe these expressions as propositional connectors, since they govern propositions that have other propositions as their subclauses…. A predicative proposition is a categorematic unit if something can be predicated of it, or if it can be predicated of something—in other words, if it can stand as a subject or a predicate in a proposition. A proposition is a syncategorematic unit if it cannot play a categorematic role, namely, if it cannot occur within a predicative proposition.”

Kimhi agrees with Aristotle’s conception of the nature of being. Kimhi asserts, “Aristotle singles out simple propositions as revealing something. In other words, only simple propositions are representations. They alone say—or display the judgment—that something is (or is not) the case. They alone reveal a being…. For Aristotle, the predicative form displays the assertoric act of predication, which he associates with the verb. Accordingly, in traditional Aristotelian logic, the verb (i.e. the predicate) in a simple proposition is marked as the locus of predication and thus the locus of assertoric force.” Finally circling back again to the nature of being, Kimhi, adds “the syncategorematic sense of being as being-true, and non-being as being false, is in fact the dominant sense.”

Kimhi ends his work by discussing the Stranger’s conversation with Theaetetus in Plato’s “Sophist”. Kimhi quotes the Stranger directly, “Whenever we speak of not being (so it seems), we don’t speak of something contrary to being, but only different…. So, when it is said that a negative signifies a contrary, we shan’t agree, but we’ll allow only this much—the prefixed word “not” indicates something different than the words following the negative, or rather, different than the things which the words uttered after the negative apply to.” Kimhi expounds, “the negation of a predicative proposition negates the predicate, i.e., the verb. The mistake that the Stranger identifies is that of supposing that the addition of “not” to a predicate yields an expression for the contrary of what is meant by the original predicate…. The negation sign, according to Plato, is attached to a predicate and thereby makes a new complete phrase, i.e., the Stranger emphasizes that the negated expression is one verb.” Plato also uses the term “Otherness”. Kimhi states, “the use of “Otherness” reveals that a particular X and not-X are not opposed as a pair of contraries…. The not-X is rather a construct, derived from the “X”.”

Kimhi goes on to contrast the two notions in “Sophist” of “the place of activity within being” of the Gigantomachia, the materialists, and the immaterialists, the friends of the forms. Kimhi states, “the exclusion of activity from being, and thus from knowledge, renders knowledge unintelligible…. Soul, knowledge, and form must be associated with a certain notion of activity in a way that will allow us to understand forms as immanent to the soul’s activity, rather than external to it…. The notion of a syncategorematic form allows philosophers to hold onto that which is—being—in both ways, as “both unchanging and that which changes.”” Finally, Kimhi asserts, “to recognize the validity of the syllogisms of thinking and being, we must come to see that the very same proposition occurs both when it is negated and when it is ascribed as a judgment: namely, in not-p and in A judges that p. This perspective is attained by combining the lessons of partition of knowledge and the partition of Otherness.”

Kimhi concludes his work with a lengthy statement worth quoting at length, “quietism does not seek to reduce not-being to being through an analysis of negation and truth- and falsity conditions, or to show that the point of view from which the use of negation appears unintelligible rests merely on a confusion about the actual use of words. Instead, the quietist seeks to render the unity of thinking and being (and non-being) self-evident by attaining clarity concerning the way logical unity is revealed through the occurrence of propositions or predicates inside and outside negations and other logical contexts…. Metaphysics—correctly understood—is quietism, by learning from within quietism, how to read the “meta-” of the “metaphysics.” The lesson of quietism is that “meta-” does not point toward a science that comes “after” physics, nor does it point toward supernatural entities such as divine substances, or a region of facts that lie “beyond” or “over and above” nature. Instead, we can conclude from quietism that the “meta-” is the beyond of the syncategorematic relative to the categorematic; in particular, it is the syncategorematic unity of simple contradictory pairs, the unity of determination and the nothing (or Otherness) of determination, which dominates the positive members of the pair. The philosophical logic that removes the Parmenidean puzzles and renders apparent the truistic unity of thinking and being must therefore be, in this sense, metaphysical.”

“Under Three Flags” by Benedict Anderson

As a natural law anarchist I tend to take a dim view of nationalism. However, I am a bit more ambivalent about anti-colonial national movements. Their tendencies to strike at rigid, racist imperial structures certainly seem like a step in the right direction. Especially when they achieved pan-ethnic unity, their amorphous, decentralized, and horizontal leadership structures often created the kind of polycentric institutions I am most fond of. This book combines anti-colonialism, nationalism, anarchism, journalism, art, and literature from the Third World in the nineteenth century. Anderson uses as a focus the Philippine struggle for independence against imperial Spain, but in doing so also traverses the globe from Manilla to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, London, Cuba, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, and America. He discusses trends from high journalism and art that encouraged anarchist actions to actual “propaganda of the deed” where assassins killed in the name of furthering and publicizing their cause. He concentrates on a couple of Filipino writers and activists not well known to history. Isabelo de los Reyes was a collector of Philippine folklore: not just folklore as in myths and fairy tales, but “saber popular” or indigenous, local knowledge that survived westernization and colonization. He spoke Ilocano, as well as Tagalog, Spanish, English, and French and would slip between them in his stories as he slipped between life in Manilla, Madrid, and Paris. Jose Rizal is more well known today: a hero still, in the Philippines at least, as a poet and their first novelist. His second novel, depicting a strange jeweled bomb placed at a colonial ball, presaged the wave of anarchist and nationalist bombings that were to later rock Europe and colonial outposts in the fin de siecle period. These Filipino writers were cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, and avid readers, imbuing their own writings and philosophies with anarchist luminaries like Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin. They mingled with anarchists from the Continent and Cuba in their several stints in Montjuich Prison, the most notorious in Spain and an incubator and meeting place for radicalism. A motto, taken from Kropotkin, was “permanent revolt by means of the spoken word, writing, the dagger, the gun, and dynamite…. For us everything good which is outside legality.” This book is a detailed history of the last days of the Spanish Empire as told through the lens of Filipino revolutionaries.

“The One by Whom Scandal Comes” by Rene Girard

In this book Girard updates and revises some of his framework of mimetic rivalry. But as he makes clear at the outset, he still feels, “mimeticism is the very substance of all manner of human relations…. Passion, intense desire, is born the moment our vague longings are trained on a model that suggests to us what we should desire, typically in desiring the model itself. This model may be society as a whole, but often it is an individual whom we admire. Everything that humanity endows with prestige it transforms into a model…. Far from being the most personal emotion there is, our desire comes from others. Nothing could be more social.” This is how rivalry develops. Once I desire what a model who is close to me desires we both covet the same object. The model has become the obstacle. Furthermore, “desire becomes more intense on both sides. The model becomes the imitator of his imitator.” The spiral escalates as desire grows. “Human relations are the unending exercise in mutual imitation- the essence of which is perfectly captured by a not wholly transparent word, reciprocity.” 

Culture was founded to restrict the escalation of rivalry into violence. It deescalates conflict and puts people in their proper hierarchy. “The prohibition always falls on a family’s nearest, most accessible possessions- which are therefore the ones likeliest to arouse conflict.” In the olden times this was often the womenfolk of the family. “In several languages the word meaning “gift” also means “poison.” In very, very remote times all gifts…. were poisoned: their original owners gave away only things that were a source of trouble and annoyance to them, and that they therefore sought to rid themselves of, in exchange for things that were just as useful but less bothersome, for the simple reason that they came from elsewhere…. The reciprocal exchange of gifts proved to be a workable system because gifts that were poisoned to begin with became harmless once they were transferred to a foreign community.” Still, in the process of gift giving we see the mimetic process involving similarities and differences at work. One has to try hard to get the balance just right. “Prudence requires no less strict equivalence in the giving of gifts than in the bartering of goods. Each party must imitate the other as closely as possible, while at the same time giving the impression of spontaneity.” The right gift must not show up the other party, nor give offense at being too paltry. It must be equivalent, yet unique. “One escapes the Charybdis of insufficient difference only in order to fall into the Scylla of excessive difference.”

Modernism destroyed many of the bounds set up by hierarchy. “Mimetic theory reveals the true reason for the cyclical conceptions one finds among the Hindus and the pre-Socratic philosophers.” Modernism, in contrast, sought to champion equality and reciprocity in their good forms, destroying both the bad and the good of social taboos. “Modernism’s wager is that good reciprocity will win out in the end.” The problem with mimetic violence is that when one is trapped in its spiral neither party is often aware of its onset. “No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to violence committed in the first instance by someone else.” One must act above the fray if one is to end the cycle of violence. An eye for eye might be justice, but it will only inflame the mimeticism. “For if we treat them as they treat us, they will be able to disguise their own injustice by means of reprisals that are fully warranted by the violence we have committed. It is therefore necessary to deprive them of the negative collaboration they demand of us. Violent persons must always be disobeyed, not only because they encourage us to do harm, but because it is only through disobedience that a lethally contagious form of collective behavior can be short-circuited.”

Girard’s other major idea is that of the founding myth created by violence towards scapegoats. This is the very act that initially unites a peoples and creates a culture. “All other members of the society will unite against them by reproducing the founding act of violence, the act that serves as a model for all sacrifices, for all religious rites of purification. The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.” This scapegoat is not an actual perpetrator. He does no wrong. He is arbitrary. He merely serves the purpose of the community. “Behind the ritual of the scapegoat, there is something more than mere superstition; there is also the tendency, universal among human beings, to take out their anger on a substitute, on an alternative victim…. Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.” This process works as long as the myth is not revealed. Only through utter unanimity in the community does the lie succeed in becoming a founding truth. “There is no human society that is not liable to break down as a result of its own violence. Every society seeks to thwart this tendency through a specific behavior of which it resolutely remains unaware…. the spontaneous, mimetic convergence of an entire community upon a single victim- the descendant of an original scapegoat- on whose head all hatreds are discharged so that they will not spread with catastrophic effect, destroying the community.”

Girard makes effort to look at myth through a biblical lens. Myth preceded, and in many ways was shattered by, the Abrahamic traditions. “In biblical texts, victims are innocent and collective violence is to blame. In myths, the victims are to blame and communities are always innocent…. Myths are rooted in crowd phenomena, which fool both the makers of myths and their audience.” The Bible is more moral than myths in the sense that it is reality. “It is more moral because it is the truth. Victims are scapegoats who have been selected solely through a process of violent mimeticism, which is why they are truly innocent. The role of unanimity ensures the victim will be a scapegoat. The “sins” of mythical heroes are too reminiscent of the ones associated with bloodthirsty crowds not the be the product of the same mentality.” The Bible was different because, for the first time, unanimity was broken. The lie was revealed.  Disunion ensued. “The sudden intrusion of the truth destroyed a social harmony that depended on the lie of unanimous violence…. In mythic accounts, the opinion of the crowd is never subjected to criticism from a dissident minority. Conversely, many psalms describe the narrator as being hounded by a crowd, without any provocation on his part.” The Bible takes the perspective of the victim. It calls truth to the violence of the crowd, the founding lie. “The New Testament completes the process of desacralization by revealing what is revealed nowhere else- the mimetic genesis of scapegoats, and their founding and organizing role in human culture.” Jesus “sacrificed” himself, but was not “sacrificed” for he would not allow the community to turn him into the scapegoat. The lie was exposed through his death. “What Jesus proposed to men so that they might escape violence [was he] invited them to be done with mimetic rivalries. Each time a potential rival makes unreasonable demands of us, or what seem to be unreasonable demands, instead of treating him in the same manner one must yield on the issue in dispute; one must avoid escalating violence, which leads directly to scapegoating…. To protect itself against its own violence, mankind had ended up directing it against innocents. Christ did just the opposite. He offered no resistance. It was not in order to play the game of his enemies that he gave himself up to be sacrificed, but in order to put an end to sacrifice…. Christ died so that humanity might abandon the habit of violent sacrifice.” He tried to end the habit of sacrifice of another by assuming a sacrifice of himself. In doing so he not only put a lie to him being the scapegoat, but of all the scapegoats who had preceded him in the archaic past. “Christ is not simply another sacralized scapegoat. Christ became a scapegoat in order to desacralize those who came before him and to prevent those who come after him from being sacralized.” Jesus put an end to God’s responsibility for violence and put it squarely on the heads of man. Collective human violence was shown for what it was: not a sacrifice on behalf of the Gods, but collective murder of an innocent victim.

The second half of the book takes the form of a discussion, where Girard discusses with a colleague the finer points of his mimetic theory. “Knowing the emissary victim requires a certain kind of conversion, namely, that one has to come to see oneself as a persecutor…. What we call conversion is, finally, the experience of the scapegoat becoming the subjective experience of the persecutor.” We finally see the other side of the coin. This is destabilizing for the community, however. “Since the victim is not guilty, he no longer has the power to absorb violence.” Girard discusses the role of submission to tradition in the Catholic Church. “Paul was more radical than Peter. He lectured Peter, and often strongly disapproved of him. But in the end Paul always gave into him because he knew that Christ had wanted Peter to speak for him. Paul went right to the heart of the matter in everything, and here he recognized the authority of tradition- a tradition that had only been in existence for a quarter-century! And it is because he was perfectly aware of what was at stake that he acted as he did. If he hadn’t, Christianity would never have survived; it would have fallen apart at once. To understand Christianity and orthodoxy one must think of Paul. Paul was indeed stronger than Peter, better educated, more cosmopolitan, but he always yielded to Peter’s primacy.”

Girard on Judaism and the history of Jewish people in the world, “the universality of Judaism comes from the fact that the Jews exemplify the experience of all peoples; that is, they resemble all the scapegoats of history.” On the domestication of animals, “why did people keep animals with them? Surely in order to make sacrificial victims of them. It is sacrifice that taught human beings to eat meat, to drink milk, and so on. And it is sacrifice that led to the domestication of those animals that could be domesticated.” The process began in prehistory, but it is first recorded in “the theory and practice of sacrifice in the Brahmanas. Everything is there: doubles, sacrifice as a form of lottery, the creative character of sacrifice, and so on. The explanation of sacrifice, in the strict sense, is inextricable from the reality of evolution. Sacrifices had to be repeated over hundreds of thousands of years in order to produce sacred kings, animal domestication, and many other human institutions. All these things came out of sacrifice just as the Hindus said.” On Tocqueville’s prescient analysis of American republicanism, “he was the first to perceive the difference between democracy and monarchy, which he rightly saw as being based on a unique kind of sacrificial animal, the king. Democracy, although it contains as many obstacles as there are individuals in society, leads people to believe that there are no more obstacles, because the king has been overthrown. No one before Tocqueville saw that, to the contrary, if the shadow of the cripple is no longer cast over the world, it is because the world is on its way to becoming a cemetery.” On modern consumerism, “people say, we all want the same thing; and the economy says, you shall have the same thing…. Mimetic desire is satisfied only for a time, which grows ever shorter. New toys must always be found, and that’s getting harder and harder to do.”

On the prevalence of twins in myth, “the troubling identity of mythic twins is a metaphor for the conflictual collapse of differences, a source of infinite disorder…. Mimetic crisis sharpens oppositions- not by reinforcing differences, as the dominant ideology of individualism claims, but by emptying them of their content, by undifferentiating them.” On the crippled victims of animal and man, “predators typically choose the weakest members of a troop of antelopes, for example, since wounded, injured, or otherwise disabled individuals are always easier to capture than healthy ones. Later they were to be found in human cultures, in the form of the archaic divinities- Greek, Hindu, and so on- to which collective murder gave birth. Human beings in search of scapegoats prey upon this same type of individual, which is why so many of the archaic and ancient gods are lame or crippled. The mimetic genesis of religion may be situated in the seemingly interminable transition between animal and man.” On managing violence in society, “it isn’t consciousness that keeps violence at bay in archaic religion, but prohibitions, which are aimed at eliminating opportunities for violence, and rites, which, in furnishing violence with an outlet that is itself violent, only to a smaller degree, transform the most lethal violence into a less lethal form.” On reason and the mob, “the informative function of reason has no effect on the crowd, which is governed instead by the scapegoat mechanism. Either this mechanism operates as it should and produces unanimity, in which case witnesses are false witnesses, or it fails to produce unanimity and ceases to operate.” Girard sums it all up, “but if you ask me what mimeticism is, I will tell you: it’s pride, anger; it’s envy, jealousy- these are the cardinal sins. It’s lust as well. Human sexuality is very important, because it’s a permanent impulse, not something episodic or intermittent. There are no tranquil interludes in human life. Rivalry is what sustains desire.”