Mimetic desire: is human desire borrowed from a model rather than spontaneous?

René Girard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

We imagine that our desires are our own — that they rise spontaneously from within, that between me and the object I want there is a straight line. This is the romantic lie, and the great novelists knew it was a lie. Between the subject and the object there is always a third term: the model, the mediator, the other whose desire I imitate.123 I do not know what to want, so I learn it by watching what others want, and I want it because they want it.

Desire is triangular, borrowed, mimetic. When the model is distant — a hero, a saint, a fictional ideal — the imitation is peaceful. But when the model is near, a rival within reach of the same object, imitation turns to rivalry, and the two converge, each confirming the other's desire, until the object matters less than the contest itself and the rivals grow more alike the more they hate.

This is not one psychological mechanism among others. It is the structure beneath the others, the thing Stendhal and Proust and Dostoevsky saw and the psychologies of their century missed because they, too, believed the lie of the autonomous self.4

Sources

  1. Thus the subject is less capable than ever of giving up the inaccessible object: it is on this object and it alone that the mediator confers his prestige, by possessing or wanting to possess it. Other objects have no worth at all in the eyes of the envious person, even though they may be similar to or indeed identical with the "mediated" object.
    The Girard Reader, pp. 35–36
  2. He makes of him a monstrous divinity. The subject's indignant knowledge of the Other returns in a circle to strike him when he is least expecting it. This psychological circle is inscribed in the triangle of desire. Most of our ethical judgments are rooted in hatred of a mediator, a rival whom we copy. While the mediator is still remote the circle is vast.
    Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, pp. 84–85
  3. Only the great artists attribute to the mediator the position usurped by the object; only they reverse the commonly accepted hierarchy of desire.
    Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, pp. 25–26
  4. That is why the very esscnce of their genius has been misunderstood by the Romantics and their successors of today.! Cervantes and Dante discover within the world of literature a whole territory of awareness that includes Shakespeare's "play within a play" and Gide's mise en abime.
    To Double Business Bound, pp. 25–26

Where the argument is made

  • Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961 — the triangular structure of desire read out of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Dostoevsky)
  • Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978 — the systematic account)
  • A Theater of Envy (1991 — Shakespeare as mimetic psychologist)

How the argument was received

Mimetic desire is the foundation of Girard's entire system and his most empirically engaged claim. It is contested as a totalizing account — critics grant that much desire is imitative while denying that all of it reduces to imitation, and charge that the theory is unfalsifiable because any counterexample can be re-described as hidden mediation. Its relation to Freud is disputed: Girard claims to explain what Freud mystified (the Oedipus complex as a special case of mimetic rivalry), while psychoanalysts reject the reduction. Deleuze's productive desire is a rival ontology. But the core insight has gained unexpected support from the study of imitation in developmental psychology and from mirror-neuron research, which several of Girard's interpreters (and Girard himself, in Evolution and Conversion) took as convergent evidence.