René Girard and Mimetic Desire

International journal of humanities and social sciences, 2016

This paper sets out to unearth the underlying reasons behind the spectacular success that the seventeenth-century Spanish novelist, Cervantes, achieved in his humoristic work, Don Quixote which has been translated into many languages, including English. In this respect, I work to demonstate the centrality of what the anthropologist Rene Girard called in his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) ‘mimetic desire’ in sustaining the lightness of the novel’s humor. A desire that is built on imitating others does, actually, define Don Quixote, the protagonist of the novel. Yet, what is special with him is that this desire leads him to generate a whole imagined narrative about knight errantry and, more importatly, to live it out in a time in which medieval chivalric codes of behaviour become outmoded and just part of the fictional world. So, Don Quixote’s plight becomes comic, for he places what he read about the knight Amadis of Gaul and other stories of chivalry as models he irresist...

2006

This paper sets out to unearth the underlying reasons behind the spectacular success that the seventeenth-century Spanish novelist, Cervantes, achieved in his humoristic work, Don Quixote which has been translated into many languages, including English. In this respect, I work to demonstate the centrality of what the anthropologist Réné Girard called in his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) ‘mimetic desire’ in sustaining the lightness of the novel’s humor. A desire that is built on imitating others does, actually, define Don Quixote, the protagonist of the novel. Yet, what is special with him is that this desire leads him to generate a whole imagined narrative about knight errantry and, more importatly, to live it out in a time in which medieval chivalric codes of behaviour become outmoded and just part of the fictional world. So, Don Quixote’s plight becomes comic, for he places what he read about the knight Amadis of Gaul and other stories of chivalry as models he irresistably strives to cult and copy from. Certainly, the sharp chasm separating reality from fiction is enough to set the protagonist in a state of confusion whereby he is made to appear to other characters and even to the reader as veritably mad. Meanwhile, our laughable protagonist keeps clinging to such a desire that helps him considerably overcome the heavy hazardous adventures he comes across in his ludicrous and, at the same time, absurd journey of what we may call ‘search for knighthood.’ It is precisely the waxing and waning of this mimetic desire, galvanizing his courage, that this paper seeks to chart and examine anthropologically. Keywords : anthroplogy, mimetic desire, humor, knight-errantry, mediation, parody, rivalry

STUDIA Z TEORII WYCHOWANIA TOM XIV: 2023 NR 2(43), 2023

René Girard has been critiqued for failing to ground his theory of mimetic desire in a discursive and philosophically robust framework. In order to meet this objection, I argue that René Girard's theory of mimetic desire can be successfully motivated by a phenomenology of the emptiness of selfhood and intersubjectivity. After grounding Girard's theory in a phenomenology of no-self, I reconstruct Girard's argument that violence is a necessary consequence of internally mediated mimetic desire  .

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2011

T he aim of this special collection of essays, titled Intersubjectivity, Desire, and Mimetic Theory: René Girard and Psychoanalysis, is to reappraise the relationship between René Girard's thought and the psychoanalytic tradition. The tripartite structure of the title clearly echoes the English title of Girard's first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, with which he introduced the psychological dynamics of mimetic desire as represented in modern European novels. 1 Through the reference to the intentionally broad notions of "intersub-jectivity," "desire," and "mimetic theory," our title also signals the intention to cover the multifarious aspects and issues that inform Girard's thinking in relation to core issues of psychoanalysis, by casting the net very broadly and exploring the theoretical implications of the encounter between the mimetic and the psychoanalytic discourse in a variety of fields and disciplines, such as philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, psychotherapy, neuropsychology, and socio-psychology. On the one hand, this collection discusses the potential theoretical and discursive integrations that mimetic theory would need in order to account for various psychological manifestations, including psychopatholo-gies of different kinds, and social phenomena; on the other hand, the collection

2017

Laberinto Journal, 2018