ALL DESIRE IS A DESIRE FOR BEING
Metadata
- Author: Ren… (Z-Library) (René Girard
Highlights
The Bible therefore effects a radical departure from mythology: in the Old Testament, and even more spectacularly in the Gospels, the supremacy of the crowd, which dates back to the origins of humanity, is finally overthrown. — location: 465
the critical mind gives way to the literary tradition. This could serve as an introduction to reexamining a great many attitudes towards literary texts. Certain texts, whatever the source of their prestige, come to serve as models. And, from that moment on, all questioning stops. — location: 583
There is nothing original about it. It reproduces the classic schema of great men who serve as scapegoats in their own lifetime, the better to be converted into sacred figures after their death. — location: 868
Literature and life have become one, not because literature imitates life but because life imitates literature. Unity of experience is achieved at the level of an all-pervasive imposture. — location: 1087
The murder is really a secret effort to re-establish contact with humanity. — location: 1342
His écriture blanche gives an effect of greyish monotony which is the next best thing to silence, and silence is the only conduct truly befitting a solipsist, the only one, however, which he cannot bring himself to adopt. — location: 1430
The ‘innocent murder’ is really the image and the crux of the whole creative process. — location: 1445
Every page of the work reflects the contradiction and the division inherent in the murder; every denial of communication is really an effort to communicate; every gesture of indifference or hostility is an appeal in disguise. — location: 1458
L’art … oblige … l’artiste à ne pas s’isoler; il le soumet à la vérité la plus humble et la plus universelle. Et celui qui, souvent, a choisi son destin d’artiste parce qu’il se sentait différent, apprend bien vite qu’il ne nourrira son art, et sa différence, qu’en avouant sa ressemblance avec tous. — location: 1562
The midsummer night is a hell of the lovers’ own choosing, a hell into which they all avidly plunge, insofar as they all choose to choose love by another’s eyes. — location: 1667
Far from raising himself to the state of a superman, a god, as he seeks to do, the subject of mimetic desire sinks to the level of animality. The animal images are the price the self has to pay for its idolatrous worship of otherness. This idolatry is really ‘selfish’ in the sense that it is meant for the sake of the self; the self wants to appropriate the absolute that it perceives, but its extreme thirst for self-elevation results in extreme self-contempt, quite logically if paradoxically, since this self always meets and invites its own defeat at the hands of a successful rival. — location: 1729
As the climax of the midsummer night approaches, the four protagonists lose whatever individuality they formerly appeared to have; they wander like brutes in the forest, trading the same insults and finally the same physical blows, all drugged with the same drug, all bitten by the same serpent. — location: 1803
There is no great theater without a gripping awareness that, far from sharpening our differences, as we like to believe, our violence obliterates them, dissolving them into that reciprocity of vengeance which becomes its own self-inflicted punishment. — location: 1841
It is in a comedy like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if we only agree to read through the transparence of the ‘airy nothing,’ that the truth will stare us most openly in the face. Far from lacking substance and profundity, as even George Orwell inexplicably maintained, this play provides a quintessence of the Shakespearean spirit. — location: 1850
Sincere Republican though he is, Brutus unconsciously turns into a second Caesar and this must be interpreted less in terms of individual psychology than as an effect of the worsening mimetic crisis. Caesar is a threat and, in order to restore the Republic, he must be eliminated; but, whoever eliminates him, ipso facto, becomes another Caesar, which is what Brutus secretly desires, anyway, as do the people themselves. The destruction of the Republic is this very process; no single man is responsible for it; everybody is. — location: 2024
what Shakespeare portrays is no conflict of differences, but a plague of undifferentiation. — location: 2034
Envy and mimetic desire are one and the same. Caesar portrays the man as a self-tortured intellectual unable to enjoy sensuous pleasures. Unlike his modern posterity, this early prototype of ressentiment – Nietzsche’s word for mimetic envy – has not yet lost all capacity for bold action but he excels only in the clandestine and terroristic type exemplified by the conspiracy. — location: 2055
The fire turns a chance encounter into a quasi-ritualistic affair and Peter violates the communal feeling of the group, or perhaps what Heidegger would call its Being-together, its Mitsein, which is an important modality of being. In English, togetherness would be a good word for this if the media had not given it a bad name, emptying it entirely of what it is supposed to designate. — location: 2691
Their pride of place resembles the snobbery one finds today in the cultural centers of our world – great universities, for instance, or world capitals. The less one can do for the place in which one lives, the more importance one attaches to living there; and rightly so, because it is the place which is doing something for one, and one feels intense disdain for the people who do not belong there. — location: 2745
There is something authentically individual about this imitation. The proof is that the time it takes varies from individual to individual. The birth of the individual is the birth of individual temporalities. So long as they form a crowd, these men stand together, speak together, and say exactly the same thing, all together. Jesus’s words dissolve the crowd. The men go away one by one, according to how long it takes each of them to understand the Revelation. Because most people spend their lives imitating, they don’t know what they’re imitating. Even those who are most able to take the initiative almost never do so. It takes an exceptional situation such as an aborted stoning to show what an individual is capable of. — location: 3226
There is something authentically individual about this imitation. The proof is that the time it takes varies from individual to individual. The birth of the individual is the birth of individual temporalities. So long as they form a crowd, these men stand together, speak together, and say exactly the same thing, all together. Jesus’s words dissolve the crowd. The men go away one by one, according to how long it takes each of them to understand the Revelation. Because most people spend their lives imitating, they don’t know what they’re imitating. Even those who are most able to take the initiative almost never do so. It takes an exceptional situation such as an aborted stoning to show what an individual is capable of. — location: 3226
As Shakespeare tells us in Hamlet, men can fight to the death over an eggshell. The playwright takes up the same image again in Coriolanus because he is obsessed by the futility of mimetic rivalry. — location: 3740
As Shakespeare tells us in Hamlet, men can fight to the death over an eggshell. The playwright takes up the same image again in Coriolanus because he is obsessed by the futility of mimetic rivalry. — location: 3740
Reciprocity is always present in human relations, whether they are good or bad. If I hold out my hand to you, you will hold out yours to me and we will shake hands. In other words, you will imitate me. If you hold out your hand and I keep mine behind my back, you will be offended, and you will put yours behind your back as well. In other words, you will still imitate me. Even though the relationship is changing drastically, it remains reciprocal, which means imitative, mimetic. — location: 4291
Most critics, seeing this situation, interpret it in terms of a broken friendship, of a great distance suddenly separating the two friends. In reality it is a lack of distance which is responsible for the problem. — location: 4335
The main human conflict is not difference of ideology or opinion, or about mugging in the streets, but rivalry. We are constantly faced by rivalry in the modern world. We compete. It is very difficult to retain your friendship with someone you are competing with. Unless you are a very strong person, you will be unable to interpret your relationship in terms of difference. — location: 4370
A myth is the embodiment of scapegoating, its completion, its perfection. It is written by a crowd which believes it has been saved by its own victim in such a way that that victim is seen as a primitive god. — location: 4438
The Gospels do exactly the opposite. Jesus says, ‘I do not bring [the] peace [of the scapegoat], but the sword’. In John’s Gospel, every intervention of Jesus is followed by, ‘they were divided by his words’. Far from reconciling the community, Jesus does not improve the situation of the world in the way which myth does. — location: 4440
In the Byzantine world they still performed Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King, but they performed it as the passion of Oedipus, as the suffering of an innocent victim. Maybe they could not verbalize or conceptualize what they did, but instinctively they felt that Oedipus was a victim of the crowd, a victim of the same type as Jesus, not an ugly goat but a kind of Lamb of God. — location: 4461
The individualism of our time is really an effort to deny the failure of desire. Those who claim to be governed by the pleasure principle, as a rule, are enslaved to models and rivals, which makes their lives a constant frustration. But they are too vain to acknowledge their own enslavement. Mimetic desire makes us believe we are always on the verge of becoming self-sufficient through our own transformation into someone else. Our would-be transformation into a god, as Shakespeare says, turns us into an ass. In Pascal’s terms, it becomes ‘Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête’ – ‘Whoever tries to act like an angel turns into a beast.’ — location: 4534
The individualism of our time is really an effort to deny the failure of desire. Those who claim to be governed by the pleasure principle, as a rule, are enslaved to models and rivals, which makes their lives a constant frustration. But they are too vain to acknowledge their own enslavement. Mimetic desire makes us believe we are always on the verge of becoming self-sufficient through our own transformation into someone else. Our would-be transformation into a god, as Shakespeare says, turns us into an ass. In Pascal’s terms, it becomes ‘Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête’ – ‘Whoever tries to act like an angel turns into a beast.’ — location: 4534
The more modern the novel becomes, the more you descend down the circles of a hell which can still be defined in theological terms as it is in Dante, but can also now be defined in nonreligious terms – in terms of what happens to us when our relations with others are dominated exclusively by our desires and theirs, and their relationships dominated by their desires and ours. Because our desires are always mimetic or imitative, even and especially when we dream of being completely autonomous and self-sufficient, they always make us into rivals of our models and then the models of our rivals, thus turning our relations into an inextricable entanglement of identical and antagonistic desires which result in endless frustration. — location: 4520
The more modern the novel becomes, the more you descend down the circles of a hell which can still be defined in theological terms as it is in Dante, but can also now be defined in nonreligious terms – in terms of what happens to us when our relations with others are dominated exclusively by our desires and theirs, and their relationships dominated by their desires and ours. Because our desires are always mimetic or imitative, even and especially when we dream of being completely autonomous and self-sufficient, they always make us into rivals of our models and then the models of our rivals, thus turning our relations into an inextricable entanglement of identical and antagonistic desires which result in endless frustration. — location: 4520
Understanding the real failure of desire leads to wisdom and ultimately to religion. Many philosophies and all religions share in that wisdom which modern trendiness denies. Great literature shares in that wisdom because it does not cheat with desire. It shows the necessary failure of undisciplined desire. The greatest literature shows the impossibility of self-fulfillment through desire. Mimetic obsessions are dreadful because they cannot vanquish their own circularity, even when they know about it. They are the mother of all addictions such as drugs, alcohol, obsessive sexuality, etc. One cannot get out of the circle even as its radius becomes smaller and smaller and our world becomes more narrowly obsessive. — location: 4539
Christianity acknowledges the ultimate goodness of imitation as well as the goodness and reality of the human person. It teaches that instead of surrendering to mimetic desire, by following the newest fashion and worshiping the latest idol, we should imitate only Christ or Christ-like noncompetitive models. — location: 4546
Christianity acknowledges the ultimate goodness of imitation as well as the goodness and reality of the human person. It teaches that instead of surrendering to mimetic desire, by following the newest fashion and worshiping the latest idol, we should imitate only Christ or Christ-like noncompetitive models. — location: 4546
Thus we have two perspectives in Proust and other great novels of novelistic conversion. The first perspective is the deceptive perspective of desire which is full of illusions regarding the possibility of the hero to fulfill himself through desire. It is the perspective that imprisoned him in a sterile process of jumping from one frustrated desire to the next over a period of many years. Everything the narrator could not acquire, he desired; everything he acquired, he immediately ceased to desire, until he fell into a state of ennui that could be called a state of post-mimetic desire. The second perspective is one that comes from the end of the novel, from the omega point of conversion, which is a liberation from desire. This perspective enables the novelist to rectify the illusions of the hero and provides him with the creative energy he needs to write his novel. The second perspective is highly critical of the first but it is not resentful. Even though Proust never resorts to the vocabulary of sin, the reality of sin is present. The exploration of the past very much resembles a discovery of one’s own sinfulness in Christianity. The time wasted away is full of idolatry, jealousy, envy, and snobbery; it all ends in a feeling of complete futility. — location: 4618
Thus we have two perspectives in Proust and other great novels of novelistic conversion. The first perspective is the deceptive perspective of desire which is full of illusions regarding the possibility of the hero to fulfill himself through desire. It is the perspective that imprisoned him in a sterile process of jumping from one frustrated desire to the next over a period of many years. Everything the narrator could not acquire, he desired; everything he acquired, he immediately ceased to desire, until he fell into a state of ennui that could be called a state of post-mimetic desire. The second perspective is one that comes from the end of the novel, from the omega point of conversion, which is a liberation from desire. This perspective enables the novelist to rectify the illusions of the hero and provides him with the creative energy he needs to write his novel. The second perspective is highly critical of the first but it is not resentful. Even though Proust never resorts to the vocabulary of sin, the reality of sin is present. The exploration of the past very much resembles a discovery of one’s own sinfulness in Christianity. The time wasted away is full of idolatry, jealousy, envy, and snobbery; it all ends in a feeling of complete futility. — location: 4618
There is something quasi-monastic about the partly mythical but nevertheless authentic account of his spending the rest of his life isolated from the world, in his cork-lined bedroom, waking up in the middle of the night to write his novel, just as monks wake up to sing their prayers. — location: 4630
Choice always involves choosing a model, and true freedom lies in the basic choice between a human or a divine model. — location: 4694
Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them. — location: 4718
Humankind is never the victim of God; God is always the victim of humankind. — location: 4720
The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough. — location: 4721
- On political correctness: It’s the religion of the victim detached from any form of transcendence. — location: 4725
- On political correctness: It’s the religion of the victim detached from any form of transcendence. — location: 4725
The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough. — location: 4721
Humankind is never the victim of God; God is always the victim of humankind. — location: 4720
Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them. — location: 4718
Men are never condemned by God: they condemn themselves by their despair. — location: 4740
Men are never condemned by God: they condemn themselves by their despair. — location: 4740
Like every object of desire, history is ephemeral. — location: 4745
Like every object of desire, history is ephemeral. — location: 4745
In intense conflict, far from becoming sharper, differences melt away. — location: 4751
In intense conflict, far from becoming sharper, differences melt away. — location: 4751
The reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy. — location: 4754
The reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy. — location: 4754
Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. — location: 4794
Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. — location: 4794
Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom. — location: 4795
Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom. — location: 4795
Tourism, too, is mimetic and a source of undifferentiation. — location: 4840
Tourism, too, is mimetic and a source of undifferentiation. — location: 4840
Unlike the modern gurus who claim to be imitating nobody, but who want to be imitated on that basis, Christ says: ‘Imitate me as I imitate the Father.’ — location: 4843
Unlike the modern gurus who claim to be imitating nobody, but who want to be imitated on that basis, Christ says: ‘Imitate me as I imitate the Father.’ — location: 4843
The unfortunate man is not stoned because he is monstrous; he becomes a monster because of the stoning. — location: 4857
The unfortunate man is not stoned because he is monstrous; he becomes a monster because of the stoning. — location: 4857