The anthropologist of desire. 172 maxims browsable at random, the whole system in three movements, the five novelists who found it first, a lexicon, reader's guides to the two central books, a drill in reading persecution texts, the life, and the objections.
Avignon, 25 décembre 1923 · Stanford, 4 November 2015
I We do not desire on our own. We copy the desires of others.
II Copied desire makes rivals, rivals make crowds, and crowds discharge themselves on a single victim.
III The Bible is the long, slow disclosure that the victim was innocent.
Académie française, fauteuil 37 · Andrew B. Hammond Professor, Stanford “the Darwin of the human sciences”
He trained as a medieval archivist, went to America to teach French literature he had not yet read, and ended by proposing an answer to the oldest question in anthropology: where does culture come from. The answer was that it comes from a murder nobody remembers correctly.
Girard's is a single hypothesis, extended over fifty years and eleven books. It begins in the novel, where he noticed that no character ever wants anything on their own. It passes through the ethnographic record, where he argued that communities discharge their accumulated conflict onto one victim and call the resulting peace sacred. It ends in the Gospels, which he read as the same story told from the victim's side, and therefore as the text that breaks the machine.
The maxims first. Everything after them is apparatus.
172 lines, gathered
The maxims
Filter by head, search a word, or pull one at random. The whole index is at the foot.
SEARCH /172
№ 1Desire
All desire is a desire for being.
René Girard
The argument entire
One hypothesis, three movements
Girard resisted the idea that he had several theories. There is one: it starts in the novel, passes through the sacrificial crowd, and ends in the Gospels. Follow it in order.
Deceit, Desire and the Novel · 1961
Desire is not a straight line from a subject to an object. It is a triangle. We want what we want because someone else wants it first.
1
The model comes first
We imagine desire as spontaneous - my taste, my choice, my object. Girard calls that the romantic lie. In fact a third party is always standing there first: the model, the mediator, whose wanting teaches us what is worth wanting. The great novelists knew it; the reason we call their books realist is that they abandoned the lie.
2
Distance decides everything
When the model is remote - a knight in a romance, a saint, a celebrity - the imitation is harmless admiration. Girard calls this external mediation. When the model stands beside you, wanting the same finite thing, imitation curdles into rivalry. That is internal mediation, and it is the engine of modern life, where nothing separates us any more.
3
The object is a pretext
What the rival finally wants is not the thing but the fullness of being the other seems to possess. This is why obtaining the object disappoints, why obstacles inflame rather than deter, and why the most desirable thing in a room is whatever someone else refuses to give up.
which leads toIf desire is borrowed, then two people who admire each other will inevitably want the same thing. Imitation, taken far enough, produces conflict from nothing.
“I desire.”
NAIVE DESIRE
The subject believes desire is spontaneous
click to advance
An illustration
Move the model closer
Nothing changes about the desire except the distance to whoever you caught it from. Girard thought that distance explained the difference between a culture of heroes and a culture of rivals.
External mediation
admiration
The model is out of reach - a knight in a romance, a saint, a dead novelist, a star. You imitate openly and say so; there is nothing to fight over because you will never stand in the same room.
Don Quixote and Amadis of Gaul.
DIFFERENCE
They define themselves against each other
Deceit, Desire and the Novel · 1961
Five novelists who knew
The theory was not deduced; it was read off the page. Girard argued that five writers, working separately, each found the same triangle - and that what we call their realism is simply the moment they stopped pretending desire was their characters’ own.
Don Quixote
external mediation
The clearest case, and the one Girard starts from. Quixote does not choose his desires: he has handed the office of choosing to Amadis of Gaul. The model is fictional and far away, so the imitation is comic rather than murderous - nobody competes with a knight who never existed.
The arc of the book runs from Cervantes to Dostoevsky - from a model so distant it is funny to a model so close it is fatal. That descent is, in Girard’s telling, also the history of the modern world.
A drill · from The Scapegoat
Read the persecution
Girard argued that four marks betray a real lynching behind a text, whatever the text believes about itself. Read the case, mark what you find, then see the reading.
The rivers were poisoned
Guillaume de Machaut, France, c.1349
A fourteenth-century poet describes a terrible time: people died in enormous numbers, the air itself seemed corrupted, and the social order broke down. He reports the cause matter-of-factly - the Jews had poisoned the rivers and wells - and records that they were killed for it. He writes as a witness, not a critic.
DISCORD
All against all
INDIVIDUALITY
Each believes their desire is their own
The working vocabulary
A lexicon
His terms are exact and routinely loosened in use. Twenty of them, with what each actually means. Tap for the note.
Desire copied from a model rather than arising on its own. Not imitation of behaviour but imitation of wanting.
The third party whose desire designates the object as desirable. Every desire has one, whether or not we can name them.
The model is far off - historically, socially, fictionally - so imitation stays admiration and produces no rivalry. Don Quixote and his Amadis.
The model is a neighbour, a peer, a colleague, close enough to compete for the same object. Admiration turns into rivalry, and rivalry hides itself as contempt.
What the rival actually pursues: not the object but the fullness of being the model appears to have. This is why possession disappoints.
The lie is the story that desire is spontaneous and original. The truth is the novelist's discovery of the mediator. Girard read the great novels as conversions from the first to the second.
The obstacle that attracts precisely because it obstructs. The model who blocks the way becomes the thing one cannot stop circling.
Two people copying each other's desire for one object. Each intensifies the other; the object recedes; the rivalry becomes its own subject.
What rivals turn into: mirror images, interchangeable, each convinced the other is the aggressor. The likeness is exactly what makes it unbearable.
The collapse of the distinctions - rank, role, kin, clean and unclean - that keep a community legible. For Girard this, not disorder as such, is what a culture experiences as plague.
The state a community reaches when reciprocal violence has erased its differences and no institution can absorb the conflict.
The involuntary resolution of that crisis: all-against-all converges into all-against-one, the victim is destroyed, and calm genuinely follows.
The one killed in place of everyone. Usually marked by some sign of difference: the stranger, the cripple, the twin, the king, the beautiful.
The necessary blindness. The crowd must believe the victim guilty for the mechanism to deliver peace; a scapegoat known to be a scapegoat is useless.
The Athenian expelled or killed to purify the city - poison and cure in one word, which Girard takes as the exact structure of the sacred.
The original lynching a culture cannot recall accurately, re-enacted in ritual, narrated in myth, and fenced off by prohibition.
For Girard not a feeling of transcendence but the community's own expelled violence, returning to it as something external, terrible, and worshipped.
Read structurally: the accuser, the principle of mimetic contagion, the process by which expulsion manufactures order. Satan casting out Satan is the mechanism describing itself.
The claim, developed with the psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, that the self is not prior to its relations but produced by them. There is no desire that is properly one's own.
Borrowed from Clausewitz in his last book: with the sacrificial brake broken, reciprocal violence has nothing to arrest it, and the apocalyptic texts read less as prophecy than as description.
THE DECALOGUE
Ten commandments - but one is the key to all others
Two books, chapter by chapter
Where to start
The anthropology and the theology, one each. Chapter maps with what each chapter is doing, so you can enter at the right door rather than the first one.
1977 in English, tr. Patrick Gregory · Bloomsbury · ~148,000 words · 11 chapters
The book that turned a literary critic into an anthropologist, and the one to read if you want the theory without the theology. Greek tragedy, ethnography and psychoanalysis are cross-examined until they yield the same hidden event: a community in crisis that discharges itself onto one victim and afterwards calls the peace sacred. Freud and Lévi-Strauss are argued with directly and at length.
Both are in print. Chapter titles are the books’ own; the summaries are mine. ↗ Bloomsbury
CONCEALMENT
The victim is guilty - so says the crowd
Fifty years, eleven books
The shelf
One argument, extended: out of the novel, into anthropology, then into the Gospels, and finally into the century ahead of him.
The first statement of mimetic desire, drawn out of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky. The novels are read as a single discovery: desire is triangular, and the great novelist is the one who stops lying about it.
English translation 1966 · 5 years later
1923 - 2015
The life
An archivist by training, a professor of French by accident, an anthropologist by conviction, and a Catholic by conversion - in that order.
1923
Avignon
Born on Christmas Day, son of the historian Joseph Girard, in a city whose central fact is a fourteenth-century papal palace.
1940s
Paris
Trains at the École des Chartes as a medieval archivist and palaeographer - a discipline of reading documents against the grain, which never quite leaves him.
1947
Paris → Indiana
Takes his diploma with a thesis on private life in Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth century, then leaves for Indiana on a fellowship. He will spend the rest of his career in America.
1950
Indiana
PhD from Indiana University, on American opinion of France between 1940 and 1943. He is teaching French literature while he does it - and, by his own account, reading the novels not much ahead of his students.
c.1959
Baltimore
While preparing his first book - reading Dostoevsky above all - he converts from agnosticism to Christianity. The theory and the faith arrive in the same years, and he never afterwards agrees to separate them.
1961
Johns Hopkins
Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Mimetic desire, discovered in five novelists.
1966
Baltimore
As chair of Romance Languages he helps organise "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" - the October symposium that brings Lacan, Barthes and Derrida to an American audience, and is usually credited with importing French theory into the United States. Girard spends the following decades arguing against most of it.
1972
New York
La violence et le sacré, written during his years at Buffalo. The scapegoat mechanism, and the beginning of his real notoriety.
1978
Baltimore
Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. The complete system, including the Christian claim that costs him a good part of his secular audience.
1981
Stanford
Moves to Stanford as Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, where he stays until retirement and where a generation of students - some of whom later go into technology - hear the theory first-hand.
1990
Stanford
The Colloquium on Violence and Religion is founded to work on mimetic theory across disciplines. The theory acquires a research community.
2005
Paris
Elected to the Académie française, fauteuil 37 - the immortals' recognition of a man who spent his career in California arguing that culture begins in a murder.
2015
Stanford
Dies on 4 November, aged 91.
The theory in the present tense
On the culture around him
He wrote on a Mel Gibson film, on eating disorders, on terrorism, on markets and on the politics of victimhood. He did not write on social media. The second file keeps that straight.
As far as the record shows, the only film he ever wrote an essay about - and he defended it. He dismissed the antisemitism charge outright, noting that where Gibson departs from the Gospels it is usually to enlarge Jewish sympathy for Jesus. His one reservation was that the beating begins earlier than the texts warrant, which handed critics an argument they did not need. What interested him most was the reception: critics who normally celebrate screen violence condemned this film, and critics who normally denounce it approved - each side borrowing the other's arguments. He called the manoeuvre a classical ballet, elegant because entirely unconscious of itself, and said what was manipulating them was the Passion itself.
From an anthropological point of view, the Passion has nothing specifically Jewish about it. It is a crowd phenomenon that obeys the same laws as all crowd phenomena.René Girard
His praise is exactly his theory: myths take the crowd's side, the Gospels acquit the victim - and that, he wrote, is what Gibson shows.
He was elected to the Académie française and called a monomaniac, often by the same reviewers. Both files are worth keeping open.
A research community, not a school
The Colloquium on Violence and Religion, founded in 1990, put anthropologists, theologians, classicists and psychiatrists to work on mimetic theory as a live hypothesis. Its journal, Contagion, is where most of the serious testing happens.
The psychiatrists
Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort were interlocutors rather than disciples: Things Hidden is written as their interrogation of him. Out of it came interdividual psychology, the claim that the self is an effect of its relations rather than their author.
The theologians
James Alison, Gil Bailie, Raymund Schwager and others took the argument into Christian theology, where it cuts hard: if the Passion exposes sacrifice rather than performing one, then substitutionary atonement is exactly the reading Girard says the Gospels were written to destroy.
Silicon Valley
Peter Thiel took Girard's course at Stanford and has cited him ever since as the frame for how he reads competition - his advice to avoid rivalrous markets is mimetic theory turned into investment strategy. He has funded work on the theory through the Imitatio foundation. The result is that Girard is now read in places that have never heard of the École des Chartes.
The literary afterlife
Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee and others have written admiringly; the mimetic reading has become a standard tool for Shakespeare, for the Greek tragedians, and for anyone trying to explain why online life produces so much conflict over so little.
ARCHAIC
Violence is contained by ritual sacrifice
Colophon
The 172 maxims are gathered from across the work - the novels book, Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden, The Scapegoat, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, and the late interviews - and grouped editorially under six heads: desire, violence, doubles, revelation, modernity, and fragments. Draw one at random, filter by head, or open the full index inside the notebook.
Everything else on this page is my own summary of the argument rather than quotation: the three movements, the novelists, the lexicon, the chapter guides, the life, and the reception. Where Girard is quoted he is marked. Both books treated in the reader's guides are in copyright and in print; the guides are a way in, not a substitute, and they link to the publishers.
The instruments - the triangle, the mediation dial, the doubles, the persecution drill, the circle, the contagion, the tenth commandment, the veil, the scale - are attempts to make the mechanism visible rather than merely described. That is, after all, what he said the Gospels did.