Modernity and mimetic desire: A critique of René Girard

Abstract

Le temps et la force des choses ont tout simplifié sur cette terre, et après quelques milliers d'années, le monde, d'abord si confus, si divers, si inconnu, si hostile à lui-même, s'est ramassé peu à peu et organisé de telle sorte, que le philosophe qui spécule sur son avenir peut et doit le chercher tout entier dans celui de cette civilisation dominante dont Paris, Londres et Berlin sont les foyers. Théodore Jouffroy, Mélanges philosophiques La connaissance du secret de l'histoire ne donne pas celle de ses voies. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique Among the emblematic voices of the 20th century we count René Girard. With the unrelenting force of a prophet, he expressed the sense of spiritual crisis that defined his time, and like the prophets, he carried a stern message. From studies of archaic myths, he conjured up a world teetering on the brink of disaster, riveted by mimetic violence from which only the sacrifice of an innocent victim-Christ-could bring release. Violence and faith are inextricably linked in Girard's work. They require, and repel, one another. Each interpellates an aspect of modernity. To find out how, we shall examine the entanglements between mimetic desire and sovereignty, arguably the defining feature of political modernity. In seeking a confrontation with sovereignty, we want to move beyond the conventional, and sterile, opposition between the subject and the state, the political form that has grown up around sovereignty. Our aims are twofold: we want to explore the role of mimetic exchange in the workings of sovereign power. We shall show that, by forming a relief around sovereign power, mimetic theory brings into sharper focus the way sovereignty connected with those it governed, and so sheds light on why it was, and why it ceased to be, such a successful format of government. But This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.