Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
The three thinkers with whom Girard has been most engaged are Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Lévi-Strauss has been important for Girard's
structural reading of texts, and he shares with Lévi-Strauss the view that mythology, and
by inference language and culture, represents the birth and development of differential
thought. Girard criticizes Lévi-Strauss's dismissal of ritual, which preserves in a more
archaic form than myth the traces of collective violence and transformation of violence
into order. Girard holds, moreover, that the structural opposites of the anthropologist's
differential thought, in and of themselves, can account for neither the expulsions
recorded in mythology nor the sequence of negative and then positive connotations -in
other words, the sacred character -- of what or who is expelled. But Girard's engagement
with the work of Freud and Nietzsche has been much more passionate and has made a
much greater creative contribution to his mimetic theory. For Girard's critique of Lévi-
Strauss, the two most convenient sources are "Lévi-Strauss, Structuralism, and Marriage
Laws" in
Violence and the Sacred
, 223-49, and "Differentiation and Reciprocity in Lévi-Strauss and Contemporary Theory," chapter 8, in "To Double Business Bound,"155-77.
See also
Things Hidden
, 105-25.
Freud's speculation in
Totem and Taboo
about a primordial murder of the father-leader
by the horde of brothers competing for the women of the band and greater power is well
known, and it obviously influenced Girard -- although it should be noted that Girard's
ruminations on the execution of Jesus according to the Gospels and on the pharmakon of
Plato as elucidated by Derrida were even more significant than the Freudian murder and
incest prohibition (see under Scapegoat/Scapegoating)* for the further development of
Girard's thinking. On the latter see "Totem and Taboo and the Incest Prohibition,"
chapter 8 of
Violence and the Sacred
,
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193-222. Another important source on Girard's engagement with Freud is,
"Interdividual" Psychology," book 3 of
Things Hidden
, especially pp. 352-92.
But the most important dimension of Girard's encounter with Freud's work is his critique
of the Oedipus complex. Girard's dismantling of the Oedipus complex, including its
ramifications in the concept of the superego, narcissism as distinct from object choice,
and the death instinct, allowed him to account for all the phenomena in human reactions,
relations, and origins in a much clearer, more elegant manner than Freud. As Girard
summarizes in this selection, taken from chapter 7 of
Violence and the Sacred
, 169-85,
Freud tried initially to develop the Oedipus complex from the basis of desire that is
mimetic, yet he is inclined toward the desirability of objects (his
Besetzung
or cathexis);
this attempt accounts for "the strange duality of the identification with the father and the
libidinous attraction for the mother in the first [
Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego
], and even the second [
The Ego and the Id
], version of the complex. The failure of this attempt at compromise compelled Freud to base his complex on a purely
cathectic desire [i.e., an object of desire invested with great emotion] and to reserve the
mimetic effect for another psychic structure, the superego." Freud often started his
analysis and theoretical constructions by taking mimesis very seriously, but he always
abandoned it in favor of his sexual or libidinal theory. For Girard, however, the right
path is the one intimated by Freud at the beginning of chapter 7 of
Group Psychology
where he focuses on identification, which is, practically speaking, mimesis or mimetic desire. The contradiction with which Freud ended, which he tried to resolve with the
concepts of "ambivalence" and the "death instinct," was "a rivalry devoid of preliminary identification (the Oedipus complex) followed by an identification without subsequent
rivalry (the superego)."
As can be seen from the following text, Girard's mimetic hypothesis is completely free
of sexual bias in the sense of attaching mimesis to genetic heritage, anything
biologically preordained, or a universal family structure or situation. The only thing that
is universal and already given in the human condition is the mimetic structure and
capacity of human beings, which require human others as models or mediators and
objects to desire according to the model's desire -but
which
humans and
which
objects
are not predetermined. This in spite of the frequent feminist charge that the mimetic
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theory is thoroughly "androcentric" or "patriarchal"! This conclusion is not based on thorough engagement with Girard's concept of mimesis in order to understand it, but a
politically influenced version of "affirmative action," or, as the British aptly put it,
"positive discrimination": instances of male and female examples are counted from the
texts and other data cited and the totals indicate whether the thinker is "politically
correct." But it misses the depth and implications of the generative mimetic scapegoat
mechanism.
We can observe both similarities and differences between mimetic desire and Freud's
Oedipus complex. Mimetism is a source of continual conflict. By making one man's
desire into a replica of another man's desire, it invariably leads to rivalry; and rivalry in
turn transforms desire into violence. Although Freud may appear on first glance to have
ignored this mechanism, he in fact came very close to apprehending it. A rigorous
examination of this text will make it clear why he ultimately failed to do so.
The mimetic nature of desire plays an important role in Freud's work -- not important
enough, however, to dominate and revolutionize his thinking. His mimetic intuitions are
incompletely formulated; they constitute a dimension of his text that is only half visible
and tends to disappear in transmission. There is nothing surprising about the refusal of
present-day psychoanalysts to turn their attention to this subject. Factions of
psychoanalytic thought, bitterly opposed in other respects, are here at one. The mimetic
aspect of desire has been ignored at once by those whose main concern is the
elimination of inconsistencies in Freud's work in favor of a unified whole and by that
other group who, while orthodox Freudians in name, quietly reject some of the most
lucid and cogent of Freud's analyses on the grounds that they are tainted with
"psychologism."
Although traces of the mimetic conception are scattered through Freud's work, this
conception never assumes a dominant role. It runs counter to the Freudian insistence on
a desire that is fundamentally directed toward an object, that is, sexual desire for the
mother. When the tension between these opposing tendencies becomes too great, both
Freud and his disciples seem to resolve it in favor of the object-desire.
The mimetic intuition of Freud gives rise to a series of concepts ambiguous in
definition, obscure in status, and vague in function. Among the offshoots of this ill-
defined mimetic desire are certain concepts that come under the heading
identification
.
Among the categories of Freudian identification, one that nowadays receives little
attention is the first one
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discussed in the chapter entitled "Identification," in
Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego
. This category has to do with the father:
A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like and be
like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his father as
his ideal. This behavior has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude toward his
father (and toward males in general); it is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits in
very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it helps to prepare the wa
y. 1.
There is a clear resemblance between identification with the father and mimetic desire;
both involve the choice of a model. The choice is not really determined by parentage,
for the child can select as model any man who happens to fill the role that our society
normally assigns to the natural father.
As we have pointed out in the previous chapter, the mimetic model directs the disciple's
desire to a particular object by desiring it himself. That is why we can say that mimetic
desire is rooted neither in the subject nor in the object, but in a third party whose desire
is imitated by the subject. Granted, the passage quoted above is hardly explicit on this
point. But its implications are clear and conform to our definition of mimetic desire.
Freud asserts that the identification has nothing passive or feminine about it; a passive or
feminine identification would mean that the son wanted to become the object of his
father's desire. How, then, will the active and "typically masculine" identification realize itself? Either it is wholly imaginary, or it finds concrete form in the desire for some
particular object. The identification is a desire to be the model that seeks fulfillment,
naturally enough, by means of appropriation, that is, by taking over the things that
belong to his father. As Freud says, the son seeks to take the father's place everywhere;
he thus seeks to assume his desires, to desire what the father desires. The proof that we
are not distorting Freud's intention is supplied by the last sentence of the passage: "[The
identification] fits in very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it helps to prepare
the way."
What can this sentence mean, if not that identification directs desire toward those
objects desired by the father? We have here an undeniable instance of filial desire
undergoing the influence of mimesis. Consequently, there already exists in Freud's
thought, at this stage, a latent conflict between this mimetic process of paternal
identification and the autonomous establishment of a particular object as a basis for
desire -the sexual cathexis toward the mother.
____________________
1. Sigmund Freud, "The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud", ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. ( London: Hogarth Press,
1953-66), vol. 18,
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
, 105.
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This conflict is all the more apparent because identification with the father is presented
as fundamental to the boy's development, anterior to
any choice of object
. Freud
emphasizes this point in the opening sentences of an analysis that will eventually unfold
into an overall description of the Oedipus complex and that is to be found in the chapter
on identification previously referred t
o. 2. A
fter identification with the father comes the sexual cathexis toward the mother, which, according to Freud, first appears and
develops independently. The object-choice of the mother appears to have its origins in
two factors: first, the identification with the father, the mimesis; second, the fixation of
the libido on the mother. These two forces act together and reinforce one another, as
Freud makes clear a few lines further on. After having subsisted "side by side for a time
without any mutual influence or interference," the two "come together at last," and the libidinal drive is thereby strengthened. This is a wholly natural and logical turn of events
if we choose to regard this identification as the mimesis of paternal desire. Indeed, once
we have seen matters in this light all other explanations seem irrelevant. I am not trying
to put words in Freud's mouth. In fact, it is my contention that Freud saw the path of
mimetic desire stretching out before him and deliberately turned aside. One need only
examine his definition of the Oedipus complex, which follows a few lines further on, to
see how he evades the issue:
The little boy notices that his father stands in his way with his mother. His identification
with his father takes on a hostile coloring and becomes identical with the wish to replace
his father in regard to his mother as well. Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the
very firs
t. 3.
The passage contains at least one point well worth noting. When, as Freud explains, the
son discovers that his father is becoming an obstacle to him, his identification fuses with
his desire "to replace his father in regard to his mother as well." That "as well" rivets the attention. Freud has earlier defined identification as the desire to replace the father, and
he now repeats that formula. Must we therefore conclude that the mother was initially
excluded, implicitly or explicitly, from the program? On examining the definition we
see nothing that suggests such an exclusion; quite the contrary. As Freud has put it: "A
little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like and be
like him, and
take his place everywhere
[emphasis added]."
The casual reader may well assume that the "as well" in the phrase "in regard to the
mother as well" is merely a slip of the pen; after all,
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