Mimesis and Science, edited by Scott R. Garrels, brings together some of the best scholar of Girard’s mimetic theory, with leading imitation researchers from the cognitive, developmental, and neuro sciences
In the science of man and culture today there is a unilateral swerve away from anything that could be called mimicry, imitation, or mimesis. And yet there is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behavior that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation. If human beings suddenly ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish… To develop a science of man it is necessary to compare human imitation with animal mimicry, and to specify the properly human modalities of mimetic behavior, if they indeed exist.
—René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World
Far from being the simple and mindless act that we typically associate it with (“monkey see, monkey do”), imitation is now understood as a complex, generative, and multidimensional phenomenon at the heart of what makes us human. In fact, imitation may very well be the basis for not only how we learn, but also how we understand each other’s intentions and desires, establish relational bonds, fall in love, become jealous, compete with one another, and violently destroy each other, all the while operating largely outside of our conscious awareness.
As a result of his extensive writing and research over the last 50 years, it is “clear to a wide range of scholars that Girard is one of the most original and influential cultural theorists on the contemporary scene.”
History of Imitation
One would think that if imitation were so vital and important to human life, then it would be evident and known in some ways by the experiences and observations of it throughout history. Indeed, imitation has been central to philosophical discourse since the foundation of Western civilization. The issue at hand is not so much that imitation has been unrecognized, but rather the way in which it has been treated and emphasized during different periods of history, including important dimensions that, until recently, have been overlooked
Plato and Aristotle were the first to treat the subject of mimesis (the Greek word for imitation) at length, with each representing opposing attitudes that would prove influential throughout history, including up to the present day.
Plato’s ideas are considered a primary source of our modern tendency to devalue imitation. In Plato’s system of thought, all elements of matter in the created world were a mere shadow, or imitation, of their absolute Form in the nonmaterial realm of the Good.
In his pursuit of objective truth and ethical grounds for the moral life, Plato believed that reason alone was capable of perceiving directly these most absolute forms of reality. On the other hand, knowledge based on mimesis in the arts was considered a devalued form of the truth since it was based on a twice-removed imitation of reality (e.g., the artist’s painting of a table was a copy of the material object, which itself was a copy of the absolute form).
This “mimetic tradition” was not only applied to the arts, but was also the basis for continued advancement and reform in religious, historical, and philosophical traditions. Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ in the fifteenth century is a classic example of the positive attitude toward imitation that was widely evident throughout this period.
The Autonomous Self
In effect, in contrast to our modern notion of limiting growth, or mere conformity, imitation was seen as a primary means of social and cultural progress throughout this long period of human history. “Undoubtedly the change in attitude in modern times has made more difficult our understanding of imitation and our capacity to perceive its benefits and its ties to Renaissance inventiveness.”
It is therefore ironic that the figure who would become known as the quintessential “Renaissance Man” was also the one most opposed to the mimetic tradition. According to Ackerman, “Leonardo da Vinci was the only writer who disapproved of all imitation in the classical sense.
He wrote of it: ‘No one should ever imitate the maniera of another because he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature with regard to art. Because things in nature exist in such abundance, we need and we ought rather to have recourse to nature than to those masters who have learned from her.’”
It is hard to imagine, however, that Da Vinci was not significantly influenced by others in the development of his art, and even more difficult to imagine, given his substantial influence, that subsequent artists did not then imitate him in his dictate to not imitate! Indeed, the generation following Da Vinci would witness a virtual end of the mimetic tradition.14 The attempt to rely primarily on oneself, and therefore deny imitation, would find its fullest expression in modern philosophy.
In contrast to the mimetic tradition, which looked primarily to community, both past and present, as a foundational source of knowledge, modern philosophy found its grounding in the idea of an autonomous self. This core belief emphasized the importance of individual strivings over and against the role and function of social influences in the construction of knowledge and the operation of the human mind.
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Self vs group
Philosophy
In many ways, Descartes’s position reified Plato’s dualistic view of reality that presumed rational thought could be separated out from the influence of mimesis and emotions. This “Cartesian split” between perception/emotion and thought/behavior brought with it the erroneous belief that each individual could consciously ward off all human passions and social influences in the pursuit of a more objective truth
In effect, Descartes implicitly denied that imitation was an essential and ongoing feature of human cognition, motivation, and behavior. In doing so, he was influential in setting up a longstanding dichotomy in the cognitive and social sciences between perception and action systems.18 Not only that, but the concept of imitation, or mimesis, itself seemed all but explained away or devalued as an important idea worth continued philosophical exploration.
Clearly, the origins and development of modern philosophy are complex and extend far beyond the writings and influence of Descartes, including the fact that many notable philosophers in the modern period did not reflect the Enlightenment spirit.21 Nonetheless, it is difficult to overestimate the overall effect that the Enlightenment tradition had on modern philosophy and the history of Western thought for over the last four hundred years. The social sciences and medical models developed during this time were so influenced by an autonomous view of the human mind and person, that only in the past 50 years have we begun to make incremental shifts in our conceptual paradigms, allowing for more diverse perspectives across a wide range of disciplines.2
Birth of Psychology
The end of the nineteenth century is generally considered the period when the discipline of psychology was born as a separate branch of the sciences.
Despite the clear dominance of Enlightenment thinking at the time, interest in imitation was revived for a short period, and even viewed by several prominent thinkers as the defining human characteristic. However, by the turn of the century, this emphasis would all but disappear as imitation was substantially marginalized by the most influential theories of modern psychology.
The Laws of Imitation
The French social psychologist Gabriel Tarde is perhaps the most notable imitation theorist of this early period in modern psychology. In 1890, Tarde published his Laws of Imitation, where he defines imitation as constituting “every impression of an inter-psychical photography, so to speak, willed or not willed, passive or active
If we observe that wherever there is a social relation between two living beings, there we have imitation in this sense of the word.”
For Tarde, imitation was the essential “social fact” to which all other social processes, including the most complex and innovative forms of behavior, ideas, and culture, could be related. As a result, Tarde’s views on imitation directly challenged the idea of an autonomous self. According to Tarde, “We err in flattering ourselves that we have become less credulous and docile, less imitative, in short, than our ancestors. This is a fallacy, and we shall have to rid ourselves of it.”
As a result of the work of Tarde, as well as many other notable authors, the subject of imitation was widely discussed and debated by the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in connection with such phenomena as hypnosis, unconscious suggestion, and crowd behavior.
William James
In the same year as Tarde’s Laws of Imitation, the American psychologist William James published his classic two-volume text Principles of Psychology. In this work, James classifies imitation as an instinctual behavior operating early in infancy and essential to what is definitively human. While imitation was not a primary focus of his work, his brief treatment of the subject is nonetheless worth mentioning given his founding influence in the field of psychology. James begins by noting that imitation of facial gestures may begin in childhood as early as 15 weeks. He then elaborates:
And from this time onward man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole civilization depends on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce. ‘Nil humani a me alienum puto,’ is the motto of each individual of the species; and makes him, whenever another individual shows a power or superiority of any kind, restless until he can exhibit it himself. But apart from this kind of imitation, of which the psychological roots are complex, there is the more direct propensity to speak and walk and behave like others, usually without any conscious intention of so doing. And there is the imitative tendency which shows itself in large masses of men, and produces panics, and orgies, and frenzies of violence, and which only the rarest individuals can actively withstand.
The nature and importance that James ascribes to imitation is remarkable.
However, despite his emphatic treatment of the subject, he did not spend much time developing his initial insights, especially concerning the relationship between imitation, rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness.
By the end of the nineteenth century, for reasons that are not altogether clear, imitation as a central concept was substantially marginalized by the most influential psychological theories as they began to emerge in the twentieth century. This profound neglect is exemplified by the absence of imitation in the development of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. Certainly, the magnitude and influence of Freud’s thought in the twentieth century cannot be overstated, both in the realm of the social sciences and popular culture.
It is therefore significant that Freud rarely mentions the function of imitation directly in his many papers and books
Sigmund Freud
From a developmental perspective, “There is no place in Freud’s theory of early infancy for imitative self-other reciprocity (primary intersubjectivity).”29 While his initial theory and treatment approach relied heavily on social influences and incorporated the function of suggestion and hypnosis—developments that were influenced by imitation theorists such as Tarde at the turn of the century—he ultimately abandoned this work in favor of his libidinal theory.
In doing so, Freud adhered to an autonomous view of the self that was confined to biological drives and instinctual formulations—a view that he staunchly held until the end of his life. His many followers similarly rejected imitation as a fundamental capacity central to human development and psychological organization
Skinner – Piaget
Like psychoanalysis, learning theories that predominated in the twentieth century—from Skinner’s behaviorism to Piaget’s cognitive theories of development—assumed that imitation was not an innate ability present immediately at birth and therefore did not play a foundational role in the elaboration of more complex cognitive functioning
Piaget argued that imitation was a developmental milestone achieved after the first year of life.33 Piaget’s research on imitation, as well as his model of human development and cognitive functioning, became one of the most respected and influential model for almost fifty years
In conclusion, the inheritance of ancient Greek philosophical conceptions of mimesis that associated imitation primarily with representation, combined with Enlightenment assumptions about an autonomous self, led most modern philosophers and psychologists to ignore or marginalize the role of imitation as a generative and foundational mechanism present at the beginning of life, and which continues to function significantly throughout adulthood. As a result of these influences, many false beliefs about imitation persisted in the cognitive and social sciences.
These limiting assumptions had the enduring effect of steering researchers away from imitation as a rich and viable area of investigation on the grounds that they had already understood the phenomenon completely. Such biases, which continued throughout most of the twentieth century, had not been questioned critically until recently, producing disciplines that severely underutilized this most basic aspect of human cognition and intersubjectivity.
Girard’s Research
Early on, Girard discovered a fundamental relationship between imitation and the unique nonrepresentational qualities of human desire and intersubjectivity. From this foundation, he was able to describe a number of emergent and generative processes that account for many aspects of human life, including the enigmatic nature of human violence and its relationship to the origin and structure of human culture and religion.
Not only did Girard recognize such a primordial role of imitation prior to contemporary experimental research, but he did so through investigations into European literature, historical and anthropological writings, and by turning ultimately to religious myths and texts for further evidence of imitative phenomena. His treatment of human imitation is therefore both substantially and methodologically unique.
According to Chris Fleming, Girard has not only produced his own research, but a “research programme”, one that has “exerted considerable and ongoing influence on a wide variety of work in the humanities and social sci-ences.”35 There is now a substantial and ever-growing body of secondary literature by scholars who have made use of Girard’s ideas on imitation in such fields as anthropology, economics, literary analysis, philosophy, psychology, and theology, to name just a few.
In other words, for Girard, imitation operates at a level that precedes representational thought and affects not only behaviors but also our very felt sense of psychological aliveness and motivation. What this means is, we usually do not recognize the ongoing function of imitation on our affective experience of desire. Instead, what we usually experience is a linear, or autonomous, process by which we are suddenly motivated or curious about an object. The essential misrecognition in this process is that it is a model’s desire that effectively creates interest and value in a particular object, and not the object itself
From this perspective, human desire is not innate or “romantic” in the sense of originating spontaneously, or “springing up” from within oneself—as in Descartes’s notion of the autonomous self, or Freud’s instinctual-drive theory.
Instead, our unique and pervasive capacity for imitation effectively creates such an illusion
Monstrous Double
Furthermore, Girard perceived that mimetic desire had a generative effect on human motivation; that is, mimesis is mutually reinforcing, whereby one person’s desire compounds the other’s desire, creating an increasingly concentrated interest in an object and varied attempts at possessing it. This bidirectionality, or double mediation, inherent in reciprocal relations has the capacity to escalate into intense passion for potentially any object, whether or not it has any “real” or inherent value apart from its significance in the social sphere
In other words, we become so caught up in the rivalry itself that we often forget what it was we were fighting over in the first place, since defeating one’s rival has become the primary desire.
As this conflict progresses and intensifies, individuals become increasingly undifferentiated with respect to their movements, utterances, accusations, and sense of identities. They become mirrors of one another, or what Girard calls monstrous doubles, referring to the ultimate convergence of exact reciprocity in the midst of intense conflict.
However, this is not the subjective experience of each person, since in the moment each individual is absolutely convinced that they are completely different from the other, while in fact both individual behaviors and intentions may be exactly alike.
Mimetic Crisis
As a result, mimetic violence is the last stage in the deepening crisis of mimetic conflict described by Girard. As individuals become more desperate in their attempts to differentiate themselves from their rival, their behaviors eventually erupt into physical violence. This violence in turn is similarly imitated and increased reciprocally with each act. Ultimately, mimetic violence can become so intense that the only perceivable resolution for establishing differences is to kill one’s rival. Indeed, there is no greater distinction than between one living and one dead.
In his first book, Girard concluded that the relational drama and conflict central to the great novels he was studying reflected the novelistic truth of the human condition; that is, without a way to come to terms with our mimetic dependency on one another, our relationships will forever perpetuate the romantic lie of self-autonomy—a lie that can only be maintained through infinite forms of deceit, hypocrisy, greed, isolation, and even death.
In Violence and the Sacred, Girard put forward his second major hypothesis, the scapegoat mechanism, which was an analysis of the function of archaic rituals (including human sacrifice), prohibitions, and myths in the genesis and maintenance of human culture and religion.
Anthropologically speaking, this aspect of Girard’s work is a theory of human origins
He wanted to understand how human culture was able to come into being and ultimately survive and flourish, given the evolving and immensely problematic forms of imitation. Because violence is one of the most imitative of all human behaviors, once initiated it has the potential of spreading quickly to those within its proximity, upsetting existing bonds of community, and leading to cyclical acts of revenge and violent group contagion.
According to Girard, social contracts would have been impossible given the prelinguistic nature of purely mimetic relations at this stage of cultural evolution. Without some “natural” way to limit mimetic violence and bring it to an end, the likely result would have been the extinction of our emerging species.
For Girard, the natural or “spontaneous” phenomenon that made social stability possible, and ultimately a cohesive human culture, was the mimetic displacement of violent tensions among members of the community onto a surrogate victim.48 While complex and wide-ranging, Girard’s anthropology asserts that archaic culture and religion have their origin in the same type of event: a mimetic crisis of undifferentiation (all against all) that polarized into a collective murder (all against one.
If my analysis is sound, far from being the cause of our violence, archaic religions are, or rather were, first a consequence of that violence and, secondly, our primary protection against it. During the longest part of our history or pre-history, they enabled human communities to survive their own violence. Archaic religions are essentially combinations of prohibitions and sacrifices. Prohibitions forbade violence directly, but they often failed and, when they did, archaic communities fell back upon their second line of defense, sacrifice. The paradox of archaic religion is that, in order to prevent violence, it resorted to substitute violence.
Girard claims that while these texts include all of the structural elements of archaic myth, including collective violence and sacrificial rituals, they also feature religious leaders and communities who were openly troubled by these events and began to view their history from the standpoint of the social victims rather than the persecuting, or sacred social order. In essence, for Girard, both the Hebrew Bible and Gospel narratives chronicle the evolution of humanity from our origins in sacrificial rituals to our modern struggle to empathize and identify with social victims and thereby come to terms with our own violence
Perhaps more than any other recent discovery, research on mirror neurons has generated a surge of interest in imitative phenomena, both from scientists and lay audiences alike.
The discovery of “mirror neurons”—first identified in monkeys,2 but also thought to exist in the human brain based on neuroimaging studies3—may very well be one such neurophysiological substrate for the operations of mimesis. These brain cells are activated both when the subject watches an action being performed and when the subject performs the action.
If I observe someone reaching for an object, the same motor neurons are activated “as if” I am performing the action myself
Girard, however, takes an additional step that scientists interested in imitation have not yet taken: he links goal-oriented imitation to conflict. Indeed, he posits that imitation is at the root of all the unique forms of human rivalry and violence. Understanding that imitation not only underlies positive human abilities, such as empathy or learning, but also presents terrible dangers is critical to understanding Girard’s anthropological theory with respect to the origins of human culture and religion in scapegoating violence
If two friends fall in love with the same girl, the very same reciprocity that brought them together could tear their friendship apart. Nor is such rivalry limited to erotic competition. It emerges whenever mutually thwarted desires reinforce each other in an escalating spiral: colleagues competing for a job or a fellowship, strangers for a parking spot, politicians for the leadership of a political party, neighboring countries for a geographic territory, and so on.
The more each perceives the other to desire the object, the more desirable the object becomes.
The imitation of the desire to possess an object, or appropriative mimesis, as Girard and I termed it, does not suffice to produce a self.7 The building up of a self requires a type of imitation that bears on the very being of the model.
This type of imitation, which serves to ontologize the self, coincides to a large degree with what Freud termed “identification.” Once this psychological process is set in motion, it is unceasing—because, as I wish to emphasize, humanity is entirely in the hands of mimesis, the free play of which is not curtailed by any “instinct,” not trammeled by anything issuing from the genetic dimension of mimesis.
This means the appropriation by the child of the very being of the model through the process of identification. Freud had the genius to notice this mechanism, which amounts to the foundation of psychogenesis and the formation of personality, but encumbered as he was by mythology and the idea of instincts, he failed to realize how purely it was a function of mimesis
The first hypothesis that I would like to formulate in this regard is this: desire gives rise to the self and, by its movement, animates it. The second hypothesis, which I have adopted unreservedly since I first became aware of it, is that desire is mimetic. This postulate, which was advanced by Girard as early as 1961, seems to me capable of serving as the foundation for a new, pure psychology—that is, one unencumbered by any sort of biologism.
Desire is the source of the self. The self is thus, in fact, a self of desire.
Note to Self (Hence the Dichotomy. The self is torn between what it already is, and what it desires to become). The self is the tension between the two. Include this in Girard section.
Because the self is engendered by desire, it cannot lay claim to the ownership of that desire. Furthermore, desire is mimetic since it reproduces or copies another desire. Therefore, the self cannot claim that the desire that constitutes it has priority over another’s desire.
These two hypotheses make it necessary to revise earlier psychologies, since these are psychologies either of the subject or of the object. They demand that one renounce the mythical claim to a self that would be a permanent structure in a monadic subject.11 A new psychology developed on the basis of these premises will have to be a psychology of movement and change. It will not be a psychology of the individual; rather it will be interdividual.
to suppose that psychological movement originates within the interior of a “monadic” subject is a mythical illusion (also add this)
Koestler and Skinner
As Arthur Koestler emphasized, there is nothing in the pompous titles of the works of B. F. Skinner—The Behavior of Organisms and Science and Human Behavior—to indicate that the data used come entirely from experiments on pigeons and rats
The attempts of behaviorists to pass from the Skinner box and the rat to human beings lead them to radical theories that have no relation to the simplest observations of actual people. Are we really to believe that human reactions are fortuitous, totally random, and that if a subject reacts in a certain way, it is simply the consequence of “reinforcement,” the effect of his having been rewarded in some way by the result obtained?
This is a claim that is all the more appealing to behaviorists in that the reinforcements themselves are founded, according to their thinking, on the satisfaction of instincts or needs, something that once again roots the source of psychological movement in the biological. These object psychologies blithely carry over forms of animal behavior into the human, completely obscuring what is fundamental:
the progressive liberation of man from instinctual imperatives in the course of his phylogenesis, the development of what we call human freedom, even if it often degenerates into servitude and unhappiness.
Humanity, as Aristotle said, is distinguished from all other animals by our mimetic capacity: “Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation.”17
There is, between humans and other animals, a radical epistemological gulf that seems to have been overlooked completely by the behaviorists, and partially by the psychoanalysts, because of their insistence on rooting psychological movement in the biological.
Psychological movement is, from the beginning of human life, mimetic. It is mimesis, and that alone, that makes one human, that constitutes the self, and that makes possible one’s entry into the sphere of language. This means that from the very start, psychological actuality is to be found between individuals. This is why Rene Girard, Guy Lefort, and I were led to propose a pure psychology, for which we could find no better name than interdividual psychology.18
Desire cannot exist autonomously and develop an “I” in A except by misrecognizing how much it owes to desire B, to the desire of the other that it copies. Misrecognition at this level is functional and normal. It serves to make possible the existence of the self of desire.
The Puppet of Desire
To this end, in my first book, The Puppet of Desire, I decided to put together a phenomenology of mimetic desire.21 I chose for this purpose some phenomena that can be clearly shown to be mimetic: magic, the casting of spells, sorcery, exorcism, adorcism, hysteria, and finally hypnosis.
This “other” may be a definite and particular other (the “little other” of Lacan or the “internal mediator” of Girard), or a cultural entity, an “Other” made up of all that the self has learned, seen, or read—of everything in which it is immersed, physically and intellectually (the “Grand Autre” of Lacan or the “external mediator” of Girard).23 This history shows successively the “other” in all its guises: a real other, absent and maleficent in enchantment; a virtual Other, cultural and external—the Devil in certain forms of sorcery and demonic possession; a cultural Other, virtual and external, but beneficent, in African possession (adorcism); an incarnate otherness in hysteria, and integrated otherness in psychoanalysis (the hysteric disguising the interdividual relation as a physical symptom, and Freud disguising it as a psychic symptom)
Being caught up in others’ movements and imitating what they are doing is an essential aspect of human sociality. Such imitation is in sharp contrast to the proclivities of monkeys and apes. Although other primates can learn in social settings, they do not duplicate the mannerisms used by another agent—instead, monkeys and apes simply pay attention to the endpoint and achieve it in whatever way suits them.12 Similarly, the imitation of actions is deeply impaired in children with autism, and it has been theorized that the abnormality in imitation is one of the key factors that cuts them off from the social world.
Humans imitate before they can use language; they learn through imitation but don’t need to learn to imitate.
A stumbling block for classical theories of human psychology was that the self-other equivalence was postulated to be late developing—emerging from language or deliberate and complex cognitive analyses. My research stands this proposition on its head. It suggests that young infants register the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. The recognition of self-other equivalences is the starting point for reacting to other humans—a precondition for human development, not the outcome of it.
My research suggests that infants may be “natural Girardians,” at least with regard to two principle philosophical claims in his writing. First, imitation operates prior to language and other formal symbolic skills, and in turn is a primary precondition for their genesis; second, imitation extends beyond mere surface gestures and behaviors to underlying goals, desires, or intentions. In contrast to previous generations of scientific thought, Girard’s mimetic theory hypothesizes a primordial role for imitation in the genesis of human culture, cognition, and sociality.
Hegel and Kojeve – The Desiring “I”
Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) can be viewed as an anticipator of the notion of mimetic desire. In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, he introduces the notion of the “desiring I” as a void to be filled by the positive content stemming from the action that by negating and destroying the desired “nonself,” assimilates it.11 Eating to satisfy hunger is one example of this type of self/nonself interaction. This condition, though, is not uniquely human, but shared with the animal world.
Human desire, though, can exist as such only within a plurality of other desires, that is, within a society of desiring human beings. In fact, when desire is targeting real material objects, it is human only to the extent that it is mediated by the desire of others targeting the same object. Kojève writes: “It is human to desire what others desire because they desire it.”12 In Kojève’s view, human history is the history of desired desires.
Besides noticing the proximity of this view with Girard’s notion of mimetic desire, I think it is important to stress that according to Kojève, the desire that defines the human condition is the desire directed towards another desire. It is only through this type of interaction that self-consciousness can be achieved. In fact, the object of this type of desire is non-natural, because this object, another desire, or better, the desire of someone else, is different from any material thing. A desire before its fulfillment is an oxymoron, nothing but the presence of an absence of reality.
The desire of being the target of others’ desire becomes one of the distinctive features of the extreme alterity of humanity from nature and vitality, one of the main themes of Kojève’s phenomenological anthropology. To desire another’s desire, to be the target of others’ desire, means to gain social recognition.
It does not interest us here where this notion of desire led Kojève. What is important for our discussion of mimesis and mimetic desire is the fact that the plurality of the mimetic desires of humans is strictly intertwined with the issue of social identification and recognition.
This issue surfaces at different times in Western philosophical thought at the beginning of the twentieth century, and notably, among others, in the work of Martin Heidegger and Helmuth Plessner. Both philosophers, although starting from different premises, underline the pragmatic nature of the human condition and criticize the subject-object dichotomy of traditional ontology.
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is more revealing of mimetic desire than any other modern book. I’ll take just one example. As a child, the main character is very precocious in his love of art, and in particular of theater. At some point, his parents decide to send him to the theater because he wants to see a famous actress, La Berma (who is based on Sarah Bernhardt), playing the lead role in Racine’s Phèdre. He fell in love with La Berma mostly through what one could call the mimesis of writing; he saw the advertisements for the theater in the streets of Paris. Reading about La Berma every day when he was going to the Champs-Élysées on his walks awoke in him a passion for La Berma, although he had never seen her. But he had heard people celebrate her.
So he goes to the theater and watches La Berma. He’s terribly disappointed.
It’s reality after the dream. He doesn’t find anything interesting about her or her performance, and he leaves completely disenchanted.
But the following day, an old diplomat, who is a friend of his father, comes to the house. Norpois is an old fool and a complete nonentity. The young boy is 50 times more intelligent and sensitive about art than he is. The father says, indicating his son: “Yesterday, he went to see La Berma.” Norpois speaks a few words of praise for La Berma. It’s pure politeness and courtesy and means absolutely nothing. But it is enough. The voice of the old diplomat has so much unspoken authority that it restores the child’s belief in La Berma.
Retrospectively he starts to enjoy the performance, even though in reality it bored him to death. His faith is restored through purely mimetic means.
R.G.: The key is that mimesis increased over time in proto humans. In the course of fighting, what must have happened at the time of hominization, over hundreds of thousands of years maybe, is that mimetic rivalry became so intense that the dominance patterns somehow disappeared. When dominance patterns no longer take hold and you are fighting mimetically for the same object of desire, you cannot be reconciled. Sooner or later the object will be destroyed or forgotten or become less significant in the course of fighting, and only antagonists will be left. At that point, you have a community which is in a very serious crisis and which is mimetically mad. Each member is imitating each other’s violence. But the strange thing is, when you only have antagonists left, you can share an antagonist. You can become aligned with another person against a third party.
Mimesis, which opposes people when they desire the same object, suddenly joins them together. Two antagonists against one will have more mimetic power, and their side is going to attract more and more people. Ultimately there will be total imbalance. All antagonists will be on one side against a single person. When this happens, if this happens, and even if others are killed in the process, some-thing different emerges in humans when all join collectively against the same antagonist. This antagonist becomes the original scapegoat, the single victim.
When that single victim is killed, all the antagonists find themselves without any antagonists; therefore, they are de facto reconciled.
R.G.: You can never say it is going to happen for sure. It may happen once in every ten times, and nine communities may be destroyed. But the shift from the mimesis of fighting over objects to the mimesis of fighting against some-one always becomes cumulative in the same way. The key to the scapegoat is very simple. How could a crisis be reduced to a single victim? Ultimately, with that kind of imitation, the contagion of antagonism, there will be only a few victims left, and then finally one.
When that one enemy is killed, there are no enemies left in the community, and peace returns. That is why the victim becomes the god. The victim is regarded not only as very bad, very dangerous, because it made us fight, but also as very good, because it reconciled us. That single victim is the origin of the archaic gods, who are very violent but also very peaceful when they want to be. They are both at the same time.
R.G.: Prohibition has only one object: the prevention of violence inside the community. Today it’s very fashionable to denigrate prohibitions, which are seen as completely irrational. But archaic prohibitions are completely rational.
Sometimes, however, archaic people have a conception of violence that is just empirically fl awed. They are aware that the more people are alike, the more they fight—and this is why so many archaic cultures are against twins. There are many archaic cultures that understand that twins have nothing to do with violence, and they pay no more attention to twins than we do. But there are others that will not tolerate twins. They feel that if they allow twins to exist, violence will spread like wildfire and destroy the whole community.
They don’t kill twins out of meanness of spirit. They simply think that the birth of twins has something to do with violence. They often think that the mother has been misbehaving or transgressing prohibitions against violence, and that if you transgress prohibitions against violence you’ll have twins. In other words, that you’ll produce mimetic rivalry, “monstrous doubles.” Many mythical heroes are twins. Why? Because twins fight all the time. Or are supposed to. And they kill each other. Romulus and Remus are two twin brothers. Cain and Abel are not far from that. Many communities, I repeat, understand it’s not true in the case of biological twins, but many don’t. And as a result, sometimes they will get rid of only one twin, which shows that it’s the similarity of twins that bothers them.
R.G.: When we use the word “scapegoat,” we think about an entire group united against an innocent victim. But archaic people actually believe that the victim is guilty. They persuade each other of that fact. And there would be no scapegoat phenomenon if there were no conviction of a guilty victim. They will invent that person if he does not exist already. Take the patricide and incest of Oedipus. The most essential thing about the myth is that Oedipus is supposed to be guilty. He himself doesn’t know about it, but he’s guilty.
Freud believed that parricide and incest were unique to the Oedipus myth.
He didn’t know mythology well enough. He has incredible insights at times, but in this case, he was totally wrong. Parricide and incest are everywhere in mythology. When a crowd gets in serious trouble, it always manages to find patricide and incest, or some other taboo that has been broken, and they kill in the name of that taboo. But it’s obvious that it’s a false reason. It’s the type of reason you get when everybody agrees mimetically. Everyone points the finger and shouts, “He did it!” But what did he do that was so wrong? Someone will say parricide, someone else will say incest, and everybody will pick it up and believe it for no reason at all. That’s the absolutely random part of the myth that Freud incorrectly saw as absolutely determined by the nature of humanity.