From The Dichotomy of the Self. This week, René Girard’s theory that we borrow our desires from other people, and what to do with one once you know where it came from.
A perfume advertisement sells desirability. A car advertisement sells command. A clothing advertisement sells individuality, and it sells it to an audience large enough to pay for the campaign. You are invited to set yourself apart by joining everyone else who bought the approved instrument of distinction. Even rebellion can arrive with a product number.
Girard built a theory of desire around that joke. He developed it through the great novelists, Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, whose characters prefer to believe that their desires begin with themselves. His claim is that desire is triangular. Between you and the thing you want stands a model, a person who makes the thing look worth having. The model gives no instructions. Their apparent satisfaction, prestige or way of being is enough. What you end up wanting is less the object than the assurance you imagine comes with it, and Girard called this metaphysical desire.
His account of rivalry starts from two kinds of model. A model outside your field, a dead writer for instance, can be admired without ever competing with you. A model inside your field can become an obstacle, because now you are both reaching for the same things. The distance that matters is social, not geographical: someone in the next room can be a generous model whose success opens possibilities for you. Once a contest takes over, each side experiences its own moves as defense and the other’s as attack. Opposition then becomes a form of dependence, and the person who refuses whatever a rival approves has handed that rival a surprising amount of control.
I don’t take the theory whole. In its strong version it can swallow any objection: admit that you imitate and the theory is confirmed, deny it and your denial is the illusion the theory predicts. Models can shape desire profoundly, but appetite, temperament, circumstance and direct experience matter too. Similarity does not make conflict inevitable either, since people with common aims also cooperate and build things none of them could build alone. The theory names the conditions under which a relationship can turn into a rivalry, without making those conditions fate. I find Girard most convincing as an account of how other people intensify, redirect or disguise what we want, and least convincing as a complete explanation of motivation.
That changes what the origin of a desire can tell you. Someone may first consider medicine because of a relative they admire. Contact with the actual work may then produce a lasting interest in caring for patients, or it may show that the admired identity mattered far more than the work. The influence was the same in both cases. What differed was what happened when the person lived with the desire. A borrowed want can grow content of its own, and a want that began in plain enjoyment can get trapped in comparison.
The book’s test is to remove the imagined audience. Would you still read, build, listen or use the thing if nobody saw you do it? The answer is rarely a clean yes or no, but it shows how much of a desire depends on display and how much grows out of the activity itself. You will not stop borrowing. But you can audit the loans.
The Dichotomy of the Self. Paperback and Kindle.