René Girard’s ‘Mimetic Desire’: A Theory That Explains Everything

René Girard, in response to critics who called his theory an idée fixe, agreed, claiming that he does indeed see evidence of his theory in almost everything:

Send any masterpiece you like my way, literary, cultural or religious, and it will be quite a miracle if I do not come back to you, a month or a year later, with my mimetic desire , my sacrificial crisis and above all — give the Devil his due — that bloody atrocity with which I am infatuated, the primordial, founding act of violence: the collective murder of the deity.

The question is: to what extent is this warranted? Is Girard’s system, as he has asserted, ‘more comprehensive and universal than anything discovered by Marx and Freud’? In this post, we’ll go through it and decide for ourselves…

Mimetic Desire

According to Girard, ‘all desire is a desire for being’, meaning, unlike need (which makes itself felt in our bodies ‘without any help from third parties’), desire is socially determined:

Behind our desires lurks a mediator or model who most often goes unrecognized by others, including the person doing the imitating. As a general rule, we desire what those around us desire. Our models can be real or imaginary, collective or individual. We imitate the desires of…