To Desire What He Desires
I would like to piggy back on an excellent article written by my friend Anthony on Girard and the passion of Christ. Particularly in our hyper consumeristic culture, Girard’s reading of the passion is needed to restore our true selves and to help us properly meditate on the mysteries of this week.
According to Girard, with the arrival of self consciousness, another’s desire replaces instinct as the main determinant of human behavior. In other words, I no longer act out of reaction directly to an object, but in a three way act. I desire something because someone else desires it. I desire the desire of another, and I desire what they desire because they desire it.
Girard’s theory follows closely that of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. For Hegel, human beings reach self-consciousness when they begin to desire non-material things. And the object of their desire is that others desire them. For Hegel, I desire primarily that the other should desire, or recognize, me. In modifying Girard, we should not reject Hegel. We can see Hegel’s dialectic everywhere in our society, especially in the nature of woman’s desire. Many women find that they have no self except as the object of a man’s desire. And this cycle too, the passion breaks.
For Girard, it is not desire for recognition that is the primary act, but rather desire according to the other’s desire. I desire what you desire. This is what distinguishes human beings from animals. And this, he argues, is at the heart of all human intentional action.
Notice that we cannot break the nature of human desire. It is what it is. What Jesus did was to raise to awareness the fact that desire is mimetic and that it tends to scapegoat the innocent in order to release the tension that it manufactures within a society.
From this awareness we have two options. First, we can make use of mimetic desire for our own purposes, such as advertisements do. They harness desire precisely by recognizing its mimetic nature. This is not the awareness that Jesus brought.
Second, we can follow the path of Jesus up Calvary. This means to desire according to the will of his Father. For us, this means desiring according to Jesus’ will. Notice in the Garden of Eden, Eve did not find the fruit tempting until the snake points it out as forbidden and desirable to eat. Then she sees it with new eyes. Jesus saw the same fruit, but chose to see as desirable what his Father offered instead. The question here thus becomes that of role models. Whose eyes do we trust to show us how to see?
For Catholics, this is precisely why we have the mass. The whole point is to ritually live out the mimetic sacrifice of an innocent victim so as to take on the perspective, not of the commercials I watch on TV, but of the innocent victim on the altar. The mass is the most subversive of actions for this reason: it up-ends the founding myth of modern society by directing mimetic desire towards the will, not of the powerful, but of the weak.
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Nathan, Extremely thought provoking. Where to begin? First, welcome to VN, which seems to be the object of my desire, not because someone else has modeled this for me, instead, the ideas expressed here draw me to that spark within me that is the source of my creation and transcends the materialism which has tempted me with the false hope of fulfillment. I am typing this very early in my hotel room with my Gift of Love from God and I am causing some distress. One thought: The woman was God’s Gift of Love to the man. The man did not recognize this until later. The woman was identified by the man through his senses and, consequently, her reaction would be felt as internally as something being absent. She therefore would respond with interest to something that resonated with this internal absence and would provide a way of understanding it and then nurture it into fulfillment.
Nathan
First, welcome once again to Vox Nova. I’m glad to see this post and it is indeed meaty.
Second, not sure if you check for comments or not — let us know if you want us here to approve for you or not.
Third, I really like the end of your post. I am sure you understand why. And I do like Girard, but — I do have a but:
I think he sometimes is, like Freud, too reductionistic. He gets to some good ends, and with means which might be true for some, but I do not think for all. It can be a hermeneutic by which to view the world, and I think it hints at interdependent realities which are not always acknowledged by us, but I sometimes feel with him (like Freud, and others) he says “this is the reason, this is just all a subterfuge” just doesn’t strike as how I see my own interaction with the history and theology he discusses. I see it as perhaps a part, at times, but not the whole. What do you think?