War against Mimesis

Baillie quotes the opening lines of Rousseau’s Confessions , and notes that it, like Descartes’s cogito, is an “effort to avert attention from what Girard calls mimetic desire, the elimination of which is tantamount to the rejection of Christian anthropology. Rousseau begins his Confessions not with a prayer, but with an assertion, and what he asserts is precisely the repudiation of mimesis . . . . Of course, the claim that he has no predecessors is odd, even comically odd, in light of the fact that he has chosen as the title of his autobiography the title Augustine used for his . . . . His genius may well have been in realizing the seductive power of autonomy on public display, something he systematically performed for the benefit of his rapt European audience. The very use of the word display in these opening lines of his Confessions must not go unremarked. Unlike Descartes, who took great pains to isolate himself from the mimetic contagion of others, Rousseau, concerned less with epistemological than with psychological verisimilitude, hit upon another strategy. In fact, it was the direct opposite of Descartes’ solution, and for that reason just as dubious. Rousseau would be alone in public , a curious but fascinating inversion of monasticism’s solidarity in solitude. It all dependece, of course, on Rousseau’s dramatization of his aloneness and aloofness.”