All Desire Is a Desire for Being
by rené girard, selected by cynthia l. haven
penguin classics, 336 pages, $18
I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” Donald Trump said during his debate with Kamala Harris. “They talk about democracy. I'm a threat to democracy. They're the threat to democracy—with the fake Russia Russia Russia investigation that went nowhere.” David Muir, one of the moderators, cut him off before he could continue. The subject of his failed assassination at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was never broached again.
The blood of Corey Comperatore had hardly dried before the assassination attempt had disappeared from the news and much of public consciousness. Perhaps the images of a bloodied former president pumping his fist in the air were too potent. Assassination and attempted assassination confer unique moral authority. For many on the left, the prospect of Trump entering the pantheon alongside Reagan, the Kennedys, Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln is too horrible to countenance. Figures such as Joy Reid even accused the Trump campaign of coordinating the attack to gain sympathy. If Trump were to be seen as an innocent victim, eight years of scapegoating would have been for naught. Worse, that lifesaving, last-instant head turn seemed miraculous, even to Trump’s enemies; for his supporters, it was evidence of divine favor. So of course his opponents were desperate to dampen the aura of providence.
They doubled down on their rhetoric that Trump poses an existential threat to our democracy. Then, Sunday afternoon, another shooter—who has imbibed and regurgitated that rhetoric—attempted to assassinate him as he was playing a round of golf.
None of this would have surprised René Girard, whose theories of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism are indispensable for understanding such events and our varied responses to them.
Where in Girard’s corpus should the neophyte begin? Chronologically, with Deceit, Desire and the Novel? Or the magnum opus of his mature thought, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World? Or perhaps his final—and most explosive—book, Battling to the End? Cynthia Haven offers a solution in All Desire Is a Desire for Being, an anthology selected from across Girard’s career. In her introductory essay, “We Do Not Come in Peace,” she explains that Girard was primarily interested in the stories we, as individuals and groups, tell about ourselves. This characterizes not only his work as a literary theorist, but also his studies in anthropology and related social sciences. Social science rests on the story that the human animal is properly viewed within a rational, empirical frame. But, as the book title illustrates, Girard’s thought moves inexorably beyond empiricism and into metaphysics. All Desire Is a Desire for Being cuts to the heart of what motivated Girard and, in turn, what Girard claimed motivates us: a search for metaphysical fulfillment.
Girard developed his theory of mimetic desire through close readings of Cervantes, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Proust. He discovered that master novelists shared the same insight into human psychology: Our desires do not originate with us; rather, we imitate the desires of others. And we take as our models those people we believe possess the wholeness of being we long for. When the objects of shared desires are scarce, rivalry ensues, and eventually violence, which can spread like a contagion through an entire society. Girard extended his method of analysis to ancient texts, especially myths, to uncover how such society-wide crises are resolved. His signal explication of the scapegoat mechanism involves a clever reading of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. To illustrate this, rather than excerpt relevant material from Violence and the Sacred (where Girard first makes the argument in book form), Haven pairs Girard’s introduction to anthropologist Mark Anspach’s Œdipe mimétique with a conversation between the two thinkers—the first time either text has appeared in English. In the conversation, Girard argues that the accusations against Oedipus serve to restore solidarity to a divided, plague-ravaged people. The king must be guilty of patricide and incest, crimes that are suspected but unprovable, so that he can be blamed for the plague. The proof matters less than the utility of the accusations. “It is the unanimous belief in the victim’s guilt, whatever the nature of the accusations against him, that allows the group to regain its unity.”
Man’s desire for being—which must ultimately be understood as a desire for communion with God—is easily perverted by envy and misdirected by the scapegoat mechanism and the rituals that spring from it. “In retrospect, the victim will also be endowed with positive qualities, being perceived as responsible not only for the crisis, but for its resolution.” Like Oedipus, who enters Colonus as an honorable figure of myth and legend, the victim of the communal scapegoating “emerges transfigured, he becomes an object of worship.” As Haven explains in her introduction, “In the archaic world, when society again faces an internal crisis, the scapegoating process is reenacted to evoke the dynamics that ended the fighting before.” These false rituals centering false gods ultimately originate in man’s misunderstanding of his own desire. We desire being, but not at the price of acknowledging our guilt, our complicity in the destruction of innocent victims. We are like those who have ears and yet do not hear, those who have eyes and yet do not see.
Even Christians have their scapegoats. Nietzsche, for example, is a villain and an atheist, but Girard insists that he has mostly been misread. Sphinx-like, he lays a trap for us in his aphorisms. Readers are apt to cut them “down to the size of their own thinking.” In doing so we read “God is dead” and miss “We have killed him–you and I. All of us are his murderers.” Read correctly, Girard says, we can see that Nietzsche “apprehends the truth of Christianity with incomparable force.” Far greater force than many of his accusers, regardless of their pedigree.
Girard admits the monomania of his insistence that the mimetic nature of desire is the key to understanding all of human behavior; but no one, after reading this collection, can deny his theory’s generative power and wide-ranging applications. For example, Haven includes some of Girard’s writing on Shakespeare. In his analysis of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Girard observes how, once we take another as our model of desire, we unavoidably strive to become the other that we are not. “It is a fact, to be sure,” he writes, “that two characters who face each other in fascination and rivalry can never occupy the same position together, since they themselves constitute the polarity that oscillates between them.” For Girard this explains the constant switching of partners inside of Shakespeare’s play, each couple eyeing the other for a better pairing. When we become aware of this desire, and then realize that the object of desire cannot be shared, we laugh and cry in equal measure. We are made ridiculous, and our ultimate desire, for communion, is revealed—and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as in most comedies, fulfilled in a wedding. If we fail—like Hamlet—to find resolution, the ridiculous becomes the tragic.
No Girard anthology could be complete without a sampling of his biblical criticism. Haven has chosen an essay grappling with Eric Auerbach’s reading of Peter’s denial, and another unpacking the mimetic dynamics of Salome’s dance before Herod. In Salome’s request for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, “desire does its best to turn the truth into scandal.” We focus on the scandalous nature of the dance, but the true scandal is our desire to kill Salome, fulfilled in the popular legend of her death: While skating, she falls on the ice and severs her neck. We want her to be guilty and to receive a fitting death, thus distinguishing ourselves from her. We want victims to be guilty, Girard observes, just as the “friends” of Job want him to be guilty as they pressure him to confess his sins against God. In this we see our affinity for “the ‘spontaneous confession’ so precious to dictatorial societies”—precious because “the physical victor of one faction over his rivals is not sufficient to re-establish the unity of truth.” Such an attachment to “truth” is in fact an attachment to lies. We cannot tolerate the knowledge that we punished someone unjustly. Job’s friends “are no more interested in truth than are Soviet persecutors.”
Haven’s selection of essays and excerpts admirably distills the essence of Girard’s thought. But her mastery of Girard’s oeuvre is most apparent in the concluding “Maxims of René Girard,” where she has gathered 172 aphoristic quotes that display his ability to provoke and inspire. They range from pithy abstractions (“current thought is the castration of meaning”) to sharpened jabs (“Academia, that vast herd of sheep-like individuals”) and brief expositions of his thought (“The victims are always there, and everyone is always sharpening his weapon for use against his neighbor in a desperate attempt to win himself somewhere—even if only in an indefinite, Utopian future—a plot of innocence that he can inhabit on his own, or in the company of a regenerate human race”). For my money, the most memorable is: “No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone.”
And that takes me back to Butler, Pennsylvania. Who shot first, Thomas Crooks or the prestige media whose rhetoric framed Trump as a unique evil unseen since the 1940s? And whose fault is that? Maybe Trump had it coming. Or maybe it is the journalists' fault, or Ted Turner’s for inventing the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Or maybe the founding fathers’ for giving the press too much freedom. Is our search for answers only an attempt to justify ourselves in the face of the slaughter bench of history? Whether we attempt to memory-hole the image of Trump’s bloody face or spread that of the dead would-be assassin, we are all hunting for a victim so we may reunite with one another as one regenerate human family. We are hunting for our own “plot of innocence” to inhabit. Politics insists on itself and we must attend to it. But in doing so it is best to be reminded that we are all already guilty. The leftists who keep attempting to kill, jail, or otherwise destroy their rivals need to be reminded that our political longing, like all of our longings, will only be satisfied when they are satisfied in God.
For Girard, true peace, and true communion, are only possible when we model our desires on Christ. Sacrifice, to Christians, means “giving of oneself even unto death.” For the ancients, sacrifice meant the victim whom they killed. “Christians are right to use the word ‘sacrifice’ for Christ,” however, because the archaic and Christian usages both concern man’s communion with God. Only the roles are reversed: God does not receive the sacrifice from man, but offers to be the sacrifice on our behalf, so that we might see the cycle for what it is and break from it at last. As Girard says in the closing of the book: “The real definition of grace is that Jesus died for us and even though his own people, as a people, did not receive him, he made those who did receive him able to become children of God.”
Colin Redemer is managing director at Beck & Stone.
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Image by François-Xavier Fabre, provided by Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.
