So, if you’re wondering what’s going on with my Kieslowski project, the next phase of it will cover at least part of The Dekalog, his 10 part TV series for Polish TV based loosely on the Ten Commandments. This series is not available currently on any streaming platform, I had to buy the BluRay collection from Criterion … and that delivery was delayed until today. So I will rewatch it soon and get back on the horse.
In the meantime, I want to say a bit about a story I came across in the Financial Times this week. It’s entitled “How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the U.S. right,” which is about the closest thing to clickbait designed specifically for me that anyone could ever discover. It turns out the story is about Rene Girard, and I’ve read some of his work.
According to the FT story:
Girard, who died in 2015, was a French literary critic who taught at American universities, publishing more than 20 books on topics ranging from 19th-century novels to Indian scripture. He was never a household name, although his work is widely cited in numerous disciplines. But in recent years, he has had a surprising resurgence for a Venn diagram of Catholics, entrepreneurs and those populating Donald Trump’s White House, who repurpose Girard’s thought in ways that are vehemently contested by some academics.
Girard is best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”, the idea that humans don’t desire things in and of themselves, but out of a wish to imitate and compete with others.
Girard seems like a completely absurd person to base MAGA ideology on, but the article draws a line from technology venture capitalist Peter Thiel to J.D. Vance, making a rather strained argument that, I think, all comes down to how Girard applied the concept of mimetic desire after discovering it early in his career:
Girard spent the rest of his career unfolding this “single, dense insight”. He saw it not as a mere theory, but a law of human nature, which novelists had intuited but not made explicit. Over the past half-century, mimetic desire has been Girard’s chief legacy, not only in humanities departments but also, increasingly, among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and east London brand managers. Inducting Girard into the Académie Française in 2005, the philosopher Michel Serres called him “the Darwin of the human sciences”. Unlike Darwin, however, Girard’s studies would lead him back to the church.
So, I want to apply some Montaigne thinking to this “single, dense insight” to see if there’s any validity to this rather airy assessment. There’s no question that Montaigne would agree that there is a great deal of mimetic thinking and activity in humanity. Montaigne devoted a great deal of space in his essays to questions of culture and how it does a much more thorough job of shaping the activities of humanity than laws or individual belief. Montaigne would no doubt argue that there is mimetic desire … but also mimetic thinking, speaking, worshipping and behaving.
Where Montaigne would disagree, however, is in calling it a law of human nature, because Montaigne saw human beings as highly variable and impossible to define as singular beings. The reason for this is, in part, is because we’re influenced by so many simultaneous sources. Great friendships can change everything about us. Books can alter the way we see the world. Coming into contact with other cultures can make us reconsider our own cultural biases and sense of superiority. The idea that everything we desire in life is imitative of a single, definable culture is too limiting. People constantly change their values.
Next, I want to go back to the source of Girard’s belief in mimetic desire. He first observed this behavior in the characters in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” with characters having desires only because others already had them — or behaving certain ways to imitate others. This is, without question, an element of Proust’s work. But there’s so much more, and two pieces of Proust’s thought in particular argue against mimetic desire as an all-encompassing human law.
The first is Proust’s concept of intermittences of the heart. I’ve written about this device before a few times — it’s basically an argument that our deepest feelings are embodied. We can have, hidden deep within us, memories of a time and place that can be unlocked by physically experiencing something similar later in life. This happens in “Swann’s Way,” when Marcel eats a Madeline cookie and has a flood of thoughts and feelings about growing up in Combray. It happens later when we bends down to tie his shoe and remembers his grandmother kindly tying his shoes, and remembering his deep love for her.
There’s nothing interpersonally imitative about these kinds of deep feelings. They are not banal imitations of feelings other people had, they are purely Marcel’s feelings. And so, if the body can hold these kinds of deep, personal affects, it must also be true that human beings are capable of having and holding feelings and desires that have nothing to do with the desires of others, they are purely our own. As much as Girard wants to dismiss this “romantic” view of human feelings and desires, Proust demonstrates throughout his novel, even as he is rejecting all forms of romantic love, that deep, lasting personal feelings are part of our human experience.
The second way that Proust refutes mimetic desire is through his theories about art. Proust makes a very compelling case that great artists do not create works that are immediately recognized and embraced by the public. Rather, it is the great works of art themselves that create the types of connoisseurs of that art capable of understanding it. Proust wrote:
This is why the man of genius, wishing to avoid the discontents of being unrecognized in his own day, may persuade himself that, since his contemporaries lack the necessary hindsight, works written for posterity should be read only by posterity, rather as there are certain paintings which should not be looked at too close up. However, any craven urge to avoid being misjudged is pointless, as misjudgment is unavoidable. What makes it difficult for a work of genius to be admired at once is the fact that its creator is out of the ordinary, that hardly anyone is like him. It is his work itself which, by fertilizing the rare spirits capable of appreciating it, will make them grow and multiply. It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12, 13, 14 and 15) which, over fifty years, created and expanded the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it. What is known as posterity is the work’s own posterity. The creator of the work of genius must make no compromises with, must take no account of, other geniuses who may at the same period be following their own course towards creating for the future a more aware public, which will reward other geniuses but not himself; the work has to create its own posterity. So if this work were to be held back, in the hope of its being known only to posterity, it would be greeted not by posterity, but by an assembly of its contemporaries who simply happened to be living fifty years later.
And, if you think about it, the fact that Girard has been oddly embraced by the American Right proves this point. If Thiel and Vance can come upon the works of Girard and be influenced by it, to the extent that they change their belief systems and feel compelled to evangelize his work to others, then it isn’t the work of the imitative masses that causes the social change, it’s the work of the individual who moved people to think differently.
Girard extrapolates his thought about desire as something that inevitably leads to competition, then to violence and the creation of a scapegoat to blame for the inevitable crisis. The Right has lots of strange thoughts about the scapegoat part of the theory — claiming, for example, that the Left does this all the time through things like cancel culture, but blind to the fact that this is exactly what they are doing right now with migrants. Girard himself wanted people to recognize when they were oppressing others and find ways to back away from conflicts. This is the exact opposite of what the Right is seeking today.
Regardless of all that, I am obviously not opposed to using literary critics as intellectual bellwethers. I just find Girard to be a completely bizarre choice for that position — and someone who relies far too heavily on one idea that isn’t particularly well developed.
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