“From Influencers to Anti-Western Resentment: How Mimetic Theory Still Illuminates Our Times””

Bernard Perret is a socio-economist.

Member of the Esprit

Violence of the gods, violence of man: René Girard, notre contemporain

LE FIGARO.

Bernard Perret.

Many social phenomena require to be clarified by the mimetic approach.

I am thinking of what is happening on the internet, influencers, harassment phenomena... Social networks are machines for intensifying mimetic suggestions.

All the violence that makes the news is underpinned by rivalries, resentments and mimetic outbursts whose mechanisms Girard can help to understand.

Thus, the resentment of a certain number of countries towards the West reflects a frustration resulting from a contradictory injunction inherent in mimetic desire.

Read alsoReligion, desire, violence: why you should read René Girard

The West is both a model and an obstacle for these peoples;

we ensure that they imitate us, but our living conditions remain unattainable for the greatest number.

René Girard draws attention to the mimetic nature of violence, which makes it difficult to be involved in a phenomenon of violence without becoming part of the problem yourself.

Violence is always perceived as reciprocal.

Every aggressor sees himself as a victim and everyone is caught in a game of mirrors which inevitably gives rise to aggressive attitudes encouraging violence in return.

We have always known that there are "escalations of violence" and endless spirals of revenge, but Girard shows how these phenomena are constitutive of the logic of human relations.

Where does violence come from according to Girard?

For René Girard, violence is linked to the mimetic, that is to say imitative, nature of desire.

Human beings desire intensely, or rather "desire to desire", but they don't know what to desire, they need another to suggest it to them.

The "other" is therefore immediately present on the path of my desire, both as a model and as an obstacle.

In a society that thinks of itself more and more as egalitarian, which simply means that symbolic differences are being erased, we no longer accept that another, reputed to be our equal, possesses something of which we are deprived.

As a result, we are all more or less rivals to each other.

One of Girard's originalities is to have built a sort of general theory of human relations, taking literature as a starting point.

Bernard Perret

However, any rivalry is a potential cause of violence.

If we are relatively protected from it, it is thanks, on the one hand, to the "monopoly of legitimate violence" (the State, justice) and, on the other hand, because we live in "societies of competition" where there is no shortage of grounds for non-violent confrontations.

The whole organization of our society bears the mark of secular efforts to limit the violent effects of mimetic desire.

Sport, for example, which has taken the place that we know in our societies, is a very effective device for containing violence, because it allows us to compete without risk - to measure ourselves against others without running the blood.

If the thought of René Giard is so unique and important, is it also because it is at the crossroads of anthropology, literary criticism and psychoanalysis?

Is it this articulation between these different fields that makes it rich?

Yes, this transversality is what makes it interesting, but also what irritates some.

One of Girard's originalities is to have built a sort of general theory of human relations, taking literature as a starting point.

As far as I'm concerned, I must admit, becoming aware, thanks to Girard, of the revealing power of fiction was a kind of revelation.

The search for reality – which is an inherent requirement of writing when it is led by its very movement to go beyond pure formalism – leads great writers to tell the truth about desire.

This demand for truth brings out aspects of human reality that theorists cannot see.

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In a novel, it is necessary to represent concrete human relationships as they can really be, which promotes a deep understanding of desire.

Concerning psychoanalysis, Girard shows that Freud and his successors largely missed the mimetic character of desire.

Desire, of course, has a biological substrate – needs and drives, especially sexual ones – but the Freudian notion of sublimation is not enough to account for the way in which “mimetic interferences” transform desire by giving it its proper character. human, its creativity but also its excessiveness and its violence.

When we read Freud's texts on the psychology of crowds, we see that he deliberately avoids mimetic contagion.

For Freud, the imitation of others could not be constitutive of the “ego”.

You write that René Girard's major theoretical breakthrough is to show that the sacred stems from practices whose primary aim was to protect emerging human communities against the mortal danger of internal violence.

Does the sacred, according to Girard, make it possible to displace conflicts between individuals towards sorts of scapegoats?

This is indeed Girard's most innovative hypothesis, and also the one that has the most consequences for the understanding of cultural phenomena.

To sum up in the extreme, the sacred emanates from sacrifice and prohibitions, which are at the origin of the means invented empirically by proto-human societies to limit and contain violence, a violence made more threatening by the intensification of mimicry. at the dawn of hominization.

For Girard, the sacrifice was first of all a ritualized repetition of spontaneous victimization processes whose participants had been able to observe the soothing and unifying effect.

For Girard, only the spiritual shock of the resurrection of Jesus could have made the disciples capable of adopting this point of view with the lucidity and the force of conviction to which the texts testify.

Bernard Perret

The polarization of violence on a single victim ends the chaos, much like we see in the opening scene of the film "2001: A Space Odyssey".

Such a hypothesis cannot be directly verified, but the fact is that it gives meaning to a multitude of ethnographic data, and that it echoes the scapegoat-type phenomena observed in all societies, including the OUR.

From there, the whole history of the culture can be told in a remarkably intelligible way: the rites, the sacred, the notion of the divine and the more elaborate religious ideas, the rudiments of thought symbolism and, on this basis, the whole edifice of institutions and ritualized social practices, whose links with sacrifice often remain clearly visible,

You also come back to his apocalyptic vision of history and his complicated relationship to Christianity...

The most controversial aspect of Girard's thought is his affirmation of the unique and exceptional character of Judeo-Christian writings.

What he has never ceased to affirm, in fact, with ever more force over the years, is that the Gospels, and to a certain extent the whole of the biblical corpus, are carriers of a knowledge anthropology whose heart is the unveiling of the victim mechanism and the violent foundations of the social order.

The tales of passion recount a lynching which seems to repeat the immemorial scene of the transfer of collective violence to a scapegoat.

But, as Girard observes, everything here is arranged with a view to unveiling: Jesus deliberately places himself in the position of occupying the place of the scapegoat and he gives his disciples, through his teaching,

Girard does not give much credit to the political genius of humans, and no more to their spiritual creativity, which is paradoxical for a believer.

Bernard Perret

For Girard, only the spiritual shock of the resurrection of Jesus could have made the disciples capable of adopting this point of view with the lucidity and the force of conviction to which the texts testify.

By thus unveiling the violent foundation of human societies, this story has enabled men to develop a new vision of living together, which is no longer based on the violent expulsion of violence, but on the contrary on the centrality of the victim. .

This vision of Christianity is innovative, but also somewhat subversive, even if no one can deny that it brilliantly illuminates the texts.

In particular, it raises the question of the meaning of Christian rites: what does the word sacrifice mean in this context?

How to avoid the misinterpretation which consists in presenting the Mass as the celebration of a sacrifice made to God,

In short, do the concepts developed by Girard make it possible to go beyond the individualism of our time?

We can see Girard's thought as a competing theory of the human psyche with psychoanalysis;

it can also be interpreted as a general theory of the origins and development of culture, or even as a decisive contribution to biblical exegesis and Christian theology.

In all cases, the central notion is that of mimesis.

Man is a mimetic animal, which means that we are more deeply connected to others and more vulnerable to the contagion of desires and violence than we spontaneously realize.

In an over-armed world increasingly constrained on various levels, we should take the greatest account of this anthropological knowledge to think about our future.

The apocalyptic pessimism shown by Girard in his last writings is not in itself exaggerated.

To put it bluntly, if we don't learn to master violence, which means first of all understanding its mechanisms better, we won't survive.

What we can blame him for is expressing himself as a prophet of doom who claims to read the future from his anthropology.

The ways of God are said to be impenetrable, and the future is written nowhere.

Girard does not give much credit to the political genius of humans, and no more to their spiritual creativity, which is paradoxical for a believer.

The fact remains that the

intensification of social interdependencies and collective survival constraints (I am obviously thinking of climate change) will force us to take new steps in the construction of a non-violent human order and there is no guarantee that we will be able to do so.

As the UN Secretary General said recently, we are going to have to “cooperate or perish”.

Violence of the gods, violence of man: René Girard, our contemporary

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