The Iron Triangle

René Girard's Mimetic Theory, Part 2

I ended Part 1 by introducing the central geometric figure of desire—the triangle—that René Girard discovers in his first book, Mensonge romantique et la Verite Romanesque — translated as Deceit, Desire and the Novel. I’m going to finish sketching the theory of triangular desire as it appears in that book and then introduce a little more context that I think will be helpful to understanding Girard.

The first text Girard uses to illustrate his triangular theory is Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the hero of which Girard describes as the “typical victim of triangular desire.” Nothing Don Quixote desires comes spontaneously from within himself, rather it is all routed through his fascination with the chivalric novels he reads, his desires are mediated by Amadis the Gaul, the fictional character he strives to imitate. Every object he views becomes transfigured by this mediation through the fiction: famously, the wash basin becomes a helmet, the windmills giants, the homely butcher girl into his lady love, and so forth. The second example is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: Emma Bovary’s desires are mediated through the cheap romantic novels she consumes, everything she wants in life comes from those pages. “From the mediator, a veritable artifi­cial sun, descends a mysterious ray which makes the ob­ject shine with a false brilliance. There would be no illu­sion if Don Quixote were not imitating Amadis. Emma Bovary would not have taken Rudolph for a Prince Charming had she not been imitating romantic heroines.”

In Girard’s third example, Stendhal, who deals directly with social climbing, that great theme of French literature, something quantitative changes in this triangular relationship that leads to a qualitative shift. In Stendhal, the mediators are in this world:

In Cervantes the mediator is enthroned in an inaccessi­ble heaven and transmits to his faithful follower a little of his serenity. In Stendhal, this same mediator has come down to earth. The clear distinction between these two types of relationship between mediator and subject indi­cates the enormous spiritual gap which separates Don Quixote from the most despicably vain of Stendhal's char­acters. The image of the triangle cannot remain valid for us unless it at once allows this distinction and measures this gap for us. To achieve this double objective, we have only to vary the distance, in the triangle, separating the mediator from the desiring subject.

This gives rise to the tantalizing possibility of possession of the object of desire and also deeper frustration when that possession is thwarted. In the words of Tom Petty, “God, it’s so painful, when something that’s so close is still so far out of reach.” And while it would make no sense to resent the characters in a fictional romance, when the mediators are with us here they block or possess what we want. They seem to become the reason we don’t have what we want, although they are really also the reason we want what we want. They become rivals. And so enters vanity, the subject of Stendhal’s novels, particularly The Red and the Black. As Wolfgang Palaver puts in his book on Girard, “The vain subject desires an object only when he is convinced that another also desires this same object. The mediator thus becomes a rival for the desiring subject. The two find themselves on the same plane, and the subject’s vanity demands that the rival be defeated.” There is nothing really special about these people: Girard says more than once that we apply to them an “arbitrary prestige.”

Girard calls the former condition “external mediation,” while he labels this closer proximity to the mediator “internal mediation.” While the sufferers of external mediation openly and almost innocently declare their heroes without shame, in internal mediation we must hide our models from others and ourselves. We cannot say to ourselves and definitely not to others, “I look up to this person, they are mediating what I desire.” This would grant a dignity and a priority of claim to the rival we must necessarily conceal. This opens up a world of deception and self-deception. We begin to hate: “The subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model­ the most submissive reverence and the most intense mal­ice. This is the passion we call hatred.”

According to Girard jealousy, envy, and hatred are just “traditional names” for “internal mediation,” the underlying phenomenon that has ontological significance. These terms, because they are superficially binary—we envy another, we hate another, we are jealous of another—cover up the actually tripartite structure lying underneath. Girard associates internal mediation and the prevalence of these bitter emotions with modernity itself:

In The Memoirs of a Tourist, Stendhal warns his read­ers against what he calls the modern emotions, the fruits of universal vanity: "envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred."…If the modern emotions flourish, it is not because "envious natures" and "jealous temperaments" have unfor­tunately and mysteriously increased in number, but be­ cause internal mediation triumphs in a universe where the differences between men are gradually erased.

Everything then flows systematically for Girard from the proximity of the mediator. The next two examples are Proust and Dostoevsky. The extremely painful jealousies suffered by Proust’s characters are the result of the mediators approaching and the situation of internal mediation intensifying. The psychotic world of Dostoevsky’s characters who cannot love without hatred or be friends without jealousy is the most intense and final realization of internal mediation which leads to all kinds of scary things: murder, suicide, and so on. You might think that the world of Proust’s dandies, delicate snobs, and sensitive artists has not much to do with that of Dostoevsky’s madmen, murderers, and fanatics, but Girard assures us they are the same, only more so.

I’m sure at this point the reader is brimming with incredulity, has objected aloud, cursed, or has simply become puzzled, so let’s deal with some objections and questions. First of all, why these guys and why these novels? Why is Stendhal, in style and themes still somewhat a creature of the 18th century, more “modern” than Flaubert, even though Flaubert comes a generation later and deals with a much more recognizably modern society? And why should Dostoevsky get the last word, since he died when Proust was just a little boy? Also, why The Red and the Black and not The Charterhouse of Parma? Why Madame Bovary and not A Sentimental Education? And what of Balzac, Zola, or Austen or Dickens, or Melville or Hawthorne? Yes, you may have picked up on the fact that this is all a bit tendentious. Why is Dostoevsky given the last word? Well, because he’s Christian and ultimately this is a work of Christian apologetics. Other novels and authors do get mentioned, but only somewhat parenthetically. The fact of the matter is that the theory works with these particular novels and not so much with the others. Girard even admits as much. Look what he writes about Balzac:

…in the work of Balzac but the metaphysical game does not unfold with the same geometric exactness as in Stendhal, Proust, or Dostoyevsky. Some of Balzac's heroes triumph over every obstacle by brute courage and an activity mostly concerned with the external world. The windmills do not overthrow the men, but the men the windmills. The laws of triangular desire do not always provide an interpreta­tion of the career of Balzac's ambitious characters.

Ah, well then. So the problem is that Balzac’s characters sometimes succeed in getting what they want by sheer force of passion, something that Girard would like to tell us is impossible. It’s notable Girard tries to sidestep Balzac, since Balzac, writing in the 1840s, essentially came up with his entire theory of mimetic desire in what’s basically an aside in Cousin Bette:

Have you observed how readily, in childhood or at the beginning of our social life, we set up a model for ourselves, spontaneously and often unawares? So a bank clerk dreams as he enters his manager's drawing-room, of possessing one just like it. If he makes his way, twenty years later it will not be the luxury then in fashion that he will want to display in his house, but the out-of-date luxury that fascinated him long before. No one knows how much obvious bad taste this retrospective envy accounts for; and we cannot tell how many wildly foolish actions are due to the secret rivalries that drive men to mirror the type that they have set up as ideal, to consume their energies in making themselves a moonshine reflection of someone else.

(It’s also interesting how Balzac immediately jumps to the acquisition of objects here — He always pays very close attention to decor.) I think the authors of the Human Comedy and the Divine Comedy, Balzac and Dante, who also anticipates the theory of mimetic desire, offer a critique of Girard’s whole theory, but I will elaborate on that later. For now I will just say that the way Girard attempts save his theory here is quite frankly a piece of definitional chicanery: the novels and novelists who replicate his theory are the really novelistic ones, while those who don’t are merely romantics, who reflect but do not reveal mimetic desire: “In the future we shall use the term romantic for the works which reflect the presence of a mediator without ever revealing it and the term novelistic for the works which reveal this presence. It is to the latter that this book is primarily devoted.” So, the really novelly novels are the ones that novel the way you say they ought to novel—Uh huh. He does this little trick elsewhere, too: Oh you found a desire without a mediator, well that’s not a desire, it’s really an appetite. That makes some sense, actually: obviously desire for another’s attention is not quite the same as the need for food, but such refinements open up the possibility of mischief.

You might also ask, “Are people really more jealous or envious in modernity? I mean, people of all social classes used to routinely stab each other all the time over very little.” The answer is, similar to the one in Nietzsche and Freud, these passions today are restrained, impotent, and without outlet and give birth to seething, unspoken resentments, which is both true enough and a little bit of a dodge.

Let’s consider a few more possible problems. The most obvious objection so far is that the idea that there is something fundamentally imitative about human beings is a totally a unremarkable observation. Of course, we are social creatures: we are born into a context, we have parents, we live in a society, etc., so nothing is truly sui generis. Only the mad or delusional would insist that their desires were not influenced or instructed by the world. This is why we make sure kids don’t watch certain movies or TV shows: we don’t want the to emulate the stuff they see.

Moreover, even if we appear to copy our desires from others surely there must be something originally there within us that they harmonize with, something in the soul that picks up what they are putting down, as it were. Whether this something comes from our early childhood experiences and the consequent fantasies, or the image of God implanted in all of us, or the impressions of previous lifetimes—it doesn’t really matter for the sake of argument—Surely, we all must have an individual something or other that relates to, needs, finds a meaning in the desires we imitate. Possibly. And possibly also we can become alienated from this something and get lost in the others, even deliberately. The idea of authenticity suggests we can find or return to this possibility in ourselves. Does Girard have such a notion of authenticity? Does he believe in the possibility of true, passionate love, and not just the shadow play of vanity? In a way, yes. He describes all the authors and their characters as having a kind of cure for mimetic desire and internal mediation and we will get to it. But in general, if you’ve noticed a kind of hostility to individuality, both that of author’s oeuvres and of people, you are correct. That’s a result both of the abstract, Cartesian method of geometry at work and a result of his Jansenist pallor; the Pascalian side: an ascetic spiritual discipline that attacks any fancy of the ego about its own self-sufficiency as mere vanity.

But in Girard’s favor, I do think that this there is something psychologically plausible about the account of the intensity of passions stirred up by external vs. internal mediation. Think of the way we relate to celebrities. Sure, we envy the lives of celebrities, we emulate them, buy the same stuff they buy, or at least the knock offs, and so forth. And our envy definitely contributes to the enjoyment we take in their downfalls and problems. But for the most part, our fixation on celebrities is a diversion, an escape. Their remoteness makes it less painful to think about than the frustrated desires of our own lives. But applying the vain and acquisitiveness ways in which they behave to our quotidian lives is a pretty certain way to experience intense unhappiness for a number of reasons. We have neither the looks, the fame, nor the money to accomplish what they have. Nor just the sheer power they have from being mediators of desire for so many people. A lot of problems among ordinary people are caused by imitating the manners and mores they see on stage and screen or the “real life” theater of celebrity drama. But so then is a lot of money made. One way of looking at social media is that it pulls the system of celebrity from the world of external mediation—our mostly harmless daydreams about stars—into internal mediation: poisonous jealousies, envy, hatreds and so forth. It’s a little too close to home.

Close, but not, therefore, more real: It’s a mirage, as well. Girard points out that the worldliness of internal mediation is also just as illusory as choosing the plainly fictional as your mediator:

The Parisian world of "envy," "jeal­ousy," and "impotent hatred" is no less illusory and no less desired than the helmet of Mambrino. All of its desires are based on abstractions; Stendhal tells us they are "cerebral desires." Joys and especially suffering are not rooted in things; they are "spiritual," but in an inferior sense which must be explained…All of Stendhal's art is aimed at persuading us that the values of vanity, nobility, money, power, reputation only seem to be concrete . .

So where does this spirit realm of haunting abstractions and contrived desires come from? Let’s look at how Girard introduces it at the very beginning of the book, in his discussion of how Julien Sorel gets his first job as a tutor to a noble family and begins his ascent in society:

Valenod is the richest and most influential man in Ver­rieres, next to M. de Renal himself. The mayor of Ver­rieres always has the image of his rival before his eyes during his negotiations with old M. Sorel. He makes the latter some very favorable propositions but the sly peas­ ant invents a brilliant reply: "We have a better offer." This time M. de Renal is completely convinced that Valenod wishes to engage Julien and his own desire is re­ doubled. The ever-increasing price that the buyer is will­ ing to pay is determined by the imaginary desire which he attributes to his rival. So there is indeed an imitation of this imaginary desire, and even a very scrupulous imita­tion, since everything about the desire which is copied, including its intensity, depends upon the desire which serves as model.

Later in the novel, Sorel repeats the same kind of trick, suggested to him by a dissolute Russian prince, when he’s attempting to seduce the vain Mademoiselle de la Mole who has previously rejected him: he pretends to court another noble woman, who becomes interested. Then Mademoiselle de la Mole gets interested. Girard points out something here that he doesn’t really return to:

It is surprising that the Marxist critics, for whom economic structures provide the arche­type of all human relations, have not as yet pointed out the analogy between the crafty bargaining of old man Sorel and the amorous maneuvers of his son.

Well, you said it, René, not me. As they say on Wall Street, the characters have “made a market.” And as on Wall Street, the price, as it were, gets bid up by the merely notional desire of others for the same, merely notional object. Here we have the introduction the possibility of relations of exchange, of an exchange-value. Perhaps what Girard labels “internal mediation” is just another name or a specific modality of the abstract domination of the commodity form. This would certainly jibe with the identification of internal mediation with modernity, after all, what is modernity except the era when the logic of the commodity has come to predominate over all other relations? Again, I must leave the explication of that theory to a later installment.

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Before concluding this installment, I want to do a hopefully brief excursus to bring in three other intellectual contexts for Girard’s theory. The first is, funnily enough, Girard’s own love life. This is what he says in an interview:

I was in my early twenties, then, and of course I was interested in girlfriends. Suddenly I realized that I was just like most heroes of novels – like Proust, you know. One girlfriend wanted me to marry her, and I didn’t want to do that. So I would move away from her when she demanded some commitment on my part. But as soon as I had moved away and she had accepted that and left, I was drawn back to her again by the very fact, in a way, that she denied herself to me. I realized suddenly that she was both object and mediator for me, some kind of model.

You see? She influenced my desire by denying it. All these negative games are always present in desire. Even the people who know least about desire are aware that the denial of the object increases the desire. The denial of the object is very much linked to the presence of the third person who might steal the object from you. Absence is a form of mediation.

I’m not sure about the last part, but the idea that someone can be both object and mediator is compelling: it’s undoubtedly true on a psychological level that we can, but perhaps it creates problems for the geometry of the triangular model: that’s a pretty squished down triangle—almost a straight line—which Girard tells us not really possible. But this observation also sort of contributes to what some people find to be almost banal about Girard. As he even says, Everyone kinda knows this stuff. I sometimes joke that Girard postulates playing hard to get as a first philosophy and things like this add to that impression.

The other source is Hegel, or rather Alexandre Kojéve, whose lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the 1930s influenced just about every single French thinker of note. This idea of desire being the desire of the Other certainly has its source in Kojéve. In Kojéve’s reading of Hegel, human beings share with animals appetites, we must consume—negate, other things in order to survive, but our peculiar form of self-consciousness is not satisfied by this, we require recognition: we desire not just things, but we “feed” on the desires of others, in order to be fully human, we must become subject and object of others desires. An example of this is manifested in romantic love:

Thus, in the relationship between man and women, for example, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants "to possess" or "to assimilate" the Desire taken as Desire-that is to say, if he wants to be "desired" or "loved," or, rather, "recognized" in his human value, in his reality as a human individual. Likewise, Desire directed toward a natural object is human only to the extent that it is "mediated" by the Desire of another directed toward the same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus, an object perfectly useless from the biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a Desire can only be a human Desire, and human reality, as distinguished from animal Reality, is created only by action that satisfies such Desires: human history is the history of desired Desires.

Then there’s a whole to-do about how humans must risk their lives to prove the humanness of our desires and then this leads to the dialectic of the master and slave and so forth, but let’s just leave that aside for now. Now, Girard and his followers would like you to believe that what he’s saying is much different than Kojéve/Hegel, but quite frankly I don’t really buy it. This also adds to the generically French quality of Girard’s theoretical output I mentioned last time. He was getting it from the same source as everyone else. Jacques Lacan, too, said, “Desire is the desire of the Other's desire,” but, naturally, he has a different story about why that’s the case.

Finally, we need to talk about Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, who is both an Enlightenment figure and a critic of Enlightenment, has a similar account of comparisons, envy, and competition in The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, which was certainly influenced by Pascal. In the sate of nature, man is governed by amour de soi, a gentle, nourishing love of self that comes from our animal instincts of self-preservation. In society, we become the victims of amour-propre, vanity, a pride which can only be validated through the eyes of others: “…the savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him.” What he writes in Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques is even more enraged and striking: “No one cares for reality, everyone stakes his essence on illusion. Slaves and dupes of their self-love, men live in order not to live but to make others believe that they have lived!” And no one had any notion yet of Instagram. Rousseau believed that the natural man and the social man were not so much actual historical states, but kind of archetypes of being within us all, and we can potentially access the natural side of ourselves and escape from the terrible bonds of society. Not so for the Catholic Girard, who believes in original sin—there is no natural goodness in man. Rousseau’s is merely another “romantic endeavor to liberate man from his distorted nature without the help of divine grace,” writes Palaver. His message is that of St. Cyprian: “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the Church there is no salvation.”

Anyway, that seems like good a place to stop for now. Thanks for reading.