To strawman it a bit: the idea seems to be that I see you eating ice cream, now I want to eat ice cream too, but secretly what I really want is to be you. Sub other desires: write a novel, be CEO, be president, it doesn’t ring true for anything. At least not for everybody.
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I *think* what’s happening is that Girard had a Straussian temperament/great man complex going. Or something like that.
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There’s no easy way to prove or disprove such a metaphysical theory, but there are indicative arguments. For example, all my mimetic desire is borrowings from genre fiction. But it manifests as a desire to (say) make up plots that mash up wildly different authors.
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I am trying to write comic surreal sci-fi mystery stuff that borrows tricks from Hitchhikers Guide, Poirot novels, Sherlock Holmes, Asimov, Star Trek, etc. I don’t even know what it would mean to want to “be” a mashup of those authors.
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Only special case where the theory works is around the works of Straussian great man types. Perhaps their works are like unique signatures, so you can only want what they wanted by wanting to be them. Ie mimetic desire sparked by reading a Shakespeare play is maybe Girardian.
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But generic mimetic desire, sparked by a genre product (ice cream, mystery novels) by definition cannot be Girardian because there’s no model/mediator there to want to “be”. And desire mostly comes in “genres” in a mass consumerist economy populated by Mass Man types (Ortega)
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It seems like Girard (and still working off Wikipedia level gloss here, he hasn’t yet earned the right to deeper attention from me) just defines away anything that doesn’t fit as a “mere” appetite. There’s just no such sharp distinction between appetite and desire.
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I’ve been influenced in my take by
@sarahdoingthing take which seems to nail the basic flaws. I think my skepticism is being triggered by related aspectshttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/05/04/fluid-rigor/ …Show this thread
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It seems exactly right to me. Isn’t this the entire idea behind modern marketing? Advertisers are selling a lifestyle, which just happens to necessitate a product. That’s why you only see attractive people in commercials, and endorsements from pro-athletes, actors, models...
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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You only end up wanting to become the other person in certain degenerate cases (which he thinks are pervasive in modern life). Most of the time other factors predominate.
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If the desire has a basis in our animal nature (eg ice cream tastes good), for Girard this isn't called "desire" at all.
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