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The Girard mimetic desire triangle idea seems backwards to me. The borrowed desires part is right but the idea that it is some disguised desire to be the person whose desire is being borrowed seems kinda dumb in an overwrought way. Am I missing something?
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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.
Replying to
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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In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom argues that there exists between outstanding writers of different generations a profound but fructifying jealousy. Jealousy is one of the consequences of mimetic desire: you'd like to be all of them, but also different: a 'special one'
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