Why do all humans imitate other humans? Because we all lack something, and we look to others who we think might help us fill this lack. Girard calls this something “being,” which indicates that who we are, and who we might be, is not something directly accessible to ourselves. We need others to help us ascertain that which we lack. This might be something physical, emotional, educational, vocational, rational… we all seek ways to become more than what we currently are, whether we realize it or not.
.. In other words, we humans are prone to place so much hope in finding something that will satisfy all of our desires that we may actually look for ways to develop patterns of thought and/or behavior that actually make it impossible for us to find that thing we think will satisfy – because of the fear that when we find it, it won’t actually fulfill what we lack after all.
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René Girard and Mimetic Theory
By reading the great writers against the grain of conventional wisdom, Girard realized that people don’t fight over their differences. They fight because they are the same, and they want the same things. Not because they need the same things (food, sex, scarce material goods), but because they want what will earn others’ envy.
.. Girard then turned to the relationship between rituals of sacrifice and the many acts of violence recorded in the founding documents of the religions of the modern West (including the secular religion known as the Enlightenment): the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels. Girard interpreted the Bible as a gradual revelation of the injustice of human violence. The culmination, Jesus’s crucifixion, is unprecedented not because it pays a debt humans owe to God, but because it reveals the truth of all sacrifice: the victim of a mob is always innocent, and collective violence is unjust.
The Resurgence of René Girard
I believe one reason for the recent interest in Girard is that he provides a perspective that highlights the uniqueness of the Christ-event while it at the same time avoids the temptation to exclude the Other.
.. I think you’re right about Girard being a thinker before his time. It took 20 years (from 1960’s until 1980s) before neuro-science was able to lend biological support to his ideas about memesis.
The internet has helped spread Girard in a way that was not possible before. Let’s not forget that. I’d have never heard of Piper, Driscoll and all that crowd either if it weren’t for the internet.