## Metaveri Başlık: **Interpreting Girard Lecture III Transcript** Yazar: *Johnathan Bi* Kategori: #articles Etiketler: #psychology ## Altı Çizilenler - When the subject and model are both socially and physically proximate, then the relationship becomes one of internal mediation or mimetic rivalry. - With resentment then, Girard provides us a psychological motivation to hurt others for the sake of hurting others. Resentment directs us to cause our rivals pain for the sake of causing them pain, even if it means harming ourselves. And we think it justified because of their malicious intent. We treat their suffering as an end in itself. This is the psychological force behind vengeance. - Girard's point is that, contra our intuitions, the more similar someone is to our self-conception, the more threatening they tend to become. But why is this? I think it's because our ideal of being is inherently exclusionary. - Because the ideal Girard thinks we are striving towards is exclusionary, the mere existence of someone with a similar self-conception threatens our very being. Let me frame our insights this way. The world of material, of utility, of experience, it may be positive sum, but the world of spirit, of being, of self-conception, of gaining social recognition and attention isn't. If what I most wanted was to make good trades, then I should be delighted that my friend made a great deal of money. But if what I most wanted was to be an investor, to maintain a certain self-conception, then I should feel threatened by such a friend. In like manner, if what I most wanted was to access truth, then I should be delighted of my colleague's academic achievements. But if what I most wanted was to be a philosopher, then I should feel threatened. And I think the fact that we are more often threatened rather than delighted by the advance of those most similar to us, even when it means we benefit materially -- tells us about the true nature of our desires and our priorities. - And I think this extends well beyond the academy: ask someone who they have the biggest problem with and it's often people very similar to them: who want the same things, who have the same self-conception. - To summarize, mimetic rivalries inflame metaphysical desire, making us lose sight of the object and become enthralled with the model in three ways. First, when two people are so intimately involved as they are in mimetic rivalry, each mediates and strengthens the other's desires for the object. Second, real competition introduces shame in the loser, which makes them desire being even more. Third, even when there is no real competition, there still exists a social competition, where we feel threatened by those two similar to us. - It makes me think of the idea that you should choose your enemies wisely, for you'll become just like them. - Fighting creates more proximity because rivals often have to resort to similar tactics. Be careful of who your enemies are because you'll be forced to be like them. - They perceive themselves to be the most radically different, even though from an outsider's perspective, the rivals cannot be differentiated. - Rivals focus on what Girard calls "false differences". - So, Girard reasons, we create and cling on to these trivial "false differences" and take them to be the core of our identity. Girard's point is that in rivalry, we systematically repress how we and our enemies are alike, sometimes even identical -- in what we want, what we believe in, who we think we are -- to justify our resentment. - Similarity leads to real and social competition. Competition produces more similarity. All of this is obstructed by false differences which justify violence. This is both the story of American Psycho and the form of mimetic rivalry at large. - "The people with eating disorders are not the people with a religious hang-up, the traditionalists and the fundamentalists, but the most 'liberated'. - Modern man, for Girard, fully liberated, is subject to oppression precisely where he thinks he has liberty. Through mimesis, the liberating "can" quickly degenerates into an oppressive "ought". Whatever objects we are given liberty to pursue can become an object of mimetic rivalry, coercing us through a radically different channel. And so, Girard believes, oppression will always plague society. It either exists explicitly in different forms of prohibition, like gender roles and caste systems, or it exists more subtly through mimetic competition, coercion disguised as liberty. - Inequity, much like oppression, will be a social pathology that we can't escape from. And the reason is quite simple: in so far as we remove the real forms of inequality -- caste systems, gender norms -- where we consider groups of people as being essentially different, we go from external mediation to internal mediation by bringing people closer. But as I've argued extensively in this lecture, proximity is the precondition for comparison, for jealousy, for mimetic rivalries. And so, as the real distance between people shrink, people feel more prone to compare, and as a result, the subjective experience of inequity balloons.