I Came to Cast Fire: An Introduction to René Girard
Elias Carr
Word on Fire Publications
November 2024
160 pages
ISBN: 978-1685781668
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel is known for going against the grain, even when his hunch is unpopular or inconceivable to others. One of the original “PayPal mafia” from the late nineties, alongside Elon Musk (whose own prominence has soared in recent months), Thiel famously became the first outside investor in an unknown college drop-out’s social network idea. Today, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are worth billions of dollars between them. Perhaps Thiel’s most controversial bet – especially among Silicon Valley’s heavily Democrat-leaning and Democrat-funding tech elite – was that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. Such a claim was scarcely credible at the time. Every media outlet, journalist, polling company, and celebrity had unequivocally assured both themselves and the public of a Hillary Clinton victory. We all know how that ended. Most recently, in 2021, Thiel backed the candidacy of a little known thirty-something from Ohio for the U.S. Senate. Today, JD Vance serves as the third youngest vice president in the history of the United States. How has Thiel backed so many seemingly unlikely winners? What does he pick up on that the rest of us do not?
One of Thiel’s most influential encounters while an undergraduate at Stanford University was René Girard, a Frenchman who held a professorship of literature there. Over the course of his long teaching career in America, Girard developed a theory of “mimesis” which proved highly influential on Thiel and others who encountered Girard and his writings. While Jacques Derrida, a contemporary and fellow Frenchman, is widely known in the humanities and social sciences to this day, Girard’s influence has been much more limited. Undeservedly so. I Came to Cast Fire is a new book by Fr Elias Carr that aims to rectify this. Published in a beautiful edition by Word on Fire, Bishop Robert Barron’s thriving Catholic media ministry, the book starts from scratch with Girard and his fascinating theory of mimetic behaviour.
Fr Elias Carr is an American Augustinian Canon currently based in Klosterneuburg Abbey in Austria. He completed his own graduate studies on the work of one of Girard’s friends and collaborators at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow. At just over one hundred pages, I Came to Cast Fire is quite brief and very readable, outlining Girard’s theory of mimesis in bitesize chapters. Carr intersperses the account with helpful anecdotes and personal stories so one never feels at sea in abstractions.
So who was René Girard, and what is mimesis? Born in France on Christmas Day 1923, René Girard completed his undergraduate studies in Paris. Finding the French university experience underwhelming, he signed up for graduate studies at Indiana University in the United States. Originally planning to stay for just two years, Girard ended up meeting his future wife there. They married, he completed his doctoral studies in history, and stayed on, holding academic positions at a number of institutions including Johns Hopkins and Duke universities. In 1981, he was appointed Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University. Despite spending his entire adult life in America, Girard never acquired a perfect grasp of English. So most of his books were written and published in French, and then translated into English a few years later. In 2005, he was elected as one of the forty immortels of the Académie Française, France’s premier learned society for the French language. Girard passed away in California in 2015 at the age of 91.
But that is only half the story. Born to a Catholic family, young René stopped practising his faith in his early teens. It was not until 1959, now living in the U.S., that Girard underwent a spiritual conversion that would influence his thinking and writing in the years that followed. The trigger was the discovery of a growth that turned out to be benign. Not long after, Carr recounts, “he found a priest to bless his marriage, allowed his son to be baptized – his daughter would be born the following year – and committed himself to the practice of the Catholic faith”. Girard’s conversion would have a profound influence on the theory of mimesis he had begun to formulate.
Carr admits that understanding mimetic theory, let alone acknowledging it at work in our lives and actions, can be challenging because “it offends our everyday notion of ourselves as independent self-governing individuals”. Deeply embedded in contemporary thinking, particularly since the Enlightenment, individualism is an empowering and alluring way to view ourselves as free agents and shapers of our own destinies. The paradox, according to Carr, is that “we are not nearly as original or self-governing as we like to believe”, yet, “with his [i.e. Girard’s] knowledge, we can become more so”.
Girard argued that our wants (désirs in his terminology) are influenced by people around us, who stir a sense of desire in us. This seems reasonable enough – schools preach on the dangers of peer pressure to their students, while advertising agencies and corporations capitalise on it in order to sell their products. However, for Girard, this is to understand desire only superficially. As Carr explains, “In mimetic theory, Girard sees that behind desires for success, wealth, status, pleasure, relationships, goodness, even love, is the longing for being, a longing to be more than what one currently is.”
This is where Girard’s theory gets interesting. Desire, as Girard understands it, is ultimately not material but metaphysical. Our desires do not really come to us independently, but are mediated by those we respect or admire – what Girard terms “models”. When we convince ourselves we want an object, we do so because the model conveys desirability on the object – “I want the object because the model wants it.” Consequently, a desirable object is often not an end in itself, even if, in our acquisitiveness, we might be blind to this reality. If we don’t really desire the object, despite our appetites, then what do we really desire?
Girard argues that when one wants the object, what one really wants is to be more like the person modelling the object. The subject (the person desiring the object) wants to become the model (the other person). Hence “mimesis”, from the Greek “to imitate”. Carr sets out the irresistible potency of this human urge: “The object is not the final point of desire. Beyond the object – whatever or whoever that might be – is desire’s true aim: the model’s being. This metaphysical hunger causes the acquisitive nature of human desire. Poor in both being and desires, the subject seeks to appropriate the being of the other, the model, through imitating what the other desires, through adopting his words, deeds, and relationships, ultimately becoming the other.” The totalising nature of this latent human hunger, not just to have but to be, can seem jarring when we have convinced ourselves of our own unimpeachable autonomy and individuality.
At some level, this is the starting point for advertising. We see someone attractive using a product or service, and we want it ourselves. At least, we think we want it. But deep down, perhaps it is not really the product that we want, but the lifestyle or qualities (wealth, strength, beauty, success, etc.) that are represented by the model that is conveying desirability on the object. This has proven an effective marketing strategy when our models are distant from us. Celebrities and influencers are attractive at least partly because their lifestyles are so unattainable to the ordinary man or woman – the red carpet, the gleaming cars, the luxury holidays, the cavernous mansions. No matter how much we attempt to imitate them, or what we desire about them, ultimately celebrities remain very distant from us, whether physically, materially, or financially. Girard defines this kind of mediated desire as “external” because of the model’s distance from us. However, what happens when our mimetic desires are drawn to someone much closer to us?
This is where things get complicated. Internal mediation occurs where there is too little distance between subject and model. Examples include friends, colleagues, and family members. Internal mediation makes rivalry likely – and this is when desire goes wrong. For Girard, “a dangerous byproduct accompanies mimetic desire: unbounded intraspecies violence”. Think of the anxieties of a student starting in a new school or university, or someone starting a new job. Carr writes of how, in such circumstances, “one looks for a group within the group to create a liveable situation”, and yet, paradoxically, such situations “are rife with rivalry and competition, with fears of imitators trying to steal what is mine.” High school movies such as Grease or Mean Girls have dramatised this tension between the overwhelming desire to fit in and be part of the gang, on the one hand, and the claustrophobia and violence that mimetic behaviour produces, on the other, to very humorous effect.
When the model realises that the subject wants something, he reciprocates by wanting the object more. Girard calls this “double mediation”. However it is not possible for both parties to have the object, especially when what the subject wants is not really the object itself but, at some level, the model’s being. Thus in double mediation, Carr explains, both the subject and the model “become the obstacles of reaching their desires”. Unchecked, through imitative, mimetic behaviours, “the subject and the model growingly increasingly resemble each other, becoming doubles or twins”. The appearance of enemy brothers or twins in history and myth, such as Romulus and Remus or Thor and Loki, exemplifies this phenomenon. Such mimetic rivalries are unstable and produce what Girard terms “contagion”. When differentiation between people collapses under mimetic contagion, violence is imminent. “The community, in danger of being consumed by its own mimetic contagion and destroying itself, discovers a way out,” Carr explains. “It collectively polarizes against a third party declared guilty for causing the crisis”. Girard terms this third party the “scapegoat”.
Often a marginal figure, at the top or bottom of society (such as the king or a poor person), or someone with particularly irritating or exceptional qualities or behaviours, the scapegoat becomes the “sin bearer” for the community. The scapegoat is levelled with the blame, and the community’s violence is taken out on them. It is important to note that the scapegoat him – or herself may well be blameless of the wrongs levelled against them. What matters is that the mob is convinced they are acting justly. If the scapegoat mechanism is successful, “then the community undergoes catharsis, a release from the mimetic fury, and a concurrent, seemingly miraculous reconciliation”. However, there is a catch. For scapegoating to be successful, nobody can be aware of it. Carr explains, “the genuine source of this peace – namely, the elimination of the victim – must remain concealed from the group. The community cannot doubt its justice; it must honestly believe in the righteousness of its action.”
By now attentive readers have picked up on some of the Christian intertexts in Girard’s theory. Mimesis, rivalry, and doubling find parallels in God and Satan, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. The scapegoat, the innocent victim burdened with the sins of the community, is powerfully resonant of Jesus Christ. For Girard, Christ is the scapegoat who “broke” the mechanism by transcending it in the Resurrection. In today’s post-Resurrection and post-Pentecost world, under the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit, the scapegoat mechanism and myth-making no longer hold up to contain and conceal mimetic violence. Even if someone is scapegoated, others will always see through it.
Unfortunately, the problem with the failure of the scapegoat mechanism is that the contagion of mimetic violence remains unresolved. Remember, the scapegoat was meant to “cleanse” the community of its violence and restore order. When people see through the mechanism, no reconciliation is achieved, and so violence continues to fester. This is the world we live in following the Resurrection. Christ, the unconquered scapegoat and innocent victim, and the Holy Spirit, have brought transparency to our concealments and deceits. Such a world has only two options: conversion or an ever-increasing cycle of violence. The latter in Girard’s terminology is “apocalypse” – not an external event brought about by an angry God, but a progressive and, someday perhaps total, self-destruction. As Carr explains: “The apocalypse definitively demythologizes the wrath of God as nothing other than the violence of man against man”.
Girard’s paradigm seems to offer a very pessimistic outlook for humanity. If we are doomed to a spiral of ever greater mimetic violence against one another, are there reasons for hope? Girard is clear that the demythologisation of the scapegoat mechanism frees us to go against the grain. We do not have to descend into jealousy and violence. Carr writes that “for individuals, […] there is hope because one is free to choose not to descend into negative mimesis, to become a rival, to reciprocate and retaliate, but rather to choose positive mimesis through a model who is at ‘the right distance’”. Who is this positive model we can imitate? The scapegoat has become the model. This is a model we can safely follow because, in His divine perfection, it is impossible to encroach upon Him or outdo Him, while in His humanity, we can identify ourselves ever more with Him.
Carr’s book is brief, simply told, and well worth reading. There is a lot to ponder in Girard’s theory of mimesis, including complexities well beyond the limited scope of this article. Girard’s fascinating paradigm incorporating objects of desire, imitation, jealousies, volatilities, and self-destructive tendencies helps one to see through a society’s – and more importantly, one’s own – behaviours and motivations. This awakening, and the recalibration of our values it entails, is what makes Girard’s theory at times uncomfortable and challenging, at others bracing and invigorating. For Carr it “offends our everyday notion of ourselves”. For Thiel, in an interview elsewhere, “there’s something dangerous about Girard’s ideas”. Offensive and dangerous, mimetic theory forces us to confront the pettiness, the self-deceptions, the cruelties latent in our actions, to see ourselves as we really are.
In an interview with Luke Burgis, another recent scholar on Girard, Thiel offered a Girardian perspective on his initial investment in Facebook. Unlike MySpace and other rivals, he perceived that Facebook was built around identity – that is, desire. Facebook allowed people to see what others have and to want it for themselves. Facebook was a frothing and seething melting pot of imitation, rivalry, and jealousy. Reading Girard may not gain us Thiel’s treasures in this world, but engaging with its deeply Christian approach to human behaviour could help us store up treasures in the next.
About the Author: David Gibney
David Gibney is a school teacher in Dublin. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature.