We are all Girardians now—whether we know it or not. The concepts minted in the early 1960s by the late French literary critic and philosopher René Girard explain the pathologies of the smartphone age as elegantly as Freud’s explained bourgeois neuroses at the turn of the last century.
While Freud was renowned in his own time, Girard, who died in 2015, is still far from a household name. A distinguished scholar and the author of nearly 30 books, he never broke through to a mass audience like his contemporary Harold Bloom, who transitioned from high theory to cultural critiques in the 1990s. Girard was not a public intellectual; he was a quietly influential, if recondite, academic: the Velvet Underground, not the Beatles.
But Girard’s posthumous reputation has been growing in certain elite circles. He was the subject of a 2018 biography, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, and a collection of his writings (edited by his biographer, Cynthia L. Haven) was published last month by Penguin Classics. J. D. Vance credits Girard for his conversion to Catholicism. But Girard’s most public and fervent advocate has been his former Stanford student Peter Thiel.
Girard has been called the “godfather of the ‘like’ button” because his theory of “mimetic desire”—our desires are not innate but learned by copying others—influenced Thiel’s decision to invest in Facebook. Steeped as he was in Girard’s theories, Thiel grasped right away that Facebook would accelerate our natural tendency to hate whom we envy. Yet Girard is no more responsible for the Like button than Einstein was for the nuclear bomb. Thiel used Girard’s ideas cynically to make money, not unlike the M.B.A.’s who read Sun Tzu for leadership tips. Girard wanted to expose mimetic desire, not empower it.
Girard, who remained apolitical throughout his life, may be a favorite philosophe of young, right-wing (or “red-pilled”) techies, but that does not mean that his thinking is inherently illiberal. Girard’s popularity among this crowd is largely a product of circumstance. He had the right idea at the right time in the right place: Stanford University, the country’s premier Silicon Valley feeder school.
And if Girard is now viewed as a latter-day prophet like Marshall McLuhan was, it’s only because his patient, close readings of the classics of literature, religion, and anthropology are so astute and original. Girard saw the future in the past, which, he argued, is always with us. For Girard, Internet users, no less than pre-modern peoples, are prone to shocking (if disembodied) acts of what he calls “collective violence and sacrifice.” Online behavior is a recapitulation of anarchic, archaic, primal, tribal social dynamics. The Stone Age brain still does Stone Age things, just on a smartphone.
According to Girard, when a catastrophe happens, a specific someone—a scapegoat—must be found to be at fault. There can never just be a plague: there has to be an Oedipus who has called down the wrath of the gods. Communities don’t get together rationally to plan solutions to their crises; they “endeavor to ward them off by triggering, through replacement victims, the mechanism that got them out of trouble the first time, the scapegoat mechanism.” It is not human nature to consider complex dynamic systems and second-order effects. We want to say that x caused y, x is bad, now x is gone, and everything is fine.
Girard goes looking for acts of mimesis and scapegoating—in Shakespeare, the Gospels, Nietzsche, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Camus—and finds them everywhere. Don Quixote turns into a knight-errant and receives a series of brutal beatings. Brutus, after killing Caesar, becomes a version of Caesar and is swiftly killed by Caesar’s loyalists. Raskolnikov commits murder to be more like Napoleon. Swann tortures himself over Odette’s suitors. The characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream swap desires. And so on.
According to Girard, when a catastrophe happens, a specific someone—a scapegoat—must be found to be at fault. There can never just be a plague: there has to be an Oedipus who has called down the wrath of the gods.
My 2022 play Dimes Square, which was about a competitive group of downtown writers and artists, was described somewhere as Girardian—which spurred me to actually read Girard. And once you have read Girard, you start to see mimetic rivalries and scapegoating everywhere, too.
On both the American left and right, various public figures (Trump, Biden, Fauci, Musk, Zuck, Gates, Pelosi, Marjorie Taylor Greene, to name a few popular choices) are held up as the root of society’s ills. But whatever they may be guilty of, their removal won’t actually solve incomprehensibly big, intertwined phenomena such as wars, pandemics, inflation, climate change, a decaying infrastructure, and so on. Girard’s most conservative trait was his pessimism.
As Thomas Hobbes, a touchstone for Girard, wrote, civilization is always on the verge of “war of all against all.” What differentiates Girard from Hobbes, or from other chroniclers of the transformation of the ancient and mythical into the modern (such as Claude Lévi-Strauss or Roberto Calasso), however, is his Catholic faith and even mysticism.
Girard’s core teaching is that we should seek to escape, through Christianity, cycles of (often violent) competition. For Girard, mimetic grace—Jesus is a scapegoat who knows he is innocent but allows himself to be sacrificed anyway—is the only way to break the ancient cycle of mimetic violence. This argument, in fact, is what persuaded Vance, in his own words (“Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims”), to convert.
For those of a more agnostic bent, however, a flip phone might suffice. Just as you don’t need to be a Marxist or a Freudian to find class struggle or the Oedipus complex useful, you do not need to be a Girardian, or a Catholic, to find Girard useful. Girard’s dogged attention to what he calls, echoing Nietzsche, the “eternal return” of the scapegoat mechanism (the cruelty and stupidity of the mob) deserves our attention. Girard warns us, with moving pathos, that we are always on the verge of reprising the horrors of history; we are still prone, especially in times of crisis and change, to retribution and revenge (digital or physical).
All Desire Is a Desire for Being is not a reissue but a new collection of essential essays and aphorisms selected by Haven. It’s the ideal way to read Girard, who only ever had one big idea. He was the kind of thinker Isaiah Berlin would have called a hedgehog, not a fox. But what an idea. Mimetic rivalry is a profound and disturbing discovery, and Girard dedicated his long and distinguished career to its explication. If he is right, we have to question whether the world we are actively creating—or perhaps passively re-creating—is not very, very wrong.
Matthew Gasda is a writer, theater director, and critic. His latest play, Morning Journal, runs through the end of August at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, which he co-founded
