According to Rene' Girard, every person feels as if she or he is missing ‘something’, a being of which others,... Read More
According
to Rene' Girard, every person feels as if she or he is missing ‘something’,
a being
of which others, by contrast, seem to possess. We want to be like our
models; therefore, we want to possess what they possess. Girard calls
this model the ‘mediator of desire’. Our desire is never
spontaneous, but always mimetic:
the only reason why we desire an object is because that object is
possessed by someone else – our model, the mediator of desire.
Here
we have a symbolic, highly impactful representation of the mimetic
desire. A crowd of crows pounces on the fruit, the ‘object of
desire’. On the right, the circle signals the negative space of
what Girard calls the ‘metaphysical’ desire: it’s not the
object itself that we want, but the being of the mediator. Which,
however, remains always unattainable to us.
