Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist

10 REPUBLICS OF LETTERS
of us. They’d talk a little less warmly about the books they love. They’d spend a little less time
choosing between this car and that car, this phone and that phone, this stray puppy and that
stray puppy. (What difference could there be? Nothing distinguishes them either objectively or
subjectively, and “similarities alone are real.”) And above all, when Valentine’s Day rolls around,
they would give their partner a card that reads “I’ve loved you ever since that other guy laid eyes
on you.” The day I see that card on the shelves, I will develop a newfound admiration for our
friends at Imitatio.
Image by Jacqueline Basu
THE “IT’S JUST AN EXAGGERATION” DEFENSE
I know what some of you are thinking. Fair enough, you’ll say, desire isn’t always mimetic; but
René Girard didn’t really mean that. He said it, because it sounds better that way, but what he
really meant is that desire is sometimes mimetic. 34 Sometimes we desire things because other people
do; sometimes there’s no difference between choice A and choice B; sometimes we’re not as
autonomous as we’d like to think. And isn’t this more modest observation an important one to
bear in mind?
Well, yes and no. I mean, imagine if I tried to stage a comeback for Thales, that famous pre-
Socratic philosopher who claimed (more or less) that everything is made of water. 35 Here I am,
34 But really, isn’t it a bit tiresome to have to keep listening to these claims that nobody could possibly mean? Back in
2009, a Republican politician, Jon Kyl, claimed on the floor of the U.S. Senate that Planned Parenthood spends over
90 percent of its time performing abortions. When he was informed that the figure is actually closer to 3 percent, his
spokesman circulated a written memo declaring that “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement.” (See
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/08/jon-kyl/jon-kyl-says-abortion-services-are-wellover-90-pe/,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_04/028869.php.) This is bad enough
in politics, where one half-expects people to lie. But do we really have to accept, in academia, the defense that what
Girard said (or what Lacan said, or what Derrida said) was “not intended to be a factual statement”?
35 This is a popular simplification of Thales’s position. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 983b68–11, for a more nuanced
presentation.