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- Author: Michael Kirwan
- Full Title: Discovering Girard
- Category: #books
- St Augustine expresses this theologically: ‘Lord, our hearts are restless, till they rest in Thee!’ The fact is, people do not know what they want – therefore they imitate the desire of others.
- any kind of market is nothing other than a mechanism for the harmonious mediation of desires.
- The adult likes to assert his independence and to offer himself as a model to others; he invariably falls back on the formula ‘Imitate me!’ in order to conceal his own lack of originality.
- Once the desiring subject wants to possess the object for him or herself, the person who first brought the desired object to recognition becomes a rival and an obstacle. One word which Girard uses to describe the model who has become a rival is the biblical Greek word skandalon, scandal, or ‘stumbling block’.
- the second is ‘metaphysical desire’, where no specific object is aimed at, but rather an indeterminate but insistent yearning for the fullness of ‘being’.
- (Yet again, we have someone bowing to the authority of fictional literary examples, in order to declaim what ‘true love’ is like!)
- the shaky syllogism which Shakespeare is keen to question: ‘these fictional true lovers all endured hardships; we too are having to endure hardships; therefore we must be true lovers.’
- ‘Oh, if only you know what thoughts and emotions I am capable of, and how enlightened I am!’
- The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognize his right – as will be said later – to that thing, to make another recognize him as the owner of the thing.
- The Slave, on the other hand, is put to work by the Master, but precisely this work enables him, over time, to build up an independent consciousness. He works directly upon the world to transform it, and gradually becomes aware of the contradictions in his situation. The Slave, in contrast to the Master, can progress. There are three stages, or ideologies, to his progression: stoicism, scepticism, and ‘unhappy consciousness’; all are attempts by the Slave to reconcile his sense of freedom with the objective condition of his enslavement.
- Hegel’s ‘Promethean’ philosophy celebrates the subject’s optimistic drive out of alienation and towards self-fulfilment, while the ‘novelistic’ imagination has seen through this dream and no longer believes it:
- Promethean philosophy sees in the Christian religion only a humanism which is still too timid for complete self-assertion. The novelist, regardless of whether he is a Christian, sees in the so-called modern humanism a subterranean metaphysics which is incapable of recognising its own nature.