In both Deceit, Desire, & the Novel: Self and Other in Literature and Violence and the Sacred, René Girard theorizes “‘triangular’ desire.” It’s the title of his first chapter in the former and culminates in “Freud and the Oedipus Complex” in the latter where Girard argues that the Oedipus Complex itself—wherein Freud theorized around what he both saw and didn't quite (want to) see as mimetic or triangular desire—by helping to obscure the fact of mimetic desire, serves to intensify the “double bind” that encapsulates the violent potentiality of mimetic desire. (It is this last point that enables Girard to conclude that we should “cast off that most burdensome of all mythologies: the myth of the Oedipus complex” [192].) The double bind, like Freud’s superego, is a more or less repressed anxiety, but it arises from the recognition that the object that one wants is altogether unpossessible as long as one wants to please the Other one admires and who also wants to possess the object. And this more or less conscious recognition that “The object represents a desire shared by both” means that “such sharing leads not to harmony, as one might suppose, but to bitter conflict” (181).
But first, a bit about triangular desire: In DDN, Girard’s formulation of desire is only posited as a “novelistic” desire or, put another way, a desire that novelists, as they’ve attended more and more to the individual or self (and, by extension, to subjectivity), have exposed. In other words, Girard is careful not to claim – in this book – that desire works this way anywhere but in the novel. However, he does broach the topic of “metaphysical desire” in his chapter called “The Metamorphosis of Desire,” when he claims:
Imitative desire is always a desire to be Another. There is only one metaphysical desire but the particular desires which instantiate this primordial desire are of infinite variety. From what we can observe directly, nothing is constant in the desire of a hero of a novel. Even its intensity is variable. It depends on the degree of ‘metaphysical virtue’ possessed by the object. And this virtue, in turn, depends on the distance between object and mediator. (83)
Of course, he immediately anchors “metaphysical desire” in the “hero of a novel,” but some overflow escapes, from the first sentence. As long as the subject always wants to be Another, the subject will always desire what the Other desires, and the extent to which the desire is not the subject’s own and is not even oriented toward the object is the extent to which Girard finds this problem interesting. He reworks this very idea in VS, and comes up with an essential form of human desire, which might best be described as desire-as-ontology.
Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even greater plenitude of being. (146)
We see here a preexisting subject (thus, a subject that already is [that already desires], but that doesn’t recognize its own being) who desires to be, but who doesn’t quite recognize this desire (if s/he did, s/he wouldn’t get distracted by the object). What this amounts to, then, is a subject whose condition of possibility is the desire to be as much as the Other already is (or already seems to be). It’s never clear what this “plenitude of being” entails[1]—it’s not of interest for Girard (perhaps because it’s only an illusion anyway);[2] what matters for Girard is that subjects will always choose some other person as a model—and, again, that it's the model and not the subject, not even the object, that will choose the particular form the object-desire will take for the subject.
It is clear that a mystification is involved in preventing the subject from seeing that s/he wants not the object but to be the mediator/model—and only secondarily the object and only because the mediator appears to want it. And given the mystification,[3] the subject will continue to move as near as possible to possessing the object. As the model/Other comes to see this threat of dispossession, the relationship between the subject and h/er model becomes a rivalry, and it is, in part, for this reason that mimetic desire always initiates a reciprocity of desire. I say “in part” because the presence of the subject for the model always already means that the subject functions, more or less, as a model for the model—insofar as the model, also, is a subject. (Mimetic desire is essentially “contagious.”)[4] But to say that reciprocity is caused by mimetic desire would be to say that subjects respond to threats to their object-desires, which is clearly not (or not only) the case. Mimetic desire is always prior to object-desire.
But to say that presence alone initiates mimetic desire is, likewise, only right “in part.” Girard’s analysis of mimesis as a more efficacious explanation of desire than the Oedipus complex draws on an anthropology of the Trobrianders (185ff.) that he takes from Malinowski (as well as a sustained close-reading of Freud). The Trobrianders are a matrilineal culture, and it is the maternal uncle who serves as the son’s model. This clearly removes the significant problems with the Oedipal complex, as the parricide-incest desire no longer can be seen to arise from the figure of the model/uncle. This has one benefit (“The mimesis is channeled in such a way that desire will not take its own obstacle as an object” [187]), but also one troubling consequence: society chooses (or structurally establishes) the subject’s model: the “ideal is indeed provided by the culture.” Thus, the double-bind is happily averted, but insofar as Girard’s analysis makes clear the distinction between an available (or present) mediator and an appropriate mediator, it seems clear that some Others matter more for subjects than others. And this means that which Other matters most is a choice of culture. Further, to assert that the model/mediator is a cultural production is to open up not just a space for an argument for that claim but also a field of inquiry that asks: why such models get chosen or—if that’s indeterminable—what purpose the selection of such models serves; how they get chosen and how the selection comes to be internalized by the subject; and above all, how that choice comes to be seen as natural and why (and how) its unnaturalness comes to be internalized by the subject; and above all, how that choice comes to be seen as natural and why (and how) its unnaturalness comes to be mystified.
I highlight this last set of questions because it resonates the most with me,[5] which is at least one criterion for a dissertation-length inquiry. However, I’m not (yet) sure that these are questions whose answers are specifically answerable within the field of literature or rhetoric. I clearly see how answers are available within these fields, but I’m not sure that the pre-selection of these fields isn’t a way of stacking the deck. That is, I could always lean on forms of poststructuralism to say that subjectivity is so overdetermined by language that representation is what we need to study if we want to figure out how subjectivity takes on a valence of mimetic desire. But I’d rather discover this to be true than to assume it and then try to argue for it—even though I realize how difficult it is to discover anything other than what one has always already (more or less [un]consciously) assumed.
[1] I’m torn about whether a definition of being/ness matters for those who use Girard. On the one hand, it doesn’t seem to be sufficient to say “subjects always desire to be another” without explaining why or how, and equally, it doesn’t seem sufficient to answer the why with: “because subjects are deluded into thinking the Other possesses a superior being.” Both the delusion and the being remain mystified, as does the question of why the subject would desire the being anyway—or put another way, why the subject would feel that s/he lacked an ontological qualification that the Other possessed. And to foreground “lack” in this way: is it not the same reliance upon object-desire that Girard nails Freud for: replacing identification (with the father) with Oedipal (parricide-incest) desire. On the other hand, these ontological inquiries are not ones to be taken up by my project proper. Nevertheless: if one is to rely on Girard, ought one not have thought through Girard’s ontological presuppositions?
[2] However, will it suffice to say “it’s an illusion” and not to ask where the illusion comes from?
[3] But must the mystification remain only “given”? See note 5(b).
[4] Metaphysical desire becomes more contagious “as the mediator draws nearer to the hero. Contagion and proximity are, after all, one and the same phenomenon. Internal mediation is present when one ‘catches’ a nearby desire…” (DDN 99).
[5] Other questions have arisen during my reading:
(a) Where does metaphysical desire come from, or is positing it as metaphysical just a way of saying it can’t be explained, and if so, why should we believe such a sense of desire exists, especially if we can’t see it?
(b) Why the mystification? Why does it emerge? Where does it come from? Why can’t subjects see it? What would happen if they did? Is mimetic desire always and necessarily mystificatory? If so, what happens when we realize that at least the Trobrianders “cope with the double bind more effectively” (187)? Have they demystified mimetic desire? Or have they simply found a work-around? And if it’s the latter, then is demystification really necessary?
(c) If subjects only desire objects because mediators desire object, then why do mediators (insofar as they are always other people, more or less individuated from the desiring subjects, they too are subjects) desire?
(d) If “There is a clear resemblance between identification with the father and mimetic desire [insofar as] both involve the choice of a model” (VS 170) then who is the subject presumed to make the choice, and on what grounds does the desire for this choice arise?
