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Resources

The online study guides are designed to use with small groups and provide leader guide and student material. For a deeper look at applications of mimetic theory, go to the Presentations, Papers and Helpful Links. Our review section rates movies and television shows according to how well they represent mimetic theory.

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Mimetic Theory 101

Mimetic Theory 101

Mimetic Theory 101 is our video class introducing the basics of mimetic theory.  Let us know if you have any comments or questions!

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Daniel's Movie Reviews

Daniel's Movie Reviews

Hi,

My name is Daniel Cojocaru. I’m currently a PhD-student in English Literature at the University of Oxford. A couple of years back, when I was still reading for my master’s degree at the University of Zurich, I coincidentally stumbled over René Girard’s mimetic theory. Reading Girard, I’ve found that his theory offered convincing explanations for literary problems where other theories were failing. But what is more important, I understood that here we have a theory that beyond literature and social science powerfully addresses the human condition as such in the revealing light of the Gospels.

It was while I was on exchange at the University of Edinburgh, watching Fight Club at a film night, that I suddenly realized: “Hang on, this is in popular form the stuff that Girard writes about.” Ever since, I have been interested, beyond my immediate work in literature, in the representations of Girardian themes in popular films. Thanks to the Raven Foundation, which has generously offered me this platform, I can now further explore these representations. For if Girard is right and scapegoating is a universal phenomenon, then the popular imagination of mainstream films offers a great opportunity to reveal his insights in a form that many of us are familiar with.

I hope you enjoy reading these short discussions of particular scenes that exemplarize key moments of Girardian theory. Please do comment on my reading or e-mail me your thoughts, as I think that the below scenes are rich sources for further discussion.

Yours,

Daniel Cojocaru

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The Financial Crisis and Scapegoating

The Financial Crisis and Scapegoating

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Bible Matters

Bible Matters

Join Education Director, Adam Ericksen, in exploring the Bible, its historical significance and its application to everyday life.

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Islam 101

Islam 101

Adam Ericksen explains Islam.

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The Raven ReView

The Raven ReView

Each quarterly edition of the Raven ReView focuses on a single theme. The features include the Founder's letter, the Trickster cartoon, an article by a guest contributor, and what's new on our website. To receive a copy by email, become a member.

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Youth Ministry 101

Youth Ministry 101

In Youth Ministry 101, Adam Ericksen shares his experiences and insights from his work in Christian formation with middle school and high school students. His contemporary topics and engaging methods offer wisdom for all ages.

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Making Peace with Revelation

Making Peace with Revelation

The Making Peace With Revelation workshop was held on Saturday, November 6, 2010. The rich resources of this event exploring the Book of Revelation are available to our website visitors here. Included are video recordings of the keynote lectures, the two keynote speakers explaining the contemporary relevance of the Book of Revelation, and a video montage by Reverend Tripp Hudgins. Your comments and questions are welcomed.

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Classics

Classics

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Papers

Papers

These papers explore aspects of mimetic theory.

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Monday, 27 October 2008 11:18

Friendship and Enmity in Desperate Housewives

Written by Daniel Cojocaru

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Valentine and Proteus can be friends only by desiring alike and, if they do, they are enemies. […] This Gordian knot is its own explanation, in the sense that any effort to bypass the mimetic double bind, short of total renunciation, must produce some kind of “monster”, a false reconciliation of entities that should remain irreconcilable.[1]
It seems that we generally assume that conflicts arise because of our differences between each other. In the above quote on Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona from A Theater of Envy and throughout his oeuvre René Girard claims the opposite. As long as we are different, conflict cannot occur as our desires remain isolated from each other. It is only once our desires merge on the same object that potentially conflict can develop. However, conflict does not originate from the desire for an object but from the desire for the rival’s being. Only when we are no longer different, when we desire to be like our neighbour, can our desires converge on the same object. Conflict is thus a result of the loss of differences due to imitated desire.
This is exactly the situation as we find it in the following excerpt from an episode of Desperate Housewives (Season 4, Episode 12). Bree Van de Kamp, played by Marcia Cross, explains to her rival Katherine Mayfair (Dana Delany) that the reason why she and her friends can get along without conflict, is because they each have their niche. Their differences protect them from rivalry. Katherine on the other hand occupies the same niche as Bree. While it is true that their being alike potentially opens the way for a much closer friendship, there is also the risk of a much fiercer rivalry. This is the Gordian Knot Girard talks about. This is why the most vicious conflicts are between “enemy brothers”, or in this case “enemy sisters”, – because they once were the best of friends.
However, as the narrator accurately observes at the end of the episode, we are usually blind to the fact that friendship and enmity emerge from the same source, which is the imitation of desire.

[1] René Girard, A Theater of Envy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 16f.
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Monday, 02 February 2009 12:48

Fight Club

Written by Daniel Cojocaru
According to the DVD-commentary of Fight Club by director David Fincher, the “Chemical Burn” – scene is the turning point in the narrative. The narrator’s imaginary alter ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) exposes the anonymous narrator (Edward Norton) to unbearable pain by kissing his hand and pouring lye on the saliva. The latter and lye cause a chemical reaction that results in a scarring burn. It is at this moment of utter pain that Tyler reveals the foundational mechanism of culture to the suffering narrator: “Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing.” A less painful way for them to reach this insight would have been to read their Girard. My point here is that this scene could have come straight from Violence and the Sacred.
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Monday, 30 March 2009 09:51

The Prestige: Discovering the Enemy's Secret History

Written by Daniel Cojocaru

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If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm hostility. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The following review of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige was inspired by the above quote which I discovered on the front page of the Raven Foundation’s website.
The Prestige exemplifies Longfellow’s insight by telling the story of two rival magicians in turn of the century London. The story of their escalating rivalry is reconstructed from their respective diaries.
Because, as the film teaches us, magicians tend to keep the secrets to their tricks in their diaries, both antagonists, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), steal each other’s diary. But they do not find what they hope to find. The respective diaries do not contain the secrets to their rival’s tricks but the secret to their rival’s identity – or rather the lack thereof. As they read each other’s secret histories, they discover that their rivalry is a quest for the being that the other is suspected to possess – driven by their own lack of being. They imitate each other’s mask of independent being: an illusion both are forced to keep up in the face of their rivalry.
But this insight is only gained in retrospect. Only once they both have successfully achieved their mutual destruction – and thus think they have finally assumed the coveted position of the rival – do they discover that there is nothing there: that the rival’s happiness, the life that they envied is in reality a history of division, torment and evidence of a fickle and contradictory nature – ultimately a lack of being.
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Tuesday, 09 June 2009 13:38

X-Men: Girard and Derrida

Written by Daniel Cojocaru

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In Violence and Difference Andrew McKenna explores the many parallels between Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and René Girard’s victimary hypothesis. This important book not only explains why Girard’s theory can stand the test of deconstruction but also argues convincingly how the mimetic hypothesis can save deconstruction from becoming a mere language game and can recover an ethical dimension to poststructuralism.
But to the uninitiated Derrida’s criticism of the whole of Western philosophy can often seem inaccessible and tedious in its insistence on a complex origin and undecidability of meaning. It is quite tempting at times in an act of frustration to conclude that life is too short for deconstruction.
X-Men 3: The Last Stand offers us an entrance into the Derridean world that might lead us to a different conclusion. In the third part of the cinema version of the comic-saga, humans have apparently found a cure for the mutant x-gene that gives the mutants their supernatural powers and makes them different from humans. Interestingly enough, the source of the cure is a mutant boy, who has as his supernatural gift the force of neutralizing mutant powers. As Dr Kavita Rao, member of the research team that developed the cure, explains: “We can replicate it but we can’t generate it.” Thus even when all the mutants are “cured” and turned into “normal” humans, there remains one mutant at the very centre of humanity from which the cure stems.
The difference between mutants and humans cannot therefore be absolutely discerned. It follows the same “poststructure” as Derrida’s discussion of Plato in “Plato’s Pharmacy”. Plato can only distinguish “real” knowledge from the madness of the poison of false knowledge through an act that works itself like a poison, an antidote. The same applies to Girard’s theory of violence. When a society tries to expulse violence to an outside through the expulsion of a scapegoat it commits an act of violence that will remain at the very centre of the community.
In X-Men 3 a rebellious mutant group under the lead of “Magneto” tries to kill the boy who is the source of the cure in order to destroy humanity. However, their project is subject to the same paradox as the human project. They will never be able to kill the boy because as soon as they come close to him they lose their supernatural power and become human. There is thus never an outside to either humanity nor the mutants and thus no absolute difference between the two but only difference within the two – what Derrida called differance. The difference between humans and mutants is produced from a source that is both mutant and human and cannot itself be differentiated and is thus truly undecidable.
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Wednesday, 26 August 2009 14:36

The Children of Men

Written by Daniel Cojocaru

 

One major point of criticism that is often inveighed against René Girard’s mimetic theory is that it seems to stem from a culturally pessimistic position. And to a certain extent this criticism is understandable. When we read Girard’s oeuvre his accounts of mimetic desire are largely negative. Think of his descriptions of enemy brothers, where he reminds us that the most intimate relations between human beings can be fiercely antagonistic. Or when he claims that the only cultural mechanism to grant us relative peace is the violent, satanic expulsion of one victim. But then he robs us of even of this relative peace through his reading of the Gospels as the revelation of the innocence of the victim, with the consequence that in our modern day version of the sacrificial crisis we might end up in a situation of violence without end.
And even when within the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R, the society devoted to developing Girard’s theory) there are voices speaking of positive mimesis as an alternative, one wing of COV&R immediately claims that there is no positive mimesis. So are we hopelessly trapped in our conflictive imitations and cycles of violence? Is Girard a cultural pessimist, not come to bring us peace but a sword?
Girard himself has always pointed out that mimesis itself is neither positive nor negative but that it depends on the models whether the effects are positive or negative. And if it seems that he does not outline an alternative to mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism, then I would like to suggest it is for a specific reason. For Girard, there is an alternative but it is an alternative that he is very cautious of capturing in specific terms, as this alternative too might be turned into an oppressive ideology of violence.
In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World Girard points to the Johannine Logos as found in the prologue of the Gospel of John, the Logos of non-violence, as being the alternative to the cycle of violence. He distinguishes it from the Greek Logos of philosophy based on reason and states: “The Johannine Logos is foreign to any kind of violence; it is therefore forever expelled, an absent Logos that has never had any direct, determining influence over human cultures. […] The Logos of love puts up no resistance; it always allows itself to be expelled by the Logos of violence.”[1]
In this description one might have the impression that this logos has no power at all to suspend mimetic conflicts that it is of no significance whatsoever. Yet this apparent weakness is exactly its strength. Maybe an illustration of this power in weakness will help us to understand the Johannine Logos a bit better. The recent dystopian film The Children of Men portrays a world in which humanity has become infertile – people have not seen a new born in more then twenty years. But then, in a modern recapitulation of the Nativity story a young woman becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby in a refugee camp.
At one point mother and child have to walk through a war zone and suddenly the warring parties suspend their fighting because, having not seen a child for more than twenty years, they are in awe of the scene that unfolds before them. The weakness and innocence of the new born child has the power to suspend all violence. It is the light shining in the darkness of mimetic violence. But as soon as mother and child have passed through, the conflicts resume. As in the prologue of John, the darkness has not understood the light.
It is this fragility of the Johannine Logos that lets Girard be wary of formulating a clear alternative to mimetic violence. But it is this Logos of non-violence – which is Christ – that Girard and the Gospels encourage us to imitate. Even if fragile, this is the Logos through which we might find, after a long and arduous journey – peace. It has the absolute power to overcome violence in its weakness– if only we, in our weakness, continue to imitate it.

[1] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World Trans. Stephen Bann &
Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. pp. 271/274.
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Thursday, 17 July 2008 10:09

Scapegoating in Spiderman 3

Written by Daniel Cojocaru

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According to René Girard’s Mimetic Theory the expulsion of a scapegoat is made possible through the projection of one’s own guilt onto someone else. Only when we thoroughly believe that the victim of our projection is guilty, can we engage in scapegoating.
In this respect it is interesting that in Spiderman 3 Peter Parker aka Spiderman struggles more with himself than with any outside enemy. The “black Spiderman” embodies the dark side of both Spiderman and Peter Parker. “Spidy” is starting to enjoy his vileness and increasingly neglects his superhero duties. Once he comes to his senses, Spidy tries to shake off the enticing black spider-suit. The suit, which has developed an agency of its own, is clinging to him like a chewing gum stuck in one’s hair and only lets go of him once Peter Parker’s rival Eddie Brock appears. His rival is enveloped by the suit and from that moment on Spiderman’s dark side is externalized and projected onto Eddie. Being rid of his internal conflict through the projection of his own dark side onto a scapegoat, Spiderman can once again assume his position as a “good” American superhero. In the final showdown Brock is defeated by Spidy. The latter regains his identity through the expulsion of the demonized Brock and his admiring audience will soon forget that it was only because Brock took the destructive black spider-suit onto himself like a scapegoat that the return of the good hero was possible.
In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning René Girard draws on Matthew 12:26 to explain that Jesus understands the paradoxical process of good being restored by evil, as it is portrayed in Spiderman 3: “If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand?“ Girard suggests that Satan is indeed driving out himself, that violence casts out violence. And that is exactly what happens in Spiderman 3. Spiderman violently projects his own dark side onto Brock, before violently getting rid of that dark side by defeating Brock. Spidy’s kingdom cannot stand and the resistance of the film to a happy ending is evidence of a certain awareness of the violent nature of the restoration of Spiderman’s identity.
I leave it to the reader to infer what the discussed scene means for American identity today, the war in Iraq, and the war on terror. May I just suggest one final observation: the black spider-suit appears to consist of a rather oily substance.
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Wednesday, 10 June 2009 12:09

Judges: Oppression

Written by Adam Ericksen

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What happens when the oppressed become the oppressors?

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Thursday, 27 August 2009 14:13

Ruth: Faith and Sex

Written by Adam Ericksen

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Ruth, I think, is ultimately about how to participate in meaningful relationships.  Does the sexuality in Ruth surprise you?

A friend pointed out an interesting connection on my facebook page.  "Bethlehem" means "House of Bread."  Naomi and her family had to leave the "House of Bread" to find sustenance somewhere else.  My friend stated, "All of us experience famine--in work, in friendship, in love, in marriage, --so where do we go to feed this famine?"

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Thursday, 15 October 2009 10:58

First Samuel: The Ark of Truth

Written by Adam Ericksen

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Is there a difference between possessing the truth and the truth possessing you?  

What difference might it make if we believed the truth possessed us?

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Monday, 08 September 2008 12:56

Mimetic Theory 101: Session 1 - Keeping Up with the Jones'

Written by Adam Ericksen

1.  Do you agree that we influence one another to desire certain objects?  Or, do our desires arise within our own selves?

2.  Have you ever tried to "keep up with the Jones'"?

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