Mimetic Desire in Musset's Lorenzaccio

1985 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-357
Author(s):  
James F. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Mimetic Desire

Sufi Springs: Air on an Oud String

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Rooney
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Initial Part ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
The Will ◽  
Arts Activism

The initial part of Caroline Rooney's essay offers an incisive account of the author's experience of Cairo in the years leading up to the 2011 uprisings that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak's rule. Rooney's narrative evinces an active Downtown cosmopolitan spirit characterised by a burgeoning sense of ‘audacity’ in forms of arts activism, and its attendant collective spirit of perseverance that increasingly rendered ineffective the repressive manoeuvres of Egypt's disciplinary State. Criticising the impulse to construe the Egyptian revolution in terms of a mimetic desire for a secular democracy on Western lines, Rooney insists that the Arab uprisings consisted, in many respects, of a revolution against Western-style free market neoliberalism. Countering the perpetual cynicism attendant to the latter, Rooney argues, requires a form of politicisation that maintains ‘the ongoing presence of the real as a matter of collective spirit’ – one that can outlast the colonial interlude by resisting the absolutist self-assertion of market fundamentalism and its collusions with ‘diplo-economic cosmopolitanism’ as a mode of class-discriminatory privilege, as well as the compromising nature of right-wing Islam. Rooney moves on to locate a counter-movement based on an alternative form of consciousness that manifests itself ‘as solidarity, as resoluteness, as genuine comradeship, as collective consciousness, as revolutionary faith and [as] festiveness.’ In the last part of her essay, Rooney raises the intriguing case of Sufism, and specifically its mulid rituals and its important role in the Egyptian revolutionary effort, as a relational cultural mode that can survive the will-to-dominance as a persistent and liberatory collective gesture.

On Girard

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 59-65
Author(s):  
Mark Juergensmeyer
Keyword(s):  
Driving Force ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
The World ◽  
Violent Acts

Much of what Freud and Girard have said about the function of symbolic violence in religion has been persuasive. Even if one questions, as I do, Girard’s idea that mimetic desire is the sole driving force behind symbols of religious violence, one can still agree that mimesis is a significant factor. One can also agree with the theme that Girard borrows from Freud, that the ritualized acting out of violent acts plays a role in displacing feelings of aggression, thereby allowing the world to be a more peaceful place in which to live. But the critical issue remains as to whether sacrifice should be regarded as the context for viewing all other forms of religious violence, as Girard and Freud have contended.

Eulogies for the Resistance

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 272-292
Author(s):  
Jack Joy
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Syrian Civil War ◽  
Moral Universe

Recent studies into the notion of crisis argue that affective states of insecurity can offer an instrumental utility to elites seeking to sustain existing power relations. Through their discursive construction, such imaginative landscapes help legitimize previously illegitimate forms of political action, rationalize heightened forms of collective sacrifice and instill new disciplinary technologies among political subjects. Building on this growing body of scholarly work, in this study I use critical discourse analysis (CDA) to address Hizbullah’s mobilization of a specific ‘crisis imaginary’ as part of its efforts to legitimize its ongoing involvement in the Syrian civil war. This perceptual regime works to uphold a ‘state of exception’ for Hizbullah, sustain the practice of martyrdom as a form of Girardian ‘mimetic desire’ and structure a wider moral universe that continues to bind the party’s audience to the resistance society while maintaining their continued docility.

Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Hayot
Keyword(s):  
Mimetic Desire

Mimetic Desire

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mimetic Desire

scholarly journals The figure of the impostor to the throne in Russian political culture: Between sacralization and mimesis

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 284-301
Author(s):  
Ilya Kalinin
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
Time Of Troubles

Proceeding from materials relating to the “Time of Troubles”, this article examines the phenomenon of imposture (samozvanchestvo) as one of the symbols of Russian political history from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. The duration of the “impostor epidemic” coincides exactly with that of serfdom, and imposture itself can be described as a social reaction to a form of authority founded on total personal dependence. The article aims to develop further Boris Uspenskij’s argument that reveals in sacralization of the Tsar’s power in medieval Russia the main reason of imposture. René Girard’s conception of mimetic desire serves as the theoretical perspective for such a development.

scholarly journals Mimetic desire in autism spectrum disorder

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Baudouin Forgeot d’Arc ◽  
Fabien Vinckier ◽  
Maël Lebreton ◽  
Isabelle Soulières ◽  
Laurent Mottron ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Mimetic Desire

The Mimetic Desire of the Social Status in ‘The Bell-Tower’

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-318
Author(s):  
Ju-Hoang Lee
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Bell Tower ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals The Artist in and of the Work

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Ian Tan
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Desire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Mimetic Desire

This paper will explore the problematic link between biography and literature as it is self-consciously demonstrated by Stephen’s theory about Shakespeare in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I argue how Stephen’s construction of the link between Shakespeare’s life and his work both illuminates and repeats a larger critical gesture between biography and literature. This is based on a mode of hermeneutical temporality which sees the present moment as containing within itself temporal fullness to be realised in a teleological fashion. However, Joyce’s own ironic construction of Stephen, who disavows his own theorizing, should alert us as to how much we can take this theory at face value with respect to a character who invokes the name of Shakespeare as much to construct a theory of him as to deconstruct it. In response to this, I argue that Rene Girard’s reading of Shakespeare in terms of mimetic desire provides a more compelling picture of the ways in which not only his characters, but the characters in Ulysses understand and articulate sexual desire as mediated by a prior belatedness patterned on the desire of the Other. However, I problematize Girard’s reading of Shakespeare and Joyce, and my final contention is that the desire of reading and self-fashioning is set in motion not so much by mimetic recognition as it is by the Lacanian notion of misrecognition. This forms the discursive conditions of the articulation of that desire while irrevocably fracturing not only the Girardian idea of the triangulation of desire, but also the ‘loop’ of literature and biography by thwarting all attempts to speak and desire from the place of the Other, as the Other.

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