Bulletin 65 – August 2020

We are in the midst of a pandemic, and, in this context of suffering and death, Oedipus the King , c. 429-425 BCE, is all the more disturbingly resonant. It starts with the Priest’s report of a plague that is devastating Thebes:

The fever-bearing god,
A plague most hated, falls upon and strikes the city.
By him is the house of Cadmus emptied, and dark
Hades grows wealthy in wailing and lamentation. (27-30)

Sophocles has keenly in mind the plague that struck Athens in 430 BCE even as it was engaged in a wrenching conflict with Sparta. Perhaps a form of typhus, this plague came in waves for several years, killing as many as 100,000 people, one-third of the city-state’s population. Thucydides contracted the disease but survived—the great leader Pericles did not—and, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, he summarizes its effect on Athenian society: “The catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.”

As David Mulroy has observed, “the play’s action begins with a plague that forces Oedipus to search for a sinner whose presence is polluting the city and angering the gods. There is no evidence that earlier versions of the story featured a plague. It is a detail that Sophocles invented for his dramatization of the story” (Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, 2011). Tyrrell conveys skillfully the scope and scale of the plague, but the Greek is more vivid and unnerving. As G. O. Hutchinson has said, Sophocles at the outset renders the plague “with immense descriptive power. A multiplicity of misfortunes, stressed with abundant anaphora and other devices, are presented as all occurring at this time together…. Present verbs given an urgent sense of a continuous situation now” (“Sophocles and Time,” Sophocles Revisited: Essays Presented to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed. Jasper Griffin, 1999).

Memorable as this description is, given by the Priest and reinforced by the Chorus, the plague in Oedipus the King is perplexing: its wounds and ravages are forcibly evoked at the outset, yet it then disappears from the characters’ experiences and memories. Charles Segal makes exactly this point: “Even before the midpoint of the action, the plague is simply forgotten. Oedipus’ search for his origins completely overshadows the sufferings of the city that have set the plot in motion. We hear of the plague for the last time when Jocasta reproaches Oedipus and Creon for quarreling in private while ‘the land suffers from such a disease’” (Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge, 2^nd ed., 2001).

In her stimulating essay in the Casebook, Helene Peter Foley calls attention to this curious feature of the ending and tries to explain it: “All members of the cast, both chorus and protagonists, are distracted from the plague that grips the city by their concern with the fate of Oedipus as destroyer of his own house” (319). As the play winds down, someone should remember the plague. No one does. This prompts Foley to place the blame on Creon: “He ignores the issue of the plague and expresses no sense of urgency about taking immediate action” (319). But it is not Creon who ignores the plague. It is Sophocles who does, deliberately.

“Oedipus promises to solve the mystery and end the plague,” says the scholar-translator Robert Bagg: “He begins a passionate inquest which reveals, when all the facts finally fit together, that it is Oedipus himself who has caused the plague. It is he who is polluting Thebes with his presence: a man who has killed his father and incestuously loved his mother” (Oedipus the King, trans. 1982). But the facts do not fit together, nor are they clear. The main elements of the plot are the plague, the murder of Laïos, the parentage of Oedipus. These are connected, or seem to be, but, in the text itself, the fit, the relationship among them is not precisely defined and articulated.

What Sophocles does is akin to a technique that Stephen Greenblatt has identified in Shakespearean drama:

Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays, that he could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations. (Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, 2004)

In his Oedipus, c. 55 CE, Seneca handles the ending differently. Jocasta, on stage, stabs herself to death with a sword, and the blinded Oedipus says:

All you with bodies burdened by disease
and fighting for your lives, I leave this place.
Look up! For even as I move away,
a gentler spirit animates the sky.
Whoever at death’s door somehow lives on,
let him now gulp great draughts of oxygen.
Go offer hope to those resigned to die;
the pestilence leaves Thebes along with me.
Destructive Fates and sickness’ trembling fear,
wasting, black plague, dementia—come here,
be my companions! All to me are dear. (trans. Rachel Hadas)

The plague will cease because Oedipus, who precipitated it, is departing from the city.

The ending is similar in Voltaire’s Oedipe, 1718. Oedipus has blinded himself; Jocasta is alive, soon to take her own life. The High Priest speaks:

A happy calm is warding off the storms
A most serene sun is rising above your heads.
Contagious fires are no longer lit.
Your tombs which were opening are already shut.
Death is fleeing and the god of heaven and earth
Is announcing his blessings through the voice of thunder. (trans. Frank J. Morlock)

In contrast, in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King the plague might or might not end. There is no mention of it one way or the other.

Through reports from the outside, and recollections from Jocasta, Oedipus has learned about his origins. But has it been proven that he killed Laïos? He might have—he thinks he did. On the other hand: the evidence is more in his mind than it is in the text. John Jones states that Tiresias functions as the authority we should rely on: he is “a prophet; he speaks for the god and his words disclose the hard bedrock truth of the situation” (On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, 1962). But Sophocles does not reveal “the hard bedrock truth.” The other characters are seeking to establish it and believe that they do, and, as readers and theater-goers, we do versions of the same. We know the myth of Oedipus and import this configuration of relationships into the text so that the action of the play confirms it. But Sophocles gives no definitive answers to the questions he raises. I am reminded of Roland Barthes’s reference, in an essay on Michel Foucault, to “une question cathartique posée au savoir, à tout le savoir.”

From this perspective, the most provocative essays in the Casebook are by Girard, Goodhart, Anspach, and Frederick Ahl. For Girard—who analyzed the Oedipus myth and play on a number of occasions—Sophocles’ text is a deep exploration of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating:

The only distinction between Oedipus and his adversaries is that Oedipus initiates the contest, triggering the tragic plot. He thus has a certain head start on the others. But though the action does not occur simultaneously, its symmetry is absolute…. At first, each of the protagonists believes that he can quell the violence; at the end each succumbs to it. All are drawn unwittingly into the structure of violent reciprocity—which they always think they are outside of, because they all initially come from the outside and mistake this positional and temporary advantage for a permanent and fundamental superiority. (246-247)

Ultimately, according to Girard, “Oedipus fails to fix the blame on Creon or Tiresias. Creon and Tiresias are successful in their efforts to fix the blame on him. The entire investigation is a feverish hunt for a scapegoat, which finally turns against the very man who first loosed the hounds” (256).

The person who indicts Oedipus most harshly (and luridly) is Oedipus himself. As Anspach astutely comments, “not only does Oedipus accept without question that he has married his mother, he instantly assumes that he has murdered his father as well” (236). Someone must be guilty, and all converge on Oedipus—a remorseless enactment of scapegoating that he takes part in. He is determined to know the truth and concludes he has found it. But, as Ahl indicates, his truth may not be the truth. Like others, he hears what he wants to hear (427).

In the accounts of Laïos’ death, there is a potent ambiguity. Was the crime perpetrated by one man or many, by a murderer or murderers? (See lines 99-149, 292-293, 308, 715-716, 842-854.) “What is striking,” Goodhart contends, “is not only that Oedipus may not be the murderer of Laïos, but that there is a curious insistence in the play that the murderers of Laïos may be many” (399). “Rather than an illustration of the myth,” he maintains, “the play is a critique of mythogenesis, an examination of the process by which one arbitrary fiction comes to assume the value of truth” (412; Anspach, 239).

The essays by Girard and the others are compelling. But they falter in a crucial respect. Each implies or declares outright that Oedipus is not guilty. This is what Girard’s insights into religion and culture require—the victim of scapegoating is innocent. As he has argued elsewhere, New Testament revelation brings to light the truth behind Greek myth: “Le récit évangélique refute non seulement la culpabilité de Jesus mais tous les mensonges du même genre, par exemple celui qui fait d’Oedipe un donneur de peste parricide et incestueux” (Quand ses choses commerceront, 1994). But Sophocles does not present this conclusion, and, when we voice it, we are making a judgment that in its speed and certainty resembles the one that Oedipus propounds and clings to. We affirm his innocence; he affirms his guilt. As for Sophocles: he is, intentionally, non-committal.

Perhaps there were many murderers or bandits. Perhaps there was only one. Or, the murderer may be the man among the many who did the actual killing. Oedipus could not be the killer, but he could be. Scapegoats are innocent, except when they are not.

There is another complication that Girard overlooks, and it is expressed in the first words that Oedipus speaks, in his opening address to the afflicted of Thebes: “I have come myself, / Oedipus, called renowned in the estimation of all” (lines 7-8). In these lines, rivalry is not between two persons, as Girard’s classic formulation posits, but between Oedipus and himself—that is, the accomplished and acclaimed person he is and his own conception of the person he must become in the future. Being the renowned Oedipus fills him with pride but is a burden to him too: the person he has to imitate and transcend is himself.

The Priest praises Oedipus as “most powerful in the estimation of all” (line 40). Tyrrell’s repeated “estimation” shows the mirroring of Oedipus’s eminent sense of who he is and the identity by which others celebrate his uniqueness. He triumphed over the monstrous Sphinx, solving the riddle: “What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night?” He thereby liberated Thebes, was honored with the kingship, and received Jocasta’s hand in marriage. The Priest says to him: “Come, best of mortals, restore the city again” (line 46). Oedipus’s mimetic competitor is himself. This is his desire and predicament, a maddening one.

Oedipus must be as good or better than the man he became and is. As the action unfolds, this demand on himself, which he generates from his awareness of how he is seen by others, grows intolerable. What Oedipus does, is to resolve this crisis by avowing—before all of the evidence is in, and before it can be sifted through and scrutinized—that he has done the dreadful deeds. Everyone agrees to this, as they should not but as they must. As Girard says, “the firm conviction of the group is based on no other evidence than the unshakable unanimity of its own illogic” (257).

In his essay in the Casebook on scapegoat rituals in ancient Greece, Jan Bremmer tells us that in the myths he has assembled and explicated, the scapegoats “spontaneously” offer themselves: “Such behavior is the rule…. The victims always sacrifice themselves voluntarily” (173). This is the choice, paradoxically fated and free, that Oedipus makes. At once, he is Oedipus, the rival, and the scapegoat, the one who is sinfully different and who therefore must be excluded.

Oedipus, infamous, soon will be exiled. He merits this punishment because he is, he asserts, “most hateful to the gods.” He piercingly states the sentence that Creon should impose: “Send me abroad, away from here” (line 1521). But “most hateful” means singularity, prestige and renown as well as shame. For “my ills, my misfortunes / no man except me can bear” (lines 1414-1415).

In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus is extolled for his gift of prophecy, and, we are informed, he died a death nearly divine:

It was some messenger
sent by the gods, or some power of the dead
split open the fundament of earth, with good will,
to give him painless entry. He was sent on his way
with no accompaniment of tears, no pain of sickness;
if any man ended miraculously,
this man did. (lines 1883-1889, trans. David Grene)

This is the man who, at the close of Oedipus the King, had resolved the mimetic crisis he embodied by embracing his guilt for crimes he may or may not have committed. He blinds himself. We cannot take our eyes off him.

So when Gifford says early on while discussing the influence of Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, that no one else was talking about the sacred and violence, he is getting to his subject as fast as he can, drawing on one of Schwager and Girard’s (and Chantre’s) special distinctions, the difference between the sacred (archaic violence) and the holy. If you ask at the library reference desk for “violence and religion” instead you will be deluged with articles, books, conferences and internet discussions from all over the planet, including of course countless episodes where Girard was asked if religion was violent. Bring several tote bags to the counter.

In the first four chapters, Gifford is headed towards how mimetic theory can prepare for reconciliation, a key responsibility at Coventry and, to adapt Yeats’s phrase, the most difficult of all work not impossible. 

To get there Gifford and the rest of us are always obliged to fashion a working model of mimetic theory in order to launch our own work, so it is good to watch someone else build their model, and very relaxing to have someone take the wheel for us. More importantly, while Gifford is driving we can move our thoughts more productively around his model and ours.  

The price of models (and live audiences) is condensation at the expense of complex understanding: to say that communities “invent” sacrifice by “choosing” scapegoats, and neatly “polarizing” off them, all efficiently, “automatically” lined up against (the last) one, can be misleading.  

Presenting the scapegoat mechanism as a “self-regulating” mechanism (as we often do, see pages 36-37 and following) probably owes its origin to Des choses cachées of 1978 being directly followed by the prodigious collocation of scientists called in by Jean-Pierre Dupuy for the Disorder/Order conference at Stanford in 1981. “Self-regulating” derives from association to first and second order cybernetics, Varela and autopoiesis, fashioned to free one from needing to find a first cause or causer of the order emerging from disorder. But the danger of tagging the scapegoat mechanism as invention, as self-regulating mechanism, is to think that it works by itself, and there is no reason to think it won’t always work by itself.  

And “invented” emphasizes awareness and consciousness too much, the matching of a recognized problem with its solution, like the older, earlier half of Prigogine and Stenger’s “nouveau alliance” for science—the world of classical physics, of causes and reversible forces. Paradoxically, the scapegoat mechanism is better understood through the newer science of the new alliance inaugurated in thermodynamics of irreversible processes, of entropy, and where discoveries are usually made when looking for something else.

Girard’s later favoring of the idea of a nondeterministic mechanism, especially in Evolution and Conversion, leaves room for human error and failure on both ends: that hominids will mostly destroy themselves when the foraging or hunting group gets too big (I put foraging before hunting, thinking that cooperation/sharing must be learned there first), that conflict will more likely break a group apart into smaller surviving groups alienated from each other, that violence might stop at a fifty-fifty stand-off (thus creating the dual systems Simon Simonse discusses), but only the very lucky group will hit on the efficacious misunderstanding of all united against the (last) one. And yet more luck is needed to repeat it accurately with the necessary misunderstanding.

As Gifford gets closer to his endpoint of reconciliation, he can only describe what and how he hopes confronting sides will learn from mimetic theory to find peace. COV&R members and speakers involved directly in peacemaking and reconciliation such as Duncan Morrow, Simon Simonse, and Vern Redekop caution that the closer you get to the scene of contention, the more modest your theorizing must be. Although Gifford chastises workers on the ground, at the trowel’s edge at Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe for disrespecting (his) theorizing (endnote 2), the closer you get (I spent two weeks there), the more modest you become about theory.

COV&R members proselytize, no apologies for that. But how, exactly, do you spread the good of mimetic theory for greater appreciation and understanding? That’s been my job for 15 years at MSU Press and Imitatio, and I’m still not certain. Cynthia Haven’s book was reviewed expansively and positively in places we have not been before, and the effect has spread to other books in the series, especially Girard’s books and Wolfgang Palaver’s Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory. 

I believe (proudly) that somehow all of us are getting it done. Andreas Wilmes’s journal The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence is both rigorous and exciting. The well-conceived series at Bloomsbury co-edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge, is now established, and it looks to me like Gifford is starting something at James Clarke & Co (endnote 3).  Good for him, good for them, good for all of us. 

¹ The meetings at Cambridge on Darwin and Girard are themselves examples of vital British interest in mimetic theory, and Wydra, Kirwan, Alison are of course present and included in the two volumes. In Gifford’s co-authored essay with Pierpaolo Antonello on Göbekli Tepe in Can We Survive Our Origins, a full set of pertinent references to the secondary literature is offered. In Towards Reconciliation Gifford cites only an article from The National Geographic on Göbekli Tepe. On my high horse I nevertheless read the article, which is very good and hearteningly solid, just the thing to refer to that his audience might have read themselves.

² Gifford refers to the multiple authors (Clare, Dietrich, Gresky, Notroff, Peters and Pöllath) of “Ritual Practices and Conflict Mitigation at Early Neolithic Körtik Tepe and Göbekli Tepe, Upper Mesopotamia: A Mimetic Theoretical Approach” in Hodder, Violence and the Sacred in the Ancient Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) who take up his essay as “the review committee” (p. 56).

³ See the James Clarke & Co. website for more information about activities concerning mimetic theory: https://www.jamesclarke.co/title-info.php/title/towards-reconciliation. For Gifford’s spirited “carrying on” in the face of cancelled live events, see the following websites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBeBHvZ13Gs&feature=youtu.be; Full Dialogue – Rowan Williams and Paul Gifford: https://youtu.be/tBeBHvZ13Gs; Short Dialogue – Rowan Williams and Paul Gifford: https://youtu.be/Bu6-wAKaCDE; Part 1 – Paul Gifford and Revd. Greg Bartlem: https://youtu.be/oBUZlq3xf38; Part 2 – Paul Gifford and Revd. Greg Bartlem: https://youtu.be/_JnkER1dgos; Part 3 – Paul Gifford and Revd. Greg Bartlem: https://youtu.be/YuyldRKyZOQ.

In Chapter 3, Dupuy focuses on the twin moral catastrophes of the 20^th century (Auschwitz and Hiroshima) as well as the tragedy of 9/11. Shifting from theodicy to anthropodicy, Dupuy exposes the human foundations of moral evil, using Rousseau’s terminology. Readers familiar with René Girard will see mimetic desire at work in Rousseau’s amour-propre, the human desire for recognition at the expense of others. Girardians will also recognize the scapegoat mechanism in Dupuy’s analysis of Rousseau, when he says, “Rousseau demystified…metaphysical evil by revealing its anthropological foundation: order is built up on the backs of scapegoats” (36). By highlighting the violent potential within amour-propre, Dupuy shows how Adolf Eichmann’s psychological stability in carrying out the Final Solution should make us all concerned about the myopic ways that we carry out our own daily tasks while the silent tsunamis of preventable disease claim millions of innocent lives. In Dupuy’s exposition of Hannah Arendt and her analysis of the Nazi war criminal, the reader can start to see the troubling ways in which Auschwitz is everywhere and Eichmann is everyone. Jewish philosopher Günther Anders punctuates this point by linking Auschwitz with Hiroshima, a connection that does not deflate the monstrous horror of the Holocaust but rather reveals the terrifying atrocity of the bombing. Dupuy demonstrates the moral danger in trying to justify the use of the nuclear weapon as a “necessary evil,” and he agrees with Anders who insists that humanity entered its final chapter of existence when the US bombed Hiroshima. 

The metaphor of the tsunami emerges again as Dupuy explores how the boundaries between moral and natural catastrophes have become blurred in the human imagination and language. According to Anders, survivors of Hiroshima refer to the bombing as a tsunami while Jewish people generally prefer the term Shoah when referring to the Holocaust. The Hebrew word Shoah refers to a destructive catastrophe (i.e. tsunami), and it is preferred since the word Holocaust is a religious term that means “whole burnt offering,” thus implying that six million Jews were sacrificed to a bloodthirsty deity. The concept of Holocaust as religious offering brings up a third category of victim: the sacrificial victim, which Dupuy explores in Chapter 4. He employs the insights of Girard, who equates all violence with the sacred so that all victims of violence become understood as sacrificial, and religious language serves as an effective way to project human violence onto God. So for Dupuy, the three classes of victims (natural, moral, religious) become conflated into one and the language of religious sacrifice and natural catastrophe reveals the human propensity to avoid responsibility. “It is time,” Dupuy concludes, “to abandon the tsunami as a universal metaphor for catastrophe” (58). 

A Short Treatise is short indeed, but its 61 pages pack a powerful metaphysical punch. Dupuy expects his readers to have a sufficient grasp of the history of Western philosophy, as he cites Heidegger, Rawls, Pope, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Jaspers, Neiman, and others along with the philosophers mentioned above. He also draws from the Bible, the Talmud, Greek myth, and writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Borges. When he summarizes the ideas of particular philosophers, the reader may find it challenging to discern whether Dupuy is affirming or critiquing these ideas. He himself recognizes this potential misunderstanding when he writes, “Up to this point I may have given the impression that I take the side of Voltaire against Rousseau. Nothing could be farther from the truth” (33). Chapter titles like “The Naturalization of Evil” (Chapter 3) and section headings like “Mourning for the Future” (2) and “The Confusion of Victims” (52) are helpful guides for the reader in following the thread of his argument, which can sometimes become obscured in the maze of metaphysical detours. Again, Dupuy himself acknowledges this difficulty when he asks rhetorically, “Have I lost the thread of my argument here?” A question that he quickly follows with the reassuring, “Not at all!” (36). The five-page appendix titled “Japan, 2011” (which addresses the Fukushima nuclear disaster) and the ten pages of endnotes at the end of the book reveal several other philosophical detours that, although fascinating, would have obfuscated the flow of his argument if they were included in the main text. Although some endnotes were added by the translator Malcolm B. DeBevoise, one endnote exhibits Dupuy’s levity even in the midst of weighty matters. In Chapter 1, when discussing the justice that humanity owes to generations not yet born, he adds the following joke: “Following a lecture someone in the audience asks, ‘How long did you say it would be before the sun burned the Earth to a crisp?’ On hearing the reply, ‘Six billion years,’ the questioner sighs in relief: ‘Thank God for that, I thought you said six million’” (69).

In this book, which was first published in France in 2005 and then made available in English in 2015, the prophetic Dupuy specifically warns of “novel strains of infectious disease” as a threat to human civilization (9). As I write this review in August 2020, the global coronavirus death toll exceeds 700,000. Many of the national leaders (and many of us) who still seem caught off guard by this virus would have likely dismissed Dupuy as an “alarmist” five years ago. Also, while writing this review, I learned of the massive explosion in Lebanon that has claimed at least a hundred human lives and wounded thousands. Although the cause of the explosion is currently unknown, the disaster sadly underscores Dupuy’s conclusion: “The human race has no need of tsunamis to destroy itself” (18). In light of the fact that we are currently living in a reality that Dupuy predicted, we would do well to heed his other warnings, including his admonition that the present catastrophe will pale “in comparison with the cataclysm that we are preparing for ourselves by poisoning the atmosphere of our planet” (18). 

In Chapter 1, titled “Genesis,” Dupuy offers a parable about the biblical Noah written by Günther Anders in which Noah warns people about the flood by clothing himself in sackcloth and ashes on the city streets and grieving as if the catastrophe has already wiped out humanity and any memory thereof. According to the parable, this form of enlightened doomsaying proves to be effective because a carpenter and a roofer later approach Noah in his home and say, “Let us help you build the ark so that it may become false” (3). As August 6, 2020 marks the 75^th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, which sealed the destructive fate of humanity, Dupuy urges us to help make that future false.  

Then there was the elaborate and continuous cover-up around his live-in partner and future wife: how does one get in the house, silently pop open the pill packs, consume the pills without dropping or losing them, and discard the packaging for 48 pills in one day, every day – all without a partner knowing? Not only was there the concealment of the contents, but the elaborate stories and even physical props needed (have a book nearby!) in case his partner became suspicious.  

As the telling unfolds, it becomes clear that drugs helped to offer a kind of security not found elsewhere. We come to learn that there were family mysteries floating below the surface and pain to be warded off from not quite belonging during his youth. “Codeine…produced in me a sense of radical self-containment, a feeling that I was protected from the world…that I could rest in my room, cocooned, and within that cocoon, indulge in the pleasures of thinking” (132).

To be able to “think” was paramount. Just as for many of us in academia and beyond, Fleming saw books and thinking as a way of belonging. Drugs allowed him to screen out anxiety and make way for “thinking” which had become a crutch. The way to feel secure in the world was to impress with one’s intellect and clever mind, “to be seen as profoundly unique, as more special than anyone else” (201). Reason, the clever comeback, the better argument were always ready at hand: when he could not be accepted for who we was, he found at least some semblance of recognition as the cunning philosopher. 

Academics know this treadmill too well: the way forward in work and in life is to scour the literature and zero in on the most current and scientifically-verifiable research by the top experts publishing in the most highly respected journals. Recognition and satiation are sure to follow. The treadmill strategy also became Fleming’s method for dealing with his addiction. The best theory and the better argument were friends too familiar to simply cast aside. 

In 2004, Chris wrote the following in his biography of Girard: “The masochist vaguely perceives the fruitlessness of his quest but fails to give it up because to do so would mean that the promise of salvation would have to be given up along with it” (26). The Romantic self-image cherished by those of us who have traveled the high road of non-conformity and rebellion leads us on an impossible quest for authenticity, uniqueness, and self-sufficiency. The quest is not easily relinquished because any alternative is either unfathomable or a non-starter. The only alternative to drugs that Fleming could imagine was the unthinking, automatic giving over to some kind of authority or spiritual program. And yet, “believing something—even a method for recovery – [was] not a matter of pure will” (188).

Reason and intellect hit a brick wall when Fleming was challenged by a rehab therapist about his feelings: “You’re not here to feel better. You’re here to get better. And you’re here to get better at feeling” (188). Because his rehab specialists quickly decided not to fall for his intellectual and argumentative bait, Fleming was forced to reconsider this new environment where expressions of vulnerability were not only openly received but encouraged. 

The world of academia is full of persons who excel by prizing thinking, as Fleming had done, and neglecting emotional life. In discussing this tendency, Fleming invokes Kierkegaard’s “aesthete” who uses his thinking to maintain distance and hide from himself. No need to experience or express any of your own vulnerabilities, especially in the psychological and philosophical disciplines where the very language communicated (“emotion,” “desire,” etc.) is supposed to be assurance enough of real existence. 

Throughout much of Fleming’s book, but especially in the last chapter, I felt a desperate regret that the book’s title was too narrowly targeted and that, because of it, he might miss the wider audience—the thinking addicts (myself included)—who would surely benefit from his pages. 

Many of us pursue psychology, philosophy, and the like in sort of a drive-by fashion in our quest for dealing with our own pain, inadequacies, or sense of alienation. In his 2008 book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Gabor Maté explores the psychological and biological life of addicts—not simply the drug addict, but the kind of behavioral addict that might fit for any of us who compulsively turn to social media, shopping, or eating to fill the void. The fragility that any of us might feel simply as members of the human struggle can become unbearable, necessitating a strategy for shutting down the pain. 

But the consequences of not addressing the pain and its associated vulnerabilities is the dulling of one’s emotions. As Maté notes, “we may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound ennui” (41). More than that, loss of touch with our own emotions makes it difficult to resonate with the same in others. 

This need to “avoid the void” is a hallmark of addiction. In thinking of addiction beyond drugs and alcohol, the reader might wonder where the line gets drawn: when does an activity go from being a “passion” to an “addiction”? For Maté, an addiction is repeated behavior that one feels compelled to keep up even as the practice has negative effects on one’s own life and the lives of others. That is surely a broad definition, but notably it highlights the fact that it is not the object or activity itself that is problematic, but one’s relationship to it. Many of my college students resonate with the idea of a “profound ennui” that they mask over with a healthy dose of video game playing that can consume many hours of the day. And of course, the antidote that excessive gaming is supposed to deliver fails to do so, with these same students also reporting persistent feelings of loneliness.

The section comprising the last four pages of Fleming’s memoir is entitled “Inheritances,” and it is the first time we get a deep dive into some of the family dynamics at work in his life. If there is one topic that shines through in this section, it is the notion of secrecy that blanketed Fleming’s family of origin. To offer only a glimpse into the family secrets, Fleming’s mother smoked cigarettes all her life, but never in front of others. Of course, she was not able to perfectly hide her vice, and in the inevitable instances in which she was caught smoking, no mention was ever made of the situation creating, as Fleming notes, a norm that no mention should be made. Fleming also learned later in life that his mom was an alcoholic, as was his father and both of his grandfathers. 

Fleming had his own secrets as a child. He describes in great detail his own internal dialogue that accompanied his childhood obsessions and compulsions which he worked so desperately to conceal. All families have secrets, as do individuals within families. Of concern is the particular content of the secrets—some are benign and some are not. As psychologists often note, the concern is that children may take on a personal responsibility for family secrets; after all, if these events or patterns cannot be discussed, they must truly be disturbing, and I might be to blame. Secrets about individual mental health can be especially apt to evoke feelings of shame, and when there is a family ethic of concealment of any abnormal or negative emotion, a child is not likely to open up to a parent in order to get the help he needs. 

As Fleming notes, the contrast between the secretive life of his past and the openness he experienced in rehab was mind-altering: “I didn’t know what it [rehab] was…[but] it was the only place I’d ever been where it was okay to say you were lonely or sad or angry or ashamed of yourself without anyone freaking out” (189). As a child, being asked not to talk about particular issues or told not to feel a certain way is a likely recipe for experiencing alienation. 

Fleming captures well (following David Foster Wallace) the eye-rolling banality of “getting in touch with one’s feelings” as he was asked to do in rehab, but he also captures how such a thing can be a most profound experience. Perhaps this is so because, as Diana Fosha explains, aloneness lives deep in the heart of emotional suffering, and the relational aspects of recovery—whether twelve step or therapy or other—may be a way to relive the hurt and trauma, only this time, to do so with another or others in a healing way. The ability to share one’s vulnerabilities is linked to enhanced understanding of one’s emotions and therefore, of being able to empathize with others’ experiences of the same.

I have to wonder if the initial allure of mimetic theory for Fleming was its interdividual, deeply relational quality. It certainly was for me. Recently, a graduate student in a psychotherapy program contacted me out of the blue as he had been desperately searching for ways to bring mimetic theory into his studies. What struck me was the reason he gave for Girard’s work having touched him so: he said the theory helped him in a fundamental way figure out he was not the only person with petty vanities, ridiculous jealousies, and persistent rivalries, etc. What is more, seeing life through this new lens had allowed him to relax and enjoy other people and himself so much more. 

Acknowledging one’s entanglement with desire ends up being less about finding some kind of automatic salvation or freedom—for Chris, for this graduate student, for Dupuy, or for me. It is more about how we convert or transform our desire which turns out to be, it seems, a slow, arduous, daily process of fits and starts in our struggle as relational beings. Comparable lingo in the attachment theory world is “rupture and repair”—our relationships and struggles are a constant process of miscommunication, pettiness, conflict, and the repairing of these failings. Fleming mentions at the end of his memoir being “reticent to use the word ‘recovery’ because it suggests a kind of finality that I’m scared might curse me” (204). Perhaps “rupture and repair” are “R” words that are a bit more palatable.