Bulletin 68 – May 2021

One of the most compelling aspects of this book, implicitly present in other works by Bartlett, is his argued conviction that the Bible “intervenes in the root of a structure of signs and meaning itself, diverting the river of human semiosis from its original spring, or in fact providing a new one. … The Bible builds on the fluidity of human meaning, arriving finally at a form that is genuinely radical and new” (25).

Bartlett provides a semiotic reading of mimetic theory in chapter 3, “Murderous Semiotics.” He goes through different stages and texts in Girard’s development, especially Girard’s response to structuralism in Violence and the Sacred and his remarks on the transcendental signifier in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Bartlett rightly emphasizes that Girard’s claim of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures as the source of truth is a claim that has to do, first and foremost, not with God or truth directly but with “signs, with words, with writing” (48).

Bartlett connects this very broad historical movement uncovered by Girard with a narrower movement of thought represented in the person of Jacques Derrida. He sees in both a movement away from metaphysics, by which I take Bartlett to mean “ontotheological metaphysics” (a point I will return to below). Bartlett is sensitive to the comet’s tail of theological implications that follows in the wake of Derrida’s deconstruction. For Bartlett the “crux” of the encounter between Girard and Derrida is “a crossroads between original victim (pharmakos) and a system of semiotic effacement (of writing, i.e., the pharmakon)” (67). Girard makes the claim for a real center; Derrida shows how it gets constantly erased.

Beginning with chapter 6 and extending through chapter 8, Bartlett follows John Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Twenty-First Century to give a historical survey of the emergence of semiotics. Bartlett makes a jump from St. Thomas to Martin Heidegger using the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, as a way of thinking being as a kind of nothingness, in order “to investigate ontology in terms of originary violence, rather than the pure abstractions of metaphysics” (88). The point of this particular move is to “allow an essential language of nonviolence progressively to infiltrate and change the signifier ‘god’ together with all its metaphysical baggage. This then becomes the role of Christian theology—to shape in discourse the transformative nonviolence of Jesus, his Father/Mother and the Spirit that comes from them” (92). Theology now uses semiotics as its “first philosophy” since it allows the emergence of being as love, ensuring that theology functions as a transformative message.

The very short version of what Bartlett derives from Deely’s huge study of the history of western philosophy is that being is being-as-relation, related through signs, rather than being-as-substance. “The essential point is what signs in nature (tracks in the snow) and signs in the mind (concepts) have in common is the ontological feature and character of relation” (109).

He then uses Umberto Eco to develop the idea of a “transformative semiotics” (129). With the conclusion being: “What is being argued is that a divine relation has effected an intervention at the most original level of code-making” (129, italics in the original). This changing of the dynamic of human codes is God’s way of saving us.

Bartlett’s penultimate move is to appropriate Jean-Luc Marion’s thought on the idol and the icon. The idol traps the gaze because the gaze desires to satisfy itself in the idol. The icon, by contrast, renders the invisible, that which “cannot be grasped, controlled, or possessed in the gaze,” visible (137). As Bartlett sees it, Marion’s description “joins with the core vector of this book to tell us that the icon offers itself as a new primary scene, propagating its own meaning in every direction through the world” (138).

Bartlett ends with a reading of the Gospel of John as an instance of the transformative semiosis he has been outlining. As Bartlett states: “Because human meaning is constructed originally out of violence, its inversion and subversion in the nonviolence of the cross constructs at once a new fundamental relation and, therewith, a completely new possible universe” (162).

I end with the few reservations or questions that I have. First of all, I sometimes feel that Bartlett, in his embrace of semiotics (of which I wholly approve), pushes to the extreme a rejection of metaphysics in general as well as the early fusion of Greek and Christian thought. I think it would be more in accord with Bartlett’s vision to hold that Christ brings all things to the Father, including metaphysics. Yes, metaphysics is rooted in violence along with everything else that stands in need of redemption. Further, but along the same lines, I sometimes felt that Bartlett’s “missionary zeal,” as S. Cowdell characterizes it in his gracious “Foreword,” runs the risk of going too far in one direction (substance metaphysics, out; relational metaphysics, in), in such a way as to leave itself open to a mimetic counter-reaction down the road. The task Bartlett outlines here is too important to let itself fall into philosophical tit-for-tat. I hope that the review has made clear that I do not see these minor blemishes as taking away from the epoch-making task it calls us to.

Armitage pursues this argument through a close examination of Nietzsche and Heidegger, whom he identifies as the central influences and enduring avatars of postmodernism or Continental philosophy, as it is sometimes called. For Armitage, the central divergence between mimetic theory and postmodernism can be located in Nietzsche and Heidegger’s rejection of Platonic metaphysics. The mistake of these thinkers, along with the postmoderns who followed them, is two-fold. There is first the mis-identification of metaphysics itself as the source of violence, and then the related failure to recognize postmodernism’s indebtedness to the very Christian tradition it critiques (x). As Armitage notes, Girard believed that Christianity provides postmodernism with its ethics of concern for victims, even as this concern is allowed to succumb to the very sort of debilitating rivalry that mimetic theory witnesses at the heart of human relations. 

Philosophy’s Violent Sacred makes its case through four chapters, which include an introduction to Girard’s thought, examinations of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and a closing critique of postmodernism in general. Armitage makes clear from the outset that his aim is not simply a “destruction” of Nietzsche and Heidegger, but rather a “deconstruction” though which he hopes to salvage some of their insights. In this, he imitates Girard, who was careful to acknowledge his own indebtedness to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Armitage presumes no prior expertise in any of the book’s central figures, including Girard; his opening chapter therefore presents his mimetic theory for the uninitiated. Far from being a simple recapitulation, however, the first chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s main argument that mimetic theory is most naturally compatible with Platonic metaphysics. Essentially, Armitage argues that Girard’s idea of the imitatio Christi implies and mirrors Plato’s supersensible world of eternal forms; each, according to Armitage, lies beyond rivalry. Just as Christ imitates the eternal, unchanging Father, one may also imitate the eternal, unchanging virtues imagined by Plato. By contrast, postmodernism, insofar as it rejects Plato’s “split world” ontology, cannot itself posit anything eternal and unchanging and therefore cannot escape rivalry. By this argument, Armitage concludes that, whatever Girard’s other reservations about Plato’s ideas, mimetic theory better aligns with Platonism rather than postmodernism.

Armitage develops this argument in the next two chapters on Nietzsche and Heidegger, respectively. The Nietzsche chapter begins with a review of Girard’s basic divergence from Nietzsche, whom Girard counterintuitively thought to be the most important philosopher and theologian of the last hundred years. Girard acknowledged that Nietzsche “understands quite clearly the essence of Christianity better than anyone before.” The problem, writes Armitage, is that “Nietzsche simply despised it” (15). What Nietzsche despised in particular is Christianity’s concerns for victims, a concern he thought born of a life-hating attitude distorted by resentment. More importantly for Armitage’s argument, Nietzsche’s own project of overcoming revenge is fatally undermined by its rejection of metaphysics, without which one has “no transcendent world of patterns to imitate” (36). As a result, Nietzschean mimesis, which becomes merely an imitation of the self, can never really escape violence. 

From Nietzsche, Armitage turns his attention to Heidegger in the book’s third chapter. The richness of this chapter, which includes important detours through Luther and Holderin, is hard to capture in a short review. But briefly, Armitage begins by observing the ways in which Heidegger’s thought both forwards and is framed by polemos, or conflict. For Armitage, the centrality of this conflict mirrors the role of the violent sacred—the need, that is, for a prior expulsion to sustain culture or thought. As in the Nietzsche chapter, Armitage notes the ways in which Girard learns from Heidegger. For Girard, Heidegger was the first philosopher to notice the fundamental distinction between the Greek Logos of Heraclitus and the Hebraic Logos of John. This distinction confirms the trajectory of Girard’s thinking, which sees expulsion of the Logos already hinted at in the prologue to John’s gospel. Like Nietzsche, then, Heidegger gets at the crux of the matter; the only problem is that he opts for the wrong Logos to further his philosophic project. 

But even as the later, more “poetic” Heidegger seems less interested in conflict as such, his critique of ontotheology still rejects the split world ontology and Platonic metaphysics that might authorize any assertion of essential or eternal goodness. Here, Armitage turns toward his argument with Martin Luther’s voluntarism and the idea that God’s will is always free beyond any essentializing limitations. This move affords Armitage the opportunity to insist that God’s goodness can be known by analogy: “creaturely goodness participates in the goodness of God, as its cause. So although we cannot know what it means for God to be ‘good,’ we can know that he is good, by analogy” (81). This reasoning also stands against Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology’s supposed essentialism; even if we cannot know everything, we can still make some secure claims about God. The security of those claims is the most reliable way to ensure that our understanding of God does not slip back into the mythic sacred. Contra the anti-essentialist critique of ontotheology, this act of claiming need not be an act of violence. 

As Armitage notes, Heidegger’s thinking has underwritten the project of philosophers and theologians like John Caputo, Richard Kearney, Catherine Keller, and Gianni Vattimo, all of whom hesitate to make any strong claims about God. Instead, these thinkers emphasize what they see as God’s weakness—that is, God’s refusal of self-assertion and the violence such would entail. These kinds of postmodern arguments are Armitage’s ultimate target, which he turns to most directly in the book’s fourth and final chapter. Here, Armitage presses his case against what he sees as postmodernism’s central contradictions—namely, its rejection of absolutes and absolute concern for victims. This is a case Girard himself made, and it remains a powerful one. Like Girard, Armitage argues that postmodernism has put itself in an untenable position: though it accepts Christianity’s concern for victims, it has divorced itself from any relation to reason or the truth. Beyond postmodernism’s hypocrisy in denying its own debt to Christianity, Armitage suggests that postmodernism is exposed to the intrusion of Marxist violence, which itself is driven by its own hyper-realized concern for victims. 

I am not sure, however, that Levinas or Kearney or some of the other thinkers Armitage names are infected by Marxism or violence, and I would have welcomed a more explicit connection of the dots at this point in the argument. Surely Armitage is right to suggest that mimetic theory and postmodern theology will be difficult to reconcile. But I do not think the idea of God’s weakness can be so quickly cast out. For Armitage, the image of weakness simply cannot be squared with Platonic metaphysics as the guarantor of virtue. To reject the split-world ontology is to sever ourselves from a realm of ideals, ideals that are less inclined to invite rivalrous mimesis. Armitage writes, “the supersensible Platonic realm” is necessary “lest human beings fall into mimesis of merely the physical world” (92). By contrast, the desire for “goodness, truth, and justice” direct toward the essential and eternal and away from “physical and finite” (92). By this chain of reasoning, Armitage maps Platonism onto both Christianity and mimetic theory. He adds, “it is only belief in immaterial truth that can properly reorient desire from the finite to the infinite” (93). 

I have two reservations about this argument. My first concerns Armitage’s suggestion that it is belief in immaterial truth that reorients desire. That is not Girard’s argument, at least as I understand it. We do not desire to be merciful or kind because we believe in eternal ideas about mercy or kindness; we desire them because our models teach us to desire them. Armitage suggests that the immateriality of virtues somehow makes them less susceptible to rivalrous desire. This seems plausible: there is no scarcity of mercy or justice that might lead to rivalry. But the problem is that we do not believe our way to virtue. We imitate our way there. 

Lest I appear to be overemphasizing a minor matter of wording, I would note my second and related reservation, which is that Armitage’s argument seems to lose sight of the Incarnation. Whether or not the virtues somehow reside in a supersensible realm, safe from rivalrous desire, the Christian learns to inhabit those virtues by imitating another who inhabits them first. The Christian does not imitate abstract qualities, but rather a particular person who lived in a particular time and place. That is the imitatio Christi. The Incarnation would therefore seem to complicate any attempt to reconcile mimetic theory and Platonic metaphysics. No doubt, Girard’s worldview and temperament put him at odds with postmodern theology and philosophy; Girard himself makes that clear in his dialogues with Gianni Vattimo. But those dialogues also make clear Girard’s sympathy for many of Vattimo’s positions, including his emphasis on the kenosis, the self-exposure of God to vulnerability, suffering, and even weakness. Elsewhere in the book, Armitage is careful to note where and what Girard learns from those with whom he disagrees. I would have welcomed that same care being applied to Vattimo. 

Nevertheless, I hope it is clear that these reservations in no way diminish my deep admiration for Duane Armitage’s important book, which I found rigorous, demanding, and rewarding. I learned a great deal from this book, and I am certain that I will return to it. Philosophy’s Violent Sacred will become a landmark study for scholars who wish to read mimetic theory with and against postmodernism, posthumanism, and the philosophies and theologies that follow. 

According to Osborn, the key benefit of such a move is that it opens up for feminist consciousness the tragic tropes in the novels she reads. In two of the novels, women must die in order to preserve cultural norms and values. But these novels also problematize those deaths, which enables Osborn to examine whether they also provide spaces for cultivating resistance to violence. For example, Osborn finds that the narrator of The Virgin Suicides is aware that the Lisbon sisters are placed in the role of scapegoats; however, because they remain “Other,” the larger system of sacrifice in which they are caught is not broken open. Even so, to the extent that the novel demonstrates self-conscious awareness of sacrifice, it moves into the realm of anti-tragedy. 

In The Ice Storm, contagion and destruction increase resulting in “an excess of tragic signifiers” (22). In this way, The Ice Storm is beset by a kind of tragic overreach that also invites critical distance. As a consequence, Moody’s novel both challenges the sacrificial imperative and dismantles it when no promised restoration of peace in a tragic catharsis occurs. 

With Revolutionary Road, the subversive potential of the suburban novel is realized. As a kind of “performance” of a novel, the narrative of Revolutionary Road stands apart from myth and “invites readers to share the interiority of those who have rejected” (23) sacrificial catharsis. Collectively, the three novels imagine the American Dream as tragic, caught in moments of sacrificial crisis, even as they also undermine the readers’ belief in the guilt of the scapegoat and its powers. 

Osborn frames her discussion in light of Girard’s observation that, as she puts it, “modern democracy promotes competitive individualism, while simultaneously thwarting individual progress by instituting a permanent mass of rivals” (21). As these rivalries are manifest in the three novels, the American Dream is shown to be a catalyst for mimetic crisis. This observation results in the most intriguing feature of Osborn’s book: reflections on Jim Cullen’s The American Dream and Andrew Delbanco’s The Real American Dream. According to Osborn, these scholars describe in macrocosm an American Dream which, at the microcosmic level, is visible in the novels she examines (25). In doing so, Cullen and Delbanco strike Osborn as savvy interpreters of that Dream as tragedy. After all, scholars of ancient tragedy regularly insist that the narratives are not “timeless” stage-pieces divorced from history. To the contrary, they are, as Hugh Grady argues when describing ancient tragedy, “‘aesthetic incarnations of moments of history.’” Or, as Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood suggests, the narratives of Greek tragedy are “‘produced and understood through the deployment of perceptual filters shaped by the cultural assumptions of fifth-century Athens’” (25). 

As fifth-century Athens goes, so goes twentieth-century America. Overlaying the filter of twentieth-century suburban life with the filter of mimetic theory and viewing the three novels in the wake of that deployment, Osborn identifies “keeping up with the Joneses” as a primary tragic mechanism driving the American Dream. Fueled by high levels of internal mediation supported by the cultural ideal of “equality,” the American Dream is manifest in acquisitive rivalries that portend mimetic crises. Citing Girard’s commentary on de Tocqueville in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Osborn points out that reductions in the class stratification enable greater investments in the dream of upward social mobility through which anyone can believe themselves capable of coming into full possession of the objects of their acquisitive desire (26-28). As products of this cultural milieu, the twentieth-century novels Osborn examines are subsequently shown in the book to be, of necessity, deeply invested in the Dream. 

How essential is the American Dream to how sacrifice became endemic to the nation? For Osborn, Cullen’s and Delbanco’s scholarship confirm its necessity. Cullen’s study of the Puritans traces the American cultural DNA to a founding generation whose mania for self-improvement, overseen by God, is matched in intensity by the Puritans’ violent attacks on marginal members of their community (36). Delbanco traces the pattern forward as a new civic religion comes into existence and reaches full form in the tragedy of the American Civil War. During the war, in a classic ritual of cleansing, the nation “expelled the taint of slavery, symbolized in the quasi-divine figure of Abraham Lincoln” (39). Indeed, as Osborn highlights Delbanco’s claims, she shows that he sees Lincoln as the “high priest of cathartic ritual” who also became a martyr around whose body the locus of the American Dream was definitively transferred from the private and religious (hospitals and churches) to the state (40). The Prosperity Gospel is a key outcome of this transition when, in the post-Civil War era and subsequently in the twentieth century, the acquisition of wealth becomes the primary sign of and means to salvation. In the novels Osborn examines, individuals who conform in ways described by Delbanco establish preconditions for crisis. Frantic in their quest to consume and increasingly undifferentiated from each other in pursuit of happiness, they become fodder for tragedy. But, as already noted, Osborn also is at pains to prove in her book that anti-tragic motifs in the novels point to alternatives to sacrifice. 

I first read Carly Osborn’s book shortly after it was published. Rereading it now, I am taken aback by how my reaction to it has changed in the wake of fifteen months of a pandemic as well as by the events of January 6, 2021. That the twentieth-century novels about which Osborn writes are “aesthetic incarnations of moments of history’” I do not deny. But that they also feature anti-tragic motifs capable of undermining readers’ belief in the guilt of the scapegoat and its cathartic powers in a way that might actually galvanize transformation within that same culture in the twenty-first century seems more doubtful than I thought possible a year ago. The sacrificial DNA that Cullen and Delbanco detect in the American Dream seems even stronger than it was in the twentieth-century suburbia on which Osborn focuses.  Indeed, it was seen in more robust form on January 6 than at any time since the Civil War. Christian nationalism was on prominent display that day. Crosses adorned clothing, posters, and flags. Signs proclaimed “Jesus Saves,” “God, Guns, and Trump,” and “Faith, Family, Freedom.” Men who breached the Senate Chamber offered prayers thanking God for “allowing the USA to be reborn.” Fifty-two percent of Americans, predominantly in the Midwest and South, identify with Christian nationalism, and its influence is gaining. Scholars of American religion see a trend persisting and even growing in influence that Delbanco thought ended with the Civil War: the alignment of sacrificial religion with the state. This religion is not deployed in civic form, as Delbanco has described; rather, as before the Civil War and now clearly visible again in the insurrection, this religion appears with a full complement of Christian symbolism and ritual. And it is summoned, as it was in Lincoln’s day, to justify white supremacy as a divine mandate. 

The virulent intersections of race, class, and gender in Christian nationalism, on full display January 6, emphasize the need for analyses of race, class, and gender that Osborn leaves to other scholars of the American Dream (2). What is in the American DNA, thanks to the construct of that Dream, melds in fiercely sacrificial form all three. A key example that calls for analyses informed by mimetic theory is the effort in multiple states to ban the teaching of “critical race theory.” Is that move an effort to hide from view the persistence of a sacrificial DNA at the heart of the American Dream? Scholars who study the legacy of white supremacy after Federal troops left the South in 1877 track a trajectory of violence through lynchings (to which sexual depravity and gendered dynamics of race are central), the Black Codes that replaced slavery with forced labor and expanded under Jim Crow, and the criminal justice system of the twentieth century which disproportionately incarcerates poor people of color and reserves death row almost exclusively for people of color (see resources from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice). When public school teachers label that trajectory “systemic racism,” the outcry against them, exemplified by legislation promoted by critics of critical race theory, aims to silence teachers by making them fear for their livelihoods if they discuss race in the classroom. Mimetic theory can and should be brought to bear on that threat, illuminating its depths. When teachers’ voices are sacrificed, the American Dream as a sacrificial construct also is rendered invisible, leaving it to range functionally intact and unchecked across America.  

Even though Osborn’s analysis needs to be supplemented by analyses that hold together multiple currents of sacrifice, gender-sensitive analyses are ever more critical to understanding how these currents run through the American Dream. The past year has exacted a particularly high cost from women. The man who killed Asian women working at massage parlors in Atlanta, blaming them for his “sex addiction,” combined the toxic features of evangelical Christianity with anti-Asia bigotry. He had learned in church that women are responsible for his lust, and his hostility to Asians had been stoked by a COVID-exacerbated white supremacist ideology. The differential impact of COVID on women has, by every economic marker available, set women’s advancement in the workplace back by at least a decade and left thousands of children, who depend primarily on mothers for care and economic support, falling behind their peers in education as well as in their mental and physical health. The breakdown of the childcare system during COVID has strengthened sacrificial currents of life everywhere, including the suburbs. 

Focusing on “the suburban tragic” in three 20th-century American novels, Osborn demonstrates that “keeping up with the Joneses” is a catalyst for catastrophe. Arguing further that these novels’ self-conscious engagement with tragic tropes works to anti-tragic effect, Osborne raises disturbing questions about the numbing conformity of suburbia even as she places female scapegoats at the heart of the suburbs’ sacrificial ethos. That they also play a role in the potential subversion of that ethos seems a less compelling claim today than it did even a year ago when I first read Osborn’s book. Perhaps because of that gap between hope and reality, Osborn’s bold and provocative reading, exposing troubling paradoxes in the American Dream, actually has become an even more urgent read in 2021. 

An excellent book provokes reflection from its readers that takes them from its pages into their own lives and times, there to reconsider their circumstances, and not just for a moment. Having elicited my sustained engagement with its claims, with admiration and appreciation, I conclude: Tragic Novels, René Girard, and the American Dream is an excellent book.  

While Burgis comes mostly from the world of business, he shows himself to be well versed in Girard’s work and its academic reception. After a B.S. from the Stern School of Business at NYU, he helped found and lead four companies. He then earned a Bachelor of Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and is currently Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at Catholic University of America. His fund of examples draws on contemporary fascinations—Silicon Valley start-ups, Italian sports car makers, Michelin-starred chefs—and mines them for their cautionary and instructive value. The book has plenty of tips for how mimetic theory applies to management, but its main interest, as the subtitle says, is “everyday life”: pragmatic approaches to working with the insights of mimetic theory for the sake of personal fulfillment and better organizations.

After a prologue about how his first exposure to mimetic theory helped him navigate a crisis in his business career, Burgis divides his book into two halves: four chapters on “the power of mimetic desire” followed by four on “the transformation of desire.” Interspersed throughout are fifteen inset “tactics,” from “Name your models” to “Live as if you had responsibility for what other people want.” Three appendices give: a glossary, with concise and accessible definitions of standard terms in mimetic theory as well as a few Burgis invents for the book; a reading list of ten books, mostly by Girard himself; and a list of “motivational themes” to accompany one of the book’s most promising tactics, identifying “thick” desires by focusing on “stories of deeply fulfilling action.”

When I explain mimetic theory, I usually say it comprises three main ideas. Burgis saves the second and third of these, the scapegoat mechanism and the revelatory importance of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, for his fourth chapter. Chapters 1-3 expansively probe mimetic desire and rivalry. Many cite simple examples of mimetic desire from advertising, but Burgis shows the genius of Edward Bernays, whom the New York Times called “the father of public relations” when he died in 1995 at the age of 103, for cleverly manipulating desire by setting up models of it. Apple founder Steve Jobs is exhibit A in chapter 2, on external mediation and internal mediation, which Burgis labels Celebristan and Freshmenistan. Given that our media climate has accelerated the movement of modern culture toward Freshmenistan, his emphasis on the ways it distorts our sense of reality is welcome.

Chapter 3 folds a treatment of mimetic rivalry into a contrast between negative and positive cycles of desire, what Burgis calls cycle 1 and cycle 2. While cycle 1 leads to rivalry and conflict in the ways Girard has made familiar, cycle 2 turns mimetic desire toward uniting people in “shared desire for some common good.” Either case involves a feedback loop which Burgis, borrowing from business guru Jim Collins, calls the “flywheel effect.” His example of cycle 2, the marketing of Giro bicycle helmets, also happens to involve financial success. Yet the tactics offered for positive flywheels, involving a clear articulation of interlinked means and ends that lead up a hierarchy of values, do indeed promise to employ mimetic principles toward desire for a common good. Burgis also calls cycle 2 creative, which implies the greater intentionality it requires as well as its potential and, perhaps, instability—what my colleague Dennis Feaster and I have tried to label with the contrast between “violence loop” and “conversion spiral.”

In keeping with its entrepreneurial milieu, Wanting takes a strong view of individual agency. Its treatment of scapegoating leaves much unsaid about how deeply mimetic violence has shaped the cultural institutions that shape individuals, though all this is waiting for readers who tackle the reading list at the end. Burgis’s use of the term “anti-mimetic” might even suggest that he thinks it somehow possible to avoid or transcend mimetic desire, but this is not what he means. What is anti-mimetic, as his glossary defines it, is anything that “counteracts the negative forces of mimetic desire.” His approach is built on the Girardian bedrock of renouncing appropriative, conflictual mimesis. The book is asking what we might build on that foundation.

Part 2, then, plays with ways mimetic desire can contribute to positive individual agency. I say “plays” because Burgis, wisely, does not pretend to be systematic. He relies, first, on inspiring examples. Second, he moves beyond discrete tactics to what he calls skills and what I would call habits, in a sense that could connect with traditional virtue ethics. Chapter 6, on the power of empathy to disrupt negative cycles of mimesis, develops a contrast between thin and thick desires that I find particularly resonant.

Burgis’s last major example, Maria Montessori (with a nod to COV&R board member Suzanne Ross’s work on the Montessori method and mimetic theory), anchors an insightful chapter on leadership. This fits part 2’s increasing attention to practices and relationships that open up alternatives to negative mimesis in the context of systems that reinforce it. He adds further distinctions that help name the positive: between immanent and transcendent desires, between desires and values, between mimetic values and objective values, between calculating thought and meditative thought (which is less mimetic). All of this moves toward a hopeful conclusion that suggests connections between Burgis’s array of ideas and more explicitly theological considerations of positive mimesis: “I believe that the only desires thick enough to satisfy us involve making ourselves a gift to others in some way” (218).

Wanting repeatedly compares mimetic desire to gravity. Some are barely able “to resist the downward pull. Others experience that same gravity and find ways to go to the moon” (xvii). The metaphor has limits if the power of flight is the same one that pulls us down, but Burgis has assembled an engaging, usable toolkit for gravity-powered ascent—anti-gravity machines. And while, true to the spirit of mimetic theory, the book speaks in human terms, its success would also be, as I think the author would hope, part of the transformative, uplifting movement of the Breath of God in our time.

The chapter on Proustian desire explores the notion that if we are to fully understand how desire works in the lives of individuals and societies, we must analyze it temporally. Desire, Grande argues, puts pressure on the old hierarchies of Combray and slowly transforms it into the modern world, represented by Swann and the salons in Paris. The modernizing world that Proust portrays is one of increasingly individualized desires, characterized by a private symbolism. Grande dedicates much of the chapter to reflecting on Girard’s notion that Proust’s great novel captures the structure of Christian conversion. Affective memory, the recapturing of memories undistorted by mimetic desire, is akin to dying to oneself in a Christian sense. This retrospective examination, which involves openness to one’s biographical past, reveals to the novelist the true structure of desire—specifically, that his secular gods were illusions. Proust’s “religion,” however, is ultimately based on art. This leads him in Grande’s estimation to an undue veneration of the figure of the artist in Time Regained, which could be seen as a new form of snobbery.

The next three chapters focus on desire and the American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman, and the songs of Lana Del Rey. The East Coast during the Roaring Twenties, an environment of “restlessness and rootlessness,” was a place where the dynamics of desire were laid bare with a particular clarity (129). The elites in The Great Gatsby have thrown off all prohibitions to desire. Gatsby considers himself, in Fitzgerald’s language, a “Son of God,” which he believes exempts him from normal moral conventions (quoted in Grande, 153). The novel shows, in Grande’s reading, how this antinomian notion of freedom leads to destruction. Gatsby’s grandiose understanding of himself leads him to believe he can control time, which is why he devotes all his efforts and resources to an impossibility: repeating his first encounter with Daisy Buchanan, which occurred five years earlier. Not only Gatsby, but all the elites in the decadent world of the novel have given free rein to their desire, and sacrificial victims, most memorably Myrtle, abound. Ultimately, Grande concludes, the novel can be understood as an exploration of the devastating effects of idolatry. Gatsby’s desire to stop time and repeat the past, Grande argues, is a distortion of the Christian longing for heaven. Grande identifies this as a sort of modern Gnosticism, one that rejects the limitations of matter and common morality in favor of esoteric “higher” pursuits. The gnostic god of this world is the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, who “sees everything and cannot be fooled but does not care” (173).

The American Dream inspires a different sort of distorted desire in the subject of the next chapter, The Death of Salesman. For Willy Loman, the American Dream consists not of an honest life rooted in hard work, but of fame rooted in natural charisma. Willy teaches his son Biff that moral norms do not apply to him because he is handsome and athletically gifted. Willy’s desire for fame gradually loosens his grip on reality and destroys his relationships. Willy and his son are gifted to work with their hands, but the problem is that Willy is a snob—only success as a salesman counts, from his perspective. Grande puts the play into conversation with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Both works recognize the need for regeneration and rootedness, which is what Willy’s brief desire to buy some seeds and grow something represents. However, unlike Eliot, Willy lives in a world completely cut off from “a cultural heritage, myths, or religion” (193). Willy’s misplaced desires have cut him off from resorting to these things as sources of renewal, which is the deepest source of the tragedy in the play.

Finally, Grande turns to Lana Del Rey’s music, which he finds to be a valuable resource for understanding the contemporary experience of desire in the Western world. Del Rey’s American Dream is not unlike that of Willy Loman—fame, fortune, and charisma—though Del Rey places a special emphasis on following the desires of one’s heart, especially with regards to erotic relationships. Grande highlights in this chapter an element present throughout his study: the repetitive, but ultimately vain effort to possess a disappearing object. This tendency becomes pronounced, Grande posits, when one divinizes the beloved. In the music of Del Rey, eros replaces agape, the desire to find something lasting flounders, and cynicism and violence ensue. The repetitive nature of this desire devolves into scandal, an obsession with the obstacles to love. Del Rey perceptively explores the impossibility of finding acceptance—which Grande theorizes through Hegel’s master-slave dialectic—in a world where all boundaries and prohibitions, of both the transcendent and immanent variety, have melted into air. Grande ends the chapter by noting the absence of a third party—that is to say, a mediator—in most of Del Rey’s music. The occlusion of the meditator is characteristic of any mythical account of love.

Grande is working out through these examples how, while desire may be metaphysically one (in a typical Girardian formulation: all desire is desire for being), it is phenomenologically many. The experience of desire looks different depending on one’s class, geographical and historical location, and the other particulars that characterize any given situation. Emma Bovary’s experience, that is, is not identical to that of Lana Del Rey. These factors which shape the individual’s experience of desire merit attention. However, close analysis of these experiences can also help us to see what we might call the deeper metaphysical constants of desire. Grande’s slim volume is more generative than comprehensive. Its broad sweep suggests future lines of inquiry into the phenomenology of mimetic desire, making it a fitting addition to MSU’s “Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory” series.