09/17/2005
René Girard: Why We Want What We Want
“MIMETIC DESIRE IS AN ABSOLUTE MONARCH.” –RENÉ GIRARD“Know thyself.” It’s not an easy proposition. As Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison says, “To know yourself means, above all, to know your desire. Desires are what lurk at the heart of our behavior. It’s what determines our motivations. It’s what organizes our social relations. It’s what informs our politics, […]
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This is KZSU, Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison
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and we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
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[Music]
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And pitious to tears. But tell me in the time of your sweet size, how did love grant you to know your dangerous desires?
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And she to me, we were reading one day for pleasure of Lancelot, how loved we set him.
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We were alone and without any suspicion. Many times that reading drove our eyes together and turned our faces pale,
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but one point alone was the one that overpowered us.
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When we read that the yearn for smile was kissed by so great a lover,
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he who will never be separated from me,
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kissed my mouth all trembling.
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Galerto was the book and he who wrote it.
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That day we read no further.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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I was reading from Kanto 5 of Dante's Inferno, the famous Salulik we of Francesca in the circle of lust.
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How did love grant you to know your dangerous desires?
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That's the question, how do no one's desire.
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We think of the university as an institution devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and so it is.
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If that's not all it is, the sciences seek after knowledge,
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but in the humanities we're interested above all in self knowledge, which is a very different kind of beast.
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The founding adage of philosophy is "know thyself."
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That's not an easy proposition.
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To know yourself means above all to know your desire.
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Desire is what lurks at the heart of our behavior.
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It's what determines our motivations.
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It's what organizes our social relations.
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It's what informs our politics, religions, ideologies, and above all our conflicts.
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And yet nothing is more mysterious, elusive, or perverse than human desire.
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It's amazing to me that our government invests so many billions of dollars in scientific research every year
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in order to better understand the world of nature.
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Yet commits only a tiny fraction of that to advancing the cause of self knowledge
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in order to better understand ourselves.
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Most of our major problems today are as old as the world itself.
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The problem of reciprocal violence, for example, which seems to draw us all into its vortex.
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You would think we would want to understand its mechanisms, its psychology, its tendencies to spiral out of control.
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Instead, we keep on reacting and blindly perpetuating its cycles,
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the way our ancestors have done for centuries and even millennia.
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We're not very good when it comes to understanding the basic laws and passions of human nature.
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Almost as if we were afraid to ask about the deeper, desired, driven sources of our conduct.
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Almost as if we were afraid to ask about ourselves as individuals and as a society, and so far as we are desiring creatures.
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I have a guest with me in the studio who has spent the greater part of his career trying to understand the fundamental mechanisms of human desire
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and will be talking to him during the next hour about his theories.
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His name is Honejiraj and it's a distinct privilege and honor to have him on this program.
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Honej, welcome.
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Welcome to pleasure to be here.
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Professor Honejiraj is one of the titans of 20th century thought,
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and I for one believe that the 21st century will vindicate the cogency of his theories in a clamorous way.
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He has published several momentous and ground-baked breaking books,
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and just this year, his native country of France saw fit to recognize his extraordinary achievements
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by inducting him into the Akadimifal says,
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which is the highest honor of French intellectual can receive in France.
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His induction ceremony will be taking place on December 15th.
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Honej, congratulations on becoming one of the so-called immortals of the French Academy.
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Thank you very much.
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I should also mention that Honej has been a professor of French literature here at Stanford since the late 70s
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in the Department of French and Italian, and that means that Stanford's Department of French and Italian
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has not only won, but two immortals among its faculty.
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Honejiraj and Michel Seir.
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For those of you who may not appreciate how exceptional that is,
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let me say that no other department in the country has even won.
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Honej, your work as an enormous reach, it branches out into various areas and disciplines, literary criticism, anthropology,
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religious studies, and so forth.
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But today we'd like to focus on what I take to be the foundational concept of all you're thinking, namely, memetic desire.
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Can you tell our listeners exactly what you mean by that term, memetic desire?
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The memetic desire is fundamentally a desire in which the choice of the object the individual is going to desire is not determined by that object itself,
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as we normally believe, but by third person, we imitate a third person, and this is what memetic means.
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In order to understand this, you can take almost any example.
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Why do all girls have been burying their navels for the last five years?
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Obviously they didn't all think by themselves that it would be nice to show one's navel.
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Or maybe one is too hot in the navel, and one must do something about this.
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We see the memetic nature of that desire, the data, fashion collapses.
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Suddenly it will become very old fashion to show one's navel, and no one will show it anymore.
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And it will be because of other people, just as now, it is because of other people that they show it.
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But how far do you want to go in and saying that desire by its very nature and human beings is fundamentally memetic?
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Well, maybe one can start from this question.
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What is the difference between need, appetite and desire?
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And need and appetite all animals have, and we know very well that if we are alone in a Sahara desert,
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and we are thirsty, we don't need a model to want to drink.
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It's a need that we have to satisfy.
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But most about desires in a civilized society are not like that.
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And if you think of such thing as vanity, snobbery, you know, what is snobbery?
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In snobbery you desire something not because you really had an appetite for it,
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but because you think you look smarter, you look more fashionable if you imitate the man who desires that object,
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or also pretend that he desires it.
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Well, let me read one quote, a few lines from one of your essays from the Volume Double Business Bound,
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where you say that mimetic desire precedes the appearance of its object and survives the disappearance of its object.
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My mises cannot spread without becoming reciprocal.
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And here the important line for me, desire is attract, ape and bind one another,
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creating antagonistic relationships that both parties seek to define in terms of difference.
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So here's the question.
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The young women who are bearing their navels,
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there doesn't seem to be necessarily an element of antagonism in this kind of massive mimetic imitation of the others.
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And it's very important, I think in your theory, to the you hold to the fact that antagonism is almost the inevitable result of mimetic desire when it becomes rivalrous.
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Well, maybe the best example would be this first place of Shakespeare in which you always have two male friends, you know.
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And they always desire the same thing. They've lived together, they desire the same dreams, the same meals,
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and they even see to each other, if you don't want what I want, you're not my friend.
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But suddenly one of them falls in love with a girl. And as soon as the other one falls in love with a girl, the same girl, because of his friend,
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antagonism is going to proceed. They are two types of objects.
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The objects we can share because they are abundant, you know, drinks, soft drinks, and so forth.
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And they are the objects we cannot share or do not want to share, which is the case for the, you know, sympathy, the love of a girl friend.
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We do not want to share that, even especially with our best friend. Even though these characters are very insecure, and as soon as they desire a girl, they are trying to get their friend to desire the same girl.
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This is a crucial point, because it's one thing to have competition over the scarcity of the object.
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One woman, one man can have her or the other. But I take it to be suggesting that it's much more complex than that.
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Which more complex.
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That it's not just that two men desiring the same object, but it's somehow their desire is, for Miss Goose, one with the other, and their rivalry sets up a kind of desire for the rival, no?
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Yes. It's very obvious, for instance, in the two gentlemen, Verona, you know, where as soon as one of the two boys is in love with a girl, his friend is inevitably drawn into the game.
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Why is that?
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And in a way, the first friend tries to draw the other one into the game, because if his friend does not love his girlfriend, he's not sure he made the right choice.
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Therefore, he too is mediated.
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And this type of friendship is something that obsesses Shakespeare and other writers.
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Well, here is the kind of path I'd like to follow first, which is given a number of examples from Shakespeare.
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I began at the top of the hour, I read from Francesca speech in Kanto 5, where the two lovers are reading a book in which two lovers kiss each other, and they let the book slip on and they imitate the lovers.
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The first question is, what role does literature play for you in your thinking, in terms of revealing the structures and mechanisms of literature?
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Literature is just like another other.
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In other words, if you imitate a book, in the case of Lancelot, you have the Queen and the Queen Queen Vere, and she falls in love with Lancelot.
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And Paolo and Francesca, they are in-laws, you know, Francesca is married to the brother of Paolo.
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They have absolutely no bad idea of making love to each other, no bad thought.
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But when they read this, they think about themselves. They think they could do the same thing.
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And they are suddenly inspired by the book to do the same thing.
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That's why Dante, obviously, views the book as in a way that devil who incites that gallo to fool liberal, a kilos crease.
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The book was their gallo to.
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The gallo to tell our listeners gallo is the traitor.
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He's the traitor between the Queen and her boyfriend.
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She is the one who suggested to the boyfriend that he should make love.
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He's a go-between.
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The theme of the go-between is extremely important in Shakespeare too, pandoras, you know.
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So the go-between is in a way a man who plays with the mimelectessai of others.
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And the man of the theater, he sets up some kind of story by inciting the méric desire
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and watching the results, which are usually drama.
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Drama of jealousy of envy of conflict.
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So Galleo, there was a traitor to the king.
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Yes.
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And a go-between between the adulterous lovers, Paolo and Francesca are cousins, or they're
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their brother and sister-in-law.
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And there's a pure emulation of behavior.
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So here, I guess the question I would ask is if literature first led you to see the structure of mimetic desires,
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I believe in your first book to seek desire in the novel, is when you first laid out this theater.
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And all this was through a massive probing of European fiction, beginning with Cervantes and going all the way up to Camus and so forth.
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So literature clearly had a revelatory fun.
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Yes, but it was more the contact between literature and my own experience, you know.
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I was in my early 20s then.
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And of course I was interested in girlfriends.
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And I suddenly realized that I was just like the most novel heroes, like post, you know, in his novel.
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One girlfriend, she wanted me to marry her.
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And I didn't want to do that.
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And therefore I would move away from her when she demanded, in a way, some commitment on my part.
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But as soon as I had moved away and she had accepted it and she had left me, I was drawn back to her again by the very fact, in a way, she denied herself to me.
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And I realized suddenly there that she was both object and mediator for me, some kind of novel.
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You see, and she influenced my desire by denying it.
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So all these games, these negative games, which are always fair in desire, because even the people who know least about desire are aware that the denial of the object increases the desire.
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The denial of that, the object, is extremely, very linked to the presence of the third person who might steal the object from you.
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And absence is a form of mediation.
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So when you turn to literature, you found in the European fiction a variety of representations of this very simple thing.
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Well, I think there are two types of writers, you know, what I call romantic writers.
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The romantic writers believe in the genuineness and spontaneity of desire.
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They believe that their choice of the object is dictated only by what they are and so forth.
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I call them romantic writers, but the more interesting writers are the ones who realize the role of that third person and play with it in order to obtain the results.
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Who would be these writers in your opinion?
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Well, I think that in the European novel, the first great example is Cervantes.
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You know, why does donkyoty want to become a knight-errant in a world with a normal knight-errant?
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He's exactly like Francesca. He reads novels of Cervantes.
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And this is because he reads novels of Cervantes.
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That he wants to become a great hero. He imitates entities of goal,
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who is a purely fictional character, of course, and the result is that he gets beaten black and blue on all the highways of Spain.
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But he's very happy in the sense that he thinks he's the great disciple of entities and is going to re-establish knight-errant, which has disappeared for centuries.
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So literature not only reveals this mechanisms of mimetic zire also proposes models of imitation for readers.
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And of course, this is something we see everywhere, not only in readers of literature, but obviously moviegoers, television watchers.
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I think it's undeniable that we're living a culture where we're steeped with the models of imitation that try to.
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And of course, the more recent media are more powerful than the old ones. Today we try to get children to read books and not to watch television.
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But in the old days, books were really fascinating because they played the role of television today, and they were temptation per se.
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When you try to convince students that they should read them against their mimetic impulse,
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Of course, you'll more or less tell them that they have no interest to them, that they are not going to get any incitement for them.
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That's probably why it's so hard to teach literature today.
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So for you, authors like Stondale, Flo Bette, I mean obviously Emma Bovacie is like a Francesca in a...
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That's true, modern-day version of Francesca, who was nourished on cheap romantic fiction, we call it cheaper.
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It was just a popular romantic fiction, which provided her with her concept of what it means to be a hero and so forth.
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It's very interesting how you, in deceived desire in the novel, you do a whole sort of typology of emotions,
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especially what we might call negative emotions.
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Hatred, jealousy, envy, energy, resentment,
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which are all linked to pride, of course, because if you have a rivalry, a mimetic rivalry, your vanity is involved,
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and you want to win at all cost. It is the main fight anyway between two young men, two seduce of woman,
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and they spend quite a bit of time, especially in Latin culture.
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I think one of the reasons Anglo-Saxon culture is, which would I say, more economically dynamic and so forth,
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it's because not energy is deviated into the sort of mimetic desire, which plays such an enormous role in the Italian little town, or in southern France,
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or in Spain, and most of people spend their whole lives doing that.
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I would raise a question that I'll ask you in a provocative spirit, which is perhaps what you're describing is correct and accurate when it comes to a culture like France,
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which has had a long aristocratic tradition typically highly committed to forms of snobbery, vanity, and other Latin cultures, as you were mentioning,
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if it doesn't apply equally well to Anglo-Saxon cultures, nothing about non-western cultures, to what extent is there a claims of universality?
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There is a claim of universality because it doesn't matter which type of desire it is.
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Of course, in these novels, sexual desire plays a greater role, but in a world of entrepreneurs, as you see in English,
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the French are supposed not to have any word for that because that is a French word.
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In the world of entrepreneurs, mimetic desire is very important too.
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And the institution, which is a most mimetic of all, is the greatest institution, capitalist institution, or just talk market.
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You desire a stock, not because it is objectively desirable.
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You know nothing about what you desire a stock, exclusively because other people desire it.
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And if other people desire it, its values grows up and up and up, and therefore in a way there, mimetic desire is absolute monarch.
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It's an official thing.
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And what is very interesting is that the analyst of the market had not yet discovered that.
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When they tell you psychology is getting into the market, they mean that the mimetic wave, which next starts, lies, is getting out of bounds.
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It has no more relationship to reality because of course, behind it there is objective information.
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But the stock market is always threatened with a mimetic wave of such importance and such a lack of objectivity,
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that there will inevitably be a collapse, which is also lacking in objectivity.
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Just as a fashionable woman in Balzac, when she is abandoned by a lover, she may be abandoned by all potential lovers at the same time.
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And it's a total disaster for her. She becomes like a stock that has lost its value.
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The error of Marx was to believe that the economic aspect of these things is more fundamental than the other ones.
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They are all equal.
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There is no reason the error of Freud was to believe that the sexual aspect was the only one which was fundamental.
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But the relationship between Freud and Marx, the mimetic desire reveals it.
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Each one of them limits mimetic desire to one sector, one aspect of human activity, which is regarded as the only important one, the key to everything.
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Whereas I take a theory of a mimetic desire is not a psychological theory.
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No.
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It's not based in psychological premises.
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No, because it's human relations.
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It's also the structures which obtain between people and not just within their own psyches.
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It's also not from what I understand exclusively limited to human beings that there is a basis for it in the animal world.
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In the animal world, you have what they call dominant patterns.
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How are they established?
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They are the males fighting for the females.
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And the males are so eager to fight for the females that sometimes the females will disappear and they will continue to fight.
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Just because they are menatically aroused and the fight is more important than the object.
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But they will never kill each other.
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Whereas human beings invent vengeance.
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Vengeance is the ultimate form of an genetic rivalry because each act of vengeance is the exact imitation of the preceding one.
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If you study vengeance, you realize how mimises imitation is all over the place in all manifestations of desire.
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So in human beings it's pushed to such an extreme that you have death.
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You have vengeance which cannot be limited.
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That's why I said in my opening remarks about why can't we have an institution devoted strictly to the study of vengeance, for example.
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And to work out its logic, reciprocal violence, these kind of things, it seems like we are far from having overcome this sort of behavior that is characterized human history throughout all these centuries.
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But let's move on to another emotion which is closely linked obviously to hatred, vengeance, and jealousy.
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It's envy.
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And we'll talk about your book on Shakespeare which you chose to entitled it The Order of Envy.
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But before we talk about Shakespeare specifically, I think envy is a highly underrated emotion among human relations.
|
| 00:26:24.000 |
How do you see the role of Envy?
|
| 00:26:26.000 |
I see it exactly in the same way.
|
| 00:26:30.000 |
I think that envy today is the most, what should I say, the emotion which plays the greatest role in our society, which is all directed towards money.
|
| 00:26:42.000 |
And therefore you envy the people who have more than you have.
|
| 00:26:46.000 |
And you cannot talk about your envy.
|
| 00:26:49.000 |
I think the reason we talk so much about sex is that we don't dare talk about envy.
|
| 00:26:55.000 |
The real repressed, the real repression is the repression of Envy.
|
| 00:27:01.000 |
And of course envy is the mimetic.
|
| 00:27:04.000 |
You cannot help imitating your model.
|
| 00:27:07.000 |
And of course if you want money very badly, you're going to go into the same business that man is in and so forth.
|
| 00:27:16.000 |
And more likely than not, you will be destroyed by strength.
|
| 00:27:21.000 |
So when people talk about masochism and so forth, they are still talking about the imadic desire.
|
| 00:27:27.000 |
They are talking about the fact that we move always to the greatest strength in the direction of the desire we envy most.
|
| 00:27:38.000 |
You know, in the direction of the thing we envy most.
|
| 00:27:41.000 |
And we do because that power is greater than ours.
|
| 00:27:46.000 |
And probably is going to defeat us again.
|
| 00:27:49.000 |
So there will be repetition, what Freud calls repetition in psychological life, which is linked to the fact that we are possessed.
|
| 00:27:58.000 |
But what has defeated us the first time?
|
| 00:28:01.000 |
Our victorious rival in lovemaking becomes a permanent model.
|
| 00:28:07.000 |
So novelists like Dostoyevsky, you know, and Cervantes himself, will show you characters who literally ask their rival to choose for them the girl they should love.
|
| 00:28:25.000 |
In the Middle Ages envy was often depicted iconographically as a woman blindfolded.
|
| 00:28:31.000 |
And I think it probably has to do with a false etymology of envy as not having sight.
|
| 00:28:37.000 |
Is there a deucey of blindness at the heart of envy in this regard or a voice?
|
| 00:28:42.000 |
Is there a blind spot in our own failure to recognize envy as one of the most dominant passions of our own society?
|
| 00:28:50.000 |
Yes, it's a most difficult to acknowledge because it involves your being, you know.
|
| 00:28:56.000 |
In a way envy is a denial of one's own being and accepting the fact that you prefer the being of your rival.
|
| 00:29:05.000 |
And this is so hateful to you that it awakens a desire for murder, for murder of that other new envy and cannot repress that envy.
|
| 00:29:18.000 |
Sometimes murder, but you can say also in other cases admiration and...
|
| 00:29:22.000 |
Not the same thing.
|
| 00:29:23.000 |
Well, hopefully they have different outcomes.
|
| 00:29:27.000 |
Yeah, I'm thinking whether the advertising industry is not...
|
| 00:29:31.000 |
Does it know what you're saying the lesson of envy very, very well?
|
| 00:29:35.000 |
Well, I think they know it very well because if you really look at advertising,
|
| 00:29:39.000 |
they are never trying to demonstrate to you that the object they are selling is the best possible from an objective point of view.
|
| 00:29:48.000 |
From the point of view of scientific objectivity.
|
| 00:29:53.000 |
They are always trying to prove to you that this object is desired and possessed by the people you would like to be.
|
| 00:30:01.000 |
Therefore Coca-Cola is drawing on a very beautiful beach, marvelous sun, a bunch of people sent fan in an ideal way.
|
| 00:30:10.000 |
We are always between the age of 16 and 22.
|
| 00:30:15.000 |
Well, everything you would like to be.
|
| 00:30:17.000 |
We are obviously very little close because they have a most shapely body, but very expensive and so forth.
|
| 00:30:24.000 |
So everything you might envy.
|
| 00:30:26.000 |
And therefore there is something sacramental.
|
| 00:30:29.000 |
Religion is always mixed up in these things.
|
| 00:30:32.000 |
If you consume Coca-Cola, maybe if you consume a lot of it, you will become a little bit like these people you would like to be.
|
| 00:30:39.000 |
It is like a kind of eucharist that will turn you into the person you really admire.
|
| 00:30:48.000 |
So why this title for your Shakespeare book?
|
| 00:30:51.000 |
The Order of Envy.
|
| 00:30:52.000 |
And it really comes from a very specific text.
|
| 00:30:56.000 |
Tom and Ernie Poe which is the Rape of Lucrice.
|
| 00:31:00.000 |
And the Rape of Lucrice is the story of all the male population in Rome which is in a camp, you know, because they are fighting a war.
|
| 00:31:13.000 |
And in the evening they talk about their wives.
|
| 00:31:16.000 |
And one of them, Colatinos in Latin, Colatine, describes his wife in such glowing ways that talk with the son of the nephew of the king.
|
| 00:31:29.000 |
During the night, lives on his horse, goes to Rome and rapes the woman.
|
| 00:31:37.000 |
In the original story by Livy, he sees the woman first.
|
| 00:31:44.000 |
In other words, he falls in love with her, he realizes she is all things, she is as beautiful as her husband described her.
|
| 00:31:54.000 |
In the story by Shakespeare, he suppresses that part.
|
| 00:31:58.000 |
She, he writes the woman, sight and scene, he is not seen her.
|
| 00:32:04.000 |
He is aroused only by the words of her husband.
|
| 00:32:08.000 |
So in other words Shakespeare there emphasizes the paradoxical aspect of her, I mean, I think the side.
|
| 00:32:14.000 |
The role of what I call the mediator, who is the husband.
|
| 00:32:18.000 |
It's the reason I think why most critics regard the rape of Lucris as a mad poor, you know, they don't know.
|
| 00:32:25.000 |
And they hate it. They dislike it, I think.
|
| 00:32:28.000 |
Because it tries to show to them what's really important for Shakespeare, the word.
|
| 00:32:34.000 |
And we of so rich it thing, this line is essential.
|
| 00:32:41.000 |
Yeah, that it shows that also it would seem to lack plausibility except if one understands my medic desire the way you do.
|
| 00:32:51.000 |
Because the idea of going to rape a woman's sight unseen would seem not to follow rules of bare as a military, whereas if one would advise into your thing.
|
| 00:33:00.000 |
No, no, I think that's up to a point that does not follow the rules of the mediator.
|
| 00:33:05.000 |
Very similar to much Shakespeare in a way, exaggerates in order to show you the truth, you know, in order to make it visible.
|
| 00:33:15.000 |
Yeah, one of the claims of your book is, and this has irks some critics one has to admit this, is that Shakespeare understood the truth.
|
| 00:33:24.000 |
He was the one literary author among the whole canon who really understood it thoroughly and theoretically, and had such a mastery with regard to the memetic phenomenon that he was able to imbued in all of his plays and to give us a corpus of works which do become this whole theater in this case of the dynamic of the
|
| 00:33:52.000 |
the dynamics of memetic desire everywhere.
|
| 00:33:56.000 |
And you as the commentator on Shakespeare claim him as your great sort of predecessor in the discovery of a memetic desire.
|
| 00:34:10.000 |
And one has to say that it's not the first time someone has claimed the authority of Shakespeare on behalf of a theory we know how Freud used him and so forth, but you really see him primarily as the poet of memetic desire.
|
| 00:34:27.000 |
Is that correct?
|
| 00:34:28.000 |
I see him primarily as the poet of memetic desire. If you take a play like in its emanate stream, you will know you would observe that two men are always tend to be in love with the same girl.
|
| 00:34:45.000 |
Then they suddenly change, supposedly because of the love Jews which is put into their eyes, and they both fall in love with the other girl.
|
| 00:34:57.000 |
And then they become rivals. So I really think that in the play the theme of the theories which is greatly emphasized by most people who represent Shakespeare on the stage should be understood as the way human beings in archaic societies fail to recognize memetic desire.
|
| 00:35:21.000 |
Myth and stories of that type are always excuses in order to explain through miraculous means the bad consequences of memetic desire.
|
| 00:35:36.000 |
Do you think Shakespeare understood that?
|
| 00:35:38.000 |
I think he has a way.
|
| 00:35:39.000 |
Or how to choose love by another's eyes is one of the essential lines of that play.
|
| 00:35:48.000 |
In other words, hell is really when you choose love by another's eyes and you are inevitably drawn into a conflict of jealousy and a problem with your friend.
|
| 00:36:02.000 |
Which is the story of memetic, the myths of an ice cream is nothing else.
|
| 00:36:09.000 |
You claim in your book that the memetic phenomena is much more present in the comedies than the tragedies.
|
| 00:36:18.000 |
Or at least it's present in such a way that it's much more obvious.
|
| 00:36:21.000 |
Much more obvious because you can have all sorts of arrangements, you know, and precisely I mentioned before the two gentlemen of all that's of who?
|
| 00:36:32.000 |
The first place of Shakespeare, you have only one pair of lovers, two boys who are in love with the same girl.
|
| 00:36:39.000 |
And beginning after that you have two pairs and the two pairs are entangled with each other.
|
| 00:36:46.000 |
Therefore it's like a ballet, you know.
|
| 00:36:49.000 |
And if you look at the shape of a ballet of a movement, you can assume in a way that behind it there is a form of memetic rivalry too.
|
| 00:36:58.000 |
You see because ultimately we are moving towards a type of art in which gestures and words and so forth are all in a way symmetrically arranged because of memetic rivalry.
|
| 00:37:13.000 |
The more memetic rivalry you have to set with someone, the more different you fear from that person.
|
| 00:37:20.000 |
Whereas in reality you always do the same thing, you always act in the same way.
|
| 00:37:27.000 |
And in a way that differences collapse, as the differences collapse, the characters become literally doubles of each other, they act in the same way, they speak the same way.
|
| 00:37:40.000 |
And they have a feeling that they are imitated by the other who is making fun of them, but this imitation in fact is compulsive.
|
| 00:37:48.000 |
This is hernia and Helena in its own history.
|
| 00:37:54.000 |
Let's take a test case of Hamlet, because in the literary criticism Hamlet, it's considered to be maybe one of the first modern consciousnesses that is at odds with itself.
|
| 00:38:08.000 |
It's an internalized self, speaks to itself, seems to be removed from the alienated from society, and would seem to be that exactly the kind of character who is free from this externalized circuit of the promiscuous circulation of desire around him.
|
| 00:38:26.000 |
He withdraws within himself and sees the birth of the romantic inward melon.
|
| 00:38:32.000 |
But doing much of the play, in fact he is, and that's why it cannot do what society requires of him, which is revenge.
|
| 00:38:42.000 |
He sees the similarity between his father and his uncle. They are both murderers, you know they hate each other, but they are memetic characters.
|
| 00:38:51.000 |
And he sees the futility of the whole world. He sees the futility of love, revenge.
|
| 00:38:54.000 |
That's right.
|
| 00:38:55.000 |
And then what happens? I mean in what way can we say that Hamlet ends up becoming a victim of the very...
|
| 00:39:03.000 |
Well, it's not that he's...
|
| 00:39:05.000 |
There is another plot inside the plot, which is really the whole story of Polonius, killed by Hamlet.
|
| 00:39:14.000 |
And then, there is the son of Polonius, in many ways is the anti-Hammlet. He is as willing and ready to commit to vengeance.
|
| 00:39:26.000 |
Hamlet is unable to commit. He is ready to mourn his sister in a very powerful, emotional way.
|
| 00:39:37.000 |
And when Hamlet sees this, he says the bravery of his grief put me into a towering passion, a towering rage.
|
| 00:39:54.000 |
And this means that out of imitation of Laertes, he will become able to kill Laertes and to start the vengeance process, which he could not start before.
|
| 00:40:08.000 |
Because Laertes is closer to him, and is very different, but becomes a model of the menerictus are, which he feels unconsciously, and which an imitation finally.
|
| 00:40:22.000 |
So it resolves the tension and the inability to act, which comes before. The inability to act in our world is in a way and awareness of the stupidity of the menerictus are, and how equivalent things are to each other.
|
| 00:40:40.000 |
The more you act, the more you get into these menerict situations, which are circular.
|
| 00:40:46.000 |
Would that be the essence of the tragedy? This is Shakespeare, you know, most tragic writers are not that modern. Shakespeare there, in a way, interpreted, at least I don't claim total truth. You know, I want to be modern.
|
| 00:41:04.000 |
But I think that Shakespeare is enormously modern. What he says is it's very difficult to keep a revenge tragedy going on for five hours or three hours, you know, and in order to do it, we must have a hero who is unable to get revenge.
|
| 00:41:23.000 |
The hero who does not believe in the situation, he does not believe in the virtue of his mother, he does not believe in the difference between his uncle and his father, which he does not believe in anything, he should believe.
|
| 00:41:37.000 |
And he's surprised when he sees that an actor who should know it's not true, is capable of shedding real tears for the Queen of Troy, Acuba.
|
| 00:41:49.000 |
Acuba, for Acuba, that actor can shed tears, and I cannot shed them in my real family life. The theatre scene is very important.
|
| 00:42:01.000 |
In that sense. What's, what's heck you but a hammer, he's a heck you about that. Yeah, what's heck you about that?
|
| 00:42:07.000 |
But I think that is tragic that one can understand the madness of reciprocal violence and the forms of vengeance and the perpetuation of those cycles, and at the same time not be able to resist falling into their pattern again.
|
| 00:42:30.000 |
And that would seem to give a deep sort of pessimism to a play like Hamlet, that even if, as I was saying at the beginning of the program, we were to create these institutions that would undertake a massive study of things like vengeance, reciprocal violence and so forth.
|
| 00:42:48.000 |
Why is it that human behavior is so resistant to adapting itself to what the mind knows.
|
| 00:42:57.000 |
It's still a big, it's the same way. That's your question. But in many instances we actually don't, you know.
|
| 00:43:04.000 |
If you really look at the situation, many people pull back from the mirror situations in the sense that Hamlet does.
|
| 00:43:13.000 |
And in a way is not modern wisdom very much this. We don't analyze completely an American situation.
|
| 00:43:22.000 |
But we are aware we are in a situation which is totally classical, which is present all over the world in thousands of examples at every minute, every second.
|
| 00:43:34.000 |
And we pull back from it because we don't want to repeat something we know too well is going to end in exactly the same fashion as all previous examples.
|
| 00:43:50.000 |
One more case from Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. That is a play where two lovers seem to have a completely unmediated relationship one to the other.
|
| 00:44:03.000 |
What do you make of Romeo and Juliet in terms of memetic desire?
|
| 00:44:08.000 |
Well, I really believe that Shakespeare there wrote a romantic play. In other words Romeo and Juliet, unlike do not play tricks on each other.
|
| 00:44:23.000 |
So, most people always quote "O meo and Juliet" as the play who contradicts my thesis. But at the same time Shakespeare gives you many clues of the way you do it.
|
| 00:44:40.000 |
The reason Romeo and Juliet fall in love with each other is that they shouldn't. They are separated by the blood feud.
|
| 00:44:48.000 |
They belong to the two different tribes that are constantly fighting. So if you look at the language of Romeo and Juliet, what is the language of the love of memetic desire?
|
| 00:45:01.000 |
In Shakespeare, it's the oxymoron. I love hate this girl. You know, love and hate are always together.
|
| 00:45:10.000 |
And people don't realize that the reason for the oxymoron is that love and hate are always mixed. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, they are not mixed.
|
| 00:45:21.000 |
But Romeo and Juliet can use the language of hatred and violence because they are on both sides of the blood feud.
|
| 00:45:33.000 |
I love my beloved enemy. Is the fundamental expression of love in the 16th, 17th century? And in Romeo and Juliet, it really means he is a capulet and a memento-gue.
|
| 00:45:50.000 |
Therefore, you can suppress memetic desire, but it is there underneath in the language because you have the blood feud that brings you the violence you need in order to have convincing passion.
|
| 00:46:06.000 |
I remember Zippiedely had a film version of Romeo and Juliet where he wanted to end with the great romantic myth of love. And the two lovers are there on the stage in the final scene, just alone.
|
| 00:46:21.000 |
But I think in the original play, there is a dead body who comes there and can't remember now. Who is it that Romeo slays?
|
| 00:46:30.000 |
Romeo slays parents.
|
| 00:46:33.000 |
And Paris is there at the end, along with the two lovers in the original play.
|
| 00:46:41.000 |
And that is a hindrance.
|
| 00:46:43.000 |
But there is something else that shows us that Shakespeare did not take the conclusion.
|
| 00:46:50.000 |
Because the thing which is funny about the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet is that they love each other sincerely. But the blood feud, the parents are willing, they can get married.
|
| 00:47:02.000 |
There is no obstacle between them. So they have to create the obstacle.
|
| 00:47:06.000 |
When Juliet does not wake up at the right second she is supposed to wake up, they stupid Romeo kills himself.
|
| 00:47:14.000 |
Therefore, when finally Juliet can wake up, wakes up, she can see that he is dead and she kills herself.
|
| 00:47:24.000 |
Now, at least about the same time as Romeo and Juliet,
|
| 00:47:31.000 |
He takes the rotisetta of that ending, saying, "Look at these fools who believe in the true love there,
|
| 00:47:40.000 |
whereas in fact these lovers are the victims of stupid misunderstanding.
|
| 00:47:51.000 |
If they do that, you have the story of Pyramus and Pispy in the midst of an ice dream,
|
| 00:47:59.000 |
in which the same thing happened, they are supposed to be separated by their parents.
|
| 00:48:05.000 |
They give each other an appointment, and when Pyramus shows up in the forest, he finds a lion there, which is chewing the scar of Pispy.
|
| 00:48:20.000 |
And he kills himself. Two minutes later, Pispy comes back, finding Pyramus dead, she kills herself.
|
| 00:48:31.000 |
And of course, it is a parody of Romeo and Juliet. It means, look what the ending of Romeo and Juliet has to be,
|
| 00:48:41.000 |
in order to make it harder, incredible when you have two young people who love each other,
|
| 00:48:46.000 |
and it is simply not true that their parents are separating them. They are perfectly ready to accept their marriage.
|
| 00:48:57.000 |
I have to tell our listeners that I've known a "Ronya" long time, and I can ask them about any text in this real literature,
|
| 00:49:04.000 |
and I will be thoroughly convinced that memetic desire is absolutely everywhere,
|
| 00:49:10.000 |
and that the theory is finally unfalcifiable. This is an issue now, hold on.
|
| 00:49:17.000 |
That's a proper thing, in order for a theory to be true, there has to be certain conditions under which is falsifiable.
|
| 00:49:23.000 |
So let me ask you, under what conditions do you think your theory of memetic desire is possible?
|
| 00:49:29.000 |
No, but I think that Romeo and Juliet in a way is Shakespeare himself, showing you that if you do away with memetic,
|
| 00:49:39.800 |
you have to use other prompts that recreate it, Haji. You can write a comedy. Comedy is a more honest genre,
|
| 00:49:48.800 |
I fear, than tragedy, but in order to have it Haji, you must bring in, you know, underhandedly something like the blood feud,
|
| 00:49:58.800 |
which has just ready-made violence. It's been going on for generations, and you have the sun of one tribe,
|
| 00:50:07.800 |
make love to the girl of the other tribe. If you look at the balcony scene between Romeo and Juliet, you know, they are very young people, she's about 13.
|
| 00:50:16.800 |
It's supposed to be the greatest love scene in Shakespeare, but what do they talk about? They talk about the henchmen of the family who are down there in the bushes, trying to kill Romeo.
|
| 00:50:30.800 |
If you really look at the balcony scene, there is no language of love. They cannot see much to each other, but they can talk a lot about the henchmen of the two families that are fighting that are going to kill Romeo. That's what Juliet is worried about.
|
| 00:50:48.800 |
They have not much to see because Juliet has already accepted to make love to Romeo, and Romeo is about to do it.
|
| 00:50:57.800 |
I promise I wouldn't do this, but I think I have to ask whether we've been talking about literature and memetic desire within individuals in relations between individuals, but blood feuds, vengeance, reciprocal violence.
|
| 00:51:14.800 |
These are also geopolitical realities in the world we live in. Do you see any sort of pulling back from the endless repetition of the old cycles?
|
| 00:51:30.800 |
Or do you see a danger of a kind of vortex in which we never really get beyond cycles of reciprocal violence in political terms?
|
| 00:51:42.800 |
I think we are free. It's a question of understanding and of real human beings are so passionate that they always get caught in the old traps.
|
| 00:51:57.800 |
We ourselves do. We are committed to what we do. We want to succeed. And we always succeed at the expense of someone. And therefore, I really think we are moving more and more towards more and more violence because of rivalry.
|
| 00:52:17.800 |
I've talked a lot about literature, but recently I read a book which is very informative for me, which was close to its on war. It was a great through.
|
| 00:52:28.800 |
And what caused it, he calls war a chameleon, and he says it says rise to the extremes.
|
| 00:52:37.800 |
And he says in order to win, you have to imitate your enemy constantly. And if you start reading in class with it carefully, you can see it works exactly like an American novel which would be explicated.
|
| 00:52:53.800 |
Because fundamentally, a drama in novel is a war. It doesn't matter which side wins. And the cause of its does not teach you how to win. But he constantly shows you the mimetic nature of war. In order to beat the French, you know, he was a Prussian during Napoleon's victory.
|
| 00:53:14.800 |
In order to beat the French, you must have a popular war. You must draft everybody. So here we see the move towards total war. And he sees very well too that the technical side of war, the power of the artillery, for instance, is a mimetic game. If you have a big gun, I must have a bigger gun than you have.
|
| 00:53:37.800 |
So in other words, he shows us the move towards total war and total mimetic conflict.
|
| 00:53:47.800 |
If they were to listen to you, what would you propose to politicians in order to try to avoid falling into this syndrome?
|
| 00:53:54.800 |
Well, I think that knowledge, it's a complicated question because my vision fundamentally is religious. And I believe in non-violence. And I believe in the knowledge of violence being able to teach you to reject violence.
|
| 00:54:16.800 |
Because it will show you that we are always getting into a game which is exactly like the previous ones, which is going to be a constant repetition.
|
| 00:54:25.800 |
You ever Hamlet already saw that? It didn't save him. Ah, but he had to bring in, you know, Shakespeare had to bring in laterties. And if laterties had been another Hamlet, there would have been no end to the play.
|
| 00:54:39.800 |
So it would have been the end of tragedy, but when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, what he said is untiled of tragedy, and he's really very close to the end of tragedy. And after that, he goes to the romances, and the romances, it's really a bunch of characters who repent.
|
| 00:54:59.800 |
Their violence, these are mimetic desire for vengeance, like guarantees in the winter tale.
|
| 00:55:06.800 |
Their aunties become aware that he's been a wild man totally mad by suspecting his wife of being unfaithful with his friend.
|
| 00:55:20.800 |
You know.
|
| 00:55:22.800 |
Honei, you're going to be a frequent guest on this program, I hope. Today, we've only really scratched the surface. We're trying to get clear some of the fundamentals about the concept of mimetic desire.
|
| 00:55:34.800 |
There's a way in which after your first book there on deceit desire and the novel, you extended it into an anthropological realm.
|
| 00:55:42.800 |
And you went on to write books like Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, where you come up with essentially what amounts to an anthropogenic theory of human culture based on scapegoat rituals and sacrifice and the violent origins of religion.
|
| 00:56:03.800 |
And the next time you're on this program, we're going to go from here to that issue of sacrifice and scapegoating.
|
| 00:56:12.800 |
So, I want all our listeners to stay tuned for that. It's going to be soon. Meanwhile, thank you very much, Honei.
|
| 00:56:18.800 |
I'm sure it would be just as present as today.
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| 00:56:21.800 |
Oh, it will be. So, please stay tuned. There's a second installment of enlightened opinions coming up.
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We have a guest here in the studio, another professor from Stanford, and you're nothing to want to miss it.
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