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75 P O S T F A C E Mimetic Desire in the Underground I am grateful to my good friend James Williams for translating and editing with great care the foregoing essay on Dostoevsky. When I wrote it I had just published the original French version of a longer book on five European novelists, including Dostoevsky. In that book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, the chief principle of interpretation is the idea of mimetic desire, which emerged from its creation and which has dominated my work ever since. The present book relies on mimetic desire, therefore, but not in very explicit fashion. In order to fit the original publisher’s requirements, I had to keep it short and I did not want to reformulate in such limited space the theoretical apparatus elaborated at length only a short time before. I was afraid it would seem repetitious and cumbersome. As a result the essay sounds more impressionistic than it really is. I would be well advised, perhaps, to perpetuate this illusion. Mimetic desire is often regarded as an artificial construct, a “reductionist” device that impoverishes the literary works to which it is “applied.” During my entire career, the “reductionist” objection has dogged my books with the regularity of a Pavlovian reflex and if there is a chance to escape unscathed for a change, why spoil it? Mimetic desire is “reductionist,” no doubt, but so is the very process of abstraction, and, unless we renounce thinking altogether, we cannot give up abstracting. Even if it were a viable option, a non-reductionist interpretation would merely paraphrase Dostoevsky; it would be of no interest to me. The only concrete choice, I feel, is between good and bad reductionism. 76 Postface Since our starting point is mimetic desire, we must begin with its definition . To say that our desires are imitative or mimetic is to root them neither in their objects nor in ourselves but in a third party, the model or mediator, whose desire we imitate in the hope of resembling him or her, in the hope that our two beings will be “fused,” as some Dostoevskyan characters love to say. The psychologists interested in role models tell us that young people, when they grow up, must imitate the best possible models. These should be older persons who have made a place for themselves in the community. If the growing youngsters imitate these good people, presumably they will not go astray. What I like about the idea of role model is the paramount function that, at least implicitly, it attributes to imitation. Most psychologists believe, mistakenly in my view, that imitation affects only our superficial attitudes and manners. If it did not influence our very desires, even the best role models could have no significant influence on their imitators. Why do peers, as a rule, even if not intrinsically bad, make bad role models? As I borrow the desire of a model from whom nothing separates me, neither time and space, nor prestige and social hierarchy, we both inevitably desire the same object and, unless this object can be shared and we are willing to share it, we will compete for it. Instead of uniting us, our shared desire will turn us into rivals and potential enemies. This mimetic rivalry is most obvious in small children. When two of them are left to play together, even and especially on a mountain of toys, the togetherness does not last. As soon as one child selects a toy, the other tries to take it away from him. The second child imitates the first. And the first child does his utmost to retain possession of the toy, not because this one, at least, “knows what he or she wants,” but for the opposite reason. The first child does not know any better than the second, and the latter’s interference reinforces the original choice. Conflicts of desire keep occurring not because strongly individualized desires strongly oppose one another but for the opposite reason. Each child takes the other as the model and guide of a desire that must be fundamentally free-floating and unattached since it attaches itself most stubbornly to the object of its rival, not only in children but in adults as well. Because of their mimetic nature, the rivalries of desires keep escalating, and the disputed objects acquire more and more value in the eyes of both rivals, even if the initial choice had...

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