Notes
263 Notes Acknowledgments 1. “Not a Country for Old Men: Mimesis and Violence in Santa Varvara,” in Kristeva’s Fiction, ed. Benigno Trigo, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 57–78; “After the Scapegoat: René Girard’s Apocalyptic Vision and the Legacy of Mimetic Theory,” Philosophy Today 56, no. 2 (2012): 141–53. Preface 1. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 180. 2. Ibid., 170. 3. Ibid., 175. 4. Ibid., 171. 5. Ibid., 176, 182. 6. Ibid., 175. 7. Ibid., 174. Traditionally, family relationships exemplify “external mediation.” This form of mediation occurs when there is space between a desiring subject and its model large enough that they do not compete for the same object. A parent who serves as a “role model” to whom his or her child looks up and aims to emulate is an external mediator; a parent who is a child’s “best friend” may fall under the sway of internal mediation. Under conditions of internal mediation, the model and the subject who would imitate the model share much in common and therefore they become rivals when the subject attempts to acquire an object valued by the model. René 264 Notes Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 9. 8. Girard writes that “it has become clear that Totem and Taboo is more compatible with the theory of the surrogate victim as the foundation of culture than is any other modern work” (Violence and the Sacred, 217). Eugene Webb suggests that Girard is “the only important thinker to take a really serious interest” in this hypothesis. See Eugene Webb, The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 154. 9. One particularly compelling example of this diversity is Randolph Splitter’s book on Proust (Randolph Splitter, Proust’s Recherche: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). The varying psychoanalytic interpretations he offers of In Search of Lost Time are eloquent testimony to psychoanalytic theory as a living system. Splitter includes Girard in his discussion and expresses concern about his narrow treatment of Freud in Violence and the Sacred (134–35). 10. René Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 67; as cited in “Editor’s Introduction: Imitating Oedipus,” in René Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, ed. Mark R. Anspach (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), xxxvii. 11. Anspach, “Editor’s Introduction,” xxxvii. 12. Ibid. 13. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 92, as cited in Anspach, “Editor’s Introduction,” xxxix. 14. Fundamental to Freud’s approach to the mechanism of desire is his early acquaintance with Charcot, whose demonstrations on hysteria Freud attended in 1885 and 1886 at the Salpêtrière amphitheater. Charcot was researching the perplexing symptoms of hysteria: paralysis, muscle contractions, aphasia, and seizures. When his contemporaries accused the patients of malingering, Charcot took his patients’ seriously, struggling to understand the physical and psychological aspects of their suffering. Freud’s attention was captured by Charcot’s search for a nondualistic account of the cause of hysteria. Psychoanalysis, a system for bridging body and mind, is born of Freud’s reflections on Charcot’s work. 15. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 357. Girard is explicitly glossing his commentary on the Oedipus complex in Violence and the Sacred in the paragraph from which I take this citation; however, he expands on that account by directly accounting for prepresentational mimesis with the notion of “animal appetite.” 16. In my own Sacrificed Lives, I address closely the value for Girard of closer attention to the maternal matrix, as described by Kristeva. In an essay on Winnicott, I also address Girard’s dismissal of Melanie Klein’s work in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World and indicate how a nuanced treatment of her work offers valuable insights for mimetic theory (Martha J. Reineke, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997], 65–102; Martha J. Reineke, “Transforming Space: Creativity, Destruction, and Mimesis in Winnicott and Girard,” Contagion 14 [2007]: 81–82; Girard, Things Hidden, 361. 17. René Girard, ed., Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice...
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