I would like to piggy back on an excellent article written by my friend Anthony on Girard and the passion of Christ. Particularly in our hyper consumeristic culture, Girard’s reading of the passion is needed to restore our true selves and to help us properly meditate on the mysteries of this week.
According to Girard, with the arrival of self consciousness, another’s desire replaces instinct as the main determinant of human behavior. In other words, I no longer act out of reaction directly to an object, but in a three way act. I desire something because someone else desires it. I desire the desire of another, and I desire what they desire because they desire it.
Girard’s theory follows closely that of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. For Hegel, human beings reach self-consciousness when they begin to desire non-material things. And the object of their desire is that others desire them. For Hegel, I desire primarily that the other should desire, or recognize, me. In modifying Girard, we should not reject Hegel. We can see Hegel’s dialectic everywhere in our society, especially in the nature of woman’s desire. Many women find that they have no self except as the object of a man’s desire. And this cycle too, the passion breaks.
For Girard, it is not desire for recognition that is the primary act, but rather desire according to the other’s desire. I desire what you desire. This is what distinguishes human beings from animals. And this, he argues, is at the heart of all human intentional action.
Notice that we cannot break the nature of human desire. It is what it is. What Jesus did was to raise to awareness the fact that desire is mimetic and that it tends to scapegoat the innocent in order to release the tension that it manufactures within a society.
From this awareness we have two options. First, we can make use of mimetic desire for our own purposes, such as advertisements do. They harness desire precisely by recognizing its mimetic nature. This is not the awareness that Jesus brought.
Second, we can follow the path of Jesus up Calvary. This means to desire according to the will of his Father. For us, this means desiring according to Jesus’ will. Notice in the Garden of Eden, Eve did not find the fruit tempting until the snake points it out as forbidden and desirable to eat. Then she sees it with new eyes. Jesus saw the same fruit, but chose to see as desirable what his Father offered instead. The question here thus becomes that of role models. Whose eyes do we trust to show us how to see?
For Catholics, this is precisely why we have the mass. The whole point is to ritually live out the mimetic sacrifice of an innocent victim so as to take on the perspective, not of the commercials I watch on TV, but of the innocent victim on the altar. The mass is the most subversive of actions for this reason: it up-ends the founding myth of modern society by directing mimetic desire towards the will, not of the powerful, but of the weak.
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