Insights with Rene Girard

. Whatever the distinctions made between forms of desire, for Girard all desire is properly speaking mimesis or mimetic desire. He has emphasized the acquisitive aspect of desire in identifying cultural and personal crises, and this acquisitive desire (la mimésis d'appropriation) is the precipitating dynamic in the founding scenario. Its initial functioning is prior to all representations; but since it is, even in its embryonic stage, evoked by the other who becomes the model, it easily becomes unstable when pressures on the human grouping, or any particular relations within it, accelerate an anxious groping for certainty and order. It is in some such situation that acquisitive desire leads to conflict and rivalry, issuing then in violence.