Mimesis

Center Study inherits the concept of mimesis from René Girard but transforms it significantly. Girard's mimetic theory centers on the triangular structure of desire — self, model, object — and on the scapegoating mechanism that resolves mimetic crisis. Katz and Gans retain the insight that desire is mimetic but resist the claim that violence resolution requires a victim. The originary scene resolves mimetic crisis not through scapegoating but through the sign.

Mimesis and desire. To say desire is mimetic is to say: we want what others want, not because we independently evaluate the object and arrive at the same conclusion, but because the desire of another constitutes the object as desirable. The originary scene makes this structural: every participant on the scene desires the central object because every other participant desires it. The desire is irreducibly social — it has no pre-social object.

Mimetic crisis. When everyone desires the same object and acts on that desire simultaneously, the result is not satisfaction but crisis: the mutual recognition of mutual reaching, which generates the danger of mutual violence. The mimetic crisis is the pressure that forces the conversion of appropriation into signification. Without mimetic crisis, no sign — the gesture of reaching converts into the gesture of pointing only under the pressure of mimetic convergence.

Mimesis and the sign. The sign defers mimesis — it substitutes representation for appropriation, shared attention for competing desire. But the sign does not eliminate mimesis; it channels it. After the originary scene, mimesis operates at the level of signs: we imitate each other's signing, we orient our attention as others orient theirs, we constitute objects as significant by collectively facing them. Mimesis is what makes signs work — the shared imitation of the originary gesture is what gives the sign its binding force.

Exhaustive imitation. Bouvard develops the concept of exhaustive imitation — the attempt to imitate so completely that no remainder of the model's particularity escapes. Exhaustive imitation is the pathological extreme of mimesis: rather than deferring the model's desire, it attempts to entirely reproduce the model, eliminating the difference that makes imitation generative. AI systems face this problem structurally: trained to predict, they approach exhaustive imitation of the corpus, which eliminates the scenic position from which genuine sign-use is possible.