Concept
Mimesis
The imitative appetite that generates crisis — and whose deferral generates language
“My starting assumption is that humans are mimetic beings: we learn everything we learn by imitation.”
From the Archive
“Mimesis is obviously a very ancient concept, prominent in Plato and Aristotle, but as far as I know until Rene Girard it was never pursued all the way down—it’s one thing to say humans are mimetic beings, but it’s another to say that mimesis makes the human.”
“Mimesis is two-sided: first of all, it is unconscious and discovered (if at all) after fact, usually through some unpleasant revelation; on the other hand, more deliberately, it is a way of approaching others from the outside so as to take on their attributes and their power.”
“And this is the real problem of mimesis, and Girard’s great discovery—imitation leads to rivalry because we learn to desire from our models and must therefore ultimately desire the destruction and our replacement of those models.”
“Mimesis is an excellent foundation for talking about the human because it provides a minimal version of human sameness that immediately opens onto a vista of human difference.”
“What makes linguistic imitation different than imitation in the pursuit of limited resources (including resources limited because of mimesis) is that a sign or utterance can be different in being the same.”
“It is to Girard that we owe these insights; yet he neglects the quality of human mimesis that separates us from the higher animals: mimesis is not merely imitation, it is representation.”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.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.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“This is the appropriate point at which to recall the Aristotelian notion of mimesis as (theatrical) representation. This notion leaves the potentially conflictive horizontal imitation of others to the subject-matter on stage and retains as its formal definition only the conflict-free vertical representation of reality. In the originary scene, the…”
“People would far rather believe that they want to sleep with their mother and kill their father than admit that their desire imitates the desire of others and that their resentment of these others is the real source of their aggression . By keeping these passions in the family, the Freudian system softens their impact. I hate X because he reminds me…”
“In order to account for formal mimesis, or linguistic representation, we have to allow as a logical and empirical necessity for the priority of behavioral mimesis–unformulated, instinctual, or genetic: we don’t yet know (1) –that humans share with the higher mammals from which we are descended. At stake here is our continuity with other living species, in…”
“Human mimesis does not need to change the genetic code to influence behavior, or desire itself, because relationships between human beings are mediated by the scene of representation. The disciple does not imitate the master’s desire as one imitates a physical gesture; this desire functions to sacralize its object. The fact that Girard has never…”
“Throw a piece of bread off the wharf and immediately seagulls swarm the morsel. Mimesis works. What makes human mimesis different? The difference is difference itself: i.e. , the arbitrariness of the relation between imitated gesture and the object it “points” to ( cf. my dog and the roast beef). In the originary scene, this gesture has to be motivated…”
“Some food would taste better than others, some potential mates be preferable to others, etc. But, absent mimesis, we wouldn’t want a particular “object of desire” more because we have been denied it, or because we imagine someone else enjoying it. And this also means that without mimesis we wouldn’t think in “non-pragmatic” ways about things, because what…”
“An domain that would greatly benefit by originary analysis is that of mimesis itself. When Girard wrote Mensonge romantique , his analyses of the structure of desire were above all attempts to make clear its mediated nature. The book’s epigraph from Scheler, L’homme possède ou un Dieu ou une idole , describes “mediation” as the sin of idolatry, but we…”
“I should say that I see no problem with “mimesis,” both because it is not a specifically human concept and because I see a fairly easy way to translate it (and its escalation into mimetic crisis) into the primes, indicating its universality: “Someone can say: ‘I see you do something.’ This person wants to do like this other someone. This person wants to…”
“Mimesis is central to our identity as humans. Aristotle observed long ago that humans are the most mimetic of animals. For Aristotle, our mimetic nature explains the delight we take in works of art that represent events or objects. He notes that we learn by imitation, and we enjoy learning new things (Aristotle 6-7). Aristotle was refuting Plato’s…”
“The prehistory of generative anthropology, beginning with René Girard’s Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque in 1961 and its theory of mimetic desire, puts mimesis at the core of our theory of the human. And although natural scientists can discuss the physiological aspects of mimesis: “mirror neurons” and the rest, just as they can study the…”
Key Texts
Adam Katz's fullest standalone treatment—mimesis as the ground of all learning, why denying it is denying learning, and how the sign turns mimesis from rivalry into language.
Develops mimesis as two-sided: the unconscious imitation we discover too late versus the deliberate appropriation of another's powers from the outside.
Eric Gans's foundational distinction—human mimesis is not mere imitation but representation, the source of the paradox that makes us human.
Frames mimesis as the minimal foundation of human sameness that immediately opens onto difference, rivalry, and incommensurable desire.