I’ll begin with a few passages from Girard’s Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevsky “As for Nietzsche himself, what he says about his own competitive and aggressive urge must be carefully examined: its implications are far-reaching. I attack only causes that are victorious..I attack only causes against which I cannot expect to find allies… I attack only causes against which I shall stand alone” This chivalrous behavior is in keeping within the demands of the mystique, no doubt. But it can also be described as a feverish enterprise of self-destruction, especially in a man who attaches as much importance to victory as Nietzsche does. What the mystique adds up to, really, is a Herculean and systematic effort to bring about its own metamorphosis into ressentiment…. If desires are truly mimetic, they are bound to clash with other desires, as Nietzsche believes; not because they freely choose to do so, as he apparently assumes, but because they are copied from another. The final outcome is disastrous because it results not from the relative strength of the desires that happen to clash together, but from a mimetic propensity that cannot be let loose without turning into a search for, and if need be a creation of, the insurmountable obstacle.” Girard put the concept of mimesis at the center in order to untangle puzzles, which proliferated in 19th and early 20th century Western culture, like Nietzsche positioning himself as a kind of Don Quixote, inventing insurmountable obstacles for himself, while disdaining Cervantes and claiming to be free of the ressentiment he attributed to others, to be a sheer embodiment of the will to power. You can test the seriousness of any social theory by the seriousness with which it takes mimesis. 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. Anyone can see looking briefly at small children can see how deep mimesis goes. There’s a kind of self-evidency to our mimetic constitution—how could anything we do, say or think not be composed of words and/or gestures that we acquired mimetically? Any social theory or philosophy or politics that privileges the autonomous or self-fashioned self or identity is suppressing mimesis—and I would include in this Nietzsche and contemporary Nietzscheans. Girard aforementioned essay deals in a very interesting way with Nietzsche’s mimetic relation to Wagner, and how his denial of this relation coincides with his increasing instability toward the end of his career and his descent into madness. Clearly, everything we have ever learned we have learned mimetically, by imitating others. In fact, a denial of mimesis is a denial of learning, which I think is crucial to understanding the history of metaphysics. Beginning with Plato, who basically equated learning with remembrance, philosophy has denied the very existence of learning—up until Chomsky, who claims we don’t even learn language—our intrinsic linguistic capacity is just elicited upon hearing others speak. I know of very few exceptions. But it makes sense, since if we accept Eric Gans’s definition of metaphysics as the assumption of the linguistic primacy of the declarative sentence, the declarative cut off from the ostensive and imperative cannot acknowledge mimesis. Imitation is ostensive and imperative—you pay very close attention to what another is doing—too close to verbalize it. You take what the other is doing as a tacit command, as if the phrase “do this” or “do it like this” was tagged to it. There is something shameful about acknowledging imitation, at least in modernity—to confess to being an imitator is one step away from confessing to being a fraud, a mere copy, a lackey and probably a bad one at that. To confess to imitation is to confess to dependency, to confess to, to use Kant’s language from his essay, What is Enlightenment, to remaining in “self-imposed nonage.” But it’s even worse—it is to confess to desire, to envy, to resentment, to jealousy; even more, to confess that one is constituted by all of these mimetic structures, from which one can only liberate oneself by strenuous discipline, one element of which is never being able to declare yourself once and for liberated—in fact, to declare oneself liberated from mimesis is a sure sign of being determined by it—it wouldn’t really be necessary to say “I don’t care what others think,” I decide everything on my own,” etc., if it were in fact the case. People deny being imitators more quickly than Jesus’s disciplines denied him, and there’s a connection here, insofar as there is nothing more mimetic than wanting to deny one’s enslavement to mimesis along with everyone else. I’ve put a lot of emphasis on pedagogy and the concept of mistakenness in stuff I’ve written because these concepts make it as hard as I can make it to forget imitation—and remembering and foregrounding imitation is the real maturity. We do, of course, like to speak about “role models,” which is a kind of recognition of mimesis, but the role model represents a version of what Girard called “external mediation,” where the model is distant enough from the imitator to be beyond rivalry—also, how one becomes “like” the role model is rarely explained. To think in terms of all of our desires, resentments, hatreds, anxieties and so on as mimetic is very disturbing, because the things we would like to think are most “our own” are in fact the most alien to us. So many social institutions, of the past and present, are opaque to us and seem absurd because we cannot recognize them as attempts, always partial, improvised and flawed, to control the conflicts caused by our mimetic nature. 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. Not every model, not every time, and not always visibly, precisely because of all the ways cultures provide for mediated contests and competitions, with all kinds of explicit and tacit rules. A social crisis occurs when these arrangements break down—even the high-low v the middle model would probably need to be understood in terms of mimetic rivalries among the elites. A healthy culture would be systematically concerned with the kinds of models for imitation that are available, the ways in which individuals imitate their models, the way they work through their models, sometimes exhaust them and transition to other models, because everything we do can best be described in these terms. It is always a fantasy to describe anyone as non-imitative, or not bound to models—but this is not to say that we don’t develop some complex relations to an array of models, which we revise by enacting them. A more careful analysis of virality, which, of course, we all now talk about, would function something like Brecht’s “alienation effect,” which involved breaking down the various gestures and utterances of a character right when the audience is about to get absorbed in some sacrificial drama. Some post-structuralist and postmodern theories, under the influence, e.g., of Austin’s speech act theory recognize mimesis indirectly—in for example, Derrida’s notion of “citationality,” adopted and applied to social theory by Judith Butler and others. It’s understood in these cases that everything one does “cites” others, is an iteration of acts, words and gestures of others, and it’s also recognized that we refuse to recognize this and make every effort to claim our desires and intentions are generated internally. Even here, though, there is an ultimate lack of seriousness insofar as the acknowledgement of citationality is seen as liberating, on the model of post-1968 understandings of the lifting of repression as leading to a utopian freeing of desire. Still, the concept of citationality is a very useful one because it projects mimesis onto the plane of language, which is the “solution” (always provisional) of mimesis, and here we have to go beyond Girard to Gans. Gans’s transcendence of Girard’s mimetic theory lies in him recognizing that the kind of “counter-imitation” involved in the sign arrests rather than accelerating mimetic rivalry. 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. Because language is so scenic or, if you like, context, dependent, saying the exact same thing someone else said is never saying the same thing the other said. In fact, imitating another very closely is often a sure sign of mockery, which is to say it is a way of distinguishing oneself from the other. And, so, marking every utterance as a citation, making explicit that you are referencing and revising a particular text or author, employing specific generic conventions or narrative techniques in a specific way, mixing media, eliciting and rerouting expectations, etc., is a way of acknowledging the inescapability of mimesis while simultaneously deferring and displaying imitable strategies for deferring the rivalries and conflicts generated by mimesis. And this is also the source of creativity and generativity of language, that by staying very close to others, ripping off others, riffing on others, by intensifying imitation in all its forms you create what is new, original and precedent-setting—much more so than by trying to excavate originality from out of one’s own depths, or wherever you think they are to be found.