Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“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 considered himself a philosopher makes all the more significant his qualification of mimetic desire in his early (1961) work Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque as “metaphysical.” Aristotle’s term, taken near-literally, designates the sign in a human system of representation, which stands “beside” ( meta ) physical reality. Thus the metaphysical world is ultimately the world of human language, but alienated from its human origin and set in the heaven of the Ideas. Metaphysics grants reality to the symbolic world of ideas, concepts–ultimately, words–independently of the world they represent; it is a secondary matter whether this reality be explored in itself (idealism) or as a model of the represented world (rationalism). We remain within the domain of metaphysics so long as we ignore the filiation of the word/concept/idea/signified with the ostensive event from which it derives, just as, when we understand desire as a binary relation between subject and object, we ignore the ostensive event by which this object was designated to us.”

— Eric Gans, René Girard and the Overcoming of Metaphysics · Saturday, February 9th, 2002 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment