Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Since the gesture was presumably successful in avoiding conflict, its sign-function will be retained, not merely as the residue of an aborted act but as an intentional gesture—which it will already have become in the course of its first, repeated, use. That the gesture designates something appetitively attractive but for the moment interdicted allows us to take it as the inaugural expression of desire , in contrast with mere animal appetite. This corresponds to Girard’s intuition that desire is always conceived in a mimetic context; although I do not need my neighbor to tell me that I am hungry, to speak of my desire for food implies that its eating is (communally) meaningful as well as physically satisfying. Given that the sign derives from an aborted gesture of appropriation, its originary imputation of significance to its referent would be indistinguishable from its imputation of sacrality . At this point, the significant —worthy of signing rather than simply acting on—and the sacred —worthy of common attention/concern but for that very reason interdicted to individual possession—would not require different signifiers, for the combination of appetitive cum mimetic interest and deferral of possession are the same in both cases. And to think of language historically, the attribution of a word to some new object may be understood as the recognition of a new nuance of sacrality; the object worthy of its own word is something that not just I personally but the human community to which I belong considers worthy of conceiving , mentally setting on a scene , as opposed to immediately taking .”

— Eric Gans, Sacred and Significant – Part II · Saturday, March 5th, 2022 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment