The Loathe of Others

In last week’s post, I did the briefest thumbnail sketch of the role Rene Girard’s notion of imitation - mimesis - plays in the generation of one’s own desires. In addition, I ended that post with a passing reference to the role that mimesis plays in vocational discernment.

However, leaving the coverage of mimesis at that runs the risk of oversimplifying the scope and complexity of mimetic theory. There is also a flipside of mimesis that warrants attention, one that I have seen close up, which is the role imitation plays in what can be broadly termed “resistance”.

I learned about this term in my previous work in the area vocational discernment in Sydney. Generally speaking, resistance refers to an shortcoming or trauma in a person’s life that the person seeks to, at its most passive, ignore or, in its more active phases, avoid or cover over. This can be done by engaging in actions that either compensate for that shortcoming or trauma, or draw the attention of others (or even that person him- or herself) away from that shortcoming or trauma.

In some circumstances, that shortcoming or trauma can be manifested in a whole other person, which the first person would then try to, as the name suggest, resist with those same actions.

The reason resistance becomes a concern in vocational discernment, so I learnt from those wiser than myself, is that the person would lack the freedom to make an informed vocational decision. Put another way, the decision in the vocation space would then be made as a reaction to the trauma or shortcoming. The vocation, ultimately, becomes a means of compensating or a means of distraction. Moreover, if left unaddressed, the point of resistance would end up manifesting itself in one way or another in the course of that person’s ministerial life.

Having moved my work from one area in vocational discernment to another, I have since become aware of another reason why resistance is a concern. It is because resistance has a subtle way to trap a person in a cycle of resistance. For years, I have not been able to find the words to articulate this cycle, until I started revisiting Rene Girard’s mimetic theory.

To step back a bit, I should mention that mimetic theory helped me understand one of the things that puzzled me about this cycle of resistance. This was the way in which the old cliche plays itself out where the person, in trying to avoid or cover up the shortcoming or trauma, ends up diving straight into and manifesting the shortcoming or trauma. In circumstances where the point of resistance resides in another person, the first person ends up manifesting behaviours that look similar to the second’s.

This is where Girard’s mimetic theory comes in, for mimesis does not simply apply to the things that we desire to acquire, but also to the things that we desire to resist.

Remember from the previous post that our desires do not occur spontaneously, but are mediated through what Girard calls a model for our desire. In the same way that our desire to acquire is mediated, so too is our desire to resist. In both circumstances, we both have a model that we end up imitating.

The subtle point here, according to Girard, is once the model ends up schooling us in our desire, they also end up frustrating it, and the model ends up as an obstacle to the fulfilment of one’s desire. Furthermore, that frustration becomes reciprocated, and the person and his or her model end up getting sucked into a rivalry of desire. Girard has this line in an essay entitled “Mimesis and Violence” (which can be found in The Girard Reader):

…the individual who first acts as a model will experience an increase in his own appropriative urge when he finds himself thwarted by his imitator. (9)

In the escalation of this rivalry on both sides, the imitation of one by the other also escalates, so that one becomes the mirror image of another. As Girard says again:

Each becomes the imitator of his own imitator and the model of his own model. (9)

While Girard refers to resisting persons in this essay, the sense I got was that this can also apply in a situation where the thing being resisted is not a person, at least at first glance. If we follow Girard, trauma and shortcomings are always going to be mediated by persons. A shortcoming is always manifested in a social setting with someone, and a trauma often follows an encounter with another person. In our resistance, we are not so much resisting traumas and shortcomings as we are resisting persons that mediate that trauma or shortcoming. And because we are mimetic creatures, in our resistance, we end up learning the patterns of behaviour that shape that which we are resisting, thereby running headlong into the very patterns that we wish to avoid.

What compounds this tragedy is that the shortcoming or trauma - and the person mediating the trauma - need not have a proximate relationship to us. The event could be long buried in the past and the person long departed or even dead, but it does not stop this mimetic cycle from manifesting in a person’s life, thereby locking the person into patterns that he or she wishes to resist.

This is why identifying points of resistance becomes such a crucial task in the process of vocational discernment, for in so bringing those points of resistance to that person’s consciousness, a person can learn be made aware of that resistance and be free to choose a course of action that is not defined avoiding trauma or shame.

It gives a whole new inflection of one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorisms: He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.

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