This was left over after I edited down my previous post. You can read it here.
I think Girard’s theories may preclude the notion of mimetic desire forming between persons who are human and the more than human. I’m not sure if we conclude that all desire is fundamentally non-human.
It’s fuzzy to me. Heritage seems distinctively human, cyclical mimetic then, preserving the memory and obligation of desire over generations might be a signature more than a origination point for human contributions for desire.
I want to be careful not to demonize mimetic desire. I believe animist discussion has been framing it’s virtues. For instance, the times when ideas have people, or when we think with the dead they are still contained within an imaginal form of some sort, hauntological persons and futures ala Mark Fisher. Mimetics give rise to incantations, and conjurations, magics, syncronizations of reality and psi events, mimetic desire might be described as a way station between here and there.
The act of divine murder coheres all parties into a singular agent of mimetic violence. Mimetic violence is conta Girard wrote concerning the nature of this violence, it’s presence, and it’s virus shaped behavior, which often runs through history whenever an honest to goodness plague arrives.
The more the antagonists desire to become different from each other, the more they become identical. Identity is realized in the hatred of the identical. This is the climactic moment that twins embody, or the enemy brothers of mythology such as Romulus and Remus. It is what I call a confrontation of doubles.
Girard, Rene. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (p. 22). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition
Also,
If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger the harmony and even the survival of all human communities.
Girard, Rene. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (pp. 8-9). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.
Which begins to cycle…basically forever.
The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is re-enacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment.
Girard, Rene. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (p. 20). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. (Emphasis mine)
Recently on the Lunar Cry Dischord someone mentioned they’d love to see what magic would do in a corporate environment, I assure you, we’re looking at it when we gaze into the anti-life equations of Cyclical Mimetic Violence:
“Institutional collapse obliterates or telescopes hierarchical and functional differences so that everything has the same monotonous and monstrous aspect. The impression of difference in a society that is not in a state of crisis is the result of real diversity and also of a system of exchanges that “differentiates” and therefore conceals the reciprocal elements it contains by its very culture and by the nature of its exchange…”
Girard, Rene. The Scapegoat, (pg. 14), John Hopkins University Press, 1986
As things speed up, the ceremonial, the symbolic, and the spiritual demarcations of reciprocity fall away and the true face of the economics of human exchange. We’ve seen this in recent years take the form of Anti-Feminist critique noticing (rightly) the economic exchanges that disadvantage men over women in a patriarchal monogamous marriage. The nakedness of this exchange emerges from the apocalypse accelerationism brings, reducing everything it’s economic utility. Note, I think this critique is incomplete by ignoring the forces of capitalism that render men disposable. It willfullyignores class and the effects of total commodification of life ways pointed out by Peter Gray in my earlier quote.
The result is in the collapse of meaningful distinction. It is a church that’s been converted into a beauty college. No magic. Just another building, another artifice in a field of meaningless economic husks. Relationships that might have once been enchanting are now reduced to their materialist metrics, consigned to apps that swipe left for pass and right for “can get it”. And so emerges from an animist world the confrontation of doubles, perhaps even a form of mass possession, perhaps not by a hierarchy of demons but rather some stratification of egregores.
This is the shape magic takes in marketing meetings and data tracking and analytic centers. It’s the process the enemy uses for their own unique brand of target selection, using materialst demography to build a map of our desires, from iconography, advertising, iconoclasm (lately). These sets of arbitrary demographic distinctions become a means of our adopting manufactured differentiation from our mimetic rivals, e.g. those who want to be free of concern, and that concern is always the same. Whether in the streets of New York, or in the boardrooms of Chicago, or the sprawling suburban neighborhoods of Texas, we all know the unspoken truth is that failure to submit to the capitalist world view ends in your own death.
So we must stand out from the crowd. And in so doing, are forced to capitulate to the systems which produce bipolar politics found in 24 hour news channels.
And death is the only real power of the mythic. Which is why when we fight empire we are infected by this mimetic contagion.
Tying this addendum back to Gordon Once more:
And what is so brilliant about this map is that it destroys the territory as it describes it. The solve for the cruelties inflicted by an emperor is not to seize the imperial capital and replace him with what you perceive to be a ‘better’ one (presumably yourself). Empires cannot be ‘improved’. It is the imposition of power over others that is archonic. The belief that you can improve Creation, that you know better than the people living their lives how to do so. It is Kropotkin vs Marx, Third Century edition.
Hypostasis of the Farmers, Gordon White. RuneSoup.com (https://runesoup.com/2020/07/hypostasis-of-the-farmers/), July 4th, 2020, ~1000 hrs, local AEST
This is why I like Hypostasis of the Archons. Along with Secret Book of John… The text opens with a reference to Paul’s “our contest is not against flesh and blood, rather the Authorities (archons) of the universe and the spirit of wickedness.” This is the way in to a description of the hows and why’s of our overlords.
The Empire/Rebellion Never Ended. Selah.
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