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Mimesis, narrative andsubjectivity in the work ofGirard and RicoeurGavin Flood aa Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies ,University of Wales , LampeterPublished online: 17 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Gavin Flood (2000) Mimesis, narrative and subjectivity in thework of Girard and Ricoeur, Cultural Values, 4:2, 205-215

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Cultural Values ISSN 1362-5179Volume 4 Number 2 April 2000 pp. 205-15

Mimesis, Narrative and Subjectivity in the Workof Girard and Ricoeur

Gavin FloodUniversity of Wales

Abstract. While Ricoeur wishes to relate the concept of narrative toidentity and ethics, Girard sees the development of ethical conscience inmyth. This paper examines this difference, arguing that the implicitlyuniversal human nature that he posits, driven by mimetic desire,compromises subjectivity as narrative identity, as developed in Ricoeur'swork. This paper attempts to read Girard alongside Ricoeur, in order tosuggest that there is a problematic tension implicit in Guard's workbetween subjectivity and drive. To do this, I describe Ricoeur'sunderstanding of mimesis and how this is related to truth and narrativeidentity. Then turning to Girard, I show how his linking of violence totruth repudiates the possibility of the attestation of truth as subjectivity.

One of the striking things about reading Girard alongside Ricoeur is thatwhile for both the term mimesis is of central importance, they link theterm to narrative in very different ways. Indeed, Girard does not use theterm 'narrative' and Ricoeur seldom refers to 'myth' (except in a moretechnical sense of 'emplotment'). While Ricoeur wishes to relate theconcept of narrative to identity and ethics, and Girard sees thedevelopment of ethical conscience in myth, the lack of a thematisedunderstanding of narrative in Girard's work disallows for the subjectiveappropriation of narrative away from 'unenlightened self-enslavement'.That is, the implicitly universal human nature that Girard posits, drivenby mimetic desire, compromises subjectivity as narrative identity - anotion that is developed in Ricoeur's work.

This problematic can be fruitfully examined through focusing on thecorrelated structure of violence and truth as presented in thesecompeting textualities and competing understandings of mimesis.Girard on myth read as violence, a violence which for him reveals thetruth of human nature, can be seen through a 'Ricoeurian' lens as theerasure of subjectivity. Ricoeur on narrative allows subjectivity asnarrative identity, and the optimal realisation of narrative identity as theethical hope of seeing oneself as another; a violence-transcending truth.Conversely, Ricoeur's optimism can perhaps be tempered by aGirardian acknowledgement of the violence entailed in mimesis.

©Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX41JF, UK and 350 MainStreet, Maiden, MA 02148, USA

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Reading Girard alongside Ricoeur points to a fundamental tensionimplicit in Girard's work between subjectivity and drive or even to anabsence of subjectivity. Put simply, for Girard myth is the site of truthrevealed as violence, whereas for Ricoeur narrative is the site of truth asethical being; the story of oneself as another.

The aim of this paper is therefore to read Girard through the lens ofthe Ricouerian problematic. I will attempt this by examining Ricoeur'sunderstanding of mimesis and how this is tied to narrative identity andtruth. Then turning to Girard, I will demonstrate how his linking ofviolence to truth through mimesis repudiates the possibility of theattestation of truth as subjectivity. I will conclude with a few remarksabout the problematic in relation to the understanding of religion.

Ricoeur's Understanding of Mimesis1

In Time and Narrative (1984) Ricoeur defends a version of narrativetheory which does not deny the narrative nature of existence, yet whichis also strongly constructivist. Here Ricoeur exposes the structuralidentity of historiography and fiction and - with particular reference toAugustine and Aristotle - demonstrates the manner in which thetemporal character of human experience is presupposed in these twoforms of narrative. Ricoeur maintains the general position that historicalsequence possesses the characteristic of narrative, and that narrative isnot simply imposed upon a temporal sequence. Narrative, claimsRicoeur, can deal with the problem of time in a way that philosophycannot. The central problem of his text is the irresolvable relation - oraporia - between 'cosmic time' and 'individual time' or the 'time of thesoul'. Cosmic time is irreconcilable with the phenomenology ofsubjective temporality except in a poetic, narrative resolution. Similarly,we might say that the structure of mimetic desire in Girard's work isirreconcilable with subjective temporality in so far as it operates outsideof narrative; or rather, might be seen as the cause of narrative (this canbe seen, for example, in Girard's study of Dostoevsky (1997) in whosework the 'unique', individual underground man is in factindistinguishable from those around him, driven by 'hateful imitation').Ricoeur's general proposal is that in narrative we can see a connectionbetween the metaphysics of time and its human, phenomenologicalaspect. But it is not so much time as Ricoeur's understanding of mimesisin contrast to Girard's that I wish to pursue here.

While Ricoeur (1991) is happy to admit of a great difference betweenlife and fiction, and that in one sense life is lived whereas stories are told(p. 25), the situation is more complex than this. Human actions arealways within the bounds of personal biography, and the narratives weapply to ourselves are given by our cultures. Time is the central feature

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of human experience, but time only 'becomes human' when it isarticulated through narrative 'and narrative attains its full meaningwhen it becomes a condition of temporal existence' (Ricoeur 1984, p. 3).Narrative has the power to refigure both the past and future in humanimagination, thereby constructing a coherent sense of identity. Becauseof the narrative identity of human experience - lives are understood andlived through the stories we tell of ourselves - the gap between 'livedlife' and 'told narrative' is not as great as might at first appear. Ricoeurtries to establish this through an argument that leads from theunderstanding of narrative - taken directly from Aristotle and buildingon structuralism and the Russian formalists - as the imitation of anaction (mimesis praxeos) and as emplotment {mythos), to narrative asconstructing personal identity. Narrative for Aristotle is imitation ofaction which is not, observes Ricoeur (1984), a copy or identical replicabut rather the production or organisation of events through plot oremplotment (mythos) (p. 24). Plot is the synthesis of multiple events thatserves to transform these events into a single story which therebybecomes a totality (p. 21) and forms a coherent narrative. Such anarrative is regarded with varying degrees of suspicion concerning its'reality'. Thus fiction is imaginary whereas historiography is less clearlyso: though both share the quality of emplotment which createscoherence or homogeneity from the discordance of human action andsuffering. Mimesis is thus translated as 'imitation' or 'representation',though not, Ricoeur (1984) insists, in the sense of a copy of some pre-existing reality. Instead it is a creative imitation or representation seen as'the break which opens the space for fiction' (p. 45).

Using Aristotle's Poetics as his starting point, Ricoeur distinguishesbetween a 'real domain' covered by ethics - which can be taken to be'world of action' or 'lived experience' - and an imaginary domaincovered by poetics. He then delineates three senses of mimesis. The firstof these, mimesis 1, is the connection between the real and the imaginarydomains through a transposition of emplotment on to the practical fieldof human action. This initial mimesis is grounded within the world ofaction which entails the meaningful, temporal structures of that worldand its symbolic nature. That is, the world of action which entailsculture and symbolism is subject to emplotment: action is symbolicallymediated through this first level of mimesis.

There are three features or anchors for mimesis 1. The first is that it isa conceptual network that enables the distinguishing of a domain ofaction: emplotment is always grounded in 'a pre-understanding of theworld of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources and itstemporal character' (Ricoeur 1984, p. 55). The second feature whichcontrols representation is that action can be narrated, or in other wordsthe 'practical field' already contains symbolic resources such as signs,rules and norms. Ricoeur says that this feature is accessed through the

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work of anthropologists such as Geertz and is the realm to whichverstehen sociology gives access (p. 57). The third feature is therecognition of the 'temporal structures which call for narration' (p. 59).That is, action itself which is represented in mimesis contains temporalstructures, and time is integral to action. It is here that we can see howRicoeur differs from any pure narrative constructivism, for action ischaracterised by a temporal structure which needs to be narrated. Thistemporal structure is none other than Augustine's characterisation of thethreefold present as the present of future things, the present of pastthings and the present of present things (p. 60). In other words all actioncontains implicitly within it this temporal dimension as present action inthe past, present and future. Action thus contains potentially a narrativestructure, and the representation of action will reflect this.

Summarising mimesis 1 Ricoeur writes:

To imitate or represent action is first to preunderstand what humanacting is, in its semantics, its symbolic system, its temporality. Upon thispreunderstanding, common to both poets and their readers, emplotmentis constructed and, with it, textual and literary mimetics. (Ricoeur, 1984,p. 64)

Ricoeur's second sense of mimesis, mimesis 2, is that of creation or theorganisation of events. This is the mediation between what precedesfiction and what follows it, or 'the postunderstanding of the order ofaction and its temporal features' (1984, p. 65). This second mimesisrefers to the representation of action in text and, to use Ricoeur's phrase,'opens the kingdom of the as if... the kingdom of fiction' (p. 64). Thiskingdom of 'as if embraces both fiction and historiography, and whilefictional and historical narratives differ in so far as they relate to the'imaginary' and the 'real', both nevertheless share the paradigm of'emplotment'; both share a narrative structure. Both historical andfictional narrative are engaged in the refiguring of time which affects thereader's imagination. This aspect of representation mediates through thetext in which it is articulated, between the pre-understanding of actionin mimesis 1 and its postunderstanding in the text.

Finally Ricoeur's (1984) third sense of mimesis is the intersection oftext and reader (pp. 70-2). This refers to the response of thereader /hearer to the text, or what the reading subject brings to narrativeas mimesis 1 and 2. In a succinct summary of his position in 'Life inQuest of Narrative' (1991) Ricoeur argues that plot, as Aristotle shows, isnot static but is an operation which is only completed by the receiver ofthe narration. There is a sense in which narrative only comes into beingwhen it is read or heard and is refigured by the reader. Thus themeaning of narrative and its transforming effects on a person occur, inRicoeur's words, from 'the intersection of the world of the text and the

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world of the hearer or reader' (1984, p. 71; 1991, p. 26), an idea that hasechoes in Wolfgang Iser's (1980) theory of reading and Robert Jauss'(1982) reception theory and, as Ricoeur acknowledges, in Gadamer's'fusion of horizons' (1989) in which the world horizon of the textbecomes fused with that of the reader's own, real action. So Ricoeurhighlights narrative as the focus of discourse and problems concerningthe nature of the self, the relation of subjectivity to objectivity, and therelation of fiction to action.

In the end Ricoeur retains the Aristotelian distinction between thereal domain of ethics - the life that is lived - and the imaginary domainof poetics - the story that is told - with narrative characterised as theascription of the plot we inherit from our cultures onto the 'real'domain. For Girard, by contrast, mimetic desire is inherent in the 'realdomain' of ethics and transposed as myth into the realm of poetics. ForGirard the structure of mimetic desire determines narrative expression,whereas for Ricoeur narrative is imposed upon action to form thenarrative identity of a subjectivity. The internalised narratives - the'narrative voices' - which comprise our life, provide a sense of identitythat constitutes us and that is constantly reinterpreted within thecontexts of culture. Unlike the proponents of alternative theories ofnarrative, such as Maclntyre (1985), Ricoeur does not think humanbeings can be the authors of their lives, though we can become 'thenarrator and the hero of our own story' (1984, p. 32). On a larger scale,historiography characterised as emplotment is the creation or refiguringof the past at a level of productive imagination. Here narrative isconstructed in historiography - and thus is parallel to fiction - and notgenerated through action within history. Narrative creates order andconcordance out of the discordance of temporal acts or lived experience.It imposes an order on the potential violence of experience through thestructuring of identity not as 'sameness' but as a narrative identity.

Narrative Identity and Truth

So far we have seen how mimesis functions within Ricoeur's work asnarrative. Rather than mimesis resulting in violence, for Ricoeurmimesis as narrative is integral to personal identity which, conversely,can be understood as the disruption of violence by the establishment ofa truth about the self in its temporal unfolding. For Ricoeur narrative isintegral to personal identity, and through narrating the self, the self isconstantly brought up against the contingencies of life and the demandsof the other.

There is, for Ricoeur, a fundamental distinction between identityunderstood in terms of either idem ('same') and ipse ('him/herself'),which have quite different significations. Idem identity 'unfolds an entire

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hierarchy of significations' of which permanence in time is the foremost(1992, pp. 2-3). Idem identity therefore refers to the sense of self as thesubject of the philosophy of consciousness, the philosophy ofsubjectivity in which the cogito is posited as self-identical. This sense ofidentity understood as sameness, indicated by idem, is contrasted byRicoeur with identity as selfhood, a dialectic between self and other thanself, indicated by ipse. While idem implies the sameness of the Husserliancogito, the sameness which answers the question who with what, identityas selfhood {ipse) answers the question who with narrative mediation.Idem abjures otherness, ipse does not, but recognises the centrality ofnarrative. As David Ford (1999) observes, Ricoeur's leading question is'who?' - 'who speaks, who acts' (p. 99) - and the answer to this questioncan only be formulated in the context of narrative and time.

In Ricoeur's Oneself and Another (1992) this selfhood is initially andimmediately shown as the embodied person, and further as the logicalsubject of predication; the 'same thing' to which two different sorts ofpredicates are ascribed. These predicates include 'psychic' predicates tothe exclusion of physical ones, which reflexively retain the same sensewhether attributed to oneself or to others. Therefore for Ricoeur identityis posited in relation to a particular narrative sequence - the person - inrelation to others within a linguistic and social community. While thisnot the place to develop a full description of Ricoeur's position, hisformulation of narrative identity has important implications forunderstanding truth and violence that has bearing on Girard's work. Onthis account truth is inextricably linked to narrative and utterance.Although, indeed, stories are lived for Ricoeur, it is in the telling thatselfhood is revealed. And then the truth of being human comes to light.

Ricoeur's understanding of narrative identity, linked in with theethical response to the other as oneself, contrasts sharply with Girard'sunderstanding of mimesis and the relation of mimetic desire tonarrative, or more specifically in Girardian terms, to myth. For Girard,as we know, myth articulates at a more subtle level than ritual thescapegoat mechanism. We can see this in texts such as Guillaume deMachaut's The Judgement of the King of Navarre (1908) discussed in TheScapegoat (1986, pp. 1-23), where the Jews are regarded as the source ofthe plague and so become the victims of violence. This is a 'persecutiontext/ an account of real violence told from the perspective of theperpetrators. Girard reads myth through the lens of mimetic desire.Mimesis in Girard therefore functions as a drive that patterns humanbehaviour, articulated in texts such as de Machaut's. But while this isextremely important, Girard emphasises the drive of mimetic desire innarrative at the cost of subjectivity. There is a dimension of subjectivityuntouched by Girard's analysis, but which is brought out in the way inwhich Ricoeur links mimesis to narrative. Ricoeur's account of mimesisas representation offers a better, or at least wider, way of understanding

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the narrative construction of subjectivity than the scapegoat narrativesof Girard.

Although he does not engage with Ricoeur's work, Girard might wellaccede to his formulation of narrative identity. But he would wish tomaintain that a dominant theme, the dominant theme, of these narrativeswhich constitute the human world is the violence engendered bymimetic desire. Subjectivities are driven by a force prior to cognition andrepresentation, a force which Ricoeur does not address directly. ButRicoeur does implicitly address the problem of violence in theformulation of narrative identity which entails the ethical demand of theother. Rather than violence, Ricoeur's focus is on suffering, which heunderstands as a 'violation of self-integrity', the reduction or destructionof the ability to act. This is coupled with a sense of mutuality and anemphasis on friendship rather than rivalry. Indeed, subjectivityarticulated as friendship, might be seen as a disruptor of the pattern ofmimetic desire Girard describes. Rather than rivalry, a centralconstituent of subjectivity emphasized by Ricoeur is trust. In Oneself asAnother (1992) he develops the idea not in terms of a psychology ofattachment, which is the locus of mimetic desire, but in terms of ethicsas a virtue. Friendship is based on mutuality (in Kantian terms astreating people as ends in themselves) and not on utility (people asmeans); not based on the sameness of the cogito but on identity asselfhood.

Ricoeur (1992) analyses friendship into three structures or elements:reversibility, non-substitutability and similitude. Reversibility is thereversibility of the pronouns T and 'you" for from the perspective of thereceiver the 'you' refers to an T, and '(w)hen another addresses me inthe second person, I feel I am implicated in the first person' (p. 193). Thisis to recognise the social and contextual nature of T and 'you', as well asto recognise the importance of language and its pragmatic analysis inthe interchangeability of pronouns. Indeed this structure must berecognised even within the Girardian model in order for theidentification driven by mimetic desire to occur. In contrast toreversibility, nonsubstitutability says that T yet remains distinct; theI/you distinction cannot be eliminated. Lastly similitude means that inthe relation between myself and another, I recognise you as an agent, asbeing like myself, which is to see 'oneself as another'.

As myself means that you too are capable of starting something in theworld, of acting for a reason, of hierarchizing your priorities, ofevaluating the ends of your actions, and, having done this, of holdingyourself in esteem as I hold myself in esteem. (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 193)

This ability to esteem others as oneself is also to esteem oneself asanother. It is here in the concept of subjectivity constituted within

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relationship to an other that the potential for the disruption of mimeticviolence occurs.

What is underestimated in Girard's analysis - due to hisoverwhelming emphasis on rivalry and hostility - is an understandingof the ethical being constructed in the relation of mutuality betweenoneself and another, a relation that Ricoeur links to ethical truth. Orrather Girard only sees this kind of mutuality in terms of the ability ofChristian discourse to disrupt mimetic violence. The suffering of theinnocent victim as the one who is subject to desire and violence is seenand alleviated in the truth of a God who lays bare this structure. Thereare of, course, deep cultural problems in Girard's analysis - is onlyChristianity privileged in disclosing mimetic violence? - but throughRicoeur we can propose that Girard neglects the force of a dimension ofhuman subjectivity articulated through narrative identity. It is preciselythis mutuality of which Girard does not take enough account. For it isthis intersubjective element which has the ability to disrupt mimeticdesire, to locate subjectivity in narrative discourse with others and topresent mimesis as containing the potential for trust and not only forviolence.

Violence and the Sacred in Girard and Ricoeur

For Girard (1977, p. 262) violence and the sacred are one and the samething whose appearance goes alongside institutional collapse, the eclipseof culture and the social order. This eclipse of culture is reflected inmyths that in effect describe (and conceal) the mechanism of mimeticdesire and in the primary religious act of sacrifice. While there is adiversity of causes of great social crises, the experience of socialdisruption is uniform: as shown by examples of descriptions ofparticular crises throughout history. The eclipse of culture, says Girard,means that it becomes less differentiated, and this indifferentiationresults in great confusion. To account for such social confusion peoplehave looked to moral causes located in others, either in society as awhole or in particular people and groups who are easily blameablewithin the logic of the scapegoat mechanism (Girard 1986, chap. 2). Attimes of cultural crisis violence replaces social order, a violence whichfor Girard cannot be separated from the idea of the sacred and thedemand for sacrifice in religions. Indeed, sacrificial violence and theviolence of social disruption focussed on a particular group areanalogues of each other. The sacrificial victim corresponds to the victimof social scapegoating, and the resulting social catharsis which allowsfor the reestablishment of order and culture corresponds to thereformation of order after the religious sacrifice. The violence of the

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sacrifice and the violence of the mob reveal the truth of mimetic desireand the foundations of human culture.

The simplicity and power of Girard's model is certainly supported bya great body of evidence amassed by him, although it is drawn almostexclusively from western literature, paganism, Judaism and Christianity.But there is a dimension of the sacred, linked to human subjectivity,which is neglected by Girard but which is thematised in Ricoeur'swriting. The truth of the sacred can be shown other than in violence andother than in the symbolic violence which privileges Christian truthagainst others. This dimension associates the 'sacred' with narrativeidentity through a hermeneutics of religious language by which 'a groupor an individual appropriates the meaning content of speech acts andwritings that found the group's and the individual's existence as acommunity and as a person' (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 48). It is the subjectiveinternalisation of religious truth in temporal subjectivity (arguablycross-cultural), and which can disrupt mimetic violence, that Girard hasneglected.

One way into this dimension of subjectivity is through David Ford's(1999) extension of Ricoeur's project. Ricoeur's question in Oneself asAnother (1992), namely 'Who speaks? Who acts?' (with the answerarticulated in terms of narrative identity) is extended by Ford into thespecifically Christian religious sphere of 'who worships?' (p. 99).Religious communities over time have formed strong senses of idem-identity, but there is also a dimension of zpse-identity expressed inworship and in the keeping of promises. Ford relates the latter to aspecifically Christian discourse. He examines the character of theworshipping self transformed 'before the face of Christ' and thesubjectivity of the self in relation to another where 'another' can be seenas Christ himself (pp. 101-4). This subjective response, and the subjectiveappropriation of the Christian narrative, is central to a sense of Christiannarrative identity. While Girard might not object to this conception ofsubjective response, he arguably underestimates its importance inhistory For subjectivity is overwhelmed by the more powerful force ofmimetic desire. While not wishing to ignore the importance of religiousviolence and the sacrificial mechanism that Girard draws our attentionto, there are other, equally important appropriations of religiousnarratives that construct a certain kind of subjectivity and make claimson truth; the interiority of Christian mystical theology for example.Extending this further, contra Girard - for whom Christianity isexclusively peaceable - there are also forms of religious subjectivityfrom other times and places that provide counter-examples to the modelof mimetic desire. Thus, for example, the Vedic sacrifice which could beread in terms of Girard's model, is metaphorically disrupted in theUpanishads by its subjective appropriation. The sacrifice becomesinternalised - the breath is the oblation - and the truth of the self

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(atmari), whose essence is tranquil {santa), becomes a higher truth. Herenarrative identity is constructed from the interpretation of Vedic mythand sacrifice which claims to transcend them. In Ricoeur's terms, thismight be to open a new dimension of reality signified by plot (mythos):one articulated in terms of a poetic language which abolishes thepotential violence of the everyday in favour of a violence and worldtranscending truth.

Notes

1. I have developed some of the following material in Flood, 1999.2. On the origins of mimesis see Sorbom (1966). For mimesis in western

thought, the classic is still Auerbach (1953). For a critical revision ofAuerbach's thesis see Genauer, Gunther and Wulf (1995).

3. Ricoeur contrasts the emplotment (mythos) of Aristotle with Augustine'salienation of the soul (distentio animi). He eloquently writes (1984),'Augustine groaned under the existential burden of discordance. Aristotlediscerns in the poetic act par excellence - the composing of the tragic poem -the triumph of concordance over discordance. It goes without saying that itis I, the reader of Augustine and Aristotle, who establishes the relationshipbetween a lived experience where discordance rends concordance and aneminently verbal experience where concordance mends discordance' (p. 31).

4. The difference here between Ricoeur's position and Maclntyre's (1985) is thatwhereas for Maclntyre narrative is inherent in the process of action, forRicoeur narrative is potential in action because of its ineluctable temporality.

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Ricoeur, Paul 1984: Time and Narrative vol. 1. Chicago and London: ChicagoUniversity Press.

Ricoeur, Paul 1991: Life in Quest of Narrative. In David Wood (ed) Paul Ricoeur:Narrative and Interpretation. London: Routledge, pp. 20-33.

Ricoeur, Paul 1992 Oneself as Another. Chicago and London: Chicago UniversityPress.

Ricoeur, Paul 1995: Manifestation and Proclamation: Figuring the Sacred: Religion,Narrative, and Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press: pp. 48-67.

Sorbom, G. 1966: Mimesis and Art: Studies in the Origin and Early Development ofAesthetic Vocabulary. Stockholm: Svenska Bokforlaget.

Gavin Flood is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies, University ofWales, Lampeter.

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