Tocqueville, Girard, and the Mystique of Anti-Modernism Stephen L. Gardner Faith, Reason, and Political Life Today Ed. Peter A. Lawler and Dale McConkey Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, March 2001

“To be radical,” Karl Marx said, “is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is

man himself.”i I propose to take a “radical” look at the radical critique of modernity–that is, to

excavate the human roots of the anti-liberal revolt in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx himself.

The French Revolution provoked a vehement intellectual reaction against modern European life,

issuing in what Karl Löwith called the “revolution in nineteenth-century thought.”ii This event

has profoundly shaped modern thought, and it has decisively shaped modern history too.

Signaling the “end of the bourgeois-Christian world”iii and the rise of industrial society and

modern democracy, this reaction issued in a wholesale indictment of “bourgeois” order–based

upon law, commerce, individual choice–as antithetical to authentic freedom. Modern liberties,

Marx asserted, barely disguise the tyranny of capital, a self-aggrandizing “social power” that

robs man of “essential reality,” the “original and free development” of “individuality.”iv Mutatis

mutandis, this sweeping anathema on bourgeois life is shared by Heidegger and Nietzsche.

Modern democracy is the final decay of man into the “herd,”the “nihilism” of the “last man”

(Nietzsche), or into the “consummate meaninglessness” of technological mastery (Heidegger).

To bring out the human springs of the radical revolt, though, is the last thing radical

thought itself wants. Although Karl Marx gave it classic expression when he claimed in The

German Ideology to found a “science” of “real, active men” in order to debunk the illusions of

“bourgeois ideology,” radical thought has steadily abandoned human things in order to interpret

them in non-human (but still historical or natural) terms, beginning with Marx himself. Marx’s

theory of capricious “laws” and “relations of production,” Nietzsche’s “genealogy” of instincts

and their blind mutations, Heidegger’s “history of Being” as a series of contingent linguistic

“events,” evince arbitrary forces of nature, history, or language, subverting classical and modern

notions of rational mind. Though radical thought rests on the thesis that “freedom is the essence

of man,”v paradoxically that thesis leads to a theoretical dissolving of man into what is

irreducibly other than man, irrational forces dressed in the illusions of conscious will. This flight

from man culminates in “post-modernism” and “deconstruction.” Real history and institutions

vanish utterly into linguistic artifice and the play of interpretations, the “truth games” and “social

constructs” of radical “hermeneutics.” Thus Foucault’s trope of “power/knowledge” or Derrida’s

“différance.” Led by Heidegger’s critique of “humanism” as “metaphysics,” it erases the

question of motives and motivation as a valid subject in its own right. Again paradoxically, this

led to a reduction of philosophical argument to the ad hominem, of interpretation to accusation,

in what Paul Ricoeur aptly called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

I suggest an “anthropology” of radical thought showing its roots in the impact of equality

on the passions. Anti-bourgeois ire is at bottom an aesthetic revolt against modernity as an

offense against “eros,” a passion for radical freedom derived from romanticism. This reflects, I

argue, yet also systematically conceals a change in the structure of human relations brought on

by the rise of equality. Spelling this out “deconstructs” the accusatory hermeneutics of radical

thought by showing perennial structures of human nature in the historical shifts of passion. Here

“freedom” does not mean free will, responsibility, liberty, or choice, traditional liberal senses.

For radical historicism, it means creativity, originality, spontaneity, aesthetic senses of freedom.

“Aesthetic” freedom posits the historical origination of man ex nihilo. As Stanley Rosen argues,

it amounts to a deification of man and of the intellectual by crediting him a capacity for creation

out of nothing, a power traditionally reserved for God.vi For the historicist, freedom is neither a

property of will nor a quality of its object, but a mode of being or rather a “charisma” exuding

genius, authenticity, or quasi-divine autarchy. Its classic (but not only) form is the romantic cult

of “genius.” Thus the mortal god of history like Napoleon, of art like Wagner or Hölderlin, or of

philosophy, the intellectual revolutionary like Kant. Divinization of man in theory, I suggest,

betrays an idolatry of individual men in practice–especially of the radical intellectual himself or

his Doppelgängers, the charismatic leader or the poet. This is well expressed by Marx’s axiom,

“The supreme being for man is man himself”–though scarcely in the heroic sense he had in

mind.

This account applies some key concepts from the work of René Girard, the French-

American literary critic and religious anthropologist, and from that of the French political thinker

and student of the modern soul Alexis de Tocqueville, one of his inspirations. Spurred by

Tocqueville’s richly suggestive account of the impact of equality on the passions, Girard works

out an anthropology of “mimetic desire” intimated (he thinks) but unrealized in Tocqueville

himself.vii While the latter is mainly concerned with political relations, the former brings out the

effect of equality on relations of individuals. Desire, on Girard’s account, is not the singular

possession of an individual, the core of his being as romantic myth has it, but a relation of

individuals, a refex of imitation. Behind the ostensible individualism of desire–the “spontaneity”

or freedom adored by romantics–there lies a “mechanism” of persons reciprocally absorbing and

reproducing each others’ passions. Democracy emancipates this “mechanism” of “mimesis”

from all traditional constraints. Imitation, however, is not as passive and bovine as some critics

of modernity would have us believe. Rather than just conformism (as the romantic would have

it), under conditions of equality it sparks rivalry, conflict, and division. As a human relation

resting solely on itself (on human will), equality creates the conditions for a self-intensifying

cycle of rivalry, threatening to spiral out of control. The crux of this theory, as I apply it to

radical thought, is what Girard calls the “ontological sickness” of “metaphysical desire”–a

typically modern jealousy fixated on the “being” of another as if he were all-powerful and self-

authenticating, as if his passion or its object evinced freedom or spontaneity, a quasi-divine

independence or originality of desire. This is the “lie” (as he calls it) that is sponsored by

romantic culture. Girard claims this very modern desire is exposed by novels like Don Quixote

and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which debunk romantic illusions, including those of the

novel itself. Radical thought, I suggest, is a classic instance of “metaphysical desire.” What one

may call its “ontological obsession” with a patina of authentic being, freedom, or originality, or

its self-deifying propensities, belies an idolatry of human beings.

* * *

Tocqueville’s theme is the transformation of modern life by “equality of conditions.”viii

Or, one might say, by the rise of “society” as such, a unique type of communal order

spontaneously arising from supposedly free and equal individuals. This revolution is far more

than just political. It creates virtually a new type of man, and transforms not just society but the

soul.ix This event, the rise of equality, dramatically intensifies the psychological pressures,

moral uncertainties, and personal frictions of life. And it brings into being a new “social power,”

a despotic potential in democracy created by the “emancipation” of passion.x Passions

emancipated by democracy–desires and ambitions liberated from traditional hierarchical order

and made volatile–tend to congeal in a novel kind of power, that of “society” itself, or some

mechanism of collective passion as if it were a demonic force over and against their will.

Tocqueville saw this power mainly in the rise of public opinion, the tyranny of the majority, and

the “tutelary” despotism of the state. Since then, a “hard” despotism of democracy has appeared

in mass movements and totalitarianism. But it has other, “softer,” less palpable but no less potent

forms as well in liberal democracy, such as popular culture, mass media, and the market.

Though tellingly abandoned by post-modernists, the rise of social power is also the

decisive historical issue for classical radical thinkers. For Marx, it is the tyranny of the “law of

value” or the “social power” of capital; for Nietzsche, the “herd instinct,” and for Heidegger, the

oblivion of Being in das Man and the non-human imperative of technology.xi Their accounts,

however, suffer fatal flaws because they ignore and finally deny its human roots. Instead of

dismantling democratic myths, their initial aim, they furnish social despotism with new ones,

which find a welcome home in post-modernism. Radical critics attack “bourgeois” individualism

as a fraud, a mask for conformism or the commodification of man. But that is to attack it in terms

of a more exorbitant version of the same. What they don’t see is either the leveling power of

individualism itself, or the tendency of leveling to intensify the need to distinguish oneself. Even

Marx protests the competitive effects of individualism as if could be purged of them. He conjures

up a society of pure “individuals” related to each other solely “as such,” without interference

from laws, roles, and ranks, and imagines that such a world would be one of sheer felicity.

Tocqueville shows, though, that modern social power is all the more effective because it operates

not against individual liberty but by means of it. And while he feared that modern democracy

tended to flatten man, making him less capable of greatness, Girard shows that equality also

intensifies social conflict and does not just lead to a slackening of spirit. Radical thought is ruled

by the romantic antithesis of the individual, artist, or philosopher versus “society,” “the herd,” or

“them.” But romantic individualism, this very antithesis, is not only part and parcel of the

leveling economy it ascribes an uncanny life of its own, but its most potent force. And that,

precisely through its proclivities for antagonism and rivalry.

Equality frees the individual to make his own choices, but at the cost of any clear

direction in which choice might be made. It “immanentizes” passion or ambition, which,

detached from any “natural” order, becomes more or less manifestly a reflex of human relations.

It demands that we show ourselves free, but robs freedom of any concrete meaning or aim.

Hence the oft-observed vertigo or anomie of equality, which many seek to escape in some

collective identity, satisfying their need for guidance while flattering them with the feeling of

liberty.xii A mild and relatively benign form of this is the pursuit of property or middle-class

status, a collectively respected goal that enables one to feel secure in one’s person. Equality and

democracy undermine the legitimacy of hierarchy, destroying any fixed order to ambitions and

desires. But, Tocqueville argued, what paradoxically results is not genuine autonomy or self-

creation–as romantic intellectuals imagine when the fetters of tradition are broken–but social

power, mild or harsh. Freedom accelerates the flattening of man.

Tocqueville’s account of the modern world rests upon the deceptively simple idea of

“equality of conditions.” In plain terms, accidents of birth–such as social rank, or today, race,

religion, or gender–lose their right to determine the scope of an individual’s ambition. Equality

of conditions signifies the rise of vocational choice or of society founded upon individual liberty,

and the de-mythologizing of tradition (starting with aristocracy and medieval orthodoxy). In the

French Revolution, it reaches critical mass, henceforth becoming the ruling principle of Europe.

This brings to accomplishment a process begun centuries earlier, even before the onset of the

modern world; it originates in the impact of the New Testament on European history.xiii

Equality thus has an eschatological dimension, or as Tocqueville puts it, seems like an

unstoppable movement of providence inspiring holy dread.xiv The eschatological dimension is

taken over by Girard, but with a different stress. Let us state it as follows.xv Equality is at

bottom a religious truth, sustainable–and capable of being moderated–only from religious

grounds. The modern world, though, wants to realize equality on a secular “rational” basis. As

secular, it proves thoroughly dialectical and volatile, undermining and weakening social

cohesion, intensifying the competitive violence of relations. Equality is a laboratory of eros. In

default of hierarchical order, the only thing limiting one person’s pride is that of another–a recipe

for social and psychological volatility. Philosophically, it generates unresolvable antinomies,

recorded in the history of liberal rationalism and its decomposition in post-Hegelian radicalism.

If no society can stand on equality alone, then its ceaseless advance eventually collides with the

political and moral conditions of society itself. Equality thus poses the question of the end of

history, or of the end of man. It so utterly eviscerates traditional social bonds and puts

individuals in such ever widening competition that the only thing remaining that might protect it

from its own excesses, or the negative passions it unleashes, is, precisely, religion. Yet

egalitarianism has a manifestly anti-religious impetus, despite its provenance. Thus

Tocqueville’s dread, with a Girardian inflection.

Let us state the situation of modernity in a way that broadly captures the “spirit of the

times” as grasped by post-Hegelian historicism. “God is dead”; human beings discover that they

are “gods,”“self-made” men, if only by default; being mortal “gods” in a thoroughly humanized

world, they see in each other a claim to a complete and independent humanity, i.e., freedom. This

awakens and shapes their desires in a distinctively modern way. Individuals compete to

exemplify freedom–whatever it is, for it lacks any content–in themselves; hence they conceive

peculiarly modern ambitions, personal as well as intellectual. And so they either embrace

equality as the deification of Man (Marx), or flee into equality to avoid the burdens of freedom

(Nietzsche’s “last man,” Heidegger’s das Man), or rebel against it by asserting the divine power

of the genius to escape the mass and project “being” (Heidegger, Nietzsche).

It is one thing to claim that human beings actually do become or discover themselves to

be mortal gods because “God dies,” giving rise to the demand for equality or, for that matter, for

inequality. That claim–made by Marx and Nietzsche–is quite different from the one that modern

man contracts a desire or psychic need to be a god from the rise of equality.xvi I suggest that

rather than promote themselves as gods, human beings first see each other as gods under

“equality of conditions.” As Girard puts it, men are gods in the eyes of each other. Self-

deification is a reaction to equality, a result of its exigencies. Equality inculcates the notion,

however absurd, that if a man is not a god, he is nothing. He must at all costs be able to worship

himself at some level of existence. But this psychic reflex is rooted in worship of others. Modern

ambition typically admits only other human beings as arbiters of “value.” Man is the measure of

all things–or, more precisely, men are the measure for each other.

Pursuit of divinization is, needless to say, not uniquely modern. It has always been a part

of Western philosophy. But the ancient desire for divinization–say Plato’s–sought to escape the

collapse of mythic order by restoring a transcendental law. The philosopher aimed to surpass

himself by participation in eternal being . This was a private affair beyond the public world; he

never forgot the difference of philosophy and politics. The modern desire for divinity, however,

is a desire to be a god among men, inseparable from desire for recognition.xvii If so, then it is

not a spontaneous self-assertion–a natural instinct like Plato’s eros–but the reflex of a sense of

nullity based on anomie and self-comparison with others. Modern self-aggrandizement really

belies self-abasement, a “metaphysical” jealousy of one’s contemporaries as if they secretly

withheld the truth of being. This intensification of rivalry under equality congeals in the romantic

myths of freedom invented by philosophers and poets. The images of autonomy, authenticity,

self-creation, etc., proposed by thinkers from Descartes to Heidegger, and the celebrity myths of

rock-stars and sports heroes, are really cut from the same cloth.

Equality creates enormous psychological pressure to prove one’s freedom or autonomy in

the face of the imagined freedom of others. But under conditions of equality, there are fewer and

fewer impartial standards, like those of religion or tradition, that might supply viable models.

Rather, these standards tend to become embodied in other individuals on the same moral plane,

one’s neighbors and contemporaries. There is intense compulsion to see in them proofs and

models of freedom, and to absorb the “divine being” one imagines one finds there for oneself.

Self-deification is best seen not as a spontaneous desire, an act of self-assertion or emancipation

from the tyranny of religion, tradition, or nature. It is really an attempt to “mediate” the psychic

contradictions of passion in a world that, morally speaking, is purely human, devoid of any

higher order.

The assumption of equality is that each individual bears a humanity separate and whole in

himself. But this presumptive fact is a burden to prove. And it creates an invidious dialectic. It

makes us feel that we must not be like all the rest, just because we are like all the rest. For one

must prove that one is “equal” by showing that one is independent, free, self-directed, unique,

not second to anyone. Equality creates a need to be “original” and “self-made”–to be “different,”

owing our physical existence, but not our essential “being,” to anyone else. Yet we must prove

our unique and autonomous status by evincing a model or law valid for everyone, able to be

desired, esteemed, emulated by all. In our difference, we must be universally valid. We want to

be imitated by others, without seeming to imitate them. Of course, to the degree that others do

succeed in imitating us too well, we suspect them of seeking to rob us of what is distinctively

ours. Egalitarian man fears nothing so much as being the same as everyone else, yet there is

nothing he tolerates less well than the appearance of distinction in his neighbor.

By setting persons on the same moral plane, equality reduces the psychic distance

between them. The psychological regime of equality is amour-propre, self-comparison with

others, vanity. On the other hand, proximity or comparison invites humiliation, unless one is able

spontaneously to endow life with meaning, focus, or validity, without a discreet glance at others.

Modern man finds himself in the impossible situation of deriving his aims from others and

having to deny that he does so. As pressure builds that he demonstrate himself a “little Cartesian

god” (in Girard’s phrase), he cannot but imagine someone else who already seems to project this

quality of spontaneous generation. Unless one really is a god, modern “self-assertion” seemingly

entails idolatry of others. Modern culture high and low generates an endless series of idols and

icons of the spontaneity of desire, images of freedom. Just as in Aristotle, the superlunary sphere

is filled with “stars,” breezy celebrities and Homerically childish athletes, millionaires and

billionaires,“writers” and “artists,” models and movie directors, Gargantuan philosophers.

The anthropological ground of this, according to René Girard, is that desires in the strict

sense are not given us by nature but acquired, learned by imitation. Imitation extends to

emotions, too: it is not limited to gesture, speech, or behavior. Desires are absorbed from others

by a reflex of “mimesis,” a “triangular” relation between two desires (of which one is model to

the other) and an object (though both may play the model simultaneously). Girard’s paradigm

case is Don Quixote, who decides to live and do just as his imaginary model Amadis of Gaul

would–to desire as he desires, to abhor as he abhors. Instead of exercising choice–the freedom

that supposedly makes modern life superior to all other forms–Don Quixote surrenders it in order

to desire according to the desire of another. Similarly, Julien Sorel, the character of The Red and

the Black, seduces Madame de Rênal because she is the wife of his employer; her value for him

has little to do with her natural qualities but with the fact that she belongs to a man whose status

Julien intensely envies. He does not acquire his object directly, but through the mediation of a

perceived rival. Unlike Don Quixote, his model is not a fiction pitting him against reality but

another human being close by, a felt competitor. Equality shifts the structure of desire from

“external” mediation, where the model occupies a higher level of being removing him from

direct comparison or competition with his imitator (as is still the case with Don Quixote), to

“internal” mediation, where model and imitator occupy the same level in relatively proximity,

and so potentially in direct competition (as is the case with Julien Sorel).

Advertisers, then, would seem to have a deeper if more cynical insight into the nature of

passion than philosophers or poets do. While the latter conjure up charmingly naive images of

self-will or spontaneous emotion, advertisers know that desire is aroused by a mysterious patina

of “desirability,” an occult quality conferred on things by appearing to be desired by others. An

object is valorized for one person’s desire by its seeming to be desired by another. An important

consequence of this is that one can desire mimetically without imitating anything real; it is

enough to imagine the desire of the model. Further, if mimesis gives imagination free rein, it

affords desire a certain autonomy, liberated not only from the constraints of reality, but even

from persons. Desire takes on a transpersonal existence, all the more real for being purely

imaginary, a mechanism of passion transmitted like a contagion by the reflex of imitation from

one person to another. It operates like a fixed idea seducing one with the feeling of freedom the

more it holds one in its power. Consider, to take an obvious case, intellectual fads.

Does this account for all passions? Certainly not. Girard leaves open the possibility of a

passion not governed by the mimesis of envy, although it is unclear whether this would be a non-

mimetic desire or a passion structured by a different kind of mimesis. His anthropology is thus

incomplete, nor can it pretend to be a full philosophy of man. Girard seems unwilling to say, at

least in the work on the novel, whether all passions are mimetic, or only some.

In any case, Girard revives the Platonic intuition that imitation, the foundation of learning

and character, is also a primal source of violence and disorder,xviii though in modern life its

violence is often internalized and psychological. It generates conflict as much as conformity,

contrary to the romantically-minded, since it applies to inner life, not just to outer modes of

behavior. If human beings acquire their desires from each other by imitation, then they become

competitors because they desire the same things. Consequently, desire is possessive,

expropriative, because the mimetic desires of different persons converge on the same objects.

Envy is the root form of “desire” in the strict sense; “acquisitive” desire is the original source of

conflict and a pervasive form desire never sheds. Now, this alters the customary view of the

“obstacle” or “obstruction” to desire, usually seen as something extraneous, an unfortunate

circumstance blocking it from without. To the contrary, Girard suggests, obstruction is the very

essence of imitative desire. We need, want, and enjoy what is easily available to everyone. But

nobody “desires” it. Desire is bound up with obstacles, not because persons happen to cross each

others’ paths, but because desires necessarily provoke and “scandalize” each other. Desire is

naturally fascinated with obstructions, called into being by them. Obstruction first awakens it.

This theory rejects the view of Marx that conflict is rooted in scarcity or need, as if desire

would be liberated from conflict once scarcity is abolished. To the contrary, desires conflict

because they mediate each other. Desire creates its own scarcity; it is superfluous by nature;

desire feeds on obstruction. It is not scarcity that gives rise to the division of labor and the

competition of classes so much as human desire that gives rise to competition and thus to

scarcity and the division of labor. But Girard’s theory also rejects that of a desire that heroically

needs obstacles because it thrives only by conquering them. This view was advanced by the

German romantic idealist J. G. Fichte, and in different form by Nietzsche (and the aesthetic

fatalist Georges Bataille). In Fichte’s combative egoism, the “I” can assert itself only in

opposition to a “not-I,” which it calls forth just for that purpose. It exists in endless struggle with

the not-I, as it must perpetually reproduce the obstacle that affords it the occasion to assert itself.

The ego thus resolves itself into “longing” or “yearning,” a futile passion to overcome an

opposition that it itself creates. For it “feels” that it “really” exists only by intensifying itself; the

less it is the more it is. Fichte’s dialectic has the advantage, though, that it reveals what Girard

calls (after Dostoevsky) the “underground” of romanticism: the self-deifying ego is fascinated by

what frustrates it and so doomed to defeat. In the symbolism of Dionysus, Nietzsche embraces

the teleology of nihilism Fichte merely implies. Will-to-power, dominated as it is by an endless

cycle of obstacles, “satisfies” itself only immolating itself. But no matter how hard it strives to

maintain the illusion of spontaneity, the indispensable obstruction (always another will) gives

away its social, mimetic character. Even Fichte’s ego is interpersonal: the not-I is really another

I. It is because of the other that one most prove oneself free. Desire is inter-personal, divided

between individuals, conjugated in their relations. It always stands in the shadow of someone

else, just as Nietzsche was haunted by Wagner.

Thus far, this account of desire could in some respects be compared to that of Plato, or

Augustine. What happens when this universal fact of human nature is translated into conditions

of equality? It takes a new turn–the desire for originality, to be different, the sole author of one’s

being–to be one’s own father, as Freud put it.xix It goes romantic. Modern man derives his

desires from others, but unlike previous historical regimes, equality compels him to deny it. His

worst humiliation is to have his needs and wants exposed as determined by the regard of others.

The more he is like others, the more he must pretend to be otherwise, a veritable genius of

spontaneous passion. Yet equality leaves him little else but that. So envy takes a new turn. In its

quest for objects, desire travels from things back to persons, to the possessor pictured as the sole

author of his desire, valorizing his object entirely from out of himself. Like Julien Sorel, it

becomes entranced by the person of his rival, as though it were godlike. His imagination endows

him with a mystique of being, a new object of desire to be expropriated and annexed. By the

same token, his very being is now an obstacle, provoking both desire and resentment. His mere

presence awakens jealousy, if he makes an impression of difference, independence, originality.

Modern rivalries often take on a morbidly personal quality, as object, model, and

obstruction all collapse into each other. The individual cannot admit that his envy already

imitates the desire of the other whom he resents. He must at all costs maintain the pretense of

originality, just as he must desperately deny it in the latter. The more like the other he wants to

be, the more he must strive to portray himself as different. Imitation takes the form of denial,

contrariety. He must imagine that the target of his envy falsifies the “true” desire that he alone

authentically represents. A peculiar negativity arises, a morbid fascination with the other, as if

his being an obstacle were the sinister aim of his desire. The obstruction of desire turns into a

desire for obstruction; negative passion assumes a life of its own. The issues over which

individuals compete dwindle to mere pretexts, as they become obsessed with each other and

rivalry takes on its own momentum. Likewise the alternating moods of self-exaltation and

depression, glory and rage, oscillating between prostrate worship and resentment of the other.

Thus equality naturally tends to division and opposition, as “doubles” struggle to differentiate

themselves. Manicheanism is built into it. Yet their very conflict makes them the same.

Rivalry always has a morbid potential; there is nothing uniquely modern about it. But

equality spreads this propensity to a high degree. It is not just a banal passion portrayed in soap-

operas, but a potent force of modern culture. Indeed the latter would be inconceivable without it.

Its achievements are generally not the product of generous competitions and playful rivalries.

Especially among intellectuals, jealousy and obsession are creative forces, albeit in a destructive

sort of way. Ancient philosophy sought agreement by finding common goods. Modern

philosophy, to the contrary, is driven by the need to distinguish oneself as an original genius. In

post-modernism, the rush to outstrip one’s rivals with ever more daring displays of radicality or

Oedipal assaults on tradition reaches a sort of delirium.

The end of envy (such as desire for originality) is to eliminate the rival. In real terms, the

logical climax of envy is murder. Civilization forbids this act, yet intensifies the passion all the

more, as it shifts from things to persons. Denied physical expression by society, the violence of

mimetic desire invents “symbolic” forms, where, however, it is no more likely to find

satisfaction. Compared with the violence of intellectual life, the conflicts of politicians and

businessmen seem relatively limited and benign. For them victory is measured by a profitable

deal or the passage of a bill, clear standards of success or failure that allow everyone to move on.

But where will-to-power is engaged in the creation of “new values and interpretations,” no such

clear standards apply. There the psychotic law of endless escalation obtains. The very being of

the intellectual is at stake. And for him, often nothing less than moral annihilation of the

adversary will do. The romantic cult of genius is thus an ethereal violence, a desire to strip the

competition of its “being,” of its claim to freedom. It is a verbal guillotine,xx beheading one’s

enemies by demonstrating them to be mere excrescences of reification or inauthentic creatures,

like Nietzsche’s “flatheads” and Marx’s “philistines.” Such “mortal” combats were not invented

by philosophers but merely endowed with a name and refined to a certain form and intensity.

Romantic theories of genius, creativity, intuition, poetic revelation, and so forth, are theoretical

expressions for what is in fact a very banal relation of persons under equality. Historicism

disavows romantic egoism yet the violence of this passion is intensified, not diminished.

Perhaps most adept at mediating the contradictions of mimetic desire is not the romantic

poet or revolutionary philosopher, but the capitalist entrepreneur. By amassing wealth, he

distinguishes himself from the rest, yet the sign of his distinction is also what he shares with

everyone. For what is money but mimetic desire incarnate? It lends its luster to whoever has it,

but is detachable all the same, the common property of all. The rich entrepreneur achieves an

ideal of freedom of whose universal validity there can be no doubt. But in establishing him as a

universal object of desire, wealth registers his commonality as well. The entrepreneur is thus a

true democrat. Money distinguishes him without separating him. The gigantic fortunes of

capitalism provoke less envy, or at least less murderous envy, than the aristocratic privileges of

the old regime, though the material differences entailed by them are even greater. Even the poor

obtain a certain redemption by worshiping at the temple of the rich. The capitalist sustains his

position not, as Marx thought, by impoverishing and enslaving the working class, but by

constantly expanding the social circle of desire to include it. Capitalism undoubtedly creates new

forms of inequality, but it does so by fertilizing the passions of equality. It is able to stabilize

“mimetic desires” to the degree it affords them satisfaction in property, which shifts competitive

rivalry away from morbid obsession with persons. Perhaps here is where its real “contradiction”

lies, in arousing competitive (and acquisitive) passions of equality more quickly than it can

satisfy them productively in the mechanisms of economy. It unleashes a social mechanism of

expanding desires that threatens to outstrip its own ability to afford them an equilibrium.

It is among aesthetes and intellectuals that the sado-masochistic, manic-depressive

proclivities of the modern psyche are particularly to be found. Perhaps this is where Hegel’s

dialectic of freedom and recognition fits in. In a classic chapter of the Phenomenology of

Spirit,xxi Hegel presents a pristine struggle for status, two individuals each seeking to convert

the other to an admiration of his freedom, or independence of desire. Each sees the being or

independence of the other as an unendurable insult to his own. At first this incites a fight to the

death, but detouring this impasse, it leads to a relation of “master and slave,” as one capitulates

to the other, recognizing the victor without being recognized in turn. In his famous commentary,

the French Hegelian Alexandre Kojève persuasively argued that struggles over recognition–the

“desire for the desire of another,” as he put it–are the catalyst of history for Hegel.xxii The

settled relation of master-slave drives rivalry “underground” while above ground, it creates the

world of culture. After a series of battles, breakdowns, and revolutions, culture finally resolves

itself in the legal equality of modern civil society, based on the modern state, and reciprocity of

recognition reigns happily ever after.

Most interpreters read Hegel as though the “master-slave” relation resolved its

contradictions in “reciprocity,” as if one could deduce agapic love from erotic rivalry by means

of dialectics. It might be more revealing to reverse Hegel and Kojève and read it as showing how

reciprocity of recognition (i.e. equality) may generate a psychology of “master and slave.” It is

clear in the text that Hegel’s battle already assumes reciprocity of recognition, or equality. Only

because each individual already perceives the other as the same as himself, does he feel

compelled to deny the other, in order to establish his own identity. Each conceives the desire for

freedom, because he imagines the other already to have it. Each sees in the other only the theft of

his own being, and so desires to steal it back. Each is trapped between a desperate desire to

appropriate the self of the other, and a struggle to maintain a mask of indifference and sovereign

self-satisfaction. For one must not betray for an instant his preoccupation with the other, as that

would expose the slavery of his desire. Yet he shows it all the same, even in his contempt for the

life of the other. So it is not a natural instinct for freedom that kindles Hegel’s struggle for

recognition but reciprocal recognition that kindles passion for freedom and a fight issuing in

death or mastery. The narcissist pretense that pushes them into combat is a defensive reaction of

each to the other, to deny a fascination with yet to expropriate the self of the other, his

independence of desire. He who would be a god, must be prepared to become one of Nietzsche’s

“beasts of prey.”

As a model of violence alternating between murder and idolatry, Hegel’s dialectic is not

the primordial origin of history, as he seems to imply, so much as its possible end. Hegel’s two

egos try to murder each other, at first physically, then psychologically in the master-slave

relation, because they inhabit a world stripped of all traditional order, a world of pure equality.

The only law that rules in such a world is violent envy. At least that is the specter it conjures up–

equality has triumphed over all relations and reduced human beings to pure individuals,

governed by nothing but ego and mutual jealousy. In such a situation, the “fight to the death” or

the psychology of “master and slave” would seem indeed inevitable.

True, this is the extreme case, a tendency few carry to the bitter end. On the other hand,

these are often very exceptional individuals–not Nietzsche’s weaklings, but gifted, superior

types, like Nietzsche himself. The extreme case is often the rule with modern philosophers, and

twentieth century politics as well. Of course, Nietzsche is right that democracy legitimates the

negative passions, jealousy, envy, and impotent rage. It democratizes the “sense of honor,” the

ease with which one takes offense, delusions of grandeur and insane rivalries even among the

ordinary. But what is striking is how intelligent and spirited persons are likely to get drawn into

these little Homeric comedies. The negative passions may be just as powerful among them (if

also more productive). Nietzsche’s view of ressentiment as frustrated weakness obscures the

extent to which his own notion of greatness rests upon anthropological reflexes like these.

To be sure, one reads every day in the newspapers about the violent underside of what

Philip Rieff called the “therapeutic culture.”xxiii It places infinite weight on “self-esteem” yet

denies every moral hierarchy, destroying any possibility of basing it on reality. And so it

promotes the alienated pathologies to which it is supposedly the answer. Richard Rorty, for

example, takes over Rieff’s picture of “psychological man”–the Freudian successor to “economic

man,” a thoroughly democratized psyche held together by a contradictory web of desires–but

bereft of Rieff’s critical sense.xxiv In liberating himself from hierarchy, modern man may be

taking on psychological burdens of unprecedented scale. Without “vertical” order, the dialectic

of pride may be irresolvable. But Rorty sets up “psychological man” as an unproblematic ideal,

as if its pathologies were the very acme of post-modern “irony.” The aim of politics, for him, is

to end cruelty and humiliation, but he seems unaware how equality might make humiliation more

likely. Or to how the humiliated might be psychologically complicit in their humiliation and

prone to a bit of cruelty of their own. Yet a certain pride, at least, is inherently masochistic,

trapped in a competitive envy that worships its rival as a god. Rorty writes as if to admit pride

were a minimal concession to human nature without consequence. In reality, he never faces the

problem of pride or humiliation (only its blatant effects), as it is really a theological problem,

excluded from his view of man. He rightly condemns the cruelty of the intellectual but nowhere

seeks to understand it. Alas, in modern democracy the problem of pride is not confined to the

exceptional man or the intellectual, as in ancient politics. And as it turns out, nothing is more

plebeian than the pride of the modern philosopher. That is why it is so inflated and mean.

So it is easy to imagine that what is really going on in Hegel’s battle for recognition is

two egos with the vanity of debutantes, advanced thinkers perhaps, challenging each other in a

duel of indifference, a calculated lack of regard designed to break the other’s will. At any rate,

Hegel’s dialectic well described avant la lettre a type of encounter not infrequent among

romantic and radical poets and intellectuals and their rivals. Narcissism, after all, can have a

certain seductive appeal; the aloofness of self-regard contagiously infects the desires of others.

And what Hobbes called “contempt” or indifference can be an instrument of domination; the

signs or appearance of power are the most effective instrument of power in a world based on

mimetism. The modern world, moreover, insists that the rights of the individual be at least

minimally respected. An actual fight is out of the question. Here, desire–or the appearance of

desire, self-desire to be precise–is itself a weapon of combat, the all-powerful snub. Each tries to

master the other with his snobbery or self-absorption, as if that gave the other a reason to admire

him, so confirming his superiority. The trick is to make sure that one doesn’t let slip the mask of

self-absorbed indifference, and betray how much one counts on the regard of the other. Sooner or

later someone is bound to give in and surrender to the vanity of the other. Not, however, as a

result of violent mastery, but of a contract, a voluntary division of labor in the economy of

imitation. Surrender, too, can be a liberation for mimetic desire; in yielding to the charismatic

egotism of another, one is liberated from the burden of desire, the need for an object. The slave’s

desire is vindicated by the contempt of the master. Far from destroying reciprocity, the “master-

slave” relation realizes it. Narcissism, not to be confused with solipsism, is a relation that

preserves equality exactly through asymmetry.

* * *

Modern equality endows social status with absolute value just as it renders it totally fluid.

Social status, in fact, becomes a kind of “ontological status”–to use a student’s phrase that,

appropriately enough, came into circulation with Heidegger and existentialism–endowed with a

metaphysical mystique of its own. It would be a mistake to limit this to “bourgeois” status alone.

Consider the hieratic order in the romantic coterie, the avant garde, or the radical political

movement (left or right)–to mention only “classic” examples. Compared with the latter and other

“marginal” forms of social idolatry, ordinary pursuit of bourgeois status and property is

undoubtedly relatively stable and productive, compatible with a certain prosperity and

equilibrium, even if it can’t be equated with full human flourishing. Acquisition offers some

solace in a world of moral uncertainties; it enables the imitative aspect of desire to achieve a

relative equilibrium. It is, to the contrary, the kinds of social idolatry that imagine themselves as

rejecting the bourgeois type that show the travails of modern passion most unmistakably. And it

is here that we may discern a connection between social idolatry and modern ontology. Modern

desire, as Girard pointedly puts it, is “metaphysical desire,” an “ontological sickness”: an

obsession with the presumptive “being” of the model, as if he owned the secret of freedom and

refused to share it. The modern ontology of freedom is based on an ontological obsession in

modern relations themselves. For Heidegger, for example, philosophy is a pursuit of an

“authentic” relation to “Being” as the quintessence of freedom, exemplified in thinkers or poets

who embody the “destiny” of “Being.” Heidegger criticizes “humanists” like Marx and

Nietzsche as “metaphysical,” but makes the charismatic aspect of their thought the heart of his

own. What he calls ontology expressly assumes what is tacitly operative in them, the mystique of

authentic Being evinced by the charisma of freedom.xxv Heidegger’s ontology is really a

perverse theory of incarnation, of “Being” in man. Correspondingly, philosophy is replaced by a

cult of Philosophy. Meanwhile, real concerns–the despotism of mass man, the soullessness of

technology, the reduction of all to an economic logic, the politicization of intellectual life–are

sacrificed to the monomania of exemplary Being.

What Kojève posits as the universal character of all desire (for the desire of another, for

recognition) is universalized only by equality.xxvi His analysis doesn’t consider that it is

especially in equality (at the “end of history” he ascribes to Hegel) that desire itself becomes the

object of desire, immanentized in the absence of a natural order. Modern desire senses that desire

is the real (if also imaginary) source of “value” but without ceasing to embrace its illusions. It

acts as if value were created simply by multiplying desires by each other. It sees the fiction of

desire and is addicted to it all the same. Kojève (as it seems to me) thus lets out its secret, yet

without comprehending it. What Kojève describes is really the heart of consumerism. In a

consumerist utopia, the best that one can aspire to is to be a god, a hot commodity; there is

nothing higher than that to lift one outside and above oneself. The object of such a desire is an

elusive Being, always incarnated in someone else, whose desire evinces the sublime power to

valorize itself. Such an “independent” desire would desire itself because it creates its own value,

and create its own value by desiring itself–a fatal circle that it can neither resolve nor escape.

Kojève’s desire is the absurdity of a desire that is satisfied by desiring itself. In reality, it desires

itself only because it thinks it is desired by another. The teleology of this desire is not to

transcend the master/slave relation but to realize it–although, to be sure, reciprocally all around.

Denis de Rougemont showed that the romantic cult of passion is a “love of love,” a

narcissistic love of one’s own passion epitomized in the ancient Tristan legend.xxvii Such a

passion, he believed, was doomed to self-immolation, as it thrived only by being obstructed. It

sought intensification rather than satisfaction. So the scandalous secret of the romantic passion

for passion is really a love of death, classically expressed in the Liebestod of Wagner’s Tristan

und Isolde. Girard explains the teleology of nihilism in romantic passion by locating the

obstruction in a mimesis of desires. Modern passion is romantic because the object of desire is

the desire of another, on which it seeks to base its own. On a certain level, but not the deepest,

this appears as Kojève’s desire for recognition. On a more basic level, though, romantic desire is

desire for the being of the model, for a passion that mythically exemplifies freedom, or

independence of desire. If one desires to be the object of another’s desire, as Kojève thinks, it is

because he believes that the desire of the other has the capacity to project value, in as much as

his own value depends on it. The desire for the desire of another is really a fascination with the

being of the other, as if his desire had the capacity to invest an object with value, by the mere

fact of desiring it. Contrary to Hegel, the more original desire is not that for recognition but that

for property, the acquisitive focus of desires. Contrary to Marx, though, in a thoroughly human

world, the model of desire itself becomes the object of desire. The desire for property fixates on a

certain property of desire. What Hegel described as the fight for recognition is not the origin of

history, as Kojève thought, but its imagined end; while what Marx described, conflicts over

property, are not the end of history, but its relative beginning. Desire that ends in tangible

property, even if symbolic, is relatively unproblematic as long as an order of rank contains and

channels potential rivalries. This is the function of hierarchical order, replaced by money and

modern property. But if hierarchy is “de-mythologized” by equality, a profound inversion may

occur. The object of eros ceases to be determined by an order independent of eros and instead

becomes eros itself. Eros for eros, far from being spontaneous, is a “desire for the desire of

another.” Far from issuing in bovine stasis, it is a recipe for endless escalation as object, model,

and obstruction, all collapse into one.xxviii

* * *

In a world of immanent imitation, passion assumes an inter-personal life of its own. This

is the social power of modern democracy, most obvious in popular culture, the market, the mass

media, public opinion, and the state. Each person sees himself as equal and free, signifying as it

were the whole of humanity in his own person, and thus entitled to offer himself as an absolute

measure of value. Yet the collective product of individual self-affirmation is a social power that

tyrannizes all. So strictly speaking the thesis that modern nihilism arises from the disappearance

of transcendental being needs to be qualified. De-mythologizing has produced its own myths,

which in the guise of freedom, facilitate the power of collective passion. There has always been a

“transcendental” force operative in human affairs, the force of passion, a social “being” that

circulates through individuals, holding them in its grip like a jealous god. But when it ceases to

regard itself in terms of higher law and is absorbed back into “free” human relations, it assumes a

certain form. It is like a demonic power over the individuals, as if it were not they who possessed

passion, but passion that possessed them, yet it arises entirely through their consent. This power

could be compared to the sacrificial divinity that (according to Girard) comprised the “natural”

foundation of pre-modern orders. Except those myths rested on an inviolable separation of the

sacred and the profane, imposing limits on human will. This is absent or constantly undermined

in modern societies, where the power of myth operates precisely through the self-assertion of

democratic man. Myth is recreated “freely” within the human world, and with it leaders and

followers, idols and worshipers, “masters” and “slaves.” The social power thereby created,

unlike the corresponding power in the pre-modern world, recognizes no intrinsic limits, and so

may assume rabid forms. Even the comparatively benign god of liberal democracies, public

opinion, must be fed occasionally by a victim, like the old sacrificial deities. The triumph of

passion is really the triumph of the inhuman mechanisms of social mimesis. An apt symbol for

social power is thus Dionysus, as in Euripides’ Bacchae. Dionysus, Girard says, is the god of

mob violence. That god, true to the incantations of Hegel and Nietzsche, represents the sacrifice

of the individual as the price of deification.

When Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, and othersxxix invoke Dionysus to signify the truth of

being, they basically speak for continental thought. In seeing history in terms of an “ontology” of

freedom, radical thought effectually puts itself at the disposal of the social power of democratic

passion. Traditional myth tempered violence, protected it from itself, and found a way to turn

violence into order, albeit at a price. The great difference between modern myths of freedom and

the old myths is that they acknowledges no limits, no difference between the human and the

divine that enables man to accept boundaries. In attacking the “soft” despotism of liberal

democracy (leveling) as ontological decrepitude, historicism invents ideological justifications for

a very “hard” despotism indeed. One wonders if Nietzsche and Heidegger had the irony to

appreciate that in Dionysus or the truth of Being they merely issued anti-liberal versions of

Durkheim’s positivist thesis that society is God. Perhaps, though, we can take some solace in the

fact that today in post-modernism their thought serves a despotism of only the “soft” variety.                                                                                                                 The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 60. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor, 1967). Löwith’s phrase for the brief accommodation of bourgeois and aristocratic orders between 1815 and 1830. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947, 1970), 82-95; 118. See Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Odéon, 1987). Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) illustrates the dialectic of egalitarian desire in Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky. Mimetic desire is described Chs. 1-4; modern novels systematically expose it, Chs. 5-11. Also, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 283-325. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). Vol. One, 3-14, and Vol. Two, Pt. Two, Ch. 13. This is shown by Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996). For soft despotism, see Democracy, 665 ff.; and Tocqueville, Ch. 5. For Tocqueville’s critique of modernity compared with Heidegger’s, see Ralph Hancock, “Tocqueville’s Practical Reason,”in Perspectives in Political Science, Fall 1998, 212-219. Democracy, 667. Equality separates human beings but renders them less certain of who and what they are, driving them together in a new way, as a mass. This is recognized also by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche. Tocqueville, Democracy, 6. Girard’s apocalyptic side comes out in Things Hidden. My version of it is adapted to Tocqueville. See Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) for Nietzschean self-deification,15 ff., 150, 208 etc. Rosen distinguishes ancient and modern divinization by their different notions of divinity. The modern applies the biblical notion of creation ex nihilo to the philosopher, whereas the ancient recognized an order to which even a god was subject. I suggest that what distinguishes them also has a “political” aspect. To be a god for the modern philosopher means to be a god among men; the ancient philosopher is not concerned with fame or “recognition.” This insight distinguishes Plato (Things Hidden, 15-18). Philosophy displays both sides of mimesis but, thanks to mythic fear of the sacred (the divinity of sacrifice, in Girard’s theory, 3-47), it cannot reconcile them. Thus Plato banned mimesis, while Aristotle ignored its potential for violence, which Plato saw very well. “A Special Type of Object-Choice Made by Men,” in Sigmund Freud, The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 7: On Sexuality (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 240-241. Blandine Kriegel, The State and the Rule of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 103.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), Ch. Four. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 3-10. The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). It is easy to show this in Marx’s theory of alienation, imbued with the metaphysical idiom of romanticism, or in Nietzsche’s idolatry of will-to-power as creativity or a scale of ascending or declining “forces.” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe commits a basic error by equating Girardian desire with Kojève’s or Hegel’s “desire for the desire of another.” Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Stanford: Meridian, 1998), 102 ff. Love in the Western World (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 38-46. Girard in effect corrects Rougemont with Kojève, and Kojève with Rougemont: like Rougemont, he sees the teleology of nihilism in the unbridled quest for recognition; like Kojève, he sees that the obstacle originates in the inter-personal structure of desire. See Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965).