Quotes About Mimetic

mechanism. In their slow evolutionary ascent, proto-humans 'found' in this mechanism a 'tool' for controlling the mimetic escalations of interspecific violence, when imitation (stronger in humans than in animals) diffuses dynamics of reciprocal contention and revenge in a given social group.

Markus Müller, "Interview with René Girard," Anthropoetics 2, no. 1 (June 1996): 3–5. 2

Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.

Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution.

What I call a mimetic crisis is a situation of conflict so intense that on both sides people act the same way and talk the same way even though, or because, they are more and more hostile to each other.

There is no reason to assume that gender also ought to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it.

lie of scapegoating, this unconsciousness of scapegoating (to have a scapegoat is not to be aware that one has a scapegoat), therefore means that a text that openly mentions scapegoating cannot be a scapegoat text. I have confidence that this will be done and is already being done by interpreters of the Bible who use mimetic theory.

A mimetic crisis is when people become undifferentiated. There are no more social classes, there are no more social differences, and so forth.

The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.

Slipstream fiction is usually defined as fiction with a contemporary setting in which story elements are mimetic (that is, seem real) - except for one or two eerie strangenesses. Unlike outright fantasy, these are not explained or integrated into an alternate-reality setting.

fugidia que nem a mais mimética das enguias.

Society's preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process.

The man who would have no imitators had legions of them, each infected with the mimetic dilemma that Rousseau personified: how to get others to notice how disinterested one is in whether they notice or not.

By it's mimetic intention, the world of fiction leads us to the heart of the real world of action.