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René Girard is the man who worked out the theory of mimetism a couple decades ago, but he's not even mentioned here. If you want a proper explanation of mimetic
by float4 5y ago
René Girard is the man who worked out the theory of mimetism a couple decades ago, but he's not even mentioned here. If you want a proper explanation of mimetic theory, you should read some of his books.
> Many people are savvy enough to know that they're influenced by the people around them
Girard acknowledges that many people before him, e.g. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, the Evangelists, were very aware of mimetic theory. You notice that when you read their works, as their characters behave in a way that is just too consistent with mimetism for it to be a coincidence. Girard was simply the first to explicitly explain the theory and work it out.
Lastly, although I, like so many others, discovered mimetism by myself when I was a teenager, Girards books were still very enlightening to me. He takes a pretty trivial theory, but works it out very thoroughly and draws a lot of insightful conclusions from it.
- monkeycantype 5y agoHell yeah. Conversations on this topic have gone off the rails, to the point of being flagged, with groups talking past each other, a set critiquing a cheesy blog post or Thiel and another group defending Girard's idea. I haven't read as much of Girard as my library fines for his books might suggest, but what I have read affected me deeply, it brought clarity to ideas I was perceiving in a muggy form that I couldn't quite communicate. If mimetic theory seems silly, I think it's worth reading it from Girard, rather than from primates such as myself, chattering incoherently about happened in their head when they read his ideas.
- ramblerman 5y agoany book, or entry point you can recommend to start with?
- wrapupandkeepit 5y agoStart with some online summaries. Girard's theories span multiple essays and books. Instead of jumping straight into one of his books, it will help to get some overall context. I personally read "The Scapegoat" but Girard is doing literary critique which, like philosophy, can be dense and difficult to read if one isn't used to such texts. Personally, I would like to read "Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure" sometime in the future.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]