Lecture III: Mimetic Rivalry and Girard's Theodicy | René Girard's Mimetic Theory

Johnathan Bi

In this lecture, we will finish painting the picture of Girardian psychology by understanding mimetic rivalry and negative mimesis. This picture will expose humans as fallen and certain psycho-social pathologies as inevitable: fetishization, alienation, bipolarity, masochism, oppression, and inequity. Girard’s psychology, then, is also a theodicy — an inquiry into the origins of evil. For Girard, evil is not contingent on poorly designed societies but an inevitable consequence of corrupt human nature. We will never escape these pathologies no matter how much social “progress” is made. Girard’s theodicy tampers our expectations of the world and inoculates us against a whole host of, what we can loosely call, critical theories. This is a critique of critique.
00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:26 Internal and External Mediation
00:10:50 Mimetic Rivalry
00:33:33 Doubles
00:35:24 False Differences
00:37:58 American Psycho
00:42:19 The Negative Phase of Mimesis
00:46:33 Conforming to Contrarianism
00:53:31 The Psycho-Social Pathologies of Man
00:55:51 Fetishization
00:56:39 Alienation
00:59:08 Bipolarity
01:01:01 Masochism
01:04:27 Oppression
01:07:56 Inequity
01:10:03 Hegel's Theodicy
01:13:22 Rousseau's Theodicy
01:15:40 Girard's Theodicy
01:20:14 A Critique of Critique

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