Girard gradually turned his research to the study of Greek tragedy and the anthropology of religion in the years following Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. This second phase of his career culminated with the publication of Violence and the Sacred (1972). It was also a decisive period during which René Girard would criticize Hegel’s philosophy in a more direct manner. Starting from the late 1960s, Girard’s point is that the Phenomenology’s supposedly logical transition leading from the struggle to the death to the master and slave relation entails a dismissal of the most radical conflict scenario. Far from being the “‘movement’ of the Real,” Hegel’s dialectic is a theoretical construct resting on a watered-down account of human violence.
Hegel’s Category-Mistake
In his 1968 paper entitled “Symmetry and Dissymmetry in the Myth of Oedipus,” Girard was already on the way to discovering the main elements of his theory of archaic myths. Right after outlining the idea that “the myth never wants to face . . . the truth of its own genesis”—i.e., the Thebans put the blame for the plague on Oedipus by accusing him of incest and patricide—Girard addresses the merits and limitations of Hegel’s philosophy:
It is always the expulsion of the scapegoat, in one form or another, which resolves, in the Western world, the conflict between Same and Same. But the operation is often disguised under some flattering name: dépassement, synthesis, progress, science, humanism, religion, etc. Hegel’s greatness lies in having read in history the ineluctable dilemma of Oedipus and Creon: kill or be killed, expel or be expelled. But this dilemma was then conjured away by Hegel. He thought that two desires must behave like two concepts that cannot fail to agree once nothing separates them any longer.
According to Girard, Hegel’s struggle for recognition rests on a category mistake that attributes the properties of ideas or concepts to human desires. In respect to ideas or concepts, identity is defined as non-contradictory and difference as contradictory. But the same does not apply to desire. Desires are different when they relate to distinct objects. In such a case, the desires do not collide; they are non-contradictory. Desires are identical when they relate to the same object. If this object is close to both agents and cannot be shared by them, then desires collide; they are contradictory. Hence, applying the classical logical law of non-contradiction to human desires amounts to a category-mistake. How may such a category-mistake precisely relate to The Phenomenology of Spirit? The distinctive logic of desire is exemplified by Hegel’s account of the struggle to the death. Agents jointly push themselves to put their lives at risk because of the collision of their two identical desires. Here, identity clearly equals contradiction. However, Hegel will dismiss the radical problem raised by the struggle to the death by arbitrarily moving from a desire-related understanding of identity to a conceptually related understanding of identity. Indeed, the necessity for both agents to stay alive—or for the slave to back down during the struggle—has nothing to do with the logic of desire, but is rather a command imposed from the outside by virtue of the classical law of non-contradiction. If one adopts the detached standpoint of the philosopher, then consciousness must prove identical to itself on a pure conceptual level; its independence from the biological world ought to be verified in the eyes of another consciousness. Thereby, the act of killing and violent death will be defined as a contradiction in terms, for it is illogical for consciousness to suppress the necessary means for ascertaining its identity. It follows from this that human desires are, as a matter of fact, constrained to “behave like two concepts.” It will thus become possible to distinguish the two consciousnesses in struggle as master and slave and to analyze the “Lordship and Bondage” relation in a dialectical way as a first step on the (already traced) path toward reciprocal recognition.
A significant consequence of the Hegelian category-mistake is that the most radical problems inherent to human conflict are already solved in an artificial way at an early stage of The Phenomenology of Spirit. For, although master and slave are still far away from authentic reciprocal recognition, their relation already represents a decisive step in which the logic of desire has been ruled out by the logic of ideas. At this point, recognition becomes a conceptual necessity supplanting the concrete conflictual features of human desires. Eventually, it is worth noting that Girard does not dismiss the idea of recognition in its empirical sense, i.e., he does not deny the existence of recognition claims among individuals, but rejects the Hegelian theory of recognition, which, in his view, mixes up the logical properties of concepts and desires.
Monstrous Doubles
Let us now tackle Girard’s critique of Hegel in Violence and the Sacred. In a mimetic crisis, violence spreads like a contagious disease through the community. Unlike in Hegel’s struggle for recognition, no logical necessity commands the opponents to stay alive. Human rivalries do not have any built-in limits. All the differences structuring the social order are erased by individuals’ violent reciprocity. An accurate description of this growing state of undifferentiation requires us, again, to carefully distinguish the logic of concepts from the logic of desire. On the one hand, the analytical or conceptual approach corresponds to the detached (or third person) point of view in which the mimetic crisis is observed from the outside. From this perspective, although agents might be distinguished as masters and slaves at distinct moments, the entire sequence of their rivalry shows that reciprocal imitation prevails. Across time, the detached observer notices a continuous reversal of roles and positions; in a seemingly unending process, former masters become slaves, and former slaves become masters. From the conceptual vantage point, individuals are strictly identical. On the other hand, the logic of desire corresponds to the agents’ point of view within the crisis. From this perspective, the identity of the agent’s desire with the desire of the other is always experienced as a contradiction between himself and the other. The identity of the different agents noticed from the conceptual perspective can never be acknowledged as such by the agents themselves. For them, identity is constantly seen as a difference placing them opposite to another. Both the conceptual perspective and the agents’ point of view are part of the same reality. The agents do not recognize themselves as identical, however, and cannot erase the reality of reciprocal imitation, noticed by the conceptual perspective, that gradually eliminates the differences separating them. The more agents become identical from the conceptual perspective, the more they will oppose each other. And the more agents oppose each other, the more they will misperceive their increasingly reciprocal, yet unacknowledged, imitation of each other as an assertion of difference. Consequently, the mimetic crisis will reach a critical moment where the agents experience their own similarities, visible as it can be, as something alien to them. The acceleration of violent reciprocity between the agents makes their perceived differences “shift ever faster and more rapidly as the crisis grows in intensity.” These differences progressively appear to the agents as an increasingly rapid succession of still images creating the illusion of movement. Ultimately, differences can no longer be identified by them as distinct moments of the conflict but melt into a nightmarish hallucination. This nearly cinematographic phenomenon represents the moment where agents confront each another as monstrous doubles—the penultimate step of the mimetic crisis before the collective murder of the surrogate victim.
According to Girard, Hegel’s conception of human violence prevents us from recognizing the reality of monstrous doubles. The struggle for recognition, indeed, does not take accurate measure of human beings’ propensity to be unaware of their similarities in a state of conflict. The theory of monstrous doubles is possible only if one avoids confusing the logic of desire with the logic of concepts. Girard aims to show precisely how both logics evolve in tandem, without making one supplant the other. He thus notices that the phenomenon of undifferentiation observed from outside the conflict (the logic of concepts) is always sustained by the illusion of difference separating agents from within the conflict (the logic of desire). Actual similarities between agents only appear to them under the guise of the illusion of difference, which, at its most extreme degree, takes the hallucinatory guise of monstrous doubles. As Girard observes, the escalation to undifferentiation “affords no stability of any sort, no synthetic resolution,” so there is indeed “no point in invoking a master-slave dialectic” as an explanation.
Years later, in his book on Shakespeare, Girard again opposes his theory of monstrous doubles to Hegel’s master and slave dialectic. His study of A Midsummer Night’s Dream gives him the opportunity to supplement his first critique of Hegel in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel with the insights gained in Violence and the Sacred. In Shakespeare’s play, not only are Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, and Helena going through the deceptive “dialectic of indifference,” but they are also plunged into a mimetic crisis by the influence of Puck’s love potion. Although, as noticed by Girard, it might “be tempting to compare” the winners and losers of romantic seduction to Hegel’s master and slave, we should avoid such an analogy, which “brings an aura of permanence and rationality that makes it inappropriate.” As a matter of fact, Shakespeare’s play pushes the “dialectic of indifference” a step further by showing how the roles and positions of the different characters are constantly and ever more rapidly reversed. In an unceasing movement, each character becomes at turns a worthless animal or a divinized model for another. These differences shift more and more rapidly and create the illusion of movement; they melt into the hallucinatory vision of monstrous doubles that Girard contends bears no resemblance to Hegel’s dialectic: “When the dog and the god, the beast and the angel, and all such contraries oscillate fast enough, they become one, but not in the sense of some harmonious ‘synthesis’ à la Hegel.”
Appropriative Mimesis
In his last book, Girard acknowledges the influence Hegel had had on his early writings but also offers a summary of how his more mature writings should be distinguished from Hegel’s philosophy. In accordance with his earlier critique of Hegel’s category-mistake, Girard argues that the struggle for recognition arbitrarily dismisses the most violent conflict scenario. As he puts it in Battling to the End: “The desire for recognition prevents them [the master and the slave] from killing each other. How would they be able to recognize each other if one of them died or they were both killed?” In the same vein, he affirms: “Hegelian dialectic does not work for me: I find it too rationalist and not tragic enough. It flies through conflict without ruffling its feathers.”
But Girard now also adds a more anthropological dimension to this critique. The conceptual necessity of recognition, as he notices, operates like a violence inhibition mechanism, which bears a strong resemblance to “dominance hierarchies in animal societies.” The display of signs of submission by the slave to the master immediately results in the cessation of the struggle. Similar regulatory mechanisms of intra-specific aggression have been observed in certain animals by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz. However, according to Girard, it is the more advanced biological instinct of mimicry that sets apart man from the rest of the animal kingdom and explains the extent of his violence. The mimetic crisis cannot be regulated through dominance patterns, but only through the scapegoat mechanism. Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” hierarchy therefore introduces a philosophical paradigm that inevitably overlooks the violent origins of culture and archaic religion.
Girard also maintains that his theory of monstrous doubles differs significantly from the Hegelian “struggle for recognition”: “The fight to the death is thus much more than a simple desire for recognition. It is not a master-slave dialectic, but a merciless battle between twins.” Battling to the End, however, goes a step further to vindicate the singularity of mimetic theory. The two key features of desire in Hegel’s dialectic are (1) the antagonists aim to prove that they are more than mere living organisms, that is, their purpose is to get rid of the world of objects in the broadest sense of the word, and (2) they not only desire to be recognized but also desire the desire of the other, that is, both desire to be desired by the other as a being transcending the natural world. Mimetic theory is different to the extent that: (1) desire implies a disciple, a mediator, and an object, and (2) desire rests on appropriative mimesis, that is, individuals do not merely desire to be desired by another, but they desire either to take ownership of an object (seemingly or actually) desired by the model or to possess the purported qualities of the mediator to whom the object belongs to. The close spatial, temporal, and intellectual distance between the disciple, the mediator, and the object (apparently or really) desired by the mediator, as well as the impossibility of sharing the object, are the first parameters determining the emergence of conflict. When the mediator blocks access to the object to the disciple, the former becomes a model-obstacle. By the same token, the disciple’s desire is reinforced by the obstacle and reinforces the model’s desire in turn. Thereupon, both agents enter the stage of double-mediation, as each becomes a model-obstacle for the other. A struggle in which agents lose their initial interest for the object will ensue. Nonetheless, as observed by Girard, each now wants “to be what the other becomes when he possesses this or that object.” This aim to take ownership of the model-obstacle’s supposed qualities can be pushed to the extreme of killing, and explains why the stability of Hegel’s master and slave relation turns out to be misleading. From Girard’s perspective, the slave will not simply accept the master’s domination, but will still desire to appropriate the latter’s qualities—in Hegel’s case scenario, the quality of having apparently transcended the natural world. Dominance patterns, as we saw, do not apply to human conflict. The slave cannot merely behave like a dog baring his throat when faced by a stronger opponent; rather, his desire to reverse his relationship with the master will persist. In the end, Hegel’s dialectic rests on the mistaken assumption that the slave could be content with recognizing the master as his nearly own essence.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from René Girard and the Western Philosophical Tradition, vol. 1: Philosophy, Violence, and Mimesis (Michigan State University Press, 2024). All rights reserved.
