Rene Girard - Things Hidden

0:00:00 - 0:02:55 Opening Credits  

0:02:55 - 0:03:35 Intro 

0:03:35 - 0:10:35 The Early Days 

0:10:35 - 0:22:33 The Discovery: Mimetic Desire 

0:22:33 - 0:31:27 A Conversion Story 

0:31:27 - 0:49:10 Violence and the Sacred 

0:49:10 - 1:13:00 The Christian Difference 

1:13:00 - 1:29:30 Battling to the End 

1:29:30 - 1:33:11 End Credits

Excerpts:

"All Desire is a Desire for Being"

This feeling that we have, this persistent feeling  that somebody else has the metaphysical goods.   That if we could only be as beautiful, as clever,  as charming or whatever as this other person, then we would have it made, then everything  would be okay in our lives. The desire for this being of another that we don't have. And  that's the illusion. That's the chief illusion.

The more mimetic desire you have, the more it gets into real life, and the more it destroys   your life, and the more unhappy the characters  become.

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I think in a sense, in my first book, much of my theory of human relations is already there. What is hinted behind it  is a history of the Western world as more and more competition, as less and less distance between models and their imitators. And we feel we are constantly moving toward more happiness as we become more equal. But in fact, we're always moving towards more rivalry.  And this history at the same time is the history of what happens to the Christian world, which becomes less and less Christian with time, which is a history of modern individualism, which is a rebellion against religion. 

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...You descended through the ages to ancient man. And there you found a certain failure of man to live together.

In animals, you already have this type of fights. At certain seasons, certain animals will always fight for the females. But there is a difference between animals and men.  

All ethologists will tell you that these fights will end up in one of the two animals yielding to the other. They are never fights to the finish. They never lead to death. And the animal who yields becomes the dominated animal and the other one becomes the dominant animal.

This is the rule in animal societies. Now we know that in men there is no such thing. People, when they become really excited, really angry in a rivalry, kill each other.

And this is probably decisive in the definition of man, because this greater power of imitation is both our intelligence, our ability to learn from others, and also our violence, our rivalries, the fact that we kill each other  in rivalries. And rivalries in human beings don't end with the dominant-dominated  pattern. They end with vengeance.