The Missing Mother: The Oedipal Rivalries of Ren Girard Author(s): Toril Moi Reviewed work(s): Source: Diacritics,

Vol. 12, No. 2, Cherchez la Femme Feminist Critique/Feminine Text (Summer, 1982), pp. 21-31 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464676 . Accessed: 26/02/2013 05:47
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THE
THE

MISSING

MOTHER:

OF

RIVALRIES OEDIPAL RENE GIRARD

MOI TORIL

in the femaleprison women There seventy-five are And whatwouldn't give if I were there? I Butthatold triangle Goesjingle-jangle All alongthe banksof the RoyalCanal. (DominicBehan) Since the publication of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in

Structure by YvonneFreccero(Baltimore: (Tr. JohnsHopkins,1965), Literary et Frenchoriginal:Mensongeromantique verit6romanesque (Paris: Grasset, his and has 1961)),ReneGirard been tirelessly expanding expounding theoryof desireis or triangular mimeticdesire.Inthisfirstbook he claimsthattriangular Stendof the key to a true understanding the novelsof authorslikeCervantes, and and Proust.In his next majortheoretical work, Violence hal, Dostoevsky the Sacred(Tr.by Patrick JohnsHopkins,1977), French Gregory(Baltimore: his La Grasset,1972)) he transports triangle original: violenceet le sacr6 (Paris: into the fields of anthropologyand religion. Girardnow maintainsthat beliefsconcerning and rituals religious desirecan explainall sacrificial triangular At victimsand scapegoats. the end of Violenceand the Sacredhe promises furof therdevelopments histheory,and he does not fail us: in 1978 he publishes avec du Deschosescacheesdepuis fondation monde:Recherches Jean-Michel ia readsthe Old and et 1978).HereGirard (Paris: Grasset, Oughourlian GuyLefort in the New Testaments the lightof histheoriesand also seeksto provethathis to of intothe nature desireis considerably By superior Freud's. thispoint, insight for is Girard layingclaimto totaland universal validity his theories. not mimesis Weshallnow see thatwe can relatebackto appropriative in but only the interdictions the rites and religiousorganisation its entirety.Whatwill emergefromthissingleand uniqueprincipleis a complete theory of human culture. [Des choses cach6es depuis le Des debutdu monde, hereafter: chosescach6es,pp. 26-27] I willargueherethatthese claimscannotin factbe validated. maincontenMy desire. desirecannotaccountforfeminine tion is thatGirard's theoryof mimetic validityfor his theory mustthereforebe abandoned. Any claimsto universal worksI will tryto show thatfeminine theoretical of a Through reading Girard's desireis in factabsentfromhisworks,andthatthe reasonforthisabsenceis to exclusionof the motherfrom the Oedipaltriangle,an be found in Girard's has cost:Girard to at whichcan only be maintained a hightheoretical exclusion in as positheterosexuality an inborninstinct humanbeingsin orderto save his of reading the Oedipuscomplex.
Vol. DIACRITICS 12 Pp. 21-31 $01.00 ? 1982 by The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress 0300-7162/82/0122-0021

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Mimetic desire In a style itself prodigal with hieratic and authoritariangestures ("The truth is that...", "Allwe have to do to account for everything. .. .") Girardstates that all desire is appropriative and mediated. The subject can only desire an object insofaras another subject already desires the same object. All desire is an imitation of the rival'sdesire and therefore mimetic. Girard himself puts it in this way: In all the varietiesof desire examined by us, we have encountered not only a subject and an object but a third person as well: the rival. It is the rival who should be accorded the dominant role. [. ..] The subject desires the object because the rival desires it. [...] The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject, not only in regard to such secondary matters as style and opinions but also, and more essentially, in regard to desires. [ . .] We must understand that desire itself is essentially mimetic, directed toward an object desired by the model. [.. .] Thus, mimesis coupled with desire leads automatically to conflict. [Violence and the Sacred, hereafter:Violence, pp. 145-146] The competition between subject and rival soon overshadows the subject's mediated desire for the object. The importance of the mediator increases as he approaches the subject, and the importance of object decreases correspondingly. Before long the subject is caught up in an intense and ambivalent relationshipwith the rival/model. The object recedes more and more into the background, and is presently declared superfluous: IMO [Jean-MarieOughourlian]: What strikes me in what you say is that it is no longer a question of the object. Everythingleads back to the relations between the mimetic rivals, each the model and the disciple of the other. [ . .] RG [Rene Girard]:Desire itselfgraduallydisengages itselffrom the object in order to attach itself to the model, and the intensificationof the symptoms is at one with this movement. [Des choses cachdes, pp. 334-335] This conflictual relationship between subject and rivalwould lead to endless violence if society did not manage to curb the expression of mimetic conflict. This, in effect, is the role of religion. Girardmaintainsthat all sacrificialrites, all choice of scapegoats, are designed to prevent social violence. Violence is thus an inherent part of the sacred; the very function of the sacred is to procure socially acceptable outlets for mimetic violence. Mimetic rivalrybetween subject and model increases as the difference between them diminishes; the model then becomes the subject's double, and the mimetic violence grows in intensity. In order to halt this circle of violence a victim who is differentfrom the rivalling subjects/mediators, a scapegoat, must be chosen. Precisely because the scapegoat is different it can break the unending circle of mimetic rivalrybetween near-identical doubles. This choice of a scapegoat is expressed in two stages. For Girard, All sacrificialrites are based on two substitutions. The firstis provided by generative violence, which substitutes a single victim for all the members of the community. The second, the only strictly ritualisticsubstitution, is that of a victim [une victime sacrifiable] for the surrogate victim. As we know, it is essential that the victim (les categories sacrifiables)be drawn from outside the community. The surrogate victim, by contrast, is a member of the community. [Violence, p. 269, my italics added] The sacrificial mechanism consists in finding an outlet for the mimetic violence outside the community, thereby providing the basis for a stable and peaceful society. Sexism and Literary Criticism Girardadmits to almost having succumbed to the "neo-Marxianand LukAcsian temptation embodied in the late and lamented Lucien Goldmann, for whom mimetic desire was

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the monopoly of a specific literarygenre, the novel, belonging to a historicallydated milieu" ["An Interviewwith Rend Girard," originally printed in Diacritics,vol. 8, March 1979, here in Rend Girard, To Double Business Bound. Essayson Literature,Mimesis and Anthropology (Baltimore:Johns Hokins, 1979), hereafter: Double Business, p. 200]. Girard'smimetic hero is strikinglyinfluenced by Goldmann's 'problematic'hero, searching for authentic value in a world where it has been lost and degraded. In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, however, Girardseems more interested in subverting Goldmann's project than in imitating him. Whereas Goldmann sought to situate Lukacsian categories in a historical and material context, Girard rejects this historical perspective and thus effectively undoes Goldmann's historicization of Lukacs. Returningto the early Lukacs, Girard'sworks is more reminiscent of the idealist typological categories of The Theoryof the Novel than of The Hidden God. It is indeed significantthat Girarddefines Goldmann as the "Lukacsiantemptation": he himself succumbs to that temptation by absolutizing the historically relative gender-roles of his sexual triangles. Already in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel it would seem that for Girardthe desiring subject is always male, and that so is the rival,whereas (tiens!)the object is female. Throughout work this male-male-female constellation recurs as an absolute, ahistoricalstructure. Girard's The following passage is typical: The subject does not want to win the girl decisively; if he did, he would lose the mediator and he would lose all interest in the girl. The mediator must not win too decisively either; if he did, the subject would go on desiring intensely but the riskof being permanently excluded would be too great. No resolution of the deadlock is reallysatisfactory.The only tolerable situation is for the rivalryto go on. The triangle must endure. ["Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevski," Double Business, p. 66] Since full possession of the object implies the absence of all rivalry,the subject can never be satisfied. The subject's desire is sustained by the rival and disappears with "him." Because the triangle must endure Don Juan becomes the desired rival, the rivalpar excellence: If the subject desires this woman rather than another, it is because of the flattering attention she receives. And this attention would be all the more flattering,it would give the sexual object all the more value in the eyes of the subject, if it is directed to her by a greater expert in the matter, a person who appears as invincible in the erotic field, for instance what one would call a "ladies' man."[ . .] Blended with the the obstacle is the admiration (and even veneration) proexasperationprovoked by voked by the exploits of Don Juan. [Des choses cachees, pp. 362-363] In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Girard claims that only the truly great novelists (Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Dostoevski) have discovered and understood the true nature of desire, that is to say, that all desire is mimetic and mediated. This claim makes it almost impossible to criticize Girard'sthesis, since novels that do not display mimetic desire can easily be judged 'not great' and thus discounted as a falsificationof the theory. It is evident that for Girard,women have not produced many great texts. The only novel written by La a woman that he mentions is Mme de Lafayette's princesse de CIves, which is treated in a manner. very perfunctory The best way of countering Girard'sreadings in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel is to meet him on his own terrain, by commenting on a text that he himself alludes to in a positive way. In his chapter on how great novels end, Girardclaims that the conclusion of Tolstoy'sAnna Kareninaparallells that of Le rouge et le noir, The BrothersKaramazov,Crime and Punishnovels end in the same way: ment and Le Temps Retrouv4. According to Girard, all "great" The vision of the subject/hero (subject is here used in the traditional sense of protagonist) becomes identical with the vision of the novelist. Confronted with death, both discover the true meaning of life, the falsityand hypocrisy of mimetic desire, and recognize the value and nature of a direct, transcendental and vertical desire for God. The only way one can possibly maintainthis readingof the conclusion of Anna Karenina is to suppose that Levin is its main subject (protagonist).Levindoes indeed find transcenden-

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tal desire (God) in the last few chapters, but even so the parallel with the other novels is halting. Levin is depicted precisely as untainted by mimetic desire. He is no Julien Sorel or Marcel. Levin'slove for Kittyis presented by the text as entirely unmediated by any rival; Levin loves her before Vronsky startscourting her, and continues to love her afterwardsin much the same way. There is no trace of an intensification of his desire for Kittyafter he learns about the existence of a rival/obstacle. Levin is not at all caught up in fierce mimetic rivalrywith Vronsky; on the contrary, they hardly meet throughout the novel, and never think of each other in particularlyintense fashion. The passionate, violent and ambivalent circulation of desire that Girard describes between the subject and the rival is absent between Vronsky and Levin. The glaring insufficiency of such a reading of Anna Kareninalies in the fact that Girard implicitly assumes that Levin, and not Anna, is the principal subject in the novel. It never occurs to Girard that Don Quijote should not be the subject of Don Quijote, or Emma of Madame Bovary.Anna'sdesire for Vronsky does not at all correspond to Julien Sorel'sdesire for Mathilde. There is nothing calculating about Anna'sdesire; all she can gain from it is loss of social recognition. Indeed, this would seem to be a general characteristic of women's novels: it invariablyleads them to social ruin, whereas the mediated desire in these "great"

desire Girard describes in men is mediated precisely because male erotic desires are calculated to lead to greater social renown. Anna's death in no way constitutes the clear, tranquil recognition of the necessity for reconciliation with God that Girardinsistson finding literature. everywhere else in "great" Girard avoids dealing with women as subjects in literature,except for Emma Bovary. But Emma'sdesire is a cause of 'external'mediation (the rival is never in direct contact with the subject), parallelto Don Quijote's rivalrywith Amadis and the books of chivalry.As such, it does not fall in the same category as the other novels mentioned, which all depict 'internal' mediation, that is, when the subject and the rival confront each other within the novel. This absence of female subjects is puzzling not least because Girardalso claims that his theory of desire is equally valid for women and men: "One of the advantages of conceiving of the origin [of desire] in rivalryis that it presents itself as absolutely symmetrical in both sexes. In other words, all sexual rivalryhas a homosexual structurein woman as in man"[Des choses cachees, p. 360]. Ciriaco Mor6n-Arroyo has already pointed out this inability to account for women as agents. Reviewing Cesar Bandera's Mimesis conflictiva: Ficci6n literariay violencia en Cervantesy Calder6n (Madrid:EditorialGredos, 1975), he focuses on this problem, but in a particularlyreluctant and uncertain manner:

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Why should the stories of Cardenio and the curious impertinent be approached from the couples Cardenio-Fernando, and Anselmo-Lotarioonly? This approach casts women merely as objects of the conflicting desires;from this angle the theory is illuminating. But is it not legitimate to look at the story from the side of the women, as subjects who are the tragic victims? Whom do the women imitate and desire? [ . .] In this case, it seems to me, the scheme of mimetic desire fails. But my view of these stories from the side of the women may be prompted by a hypercritical, conflictive desire to expose the apparent weaknesses of the theory. [Diacritics, vol. 8, March, 1978, p. 83] The curious volte-face of Mor6n-Arroyo'slast sentence may signify an understandable reluctance to criticize a theory on feminist grounds. In this case the reluctance is not, however, justified:Girardhimself reveals quite explicitly the fact that his mimetic desire must desire. In Violence and the Sacred Girardwonders essentially be taken to mean "masculine" it is that women seem to have such a predominant role in the cult of Dionysus. His why answer is that this must be an example of A secondary mythological displacement, an effort to exonerate from the accusation of violence, not mankind as a whole, but adult males, (non pas aux hommes en g6neral /.../ mais aux adultes du sexe masculin), who have the greatest need to forget their role in the crisisbecause, in fact, they must have been largelyresponsible for it. They alone riskplunging the community into the chaos of reciprocal violence. [Violence, p. 139, my italics added] One should note the opposition Girardis here forced to make between les hommes en general and les adultes du sexe masculin. As soon as his text has to accommodate the presence of women, its language cracks open to reveal what it strives to conceal: the subsumption of women under the category of "man."He elaborates this point by suggesting that The role played by women in the religious and cultural structure of a society- or rather, the minor importance of that role [ou plut6t [. . .] leur absence de r681e]-is graphically illustrated by the social framework [plan] prevailing in certain South American villages- in those of Bororo, for example. [Violence, p. 140. My italics added to show how the translator has toned down the original expression.] Girardthen attacks certain anthropologists who have taken the Bororo village to express the superiority of women: In fact, far from attesting to women's importance [la puissance sup6rieure des femmes], [the immobility of the women] suggests that women are only passive spectators at a masculine tragicomedy. [ . .] The physical structure[plan] of the Bororo village seems to reflect the centrifugal inclinations of its weakest inhabitants, the women, by making the center an exclusively masculine preserve. This inclination is universal. [Violence, p. 140, my italics added] Unrestrained mimetic desire leads to violence and disruption- to "lacrise sacrificielle:"
The sacrificial crisis, that is, the disappearance of the sacrificial rites, coincides with

the disappearance of the difference between impure violence and purifying violence. When this difference has been effaced, purification is no longer possible and impure, contagious, reciprocal violence spreads throughout the community. [Violence, p. 49] Logicallyenough, Girard later points out that among the effects of the sacrificialcrisis is the disappearance of sexual difference: "Amongthe effects of the sacrificialcrisis there is, as we have seen, a certain feminization of men as well as a certain masculinization of women." [Des choses cachdes, p. 200]. For Girardthe disappearance of any difference shows the col-

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lapse of social norms; the disappearance of sexual difference is just one of many signs of crisis in a society. But when Girardlater in the same text claims that his own theory of desire allows us to evacuate "thetoo absolute conception of sexual difference"[Des choses cachees, p. 360], the reader is left wondering how it is possible to distinguish so easily between the Scylla of the disappearance of sexual difference and the Charybdisof the too absolute conception of it. Oedipus, Freud and Girard Girard is irresistiblyfascinated by the Oedipus complex. Freud'striangle is so evidently that Girardsimply canthe main competitor (perhaps apartfrom the Holy Trinity)to Girard's not leave it alone; the fascinating and ambivalent circulation of desire between Rene and Sigmund never ceases. Girard constantly claims superiority over Freud. In Des choses cach6es this is voiced not only by Girard himself, but also by his two interlocutors, JeanMarie Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, conveniently set up to articulate views which would perhaps prove less palatable from the author. Indeed, Lefort'scontributions to the book seem largely to consist in voicing the most unembarrassed flattery of Girard himself: Once one has understood the superior efficiency of the mimetic principle, this simpler, more intelligible and more effective mode of generating everything that Freud seeks to relate to his Oedipus without really succeeding, the vogue of the Oedipus complex constitutes a problem which you cannot avoid posing. [Des choses cach6es, p. 376] Girard himself underscores Lefort'sstatement: The oedipal scheme is absolutely incapable of fulfillingthe function that its inventor has assigned to it; that of producing all the triangularconfigurations that structure the erotic relations of patients, or the plots of literary works, comic or tragic, dramatic or novelistic. [Des choses cachdes, p. 378] It is clear by this point that what Freud cannot do is exactly what Girard can do for him. Girard particularlyenjoys 'refuting'the Oedipus complex through Freud'saccount of it in Dostoevsky and Parricide(StandardEdition, XXI,pp. 177-194): In his article Freudsummarizes the Oedipal doctrine. The small child sees his father as a rivaland desires to kill him, but he manages to repress this desire. On the one for and hand he fears "castration" on the other he maintainsa certain "affection" the it fatherwho was initiallythe model. This"affection," seems to me, constitutes a particularly weak link in Freudian reasoning. ["The Underground Critic," Double Business, p. 50] This is Girard'schief argument against the Oedipus complex: he simply cannot believe that it accounts for any affection towards the father. "The more I adopt Freud'sreasoning, the closer I move to the heart of his subject, the more ardently I say yes to patricide and incest, the more I want to say no to this affection, to see it as a vestige of an outdated mode of thought." ["The Underground Critic,"Double Business, p. 51]. In Des choses cachdes Girard furtherattacks the notion of the little boy's desire for the father, insistingthat this really is the most absurd of Freud'stheories: "apassive homosexual desire for the father, a desire of being desired by the father as a homosexual object! [.. .] The unconscious is a stubborn concept [a bon dos], but this desire of the son for the father is a lot, even for the most recalcitrantof concepts [m~me pour le meilleur des dos]." (Des choses cach~es, pp. 385-386). The Missing Mother "The main difference between the mediation principle and psychoanalysis," writes Girard, "is that, for Freud, the desire for the mother is intrinsic."["Nietzsche, Wagner and

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Dostoevski," Double Business, p. 67]. This is clearly an untenable position for Girard, who maintains that all desire is mimetic and mediated. His final 'refutation'of the Oedipus complex thus relies heavily on the exclusion of the notion of a fundamental desire for the mother:' Freud does not understand that the mediator'sdesire is the essential factor in the desirabilityof the woman. The subject needs the desire of his rivalto sustain and to legitimize his own desire. In Oedipal terms, this would mean that the son wants the father'sdesire to sustain and legitimate his desire for the mother. If there is one thing the Oedipus complex will not allow, it is certainly that. It would mean that the mother is not desired "forherself,"that she has no independent value of her own, that she is desired primarilyas an object for the father. In addition, it would mean that the father is not the incarnationof the law against incest. The two pillarsof the Oedipus edifice crash to the ground. ["Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevski,"Double Business, p. 67] Girard here actually seems to be proud of having shown that the mother (the woman) cannot possibly be desired for "herself." whole value resides in her status as an object for Her the father. This, of course, is the logical implication of Girard's triangulartheory.2 Both in Des choses cachees [cf. p. 375] and in his chapter on Freudand the Oedipus complex in Violence and the Sacred, Girardrejects the suggestion that the child should desire the mother. But it is precisely in this escamotage of the mother that the flaw in his own theory can be detected. For he has apparently not discovered that the Oedipus is the situation, for Freud, in which sexual differentiationbegins. The Oedipus complex enables Freudto account for sexual difference. Since Girardcannot account for it at all, he has consequently to deny its existence. To be concerned with sexual difference, he believes, is reactionary.The luckless Guy Lefort is again manipulated as a mouthpiece for this rather striking view: "One should perhaps emphasize that the critique of the Freudian'bisexuality'in no way implies a rearguardbattle in favor of sexual difference" [Des choses cach6es, p. 390]. If Girard manages to lose the mother somewhere in his discussions of the Oedipal triangle, it is largely because he refrainsfrom all mention of the preoedipal stage. Ifwe are to believe Girard, the child is born directly into the Oedipal conflict. He never alludes to the first years of the child's wholly mother-dependent development (still the dominant-if socially determined - practice), the period when all its desires take her as their object, and when the very existence of the father will go unrecognized. But mimetic desire is automatic and indiscriminate: [The automatic mechanism of mimetic desire] is already at work before the beginning, by virtue of the fact that the subject is parasiticon an already formed desire, and that he constitutes the thirdcorner of the triangleand not the first,as the implicit solipcism of the archetypal conception quite wrongly imagines. [Des choses cachdes, p. 380] If we are to believe Girard here, it would follow that any new-born child would automatically imitate the desire of the only person to whom it is closely related, namely the mother. Needless to say, Girardhimself does not seem to be aware of these implications. He totally ignores the preoedipal stage, and for good reasons. For if we apply his own mimetic theory to the preoedipal stage, the weaknesses of the theory are clearly exposed. Ifwe suppose that the infant assumes its place as a rivalto the mother'salready existing desire for the father, it follows that the baby girl will imitate her desire -and so will the baby boy. IfGirard's
in IIn her article "ReadingReading:Echo'sabduction of Language" Women and Languagein Literature and Society, eds. S. McConnell-Ginet, R. Borker and N. Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980) Caren Greenberg makes the same point when she writes that "The very elements which make the Oedipus myth so useful in the discussion of male sexuality tend to deny the importance of the woman, since she acquires meaning only as the symbol of the father'spower" (p. 303). 2The same logic operates in his account of narcissism,which Sarah Kofmanhas brilliantlyinterrogated in her article "TheNarcissistic Woman: Freud and Girard,"Diacritics, Fall, 1980.

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mimetic theory is applied to the preoedipal stage, one is obliged to posit the woman's desire as original, the mother'sdesire becomes paradigmaticof all desire. This stands in sta:k contradiction to Girard'sown positing of masculine desire as normative, and is also totally improbable. Given that the first mimetic triangle in one's existence has the power to generate later ones, the application of the mimetic principle to preoedipality obliges us to conclude that all males would be homosexual, as a consequence of their initial imitation of the mother's desire for the father. Since Girard's"simple and intelligible" mimetic principle does not theorize objectchanges, the only way out of this logical aporia is to declare that heterosexuality is an inborn instinct in all human beings. All rivalryhas a homosexual structurein the woman as in the man, at least as long as the object remains heterosexual, that is to say, it remains the object prescribed by our instinctual apparatus inherited from animal life. [Des choses cachees, p. 360] Here indeed is the crucial precondition for the smooth functioning of the mimetic principle. Girard is forced to assume that humankind is instinctually heterosexual in order to preserve his structures intact. On the one hand he claims that "Sexualityis, in effect, subordinated to rivalry" [Des choses cachees, p. 365]; on the other hand he is obliged to argue that heterosexuality already informs the first object-choice of the baby. Finally, in Girard's

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account, the desire for the object may no longer be mimetic, since half the human race may be excluded as objects from the start;the subject chooses both its rival and its object. In the preceding paragraphs I have applied Girard'stheory of mimetic desire to the preoedipal stage, since Girardhimself seems none too eager to do so. We have seen that the application of his theories to preoedipality would constrain him not only to posit the desire of the woman (the mother) as original, but also to declare heterosexuality innate. Girard's silence on the subject of the preoedipal child indicates a fatal flaw in his proud, patriarchal and oppressively monolithic theory. InstinctualHeterosexualityand Homosexuality: Girardand Freud Girard'stheory is oddly paradoxical: it explicitly states that all desire is heterosexual while at the same time positing rivalryas the essential condition for desire. All rivalrythen logically becomes homosexual, and Girardgives far more attention to the love-hate liaison between rivals than to the subject-object relationship. Firmlydenying the existence of "a direct homosexual drive," he simultaneously posits a same gender rival as indispensable: In all these triangles,the goal is less to wrench the loved one from the mediator than to receive her from him and to share her with him. The presence of the rivalis indispensable. [. . .] Why? Is there a direct homosexual drive, as Freudbelieves? There is nothing of the sort. [. .] The rival is needed because his desire alone can confer on the girl whatever value she has in the eyes of the subject. If the rivaldisappears,this value will also disappear. ["Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevski," Double Business, p. 67] The necessity of receiving the beloved woman from another man is strangely reminiscent of Luce Irigaray's reading of sexual relations under patriarchy.For Irigaray,heterosexual relations serve only to mask the real libidinal impulse: homosexual relations between men. For her, all sexual relations are "hom(m)osexuelles."Women are merchandise exchanged between men as tokens of their love for each other ["Des marchandises entre elles," Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris:Minuit, 1977)]. Fromthis standpoint Girardis indeed furnishingan accurate description of masculine desire under patriarchy,but his repression of the mother renders him incapable of seeing or understanding feminine desire. Girard claims proudly that mimetic desire has managed to eliminate "the false difference between homosexual and heterosexual eroticism" [Des choses cachees, p. 360]. Stronglystressingthe unitarynature of mimetic desire, he once more implicitly postulates its heterosexual character: Only one genesis is needed, since the exasperation of the vicious circle that constitutes the relationshipwith the mediator accounts perfectly for the varyingdegrees of fascination vis-a-visthe rival and for the gradual shift away from the heterosexual object to the rivaland model of the same sex. Beforehe is an object, the homosexual partner is a rival. ["Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevski," Double Business, pp. 67-68] This is clearly an untenable position, not least when it is compared with Freud'sconception of desire as anaclitic. Girardassumes that heterosexuality is "prescribedby our instinctual apparatus inherited from animal life,"that is to say that the object-choice is instinctually given. The Freudianmodel of the sexual drive as anaclitic to (leaning on or propped against) the instinctual biological need, as with hunger, leads Jean Laplanche to conclude that "sexuality does not have, from the beginning, a real object": On the one hand there is from the beginning an object, but [. . .] on the other hand sexuality does not have, from the beginning, a real object. It should be understood that the real object, milk, was the object of the function, which is virtuallypreordained to the world of satisfaction.Such is the real object which has been lost, but the object linked to the auto-erotic turn, the breast- become a fantasmaticbreast-

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is, for its part, the object of the sexual drive. Thusthe sexual object is not identical to the object of the function, but displaced in relation to it; they are in a relation of essential contiguity which leads us to slide almost indifferentlyfrom one to other, from milk to the breastas its symbol. [Lifeand Death in Psychoanalysis,Tr. by Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins, 1976), pp. 19-20] Laplanche also demonstrates how the loss of this firstobject contributes to the developown theory of desire would ment of the contingency of laterobjects. In some ways, Girard's seem to support the notion of the cathected object as contingent. When he speaks of "the mechanical character of primary mimesis" [Des choses cachbes, p. 320] or about the "mimetic disease," one is left with the indelible impression that the object of desire has considerably less significance than the fact that somebody else (man or woman) desires it too. This, however, is immediately contradicted by Girard'sown insistence elsewhere on the heterosexuality of the object-choice. That Girard should reject Freud's concept of preoedipal desire is in one sense remarkable, since the theory actually implies that the child's desire at this very early stage is essentially mediated or mimetic. In his book Jean Laplancheshows how Freudiandesire is in no way 'intrinsic'as Girard has it. Laplanche points out that the erotogenic zones are exactly those zones of the body where the exchange from biological instinctto sexual drive takes place, the mouth being the most evident example: This zone of exchange is also a zone for care, namely the particularand attentive care provided by the mother. These zones, then, attract the first erotogenic manoeuvers from the adult. An even more significant factor, if we introduce the these zones focalize parentalfantasiesand above all subjectivityof the first"partner": maternal fantasies, so that we may say, in what is barely a metaphor, that they are points through which is introduced into the child that alien internalentity which is, properly speaking, the sexual excitation. [Laplanche, p. 24] The baby is seen here as opening up for and internalizingthe mother'sfantasies in a way with which Girard might well agree. The baby's desire for the mother, in Freud'saccount, Girard has merely misread the Freudiantext. can now hardly be said to be "intrinsic"; The anxiety of influence Why is it, one must ask, that Girardso insistently misreads and rejects Freudiantheory throughout his writings?One answer, it would seem, is that Girard, in his valiant effort to avoid all confrontation with the Mother, is impelled all the more starklyto confront the alternative parentalfigure. Freudis Girard'shaunting rival,daunting double and castratingfather. As Hayden White shrewdly has written:"Itis no accident that mirroring,doubling, repetition and displacement are crucial concepts in Girard'scritical economy. His enemies are mirror 'lie' Diacritics,vol. 8, March 1978, p. images of himself' ["Ethnological and Mythical Truth'," 7]. Indeed, Girard'srelation to Freud emerges as a classic case of Bloom's tessera ("completion and antithesis").Working within a Freudiansphere of discourse, attending to the same questions as Freud himself, Girardmakes the excessively affirmativeclaim that only his own reading of (for example) the Oedipus triangle is the true and correct one. The precursor's error, as so often, is simply to have been the precursor: Except for writers, Freud was the firstone to observe this type of configuration[the mimetic triangle]and to attempt a scientific interpretationof it. Thus he could not fail to do so better than anyone before; but it is easy to show that, in spite of his very great merits, he did not come up with the right interpretation, nor did he even observe the triangularoperation properly. ["Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoevski," Double Business, p. 66] it is no accident that the sexism of Girard'sworks should be coupled with a generally reactionary outlook. He believes that all struggle for liberation is doomed to failure: "The

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more men believe they are realizing their utopias of desire, in short, the more they cling to their emancipatory ideologies, the more they, in effect, work to perfect the competitive world in the midst of which they suffocate"[Des choses cachdes, p. 310]. The true object of desire is God; if the religious dimension disappears from society, society will sink back into unlimited mimetic violence. Behind the assumptions which structure Girard's sexual triangulationcan be discerned the shape of another mystifyingTrinity.

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