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Cultural Values
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Mimesis, narrative and

subjectivity in the work of
Girard and Ricoeur
a
Gavin Flood
a
Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies ,
University of Wales , Lampeter
Published online: 17 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Gavin Flood (2000) Mimesis, narrative and subjectivity in the
work of Girard and Ricoeur, Cultural Values, 4:2, 205-215

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797580009367195

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 Cultural Values ISSN 1362-5179
Volume 4 Number 2 April 2000 pp. 205-15

Mimesis, Narrative and Subjectivity in the Work

of Girard and Ricoeur
Gavin Flood
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University of Wales

Abstract. While Ricoeur wishes to relate the concept of narrative to

identity and ethics, Girard sees the development of ethical conscience in
myth. This paper examines this difference, arguing that the implicitly
universal human nature that he posits, driven by mimetic desire,
compromises subjectivity as narrative identity, as developed in Ricoeur's
work. This paper attempts to read Girard alongside Ricoeur, in order to
suggest that there is a problematic tension implicit in Guard's work
between subjectivity and drive. To do this, I describe Ricoeur's
understanding of mimesis and how this is related to truth and narrative
identity. Then turning to Girard, I show how his linking of violence to
truth repudiates the possibility of the attestation of truth as subjectivity.

One of the striking things about reading Girard alongside Ricoeur is that
while for both the term mimesis is of central importance, they link the
term to narrative in very different ways. Indeed, Girard does not use the
term 'narrative' and Ricoeur seldom refers to 'myth' (except in a more
technical sense of 'emplotment'). While Ricoeur wishes to relate the
concept of narrative to identity and ethics, and Girard sees the
development of ethical conscience in myth, the lack of a thematised
understanding of narrative in Girard's work disallows for the subjective
appropriation of narrative away from 'unenlightened self-enslavement'.
That is, the implicitly universal human nature that Girard posits, driven
by mimetic desire, compromises subjectivity as narrative identity - a
notion that is developed in Ricoeur's work.
This problematic can be fruitfully examined through focusing on the
correlated structure of violence and truth as presented in these
competing textualities and competing understandings of mimesis.
Girard on myth read as violence, a violence which for him reveals the
truth of human nature, can be seen through a 'Ricoeurian' lens as the
erasure of subjectivity. Ricoeur on narrative allows subjectivity as
narrative identity, and the optimal realisation of narrative identity as the
ethical hope of seeing oneself as another; a violence-transcending truth.
Conversely, Ricoeur's optimism can perhaps be tempered by a
Girardian acknowledgement of the violence entailed in mimesis.
©Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX41JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Maiden, MA 02148, USA
 206 Gavin Flood

Reading Girard alongside Ricoeur points to a fundamental tension

implicit in Girard's work between subjectivity and drive or even to an
absence of subjectivity. Put simply, for Girard myth is the site of truth
revealed as violence, whereas for Ricoeur narrative is the site of truth as
ethical being; the story of oneself as another.
The aim of this paper is therefore to read Girard through the lens of
the Ricouerian problematic. I will attempt this by examining Ricoeur's
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understanding of mimesis and how this is tied to narrative identity and

truth. Then turning to Girard, I will demonstrate how his linking of
violence to truth through mimesis repudiates the possibility of the
attestation of truth as subjectivity. I will conclude with a few remarks
about the problematic in relation to the understanding of religion.

Ricoeur's Understanding of Mimesis1

In Time and Narrative (1984) Ricoeur defends a version of narrative
theory which does not deny the narrative nature of existence, yet which
is also strongly constructivist. Here Ricoeur exposes the structural
identity of historiography and fiction and - with particular reference to
Augustine and Aristotle - demonstrates the manner in which the
temporal character of human experience is presupposed in these two
forms of narrative. Ricoeur maintains the general position that historical
sequence possesses the characteristic of narrative, and that narrative is
not simply imposed upon a temporal sequence. Narrative, claims
Ricoeur, can deal with the problem of time in a way that philosophy
cannot. The central problem of his text is the irresolvable relation - or
aporia - between 'cosmic time' and 'individual time' or the 'time of the
soul'. Cosmic time is irreconcilable with the phenomenology of
subjective temporality except in a poetic, narrative resolution. Similarly,
we might say that the structure of mimetic desire in Girard's work is
irreconcilable with subjective temporality in so far as it operates outside
of narrative; or rather, might be seen as the cause of narrative (this can
be seen, for example, in Girard's study of Dostoevsky (1997) in whose
work the 'unique', individual underground man is in fact
indistinguishable from those around him, driven by 'hateful imitation').
Ricoeur's general proposal is that in narrative we can see a connection
between the metaphysics of time and its human, phenomenological
aspect. But it is not so much time as Ricoeur's understanding of mimesis
in contrast to Girard's that I wish to pursue here.
While Ricoeur (1991) is happy to admit of a great difference between
life and fiction, and that in one sense life is lived whereas stories are told
(p. 25), the situation is more complex than this. Human actions are
always within the bounds of personal biography, and the narratives we
apply to ourselves are given by our cultures. Time is the central feature
 Mimesis, Narrative and Subjectivity in the Work of Girard and Ricoeur 207

of human experience, but time only 'becomes human' when it is

articulated through narrative 'and narrative attains its full meaning
when it becomes a condition of temporal existence' (Ricoeur 1984, p. 3).
Narrative has the power to refigure both the past and future in human
imagination, thereby constructing a coherent sense of identity. Because
of the narrative identity of human experience - lives are understood and
lived through the stories we tell of ourselves - the gap between 'lived
life' and 'told narrative' is not as great as might at first appear. Ricoeur
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tries to establish this through an argument that leads from the

understanding of narrative - taken directly from Aristotle and building
on structuralism and the Russian formalists - as the imitation of an
action (mimesis praxeos) and as emplotment {mythos), to narrative as
constructing personal identity. Narrative for Aristotle is imitation of
action which is not, observes Ricoeur (1984), a copy or identical replica
but rather the production or organisation of events through plot or
emplotment (mythos) (p. 24). Plot is the synthesis of multiple events that
serves to transform these events into a single story which thereby
becomes a totality (p. 21) and forms a coherent narrative. Such a
narrative is regarded with varying degrees of suspicion concerning its
'reality'. Thus fiction is imaginary whereas historiography is less clearly
so: though both share the quality of emplotment which creates
coherence or homogeneity from the discordance of human action and
suffering. Mimesis is thus translated as 'imitation' or 'representation',
though not, Ricoeur (1984) insists, in the sense of a copy of some pre-
existing reality. Instead it is a creative imitation or representation seen as
'the break which opens the space for fiction' (p. 45).
Using Aristotle's Poetics as his starting point, Ricoeur distinguishes
between a 'real domain' covered by ethics - which can be taken to be
'world of action' or 'lived experience' - and an imaginary domain
covered by poetics. He then delineates three senses of mimesis. The first
of these, mimesis 1, is the connection between the real and the imaginary
domains through a transposition of emplotment on to the practical field
of human action. This initial mimesis is grounded within the world of
action which entails the meaningful, temporal structures of that world
and its symbolic nature. That is, the world of action which entails
culture and symbolism is subject to emplotment: action is symbolically
mediated through this first level of mimesis.
There are three features or anchors for mimesis 1. The first is that it is
a conceptual network that enables the distinguishing of a domain of
action: emplotment is always grounded in 'a pre-understanding of the
world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources and its
temporal character' (Ricoeur 1984, p. 55). The second feature which
controls representation is that action can be narrated, or in other words
the 'practical field' already contains symbolic resources such as signs,
rules and norms. Ricoeur says that this feature is accessed through the
 208 Gavin Flood

work of anthropologists such as Geertz and is the realm to which

verstehen sociology gives access (p. 57). The third feature is the
recognition of the 'temporal structures which call for narration' (p. 59).
That is, action itself which is represented in mimesis contains temporal
structures, and time is integral to action. It is here that we can see how
Ricoeur differs from any pure narrative constructivism, for action is
characterised by a temporal structure which needs to be narrated. This
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temporal structure is none other than Augustine's characterisation of the

threefold present as the present of future things, the present of past
things and the present of present things (p. 60). In other words all action
contains implicitly within it this temporal dimension as present action in
the past, present and future. Action thus contains potentially a narrative
structure, and the representation of action will reflect this.
Summarising mimesis 1 Ricoeur writes:

To imitate or represent action is first to preunderstand what human

acting is, in its semantics, its symbolic system, its temporality. Upon this
preunderstanding, common to both poets and their readers, emplotment
is constructed and, with it, textual and literary mimetics. (Ricoeur, 1984,
p. 64)

Ricoeur's second sense of mimesis, mimesis 2, is that of creation or the

organisation of events. This is the mediation between what precedes
fiction and what follows it, or 'the postunderstanding of the order of
action and its temporal features' (1984, p. 65). This second mimesis
refers to the representation of action in text and, to use Ricoeur's phrase,
'opens the kingdom of the as if... the kingdom of fiction' (p. 64). This
kingdom of 'as if embraces both fiction and historiography, and while
fictional and historical narratives differ in so far as they relate to the
'imaginary' and the 'real', both nevertheless share the paradigm of
'emplotment'; both share a narrative structure. Both historical and
fictional narrative are engaged in the refiguring of time which affects the
reader's imagination. This aspect of representation mediates through the
text in which it is articulated, between the pre-understanding of action
in mimesis 1 and its postunderstanding in the text.
Finally Ricoeur's (1984) third sense of mimesis is the intersection of
text and reader (pp. 70-2). This refers to the response of the
reader /hearer to the text, or what the reading subject brings to narrative
as mimesis 1 and 2. In a succinct summary of his position in 'Life in
Quest of Narrative' (1991) Ricoeur argues that plot, as Aristotle shows, is
not static but is an operation which is only completed by the receiver of
the narration. There is a sense in which narrative only comes into being
when it is read or heard and is refigured by the reader. Thus the
meaning of narrative and its transforming effects on a person occur, in
Ricoeur's words, from 'the intersection of the world of the text and the
 Mimesis, Narrative and Subjectivity in the Work of Girard and Ricoeur 209

world of the hearer or reader' (1984, p. 71; 1991, p. 26), an idea that has
echoes in Wolfgang Iser's (1980) theory of reading and Robert Jauss'
(1982) reception theory and, as Ricoeur acknowledges, in Gadamer's
'fusion of horizons' (1989) in which the world horizon of the text
becomes fused with that of the reader's own, real action. So Ricoeur
highlights narrative as the focus of discourse and problems concerning
the nature of the self, the relation of subjectivity to objectivity, and the
relation of fiction to action.
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In the end Ricoeur retains the Aristotelian distinction between the

real domain of ethics - the life that is lived - and the imaginary domain
of poetics - the story that is told - with narrative characterised as the
ascription of the plot we inherit from our cultures onto the 'real'
domain. For Girard, by contrast, mimetic desire is inherent in the 'real
domain' of ethics and transposed as myth into the realm of poetics. For
Girard the structure of mimetic desire determines narrative expression,
whereas for Ricoeur narrative is imposed upon action to form the
narrative identity of a subjectivity. The internalised narratives - the
'narrative voices' - which comprise our life, provide a sense of identity
that constitutes us and that is constantly reinterpreted within the
contexts of culture. Unlike the proponents of alternative theories of
narrative, such as Maclntyre (1985), Ricoeur does not think human
beings can be the authors of their lives, though we can become 'the
narrator and the hero of our own story' (1984, p. 32). On a larger scale,
historiography characterised as emplotment is the creation or refiguring
of the past at a level of productive imagination. Here narrative is
constructed in historiography - and thus is parallel to fiction - and not
generated through action within history. Narrative creates order and
concordance out of the discordance of temporal acts or lived experience.
It imposes an order on the potential violence of experience through the
structuring of identity not as 'sameness' but as a narrative identity.

Narrative Identity and Truth

So far we have seen how mimesis functions within Ricoeur's work as
narrative. Rather than mimesis resulting in violence, for Ricoeur
mimesis as narrative is integral to personal identity which, conversely,
can be understood as the disruption of violence by the establishment of
a truth about the self in its temporal unfolding. For Ricoeur narrative is
integral to personal identity, and through narrating the self, the self is
constantly brought up against the contingencies of life and the demands
of the other.
There is, for Ricoeur, a fundamental distinction between identity
understood in terms of either idem ('same') and ipse ('him/herself'),
which have quite different significations. Idem identity 'unfolds an entire
 210 Gavin Flood

hierarchy of significations' of which permanence in time is the foremost

(1992, pp. 2-3). Idem identity therefore refers to the sense of self as the
subject of the philosophy of consciousness, the philosophy of
subjectivity in which the cogito is posited as self-identical. This sense of
identity understood as sameness, indicated by idem, is contrasted by
Ricoeur with identity as selfhood, a dialectic between self and other than
self, indicated by ipse. While idem implies the sameness of the Husserlian
cogito, the sameness which answers the question who with what, identity
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as selfhood {ipse) answers the question who with narrative mediation.

Idem abjures otherness, ipse does not, but recognises the centrality of
narrative. As David Ford (1999) observes, Ricoeur's leading question is
'who?' - 'who speaks, who acts' (p. 99) - and the answer to this question
can only be formulated in the context of narrative and time.
In Ricoeur's Oneself and Another (1992) this selfhood is initially and
immediately shown as the embodied person, and further as the logical
subject of predication; the 'same thing' to which two different sorts of
predicates are ascribed. These predicates include 'psychic' predicates to
the exclusion of physical ones, which reflexively retain the same sense
whether attributed to oneself or to others. Therefore for Ricoeur identity
is posited in relation to a particular narrative sequence - the person - in
relation to others within a linguistic and social community. While this
not the place to develop a full description of Ricoeur's position, his
formulation of narrative identity has important implications for
understanding truth and violence that has bearing on Girard's work. On
this account truth is inextricably linked to narrative and utterance.
Although, indeed, stories are lived for Ricoeur, it is in the telling that
selfhood is revealed. And then the truth of being human comes to light.
Ricoeur's understanding of narrative identity, linked in with the
ethical response to the other as oneself, contrasts sharply with Girard's
understanding of mimesis and the relation of mimetic desire to
narrative, or more specifically in Girardian terms, to myth. For Girard,
as we know, myth articulates at a more subtle level than ritual the
scapegoat mechanism. We can see this in texts such as Guillaume de
Machaut's The Judgement of the King of Navarre (1908) discussed in The
Scapegoat (1986, pp. 1-23), where the Jews are regarded as the source of
the plague and so become the victims of violence. This is a 'persecution
text/ an account of real violence told from the perspective of the
perpetrators. Girard reads myth through the lens of mimetic desire.
Mimesis in Girard therefore functions as a drive that patterns human
behaviour, articulated in texts such as de Machaut's. But while this is
extremely important, Girard emphasises the drive of mimetic desire in
narrative at the cost of subjectivity. There is a dimension of subjectivity
untouched by Girard's analysis, but which is brought out in the way in
which Ricoeur links mimesis to narrative. Ricoeur's account of mimesis
as representation offers a better, or at least wider, way of understanding
 Mimesis, Narrative and Subjectivity in the Work of Girard and Ricoeur 211

the narrative construction of subjectivity than the scapegoat narratives

of Girard.
Although he does not engage with Ricoeur's work, Girard might well
accede to his formulation of narrative identity. But he would wish to
maintain that a dominant theme, the dominant theme, of these narratives
which constitute the human world is the violence engendered by
mimetic desire. Subjectivities are driven by a force prior to cognition and
representation, a force which Ricoeur does not address directly. But
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Ricoeur does implicitly address the problem of violence in the

formulation of narrative identity which entails the ethical demand of the
other. Rather than violence, Ricoeur's focus is on suffering, which he
understands as a 'violation of self-integrity', the reduction or destruction
of the ability to act. This is coupled with a sense of mutuality and an
emphasis on friendship rather than rivalry. Indeed, subjectivity
articulated as friendship, might be seen as a disruptor of the pattern of
mimetic desire Girard describes. Rather than rivalry, a central
constituent of subjectivity emphasized by Ricoeur is trust. In Oneself as
Another (1992) he develops the idea not in terms of a psychology of
attachment, which is the locus of mimetic desire, but in terms of ethics
as a virtue. Friendship is based on mutuality (in Kantian terms as
treating people as ends in themselves) and not on utility (people as
means); not based on the sameness of the cogito but on identity as
selfhood.
Ricoeur (1992) analyses friendship into three structures or elements:
reversibility, non-substitutability and similitude. Reversibility is the
reversibility of the pronouns T and 'you" for from the perspective of the
receiver the 'you' refers to an T, and '(w)hen another addresses me in
the second person, I feel I am implicated in the first person' (p. 193). This
is to recognise the social and contextual nature of T and 'you', as well as
to recognise the importance of language and its pragmatic analysis in
the interchangeability of pronouns. Indeed this structure must be
recognised even within the Girardian model in order for the
identification driven by mimetic desire to occur. In contrast to
reversibility, nonsubstitutability says that T yet remains distinct; the
I/you distinction cannot be eliminated. Lastly similitude means that in
the relation between myself and another, I recognise you as an agent, as
being like myself, which is to see 'oneself as another'.

As myself means that you too are capable of starting something in the
world, of acting for a reason, of hierarchizing your priorities, of
evaluating the ends of your actions, and, having done this, of holding
yourself in esteem as I hold myself in esteem. (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 193)

This ability to esteem others as oneself is also to esteem oneself as

another. It is here in the concept of subjectivity constituted within
 212 Gavin Flood

relationship to an other that the potential for the disruption of mimetic

violence occurs.
What is underestimated in Girard's analysis - due to his
overwhelming emphasis on rivalry and hostility - is an understanding
of the ethical being constructed in the relation of mutuality between
oneself and another, a relation that Ricoeur links to ethical truth. Or
rather Girard only sees this kind of mutuality in terms of the ability of
Christian discourse to disrupt mimetic violence. The suffering of the
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innocent victim as the one who is subject to desire and violence is seen
and alleviated in the truth of a God who lays bare this structure. There
are of, course, deep cultural problems in Girard's analysis - is only
Christianity privileged in disclosing mimetic violence? - but through
Ricoeur we can propose that Girard neglects the force of a dimension of
human subjectivity articulated through narrative identity. It is precisely
this mutuality of which Girard does not take enough account. For it is
this intersubjective element which has the ability to disrupt mimetic
desire, to locate subjectivity in narrative discourse with others and to
present mimesis as containing the potential for trust and not only for
violence.

Violence and the Sacred in Girard and Ricoeur

For Girard (1977, p. 262) violence and the sacred are one and the same
thing whose appearance goes alongside institutional collapse, the eclipse
of culture and the social order. This eclipse of culture is reflected in
myths that in effect describe (and conceal) the mechanism of mimetic
desire and in the primary religious act of sacrifice. While there is a
diversity of causes of great social crises, the experience of social
disruption is uniform: as shown by examples of descriptions of
particular crises throughout history. The eclipse of culture, says Girard,
means that it becomes less differentiated, and this indifferentiation
results in great confusion. To account for such social confusion people
have looked to moral causes located in others, either in society as a
whole or in particular people and groups who are easily blameable
within the logic of the scapegoat mechanism (Girard 1986, chap. 2). At
times of cultural crisis violence replaces social order, a violence which
for Girard cannot be separated from the idea of the sacred and the
demand for sacrifice in religions. Indeed, sacrificial violence and the
violence of social disruption focussed on a particular group are
analogues of each other. The sacrificial victim corresponds to the victim
of social scapegoating, and the resulting social catharsis which allows
for the reestablishment of order and culture corresponds to the
reformation of order after the religious sacrifice. The violence of the
 Mimesis, Narrative and Subjectivity in the Work of Girard and Ricoeur 213

sacrifice and the violence of the mob reveal the truth of mimetic desire
and the foundations of human culture.
The simplicity and power of Girard's model is certainly supported by
a great body of evidence amassed by him, although it is drawn almost
exclusively from western literature, paganism, Judaism and Christianity.
But there is a dimension of the sacred, linked to human subjectivity,
which is neglected by Girard but which is thematised in Ricoeur's
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writing. The truth of the sacred can be shown other than in violence and
other than in the symbolic violence which privileges Christian truth
against others. This dimension associates the 'sacred' with narrative
identity through a hermeneutics of religious language by which 'a group
or an individual appropriates the meaning content of speech acts and
writings that found the group's and the individual's existence as a
community and as a person' (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 48). It is the subjective
internalisation of religious truth in temporal subjectivity (arguably
cross-cultural), and which can disrupt mimetic violence, that Girard has
neglected.
One way into this dimension of subjectivity is through David Ford's
(1999) extension of Ricoeur's project. Ricoeur's question in Oneself as
Another (1992), namely 'Who speaks? Who acts?' (with the answer
articulated in terms of narrative identity) is extended by Ford into the
specifically Christian religious sphere of 'who worships?' (p. 99).
Religious communities over time have formed strong senses of idem-
identity, but there is also a dimension of zpse-identity expressed in
worship and in the keeping of promises. Ford relates the latter to a
specifically Christian discourse. He examines the character of the
worshipping self transformed 'before the face of Christ' and the
subjectivity of the self in relation to another where 'another' can be seen
as Christ himself (pp. 101-4). This subjective response, and the subjective
appropriation of the Christian narrative, is central to a sense of Christian
narrative identity. While Girard might not object to this conception of
subjective response, he arguably underestimates its importance in
history For subjectivity is overwhelmed by the more powerful force of
mimetic desire. While not wishing to ignore the importance of religious
violence and the sacrificial mechanism that Girard draws our attention
to, there are other, equally important appropriations of religious
narratives that construct a certain kind of subjectivity and make claims
on truth; the interiority of Christian mystical theology for example.
Extending this further, contra Girard - for whom Christianity is
exclusively peaceable - there are also forms of religious subjectivity
from other times and places that provide counter-examples to the model
of mimetic desire. Thus, for example, the Vedic sacrifice which could be
read in terms of Girard's model, is metaphorically disrupted in the
Upanishads by its subjective appropriation. The sacrifice becomes
internalised - the breath is the oblation - and the truth of the self
 214 Gavin Flood

(atmari), whose essence is tranquil {santa), becomes a higher truth. Here

narrative identity is constructed from the interpretation of Vedic myth
and sacrifice which claims to transcend them. In Ricoeur's terms, this
might be to open a new dimension of reality signified by plot (mythos):
one articulated in terms of a poetic language which abolishes the
potential violence of the everyday in favour of a violence and world
transcending truth.
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Notes
1. I have developed some of the following material in Flood, 1999.
2. On the origins of mimesis see Sorbom (1966). For mimesis in western
thought, the classic is still Auerbach (1953). For a critical revision of
Auerbach's thesis see Genauer, Gunther and Wulf (1995).
3. Ricoeur contrasts the emplotment (mythos) of Aristotle with Augustine's
alienation of the soul (distentio animi). He eloquently writes (1984),
'Augustine groaned under the existential burden of discordance. Aristotle
discerns in the poetic act par excellence - the composing of the tragic poem -
the triumph of concordance over discordance. It goes without saying that it
is I, the reader of Augustine and Aristotle, who establishes the relationship
between a lived experience where discordance rends concordance and an
eminently verbal experience where concordance mends discordance' (p. 31).
4. The difference here between Ricoeur's position and Maclntyre's (1985) is that
whereas for Maclntyre narrative is inherent in the process of action, for
Ricoeur narrative is potential in action because of its ineluctable temporality.

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Gavin Flood is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of

Wales, Lampeter.