*[[The Punishment of Sisyphus - Σίσυφος|Sisyphus]] offends the gods not with violence, but with cleverness, by trying to outwit death. His punishment is to reenact **perpetual striving**—to want, to push, to ascend—only to fall again, endlessly.*
Girard’s anthropology unmasks [[The Nature of Desire, Rivalry and Myth|The Nature of Desire, Rivalry and Myth.]]
- Mimetic desire is not linear. It **circles**—from model to rival to victim to repetition.
- Desire is always for what the other wants. It **never ends in satisfaction**.
- Conflict intensifies. Peace is achieved only through **sacrifice**, which must be forgotten to work.
- Society stabilizes only through mechanisms it cannot consciously acknowledge.
Thus, _desire itself is Sisyphean_. It pushes the self toward the object via another, only to fall into rivalry, violence, and eventual crisis.
Girard never saw himself as a saviour, nor even a reformer. He saw the mimetic engine as **nearly inescapable**. His punishment was not for being wrong, but for being right too soon. His final works are explicitly apocalyptic—not because he believed in divine wrath, but because the mechanism no longer works, and no new one has emerged. Thus, modernity is the world after the scapegoat, accelerating towards diametrically opposed ends, without a god to save them.
> "Our world is both the worst it has ever been, and the best. It is said that more victims are killed, but we also have to admit that more are saved than ever before. Everything is increasing … some of which are marvellous and others dreadful"
For Girard, [what the mind attends to is elicited](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24309286/)—from void to vision, from absence to act. Attend long enough to another’s passion, and emotion is mirrored; attend to their gesture, and action is compelled. Yet, as Kant reminds us, what is imitated is never the “thing-in-itself” *(Ding an sich)* but a phenomenal image—already distorted by the ego’s desire.
This philosophy of imitation started from Plato, whose metaphysics and politics revolved around mimesis, and Aristotle, who coined man “the most imitative creature in the world.” The species of mimetic desire that features most heavily in Girard – [metaphysical desire](https://open.substack.com/pub/johnathanbi/p/completing-girard-antidotes-to-apocalypse?r=48z65u&selection=2608cd03-fead-4ad0-9bc1-1711750d544b&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web) – is motivated to acquire objects not for their inherent qualities but to be like a model who also desires or already possesses the object. I use objects here in the broadest sense of the word: materialities, positions, companions, experiences, etc. It is termed metaphysical because the strength of this desire – unbeknownst to the desiring subject who truly craves the object – is not correlated to any qualities of the object and takes upon a reality of its own based on the desirability of the model. It is, in short, deceitful. The drive, in Girard’s own words, “to be what the other becomes when he possesses this or that object” permeates our daily existence.
But we don’t select models randomly nor is it any arbitrary state of being that we want. Girard’s insight is that behind every state of being we seemingly want to acquire – smart, attractive, successful, etc. – lies a common denominator that we are really after: “metaphysical autonomy.”
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?si=BnB8iEO8Ebby80xg&list=PL_xn3B6eWvGsILrh5v5nq0rMp6OjuBOo9" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>