I tend more to the fox than a hedgehog. René Girard, cast as the essential hedgehog, nonetheless appeals to me.
No contradiction. The Many comprends the One. The only way the One can subsume the Many is by clumping them into a single set.
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“It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.
“This was, and remains, a pessimistic view of human life, as it posits a paradox in the very act of seeking to unify and have peace, since the erasure of differences between people through mimicry is what creates conflict, not the differentiation itself.”
At first it might seem Girard is alluding to what has become known as “cultural appropriation” but the seizure of the other runs much deeper than the rather superficial political idea associated with that phrase.
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“With the Gospels, it is with full clarity that are unveiled these “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35), the foundation of social order on murder, described in all its repulsive ugliness in the account of the Passion.”
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According to the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg: In La violence de la monnaie, Aglietta and Orléan follow Girard in suggesting that the basic relation of exchange can be interpreted as a conflict of ‘doubles’, each mediating the desire of the Other. Like Lucien Goldmann, they see a connection between Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. In their theory, the market takes the place of the sacred in modern life as the chief institutional mechanism stabilizing the otherwise explosive conflicts of desiring subjects.[22]
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Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: “They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition; the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position.”[33]