Modern Pathologies and the Displacement of the Sacred Emanuele Antonelli, PhD –––––––– Università di Torino Girard’s attempts to present his main ideas are numerous, and according to him (Girard 2008), never fully satisfying. When looking for the best way to explain what Mimetic Theory is, many problems arise. This is largely due to the fact that the order of the discourse and the logic of the underlying long argument, the object of knowledge and the performative deconstruction this very knowledge brings about are twisted around one another in a hermeneutical circle that can easily be misinterpreted as vicious. As a consequence, maybe also as an intrinsic necessity, Girard has eventually settled for an impressionist exposition: his lightning intuitions do not lead to a totalizing philosophical system. This misleads many readers, unreasonably anticipating an exhaustive treatment of this complex and vast matter, and at the same time yields several additional investigations. As Girard wished, Mimetic Theory is now an autonomous scientific paradigm with which many scholars can engage. I will do so by trying to expand on a mimetic account of modernity pivoting on the notions of pathology and displaced sacred. To carry this out, I will subscribe to the long argument of Mimetic Theory. According to Girard, human beings are essentially mimetic: this means that we do not just imitate purposefully as free and independent subjects, but we actually are always already intertwined with one another in a maze of mimetic relations, which are constitutive of our inner subject. 1 In this regard, his most original claim is that our desires are mimetically driven by others, which he defines as models or mediators (Girard 1965). 1. Mediations For our aim, it is essential to focus on the general notion of mediation. A subject S desires an object O according to a mediator M. If M belongs to the same “world” as S – to the same ontological, social, structural system of references – we speak of “internal mediation.” If he or she belongs to a different one, we then speak of “external mediation.” In Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1965), Girard gives examples of external mediators: Amadis de Gaule (a fictional character, even in the novel) for Don Quixote, and Don Quixote for Sancho Panza (an hidalgo for a peasant) or Napoleon (a great man from the past) for Julien Sorel. Examples of internal mediation are: Mr. Valenod and Mr. de Rênal, in The Red and the Black; Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov and his father in the eponymous novel. 1 Girard used the word “interdividual” to convey this meaning. Nidesh Lawtoo claimed that for Nietzsche already, mimesis was something like a ‘polymorphous phenomenon that troubles the boundaries of individuation’ (Lawtoo 2013, 28).