Conclusion

 

In this still unfinished manuscript, I hope to have completed Girard in three substantive ways.

First, I offered a novel interpretation of Girard that draws a clear demarcation between experience and being, between two species of mimetic desire – completing Girard’s account of our psychological landscape.

Second, with this distinction, I was able to introduce Girard to a fruitful interlocutor in Mahayana Buddhism in general and David Loy in particular. This exchange showed that there existed meaningful equivalences between: shame and lack, metaphysical autonomy and intrinsic existence, and love and compassion. The ambition of this dialogue is to show that mimetic theory and Buddhism complete each other. The former informs the latter on how Dukkha and misknowledge manifest in the social sphere, how they are generated by interpersonal relationships, and how they can lead society towards collapse. The latter informs the former of the deeper, phenomenological causes of lack. In this second way, I aimed to complete Girard, by introducing to him a more sophisticated phenomenological account of our mimetic pathologies.

Third, this Buddhist diagnosis comes hand in hand with reproducible prescriptions – emptiness, compassion, and the meditative techniques to obtain them – which can rescue Girard from the escapism of Holderlin’s tower. Girard often described his project as exclusively one of interpretation and description, leaving prescription for those who have digested his work. I aim to have completed Girard in a third way by answering his call. 

To be sure, my prescriptions might seem unachievably difficult. Scholars from both traditions may have good reasons to doubt whether these ultimate Buddhist goals can be completed in conjunction with such a deep engagement with the world by even a single individual, let alone an entire society. But even if they can’t be achieved fully, this project at the very least offers practical value in orienting praxis. That is to say, it illuminates the landscape of our social miseries and personal sufferings alongside their antidotes such that one can make incremental but nonetheless meaningful progress. Furthermore, less concretely but perhaps even more importantly, it assures the Girardian that we are not necessarily enslaved by metaphysical desire and the goal of personal and societal liberation is, at least, in principle achievable. We don’t need to hide in towers. While there is no guarantee that, because of our contingent historical circumstance, there is a path to this – granted, utopian – ideal, there is also no a priori guarantee that no such path exists. It provides hope and an impetus to action.

If Christ, on the cross, revealed the source of our collective sufferings, then Buddha, under the tree, discovered the antidotes to our social salvation. What Girard once rejected as escapist, has come full circle in rescuing him from escapism.


 

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?” (Matt. 21:42)