Desire
Nobody Has Ever Shown Me a Photograph of Themselves
René Girard spent a career arguing that we don’t want things — we want what other people want, and we borrow the wanting from whoever we admire. Thirty years behind a chair say he was right, and that the trouble starts when the model lives nearby.
A client sits down, we say the usual things about the weather, and then comes the moment that has structured my entire working life: she reaches into her bag, unlocks her phone, and holds up a photograph of a woman who is not her.
Sometimes it’s an actress. More often it’s a stranger from an algorithm, or a colleague, or a sister. The picture is held at a very particular angle — slightly hopeful, slightly apologetic — and the sentence that comes with it is always some version of “something like this.”
I have been doing this since 1993 in two countries and three languages. In all that time, not one person has ever shown me a photograph of themselves.
I used to think that was a small professional curiosity. Then I read a French literary critic who had built an entire theory of human behaviour on it, and I have not been able to unsee it since.
1961 the year Girard published the book that introduced mimetic desire — a work of literary criticism, not psychology
3 points in his model of desire: you, the object, and the person who wanted it first
2005 the year France elected him to the Académie française, forty-four years after nobody wanted to publish him
0 clients who have ever shown me a photograph of themselves
The Third Car
Start with the story everyone who writes about Girard eventually tells, because it is unimprovable.
Two children are in a room full of toys. They are playing happily and separately. An adult quietly puts one more toy car on a table in the corner and leaves. One child notices it, walks over, and picks it up.
The second child now wants that car. Not a car — he is surrounded by cars, several of them objectively better. He wants that one, and he wants it urgently, and if you ask him why he will tell you, with total sincerity, that he was about to play with it.
He was not. What he saw was not a toy. What he saw was another person wanting something, and wanting is the most contagious thing a human being produces.
René Girard called this mimetic desire, from mimesis, imitation. His claim is that desire is not a straight line from you to the thing. It is a triangle: you, the object, and a third figure — the model — who got there first and whose wanting you are quietly copying. We do not choose our desires. We catch them.
He did not find this in a laboratory. He found it in novels. Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Dostoevsky — he noticed that the great novelists all secretly knew this about their characters, and that the characters never knew it about themselves. He called the belief that our desires are original and spontaneous the romantic lie. The books that admit otherwise, he called novelistic truth.
If you have ever bought something because a person you admire had it, congratulations: you are an ordinary human being, and a French literary critic read your mind in 1961.
We Don’t Copy Just Anyone
Here is the part your draft summary of Girard usually leaves out, and it is the part that actually earns its keep.
You do not catch desire from everybody. You catch it from people you already admire — and it matters enormously how close they are standing.
Girard separated two cases. In external mediation, the model is far away: a film star, a dead saint, a fictional hero, someone in a magazine. You can copy them freely and it costs nothing, because you are never going to be reaching for the same object at the same moment. That kind of imitation is calm. It is called having taste.
In internal mediation, the model is close enough to touch. A colleague at the same grade. A sibling. A friend in the same trade, the same street, the same group chat. Now you want what they want, and you are both standing in front of it. The person you admired has become the person in your way.
This is the mechanism, and it is not gentle. Admiration and rivalry are not opposites in Girard — they are the same thing at two different distances. The model turns into the obstacle. Girard borrowed a word from scripture for the figure you cannot stop circling back to even though it wounds you every time: the skandalon, the stumbling block.
And once two people want the same thing because the other one wants it, the thing itself stops mattering. What remains is the rivalry, which is now self-sustaining and requires no fuel. Girard’s later and darker work follows that escalation all the way to its resolution — a community in crisis eventually agreeing on one person to blame, whose expulsion restores the peace and whose guilt nobody afterwards examines too closely. He spent thirty years arguing that this is the hidden machinery underneath a great deal of human history, and he was not, on the whole, being metaphorical.
Where the wanting is transmitted, and where it gets settled. Girard’s triangle, fully industrialised. Photos: Unsplash
The Machine We Built For It
Now consider what happens when you take a species that catches desire from nearby admired people, and you hand it a device that supplies an infinite scroll of nearby admired people, sorted by engagement.
This is not a conspiracy theory, and I want to be careful not to dress it up as one. Nobody sat down with a copy of Girard and designed a trap. But it is worth knowing that Peter Thiel studied under Girard at Stanford, has credited him publicly and repeatedly, and has said the theory is part of why he understood what Facebook would be worth before most people did. He was not describing a conspiracy either. He was describing a very good bet.
Social media did not invent mimetic desire. It industrialised the supply of models. It took the small handful of people you would historically have compared yourself to — the neighbours, the cousins, the other family at church — and replaced them with a permanent, refreshing, algorithmically optimised parade of people who are close enough to feel comparable and successful enough to sting.
In Girard’s terms, we took external mediation, which is harmless, and converted almost all of it into internal mediation, which is not.
An infinite supply of people standing just close enough to want things at. Photo: Unsplash
“Admiration and rivalry are not opposites. They are the same feeling at two different distances.” — Which is why the people who irritate us most are almost never strangers.
About Those Mirror Neurons
One correction, offered in the spirit of not handing anybody an easy win.
Girard’s theory is frequently presented as having been confirmed by neuroscience — specifically by mirror neurons, the cells that fire both when an animal acts and when it watches another animal act. The conversation is genuine: the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, one of the people who found them, engaged seriously with Girard’s work, and there is a real body of writing on where the two ideas meet.
But the pop-science version of mirror neurons — that they explain imitation, empathy, language and culture — has been substantially walked back. Gregory Hickok’s critique landed hard, the direct human evidence is thinner than the enthusiasm suggested, and even sympathetic researchers now describe the field as having been badly overexposed.
So: mimetic desire is not a proven neurological fact. It is a very good idea about people, drawn from literature, that predicts an unnerving amount of what they actually do. That is a lower claim than “science proves it,” and it happens to be the true one. It also loses nothing, because you can test it yourself this afternoon by watching two children and one toy.
The 1961 book is Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, published in English as Deceit, Desire and the Novel, and it is a work of literary criticism that happens to be about you. La Violence et le sacré (1972) and Le Bouc émissaire (1982) follow the theory into much darker territory. Girard died in 2015, having spent most of his career in American universities and having been elected to the Académie française in 2005 — a man who explained borrowed desire, honoured at last by the institution most people spend a lifetime wanting to be let into.
Back to the Chair
I am not going to tell you to stop imitating people. You can’t, and anybody who claims they have managed it is imitating someone who claimed it first, usually a philosopher with excellent hair.
What Girard actually offers is narrower and more useful. If desire is caught rather than generated, then the only real decision available to you is not what do I want — that question is already answered by the time you get to it — but who am I standing near. You cannot choose your desires. You can absolutely choose your models. Most people never once make that choice deliberately, and simply catch whatever is going around.
I wrote once about how little anyone is actually watching you, which turns out to be the exact other half of this. Almost nobody is looking at you. Almost everybody is looking at somebody. And I touched the same wiring writing about what our devices do to the way we relate to each other — a subject that reads rather differently once you accept that the feed is not showing you things. It is showing you people wanting things.
Behind the chair, the practical version of all this is very small. When a client holds up the photograph, I have learned to ask one extra question before I pick up the scissors: not “do you want this cut,” but “what is it about her?”
Roughly half the time the answer has nothing to do with hair. It is the confidence, or the job, or the apparent absence of a difficult year. That is not something I can deliver with scissors, and pretending otherwise is how people leave a salon with a haircut that is technically perfect and quietly wrong.
The other half of the time she just likes the fringe, and we cut the fringe, and it looks wonderful.
Both answers are fine. The useful part is that she now knows which one it was — which is more than most of us manage about most of the things we want.
The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.
