Saturday, 8 September 2018


Is it possible to draw a clear line between mimetic, secondary or mediated desire and primary, spontaneous and unmediated desire? If there is such a distinction then, as Girard notes, it is the former which has all the Sturm und Drang, to which all the intensities, the dramas, the romance, belong. Consider that all phantoms of desire that are aroused by music would necessarily be of this class. Therefore their very form is that exacerbated form of identity-discovery found in musical tastes - from "her life was saved by rock'n roll" to "Tristan". The problem is that the subject, the "I", is itself mediated, is an "experiencing as" more than an "experiencing of" and hence cannot make this distinction. All of this is further complicated by the fact that the distinction between primary and secondary desire is itself a feature of the culture of secondary desire, which is the culture of spilt romanticism that we inhabit.

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