Mimetic Desire

Helena hasn't spent much time with other babies.  Yesterday, however, Rita hosted a baby party for several of the women who had been in her maternity class, so Helena spent the afternoon with four other babies, all of them about her age.  It was a fascinating encounter, perhaps meriting an essay on the anthropology of babies, but I want to talk about just one event.

Helena sat on the living room floor, surrounded by toys and pillows.  Pedro, a handsome little boy about a week younger than she, was playing with a toy truck we brought this week on our long trip from the US.  Helena found her favorite rattle and began to shake it, attracting Pedro's gaze.  He dropped the truck and crawled as fast as he possibly could toward Helena, reached for the rattle, and ripped it from her hand.  Helena didn't even cry, she was so surprised, but Pedro's father took the rattle, explained the need to be kind, and gave it back to Helena.  For the next five minutes, the scene repeated itself, even as Pedro's father gave Pedro another rattle, distracted him with other toys, and tried everything he could imagine.

As I sat on the hammock, rocking with Helena some hour later, I told her about two French philosophers who have thought long and hard about this dynamic, though not necessarily with babies.  One of Jacques Lacan's most famous aphorisms, for instance, is that "Man's desire is the desire of the other," which can be read in many ways, among them that I want what the other wants. (Probably, the most accurate interpretation is that what I desire from you is not you yourself, but your desire for me, but I didn't talk about that with Helena.)

More to the point, though, is the literary theory of mimetic desire, developed most carefully by René Girard as he looked at romantic triangles in novels.  Two men love one woman: this is the stuff of Balzac, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and who knows how many other great novelists.  For Girard, however, the basic question here is not, in fact, the object of desire (Anna Karenina, the femme fatale of film noir), but the relationship between the two men.  I desire the thing (the woman, the car, the whatever) not because of what lies essential in it, but because I see that another person desires it.  Girard extended this argument to our relationship with fiction (Don Quijote desires what Amadis de Gaul wanted, etc), but the basic point is there: our desires have more to do with imitating the desire of the other than with anything that comes from the object of desire.

 And there, I explained to Helena, is Pedro and his desire for the rattle.  The rattle is cool, of course.  It makes a nice sound, you can chew on it, you can bang it on the floor.  But what really mattered to Pedro is that Helena had it in her hand, that she was enjoying it.  Mimetic desire starts when we're little.