Mimetic Desire

Mimetic desire, as the term appears in Boothby's reading of René Girard, designates the structural principle that objects acquire their desirability not through any intrinsic quality but exclusively through the mediating desire of another subject. The desiring subject does not encounter an independently attractive object; rather, it takes its cue from a rival or model whose desire already marks the object as worth wanting. Boothby explicitly frames this as "much more conspicuously Hegelian than Girard seems to acknowledge" — a pointed observation, since it situates Girard's theory squarely within the dialectic of mutual recognition that Hegel elaborates in the Master–Slave movement: desire is always triangulated through the Other, never self-originating. The object is, in this sense, a placeholder for inter-subjective recognition rather than a satisfaction-yielding thing in itself.

The theoretical move in Boothby's argument is to read this Girardian framework as structurally homologous to Lacanian desire. In Lacan, desire is never the subject's own in any simple sense — "the desire of man is the desire of the Other" — meaning desire is always borrowed, constituted in the field of the Other's wanting. Mimetic desire, on this reading, is Girard's way of arriving at the same insight without fully acknowledging its Hegelian-Lacanian genealogy. The rivalry and sacrificial violence that Girard derives from mimetic competition become, in Boothby's synthesis, structurally parallel to the castrating cut that Lacan identifies as the inauguration of the subject into language and the symbolic order — both accounts converge on a constitutive loss or dismemberment as the price of entry into the social-symbolic field.

This concept appears once, in richard-boothby-freud-as-philosopher-metapsychology-after-lacan-routledge-2001 (p.179), within a chapter that uses Girard as a comparative foil to illuminate Lacanian metapsychology. Its primary cross-reference is the canonical concept of Desire: Girard's mimetic desire is positioned as an independent, if underacknowledged, rediscovery of desire's fundamental alienation — the Lacanian axiom that desire is always desire of the Other. Where Lacan formalizes this through the structure of language and the signifier (desire as the metonymy of being, the gap between need and demand), Girard narrates it through anthropological rivalry; Boothby's argument is that these are structurally equivalent accounts. The concept also resonates with the Master–Slave Dialectic (though listed as a cross-reference without a full synthesis here): mimetic desire's triangular logic — desiring what the Other desires because the Other desires it — replays the Hegelian struggle for recognition, a connection Boothby explicitly flags as something Girard underestimates.

The concept further implicates Sacrificial Substitution and the Oedipus Complex in Boothby's broader argument: Girard's sacrificial dismemberment (the violence that resolves mimetic rivalry) maps onto the Lacanian castration-cut that terminates the Oedipus Complex and installs symbolic competence. In this way, mimetic desire is not merely a psychological observation about imitation but the anthropological trigger for a whole economy of loss, substitution, and symbolic law — linking it also to the Lost Object (the object desired mimetically is always already a stand-in, never the real thing) and to Repression (the violence of mimetic conflict must be symbolically managed). Within Boothby's source, the concept functions as a bridge: it allows him to show that Girard's sacrificial anthropology and Lacan's structural psychoanalysis share a common deep logic, even though Girard himself remained blind to this convergence.

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After LacanRichard Boothby · 2001 (p.179)

In Girard's view, a view much more conspicuously Hegelian than Girard seems to acknowledge, objects become desirable not for their intrinsic qualities but because they are desired by someone else.

The phrase "much more conspicuously Hegelian than Girard seems to acknowledge" does double theoretical work: it names the precise philosophical lineage (Hegelian inter-subjective mediation) that Girard's theory of mimetic desire secretly relies on, and it thereby positions mimetic desire as a variant of the desire-of-the-Other structure — the very structure Lacan inherits from Hegel and formalizes as the core of his theory of desire. The negative locution "not for their intrinsic qualities" is equally loaded, since it evacuates any object-directed or naturalistic account of wanting and replaces it with a purely relational, triangulated logic.