We're all stooges …

… He Knew the Reason We Fight | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Girard resists simple disciplinary pigeonholing. He made contributions to literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, biblical interpretation, and theology. He began his writing life as a literary critic. In his first book, the influential Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), are detectable the earliest stirrings of mimetic theory. Girard looks at the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Proust, and concludes that the “great novelists reveal the imitative nature of desire.” We live with the myth of the sovereign self, dismissed by Girard as a “romantic lie.” The novelists systematically dismantle this cherished fiction, not in philosophical tracts but through storytelling. The protagonists, by pursuing their desires—wealth, love, social status—inevitably come into conflict with others having the same goals.