1. The Economy of Rank

Difference as a Product of Rivalry

French theoretician René Girard was an intellectual mentor to Peter Thiel. Although Hobbesian inflected, Girard’s analysis of rivalry and imitation remains far more innovative than Thiel’s reductionist critique of conformism. Girard’s initial assumption is simple: Uniformity is a quasi-natural condition for humanity, while difference is the driving force at an individual level. Difference should not be thought of as an externality, something that is discovered and appropriated; rather, it is a product of an internal process that generates differentiation through the assertion of the superiority of one individual over the rest. Difference depends on the human ambition to outrank others and the social effect that such distinction produces—the hero always needs a public. The public nature of rank has, thus, two consequences. First, because difference is produced internally via differentiation, its corresponding dimension—that is, transcendence—is marked not by unconditionality but rather by its immanent origins. However, recognizing the internal, humanlike quality of transcendence, Girard also declares its universality, thus reintroducing the same essentialist logic he previously critiqued. As we will see, far from being a general law, Girard’s analysis is, in fact, useful for understanding the economic theology that dominates the phallic drive of neoliberalism. Second, to the extent that power needs the powerless to sustain its superiority, any rank economy must rely on a network of interdependencies based on the nature of desire—a condition that limits this type of domination more than commonly thought. For Girard, desire is never individual, nor is a direct assertion of one’s will. It is, rather, a vicarious volition that obeys a model. As social beings, humans learn desire through the example of others, and this modeling capacity does not vanish in time. Desire is not authentic, nor is it ultimately an individual choice; it is always the desire of and by the Other. The Other can be a real person but it is usually an imagined entity that shapes and orients passions.4 This is why, for Girard, desire is fundamentally derivative and thus mimetic. But the fact that we desire what the Other desires also suggests that our wants are largely “undifferentiated,” or homologized, as he notes.5 In effect, Girardian subjectivity doesn’t desire anything in particular, or rather, it wants something specific only insofar as it allows the subject to achieve prominence. The goal is to occupy a symbolic position. However, because it is a matter of status, the object of desire is paradoxical. On one side, to the extent that it is coveted by everybody, it is a dull, homologizing object. On the other, because it signals real difference, the object produces a form of absolute uniqueness and is literally exceptional. Strictly speaking, the modeling capacity of desire generates a mirror effect that drives individuals to seek conformity under the guidance of uniqueness.

When applied to situations in which issues of prestige, honor, and status are significant, Girard’s theoretical model is quite effective. Consider the opening canto of Matteo Boiardo’s famous epic poem L’Orlando innamorato (1483), in which Angelica, the beautiful daughter of the king of Cathay, makes a consequential appearance at the court of Charlemagne. Boiardo writes that each Christian and Muslim lord is “won by her beauty, stunned by the sight.”6 The imitative force of desire casts a spell on the court, obscuring the individuality of these heroes, nearly blurring the difference between Christian and Muslim. Their wives are similarly flattened, relegated to an aesthetic mediocrity in comparison to Angelica. Angelica’s grand entrance reflects her status as a prize and coveted object—as well as the secret weapon of the Muslim army; the Carolingian knights are, in fact, drawn into a clash to win her over, and instead of closing ranks, they compete to demonstrate their honor. Boiardo’s ironic perspective should not be overlooked. Still, Angelica perfectly represents the paradoxical nature of the object of desire. For these knights, she is both a homogenizing and a unique, or scarce, object. Similarly, because that which is desirable is reduced to the idea of prey, she is both elevated and othered. Girard’s analysis rarely questions the status of the desirable, which, insofar as it is codified as a property (and cannot assume a positive, independent valence), is usually feminine.

It is in the nature of the desirable to inevitably stir up competition. The winner, in fact, acts as a pole of attraction for other members. This overdetermination of (masculine) passions follows a triangular structure that unifies the group through the sameness of their perception and libidinal investments. According to Girard, “desiring mimesis engenders its objects, but nevertheless it always appears to the outside observer as a triangular configuration the angles of which are occupied respectively by the two rivals and their common object. The object always comes to the foreground and mimesis is hidden behind it, even in the eyes of the desiring subjects. The convergence of desire defines the object.”7 The object is a decoy. What matters is the relation about the competing males, who sustain and reproduce a mimetic model via a compounded effect. Through mutual reinforcement, rivalry increases the value of the object in question. This means that Angelica’s beauty is accrued because Charlemagne’s best knight, Orlando, falls in love with her. Similarly, Orlando’s infatuation must be equally deserving because all other Christian and Muslim knights want her as well. The paradoxical nature of mimetic antagonism points to a typical Girardian loop where it is impossible to distinguish between cause and effect. What exactly causes Angelica’s desirability is hard to say: Is it purely Angelica’s beauty, or is it Orlando’s desire and its effects on the knights? Similarly, is it Angelica or the knights’ awe that fuels Orlando’s passion?

This endless loop of desire is the matrix for another equally infinite loop: violence. As observed, Angelica stands for a totality that only one person will enjoy. Such conquest, however, does not put an end to the competition because the prestige of the desirable object draws its force precisely from the intensity of admiration and the envy it generates. These feelings all but ensure the continuation of a series of conflicts. This is why Girard writes that “he who has struck the last blow rises above the other,” boasting his “mystic prize as long as he can believe his triumph is definitive, as long as his adversary does not steal it back.”8 Consider the paradoxes we just mentioned: an object that is both homogenizing and scarce; competitors who validate and augment each other’s standing despite a hierarchy; and finally, the lack of a cause for said animosity, for Girard observes that “it is truly impossible to fix the origin of and responsibility for the rivalry, whose inexhaustible source is mimesis.”9 The most striking consequence for a model based on difference is that mimesis itself breeds a generalized indistinction. To the extent that the desire of the Other determines the desirable, it is hard to point out the specificity of the object of such desire and, likewise, to attribute the roles of the imitated and imitators. The template of mimetic desire is based on interdependent circuits that feed on themselves. Under these circumstances, mimesis is a self-organized symbolic system managing those who (usually men) are caught in it.

The Sacrificial Violence of Religion

According to Girard, the complex of mimetic desire transcends the individual level. Functioning as an anthropological law, it actually explains the origin of religions. From his standpoint, the divine beyond is inextricably bound with mimesis as the invariant principle that enables hominization. As the hostility emanating from mimesis leads to a cycle of vendettas that brings the group to the brink of civil war, religion mitigates these endemic crises through a set of sacrificial mechanisms aimed at ensuring stability against intragroup fighting. In this sense, scapegoating is the solution to containing warfare and the result of basic psychological group dynamics. It is an unconscious and self-reinforcing mechanism that brings peace by sacrificing a designated victim. Nikolaus Wandinger summarizes this mechanism as follows: “Upon experiencing this sudden and unexpected peace, the group ‘realizes’ that the culprit they had just killed was not an ordinary criminal. He/she was so powerful that his/her death catapulted their society from destructive, all-out war to harmonious peace. . . . The villain was not just a villain but a god/dess capable of both destroying and saving. The reality of this deity is confirmed by the very power of the experiences he/she provoked.”10 Once a group embraces this social arrangement, it will inevitably codify it via rituals and sacraments. In religion, violence becomes structural; in other words, it is validated and institutionally motivated. A mob lynching a designated victim is the crude solution that religion refines by establishing a complex system of rituals through which aggressions are orderly doled out. As the technology devised to manage crises, sacrifice is a form of “good violence” that humans enact to avoid the abyss of civil war, what the Greeks called stasis.11 But as the cycle of blood is always on the verge of beginning again, more culprits are required to produce a difference that channels intra-aggression toward the outside. Humans make the sacred via the spilling of blood, and the idea that the gods want a sacrifice enables them to “dispose of their violence more efficiently,” because, Girard explains, “they regard the process not as something emanating from within themselves, but as a necessity imposed from without, a divine decree whose least infraction calls down terrible punishment.”12 Violence is a pragmatic mechanism aimed at human well-being, one that is ordered and legitimated from above.

The specularity between the sacrificial and mimetic desire is blatant. Like the object of desire, the scapegoat acts as the recipient of emotional intensities, thus producing the difference needed to counteract homogeneity. Here, too, difference is the structural mechanism that is produced and consumed because of (masculine) homogeneity. What’s more, the scapegoat points to an ambivalent symbolic position. Behind gods, heroes, and kings stands the lynched victim, who becomes the culprit of societies’ ills, just as behind the object of desire stands a subject who is adored insofar as she is turned into a mute ideality. Finally, as the victim’s execution appeases fractures and divisions, it also forecasts an external point of difference, an externality that solidifies transcendence. As Girard writes, “transcendence is, in short, only because it serves as a deceiving object of rivalry.”13 In this civilizing process, transcendence sanctions the difference groups produce while killing sacrificial victims.

For Girard, this social engineering is effective only insofar as it remains hidden. Once the apparatus is revealed, its efficacy vanishes. Only the Judeo-Christian world unveils the truth of this brutality, for as Wandinger writes, the biblical revelation rests on “the insight that God is not siding with the multitude that convenes on a single victim, but that God is a protector of victims, and underdogs.”14 The Christian revelation is not void of a series of difficulties and equivocations. Girard acknowledges the presence of an extensive sacrificial economy in the history of Christianism that he characterizes as a deviation from the original message, a relapse into previous violent practices due to the concept of blood in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 9:22–26)—an understanding of blood that redeems sin because of the crucifixion of Jesus. Even though present-day Catholic doctrine continues to profess the salvific meaning of the crucifixion, Girard contends that what was once “acceptable to the medieval mind” has now “become intolerable to us.”15 What is intolerable is the reintroduction of the tributary pact between people and God—one in which the scapegoat represents the price for our well-being. The crucifixion, in fact, does not perpetuate but interrupts the sacrificial machine by dissolving violent mimesis and the contractual force that binds a community through blood spilling.

By negating redemption via sacrifice, and thus violence, Christianity exposes the essence of the divine and simultaneously marks a radical departure from it. Specifically, Christianism roots itself in the fundamental anthropogenetic mechanism of sacrifice while simultaneously terminating it.16 For archaic religions, the scapegoat is always guilty in the eyes of the community—in this sense, Oedipus is expelled by the Thebans to rid the city of the Plague. Going against a redemptive quid pro quo, however, Jesus takes upon himself the debt of society because he is innocent. The crucifixion does not offer the cleansing of sins in exchange for Jesus’s blood; rather, it offers something more miraculous: the revelation that mimetic violence does not produce the divine. This is perhaps also the true meaning of redemption: freedom from the sacrificial economy. Once the good news is uttered, however, all we have is this life on earth. Girard glosses, “So now we are liberated. We know that we are by ourselves, with no father in the sky to punish us and interfere with our paltry business. So we must no longer look backward but forward; we must show what man is capable of.”17

The true divinity of God resides not in transcendence but in the message that exposes and severs the bond with violence and dependence. Yet, transcendence is not abolished; rather, it transitions from the needed but negative case of the scapegoat to the positive but exclusive one of the Christian revelation. In other words, the crucifixion is a discontinuity so radical that it stands out as a point of (positive) transcendence. This revelation breaks away from the very idea of the economy that has ruled (at least according to Girard) humanity since time immemorial, one in which desire is subjected to a contractual logic priced in blood.

It goes without saying that the effects of this new economy have been remarkably insignificant in our history, particularly when one considers the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the endless persecution of a variety of peoples, not to mention the infinite series of wars sponsored or fought by Christianity. Girard perhaps gestures toward this legacy, but deviation from historical truth is not the problem here.18 The problem is the transcendent paradigm at work even in the solution. Girard calls it transcendent love, which is based on “the act of destroying those [mimetic] powers through a form of transcendence that never acts by means of violence.”19 This is the definition of God for Girard, and “this is indeed why the Son promises men that if they manage to behave as the Father wishes, and to do his will, they will all become sons of God,” because “it is not God who sets up the barriers between himself and mankind, but mankind himself.”20 Still, the persistence of a philosophy marked by transcendence prevents Girard from recognizing the alternatives available to desire and politics. The only two existing options are to follow the dominating direction of rivalry or to negate it altogether. One must be a realist and acknowledge the reality of violence or be a saint and abolish it. The final prize, the highest value, can be reached only through a purely voluntaristic action.21 Not surprisingly, the content of Jesus’s exception evaporates quickly. In right-wing intellectual circles, what remains is its empty, voluntaristic form and the thrill of the discovery of mimetic rivalry resulting in difference. Girard himself carves out a special case of rivalry without violence as he celebrates capitalism, a system that is productive because it “ritualizes and institutionalizes mimetic rivalry, the rules of which are willingly obeyed.”22 Likewise, the neoliberal elite that ruled over the last thirty years of globalization equates the condition of sameness to any form of social intervention, while it magnifies the true difference produced by the healthy competition of the so-called free market. As observed, neoliberalism fuels phallic forms of desire through an economy of rank in which transcendence operates as a driver of the expansion of surplus value. The fantasized Other of neoliberalism demands said growth; the elsewhere of pure value is the device that enables such economic theology.

This symbolic system not only has nefarious consequences for the health of the planet but also enables a widespread inertia regarding climate action. For those who deny the effects of global warming, it guarantees that natural resources are indeed infinite. For those who accept them, this model activates the mechanism of salvation. Any apocalypse holds the promise of spiritual (or physical) deliverance for true believers. Whether or not the world goes up in flame or is flooded, some people will be saved. For the rest of the world that is concerned, transcendence allows the temporary repression of the immediacy of the crisis. Because infinity is projected onto the domain of the elsewhere, it acquires a mystical quality that contaminates life in general, turning it into an endless present that dulls the gravity of our situation. Such repression generates, in turn, a widespread eco-anxiety that struggles to take a concrete form. The thought of immanence, instead, looks at our human condition and the natural limits it encounters to seek out the possibility for transformation in the here and now of our condition. These futurities must be embryonic in the present; otherwise, they are mere idealities. Naturally, this inquiry must take into account anthropological invariants as well, but it is necessary to avoid a modeling that is as reductionist as mimetic rivalry.

Friendship and the Economy of Noncoincidence

In the economy of rank, transcendence operates both as an imperative to dominate others via the possession of the desired object and as an injunction to preserve the group via the othering of a sacrificial victim. By reducing virtually all human interactions to this model, Girard’s mimetic theory of desire constructs human evolution as a finalistic and phallic enterprise. Feminism convincedly made this point early on when Girard’s theory was gaining traction in the 1980s. Toril Moi argued that Girard was merely reiterating “Luce Irigaray’s reading of sexual relations under patriarchy.”23 On one side, Girard discovers the modeling and impersonal capacity of desire. On the other, as Moi notes, he “assumes that heterosexuality is prescribed by our instinctual apparatus inherited from animal life, that is to say that the object-choice is instinctually given.”24 This dominating preference for the phallic is indisputable only for a warrior aristocracy or in any environment where the drive to prominence is achieved through spectacles of competition, prevarication, and dominance.

Far from being universal, mimetic theory seems to overlook the many instances in which society manages desire without privileging antagonism.25 Robert Pfaller, for instance, elaborated the concept of surrogate enjoyment or “interpassivity,” which studies how delegating pleasure to somebody else turns into a source of pleasure in itself.26 Interpassivity may create hierarchies; however, it is less subject centered and thus more inclined to convivial behavior. Furthermore, rituals are not only tributary pledges to transcendence but also self-contained acts that soften the difference between devotees and a God that is set apart from them. An example of such immanent practices is Émile Durkheim’s interpretation of the Feast of the Tabernacles, in which the rhythmic movement of willow branches “mechanically produce[s] the effects which are the reason for their existence,” namely, the wind that brings rain and, eventually, a bountiful harvest.27

If one concedes that because of mimesis our interactions are ultimately based on some symbolic authority, one should also admit that this authority, just like any other social element, may take shapes that are different from an economy of rank. This is all the more true because mimesis has a much ampler meaning than Girard’s definition in biology, even in the case of hominization. Roberto Marchesini maintains that the human animal is fully immersed in “zoo-mimesis,” a primal function that contributed to its definition as a species.28 By observing and feeling like a bird, for instance, a plethora of possibilities manifested in early humans, including perhaps a different, aerial understanding of space. But by mimicking other entities, humans also introjected otherness, thus producing a hybrid identity. This structural hybridity decenters humankind, making it ex-centric to itself and its environment, a common feature in the biological world. As Marchesini explains, eccentricity “is not a starting condition proper to the human nature; rather, it is the outcome of a mimetic process,” one that involves encounter and socializing with other nonhuman animals, organic and inorganic alterities.29

This definition of mimesis helps us move from an economy of rank that dominates neoliberalism to an alternative economy of noncoincidence that, although present in our societies, is buried under a series of misconceptions. In this sense, Paolo Virno’s theory of human development does not restrict the breadth of options available to a sacrificial and extractivist logic; rather, it embraces the ex-centric dimension of the human by combining with Vittorio Gallese’s mirror neurons theory. Mirror neurons theory argues that the social nature of our life-form is grounded in the phylogenetic chain of evolution of our sensorial organs and brain. This approach reverses the classic model of the mind, which begins from an individual who is combined with others, thus producing society. In contrast, “the mind of an individual is the product of a process of differentiation that takes place in the collective praxis.”30 Gallese calls this dimension the we-centric-space, a “tight relationship between human sociality and the natural and intrinsic pragmatic relatedness we entertain with the world, on the one hand, and our constitutive—ontological—relatedness to others.”31 Difference is the hybridization process that emerges in the we-centric-space, a form of effervescence integral to relationality, not the distinction of one individual over the others.

Superimposed on this intersubjective dimension, we find language. Virno argues that language does not “limit itself to embellishing and refining the we-centric-space already delineated by mirror neurons”; rather, it “destructively retroacts on this space, undermining its solidity.”32 In other words, the mimetic predisposition that informs the infrastructure of our animality is dilatated, bended, and pierced by language. Negation, in particular, illustrates how language complicates the we-centric space. When negating a fact, we are actually affirming that initial identity in order to turn it around. He writes that “the distinctive trait of linguistic negation . . . amounts to proposing again one and the same semantic content with an opposite algebraic sign.”33 For instance, by saying that a refugee is not really like us, I am asserting two things at once: that this refugee is a person but that, as a refugee, he is also something else—a criminal, perhaps; hence I can let him die without regret. Negation is always supplementary; the negative sign shifts the value of an entity once it has been acknowledged. This capacity for active misrecognition illustrates a mechanism common in the biological realm, which the human, however, has magnified to a remarkable level of complexity: the potentiality both for recognition (mimesis) and for full-fledged misrecognition (negation) that produces a deviation from reality. This is a double-edged sword. Because “non-recognition is grounded . . . on the tendency of the sign ‘not’ to evoke a difference that . . . is at each turn accounted for through some contingent property,” it may open unexpected solutions that imaginatively break with what looks like an unavoidable direction, or it may produce endless conflict.34 In the case of conflict, negation is very powerful. By not recognizing reality, it unleashes a form of destructive violence that is unparalleled in other animals.

Yet, negation may also act to mitigate its original violence. Virno indicates the public sphere as a form of second-degree negation. The public sphere “has the form of a negation of negation. It is a not that is added before the phrase non-man,” thus quashing the mechanical liquidation that the misrecognition of another human being inevitably generates.35 The negation of the negation is the correcting mechanism that laboriously recuperates our biological conviviality. Yet, this recuperation is not immediate, nor is it a simple re-presentation. If the we-centric-space is the “infallible and impersonal neural co-feeling,” the public sphere is the struggle for “persuasion, the metamorphosis and crisis of the process of production, the brutality of political conflicts.”36 Virno does not idealize the public sphere. Just as in the case of the first-degree negation, the public sphere opens up a set of determinations that can be beneficial but also detrimental to the human community. Following Girard’s examination of religion, one can easily see how sacrificial rites work as a negation of a negation without actually moving away from the original, violent misrecognition. As a public, institutionalized practice—as I discussed earlier—sacrifice allows a selective violence to be executed as a duty. A careful assessment of what goals and rules politics enacts is key to avoiding the terrible consequences of negation, because, Virno writes, “institutions offer real protection only to the extent that they make use of those very conditions that, under different circumstances, continuously produce a threat.”37

When organized toward emancipative and collective goals, these institutions make good use of human negation by exhibiting their rootedness in their immanent substratum—let us remark in passing that this is a sign of the fading away of transcendence. Virno insists on using a “non-dialectical understanding of the negative,” which avoids subsuming its noncoincidence via a higher form of unity.38 The anthropogenic force of negation should not be reduced to the idea of an essential benevolence of humanity (naively adopted by the progressive wing of neoliberalism) nor one of absolute evil (as in the antimodernist and authoritarian wing of reactionary neoliberalism). The capacity for a structural detachment from the reality of the environment and ourselves is all we really are or “have,” as I explain later, and that difference emerges in the uses we make of it or in the types of protection we choose. To recapitulate our use of mimesis, the natural substratum of the human animal is marked by imitation as a condition of possibility for intersubjectivity and relatedness with alterity. Language retroacts on that hybrid substratum, opening a rift that leads to positive and negative consequences. Negation, as in the proposition “This is not a human being,” engenders and supports violence but can also block it by directing it toward forms of conviviality. Negation functions as a differentiating process producing various kinds of differences, not just the difference of superiority, as in the economy of rank.

But what about difference in the singular: the object of desire that guarantees a symbolic position of distinction? What about Girard’s idea of the scapegoat, the othering that breaks the sameness of the human group but also ensures its cohesiveness via sacrifice? To respond to this question, we need to look at a recent work by Virno titled Avere: Sulla natura dell’animale loquace (2020), in which his analysis of the grammar of the verb to have will help us to delineate a positive notion of alterity. In capitalist society, this verb is distorted by the idea of absolute possession, in other words, by the frictionless domination of the object. Any object is thus turned into a thing, something inert, manipulable, acquisitive, and exchangeable. Yet, one could argue that this understanding of the verb is confused with its opposite, the verb to be. When we say that we have something, it is as if that thing becomes our appendage—what we instead rarely admit is that we may become an appendage of that thing as well. (This is the case with digital technology: Advertised as a tool to empower consumers, it works as a generator of cognitive and emotional pressures that dominate the user.)

The classic Aristotelian definition of humankind as an animal that is endowed with or “has” language shows how the verb to have does not reflect possession or control over the object in question; rather, “to have language” signals a lack of adherence, an unfulfillable cohabitation with the linguistic dimension. We are constantly aware of the opaqueness and intractability of the linguistic object; thus we can say that we make experience of language, to use Giorgio Agamben’s terminology. Likewise, we can say that we have a body, not in the sense that one’s self (or soul) pilots a set of organs; rather, the body is that corporeal other that makes one who one is. We are that non-completely-corresponding relationship with the body as other. In this case, Virno recuperates Émile Benveniste’s analysis of the verb to be, which implies an intrinsic relationship between two substances based on identity, as different from to have, which explicitly expresses an extrinsic relation of nonidentity between the two substances. The verb to have elucidates this primary detachment that allows us to be what we are as we inhabit our corporeal dimension.

The noncoincidence with language, and, likewise, the hybridity of the human being fomented by mimesis (another form of noncoincidence as nonidentity), is akin to what Virno calls the “singular and fragile whole” of friendship.39 The grammar of friendship is one that signals no-adherence and illustrates an alternative economy of noncoincidence. Just like the grammar of to have indicates a relation between a subject and something else and not a possession, friendship names the moment in which an unsaturable break in anthropological life is brought into relief. A friend is not a twin soul but rather the opposite: In friendship resonates the alterity that already inhabits us. Friendship names the emergence of something that is not familiar.40 A friend is somebody we might have because friendship illustrates the difference that we embody and enjoy. According to Virno, “noncoincidence” is the existential trait that we enjoy in a friend. This difference is precisely the zone of nonadherence that informs our relationship with language as well as the relationships we have with our bodies.

Admittedly, a politics of friendship has serious limitations when adopted as a political agenda. But Virno’s analysis of friendship uncovers a relation to alterity that may help us overcome the limits of the Girardian system. The sacrificial machine throws blame and hatred onto one person, the scapegoat, who is also the twin double of the enemy. Here Girard seems to replicate a superficial definition of friend versus enemy that Carl Schmitt himself at times slipped into, where friends are those who share the same rival. In this sense, it is the common opponent that creates cohesiveness in a group. Virno, however, argues that in Schmitt’s thought, the enemy is essentially a concept that is grounded in sovereignty and state power. The true antagonist is a set of “collective subjects who fight over the monopoly of decision of the State.”41 Hence the friend is not the opposite of the enemy because “friendship has no points of contact with state sovereignty,” not because it is a private affair but because it belongs to those ontological conditions that make human existence possible.42

What must be grasped is that friendship, as an ontological category, allows us to make experience of the constitutional difference that we embody as speaking animals. Virno writes that “in order for the human animal to encounter another itself (hetero autos), it is essential that it not fully identify with its salient prerogatives [language]. It is necessary that this animal have, and won’t be, a body . . . with a predisposition for speech.”43 Though our biological ex-centricity enables amicable relationships, such otherness is not the sole reason for friendship, else we should all be friends—we all have the ontological disconnect that Virno links to friendship. Noncoincidence resonates in the encounter with the other because it gives birth to the expression of a particular approach to the nonidentity with oneself. To express this affinity, Virno employs the term style. Friendship is based on a stylistic mode of expression—a reliable praxis, in other words, an idiosyncratic bridge that keeps friends in a virtuous, interpersonal dialogue. Virno calls this a phatic, performative, and usually gamelike dimension, for “no community of philoi exists without famous sentences that liturgically renew the initial connection of votive formulas.”44 Friends are the practitioners of new idiolects that articulate a certain way of inhabiting each other’s otherness.45

When looking at friendship from the point of view of noncoincidence, we gain access to an idea of the other that differs from the fantastic entity that models and unifies desire via mimetic rivalry—it bears noting that Virno considers issues like envy, as well as honor, betrayal, and shame, as part of friendship. The irreducibility of alterity is a fracture that springs from the self to the bond between individuals. This fracture becomes the gravitational force that fuels the encounter and the process of growth of friendship modulated by a specific flagrance or style, as observed. The significance of the role played by otherness emerges precisely at the end of a friendship. What happens in these unfortunate cases? Virno notes that when the noncoincidence of the alterity that inhabits us vanishes, friendship ends too. Here the verb to be domesticates the intractability of the verb to have; what is left is a sterile determination: My friend is selfish, conservative, and so on. The reduction of friendship to a fixed state liquidates the vitality of the cohabitation with alterity. Thus the indirect and mysterious link with the other that I am is severed and obscured.

The grammar of friendship strikes to the core of a new ecosocial perspective because it illustrates the significance of alterity (ex-centricity) and its modulation (creative expression), thus providing a basic template for a postanthropocentric understanding of nature. What are the implications of having a creek, or even a forest, as a friend? I invite the reader to ponder this question. It would probably entail resisting the idea of considering the environment as something dispensable or that, paternalistically, needs a savior. What’s more, it would also push us to welcome a radical alterity and articulate it in unpredictable, hybridized ways. In this respect, an economy of noncoincidence overcomes Girard’s depiction of transcendence as a device for the mobilization of a centered subject. With the expression fuori di sè, “beyond itself” or ex-centric, Virno indicates a self (an interiority) that grounds its selfness outside its interiority and conversely an exteriority that is contaminated by interiority. This is why Virno redefines transcendence as that domain that “seems situated outside oneself, thus manifesting itself under the guise of detachment and non-identity,” and concludes that “transcendence is the exteriority of what is interior.”46 Transcendence is the result of noncoincidence and separation because it emerges as an essence that we “have” and thus cannot possess. While transcendence is summarized by the sentence “I have what I am”—which neoliberalism misrepresents as “I own what I am,” immanence is expressed by the opposite—“I am what I have.”47 Immanence is the second moment of noncoincidence, when the subject is adroit in those faculties (like style) and “prerogatives that however, remain extrinsic and separated” from it.48 The economy of rank crumbles once noncoincidence is brought to the foreground. As a unifying principle of rank, transcendence loses its control over the symbolic field because it appears as an illusory projection of a discontinuity, nonidentity, or contradiction. Immanence is the lived-out emanation of that contradiction. It forces us to stare at that abyss without abstraction, such as the invention of a natural infinity capable of absorbing the neoliberal appetite for endless growth or the trick of salvation. In fact, the point of view of noncoincidence finds an application at an economic level, as I discuss in part 2.

Notes

1. 1. Aaron Schuster, “The Debt Drive: Philosophical Anthropology and Political Economy,” YouTube video, https://youtu.be/Pno5X5AV0UM.

2. 2. See Andrea Righi, The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

3. 3. James Osborne, “Climate Change Doubt Voiced,” Houston Chronicle, March 8, 2017.

4. 4. Although Girard does not discuss it, Jacques Lacan had already given a full and more balanced expression to this notion, which he formulated on the backbone of phenomenology—the conclusion (a veritable theorem) being that “the gaze I encounter is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.” Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973 (W. W. Norton, 1999), 81.

5. 5. René Girard, To Double Business Bound (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 91.

6. 6. Matteo Maria Boiardo, L’Orlando innamorato (Poetry in Translation, 2022), https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/BoiardoBookICantoI.php#anchor_Toc90806517.

7. 7. Girard, To Double Business Bound, 91.

8. 8. Girard, 94.

9. 9. Girard, 91.

10. 10. Nikolaus Wandinger, “Religion and Violence: A Girardian Overview,” Journal of Religion and Violence 1, no. 2 (2013): 130.

11. 11. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 37.

12. 12. Girard, 14.

13. 13. Girard, To Double Business Bound, 111.

14. 14. Wandinger, “Religion and Violence,” 132.

15. 15. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford University Press, 1987), 182.

16. 16. The good news of the Gospels rests on the idea that “they avoided sacralizing the victim as the guilty party and prevented him [Jesus] from being held responsible for the purely human disorders that his death was supposed to end.” Girard, 194.

17. 17. Girard, 195.

18. 18. Girard writes that the misunderstanding of the true meaning of the passion induces Christianity to “re-establish cultural forms which remain sacrificial, . . . still clinging to the sacrificial vision that the Gospels rejects” (181).

19. 19. Girard, 214.

20. 20. Girard, 215.

21. 21. The male imaginary constructs itself as self-sufficient and self-positing because it interdicts the symbolic dimension of the mother. See Righi, Other Side of the Digital, 3–7.

22. 22. René Girard, “Innovation and Repetition,” Substance 19, no. 62/63 (1990): 17. He also bashes the counterculture of 1968 for having waged a war against the sanctity of imitation (17).

23. 23. Toril Moi, “The Missing Mother: The Oedipal Rivalries of René Girard,” Diacritics 12 (1982): 29.

24. 24. Moi, 29.

25. 25. Slavoj Žižek argues that the dominant tonality of neoliberal society is one that, however, does not believe and yet still acts in a certain way. See Žižek, “Believe It or Not,” Drawbridge, no. 1 (2006). The possibility of disavowal undermines the power of revelation precisely by undoing the effects of truth that Girard cherishes so much. The problem here is not only the long-standing misunderstanding of Jesus’s message but also the possibility that people perfectly understood it and nonetheless decided to follow the violent authority of the mythical world.

26. 26. Robert Pfaller, Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 8.

27. 27. Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Macmillan, 1915), 34. Similarly, studying tarantism, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino illustrated the use of musical practices aimed at reintegrating presence into the life of peasant society. See De Martino, The Land of Remorse (Free Association Books, 2005).

28. 28. Roberto Marchesini, Over the Human: Post-Humanism and the Concept of Animal Epiphany (Springer, 2017), 109–13.

29. 29. Marchesini, 107. Eccentricity, Marchesini concludes, produces hominization precisely “when the human phylogenetic body melts to give life to a symbolic hybrid body that transcends the former because it has been infected with the predicates of difference” (107). Paolo Virno uses instead a notion of eccentricity borrowed from Helmut Plessner that is highly problematic because it devalues animals by reducing them to entities overdetermined by their environment. My analysis deliberately diverges from Virno’s Plessnerian paradigm.

30. 30. Paolo Virno, An Essay on Negation: For a Linguistic Anthropology (Seagull Books, 2018), 7 (modified).

31. 31. Vittorio Gallese, “The Two Sides of Mimesis: Mimetic Theory, Embodied Simulation, and Social Identification,” in Mimesis and Science (Michigan State University Press, 2011), 91.

32. 32. Virno, An Essay on Negation, 11.

33. 33. Virno, 13.

34. 34. Virno, 18.

35. 35. Virno, 19.

36. 36. Virno, 20.

37. 37. Paolo Virno, E così via, all’infinito: Logica e antropologia (Bollati Boringhieri, 2010), 159.

38. 38. Virno, 159.

39. 39. Paolo Virno, Avere: Sulla natura dell’animale loquace (Bollati Boringhieri, 2020), 79.

40. 40. Virno here is drawing on Aristotle’s definition of a friend as somebody who is by definition an other (xenos). A friend comes not from the household but from outside.

41. 41. Virno, 55.

42. 42. Virno, 57.

43. 43. Virno, 57–58.

44. 44. Virno, 81.

45. 45. Virno does not discuss the first induction to difference that happens on the maternal continuum. Although the otherness that the child begins to articulate through his relationship with the mother (or whoever occupies that position) and language is a structural element, it is true that this otherness finds a new degree of introspection when the child develops relationships outside the family.

46. 46. Virno, 183.

47. 47. Virno, 184–85. My understanding of transcendence differs from Virno’s.

48. 48. Virno, 185.