Anorexia and Mimetic Desire

By René Girard, Mark R. Anspach

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2013 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-087-0

Contents

Foreword, by Jean-Michel Oughourlian, translated by M. B. DeBevoise……..viiIntroduction: Anorexia and the Spirit of the Times, by Mark R. Anspach…..xvEating Disorders and Mimetic Desire, by René Girard……………………1A Conversation with René Girard, with Mark R. Anspach and Laurence Tacou…45

CHAPTER 1

Eating Disordersand Mimetic Desire

René Girard

Among younger women, eating disorders are reaching epidemicproportions. The most widespread and spectacularat this moment is the most recently identified, the so-calledbulimia nervosa, characterized by binge eating followed by”purging,” sometimes through laxatives or diuretics, moreoft en through self-induced vomiting. Some researchers claimthat in American colleges at least one third of the femalestudent population is involved to some degree. (Since nineout of ten sufferers are women I will use feminine pronounsin this paper, but some undergraduates at Stanford tell methat the epidemic is spreading to male students.)

G.M.F. Russell, the first researcher who focused on thespecific aspects of modern bulimia, is usually presented as thediscoverer of a new illness. The title of his 1979 publicationcontradicts this view: “Bulimia Nervosa: An Ominous Variantof Anorexia Nervosa.” And, indeed, all the symptomshe describes had been mentioned before in connection withanorexia (see Bruch).

The insurance companies and the medical profession likeonly well-defined illnesses, and so does the public. We all tryto distance ourselves from pathological contamination bygiving it a name. Eating disorders are oft en discussed as if theywere new varieties of measles or of typhoid fever.

Why distrust the distinction between two illnesses withsymptoms as radically opposed as those of anorexia andbulimia? Because we live in a world where eating too muchand not eating enough are opposite but inseparable waysof coping with the slenderness imperative that dominatesour collective imaginations. Most of us oscillate all our livesbetween attenuated forms of these two pathologies.

The layperson understands perfectly a truth that mostspecialists prefer not to confront. Our eating disorders arecaused by our compulsive desire to lose weight. Most bookson the subject acknowledge the universal calorie phobia butsomewhat absent-mindedly, as if it could not be the majorcause of a serious illness. How could a fundamentally healthydesire become the cause of pathological behavior, even ofdeath?

Many people would be healthier, no doubt, if they ateless. In view of this fact, it is not illogical to suppose that,in anorexia, there must be some motivation other than thishealthy desire, some unconscious drive, no doubt, that generatesabnormal behavior. By turning anorexia and bulimiainto two separate pathologies, the classifiers make it easierfor us to lose sight of their common basis.

The Bankruptcy of Modern Theories

The search for hidden motivations is the alpha and omega,of course, of our modern culture. Our number one principleis that no human phenomenon is really what it seemsto be. A satisfactory interpretation must rely on one of thehermeneutics of suspicion that have become popular in thenineteenth and twentieth century, or on several of these, ona cocktail of soupçon: psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, etc.We automatically assume that social phenomena have littleif anything to do with what is obvious in them, in this casethe rejection of food.

In anorexia, psychoanalysts usually diagnose “a refusalof normal sexuality,” due to the patient’s excessive desire “toplease her father,” etc. These explanations are still invoked inbooks being written right now but the voice is growing fainter.Around this sort of thing the smell of mustiness is overpowering.Even in Lacan’s own land, the old arrogance is gone.

Early in my life, I had an opportunity to observe that theeating practices of young women have nothing to do witha desire to please their fathers. Just before World War II, apretty cousin of mine was dieting furiously, and her father, myuncle, was storming about helplessly, trying to get her to eatmore. Fathers, as a rule, are not pleased to see their daughtersstarve themselves. This particular father was also a physician,at a time when the medical profession had not yet caught thedisease it was already trying to cure.

This uncle was our family doctor and, as such, had greatprestige in my eyes, at least until that day. I had not yet readFreud but my later skepticism regarding his conception offatherhood may well originate in this incident. I immediatelyperceived that my cousin was listening to a command morepowerful than her father’s desire and, with the passing of time,this more authoritative voice has become louder and louder.It emanates from the people who really count in our adolescenceand who are our peers and contemporaries rather thanour fathers. The individual models of young people reinforcethe authority of the collective models which are the media,Hollywood, and television. The message is always the same:we have to get thinner, regardless of the cost.

The compulsive dieters really want to be thin, and mostof us are secretly aware of this because most of us also wantto be thin. All our convoluted systems of explanation, basedon sexuality, social class, power, the tyranny of male overfemale, and tutti quanti are floundering on this ridiculousbut irrefutable fact. The capitalist system is no more responsiblefor this situation than fathers are, or the malegender as a whole.

The capitalist system is clever enough, no doubt, to adjustto the rage for thinness and it invents all sorts of productssupposedly capable of helping us in our battle against calories,but its own instinct runs the other way. It systematically favorsconsumption over abstinence, and it certainly did not inventour dieting hysteria.

It is the intellectual beauty of our eating disorders at thispoint in our history that they make manifest the bankruptcyof all the theories that continue to dominate our universities.

The problem is not that these eating disorders are too complexfor our current systems of interpretation—which wouldmake our explicators salivate with delight. The problem is thatthey are too simple, too readily intelligible.

The Need for Common Sense

All we need, to understand the symptoms described by thespecialists, is to observe our own behavior with food. At sometime or other, most of us experience at least an attenuatedversion of the various symptoms that characterize our twomain eating disorders. When things are not going well, wetend to take refuge in some form of excess, which turns intoa quasi-addiction.

Since food is still the least dangerous drug, most of us resortto a mild form of bulimia. When the situation improves,we revive our New Year resolutions and we go on a strict diet.Feeling in control once again, we experience a psychologicallift not unlike the exhilaration of the true anorexic.

Between these “normal” oscillations on the one hand,and bulimia and anorexia on the other hand, the distance isgreat, no doubt, but the path is unbroken. We all have thesame goal, to lose weight, and, to some of us, this goal is soimportant that the means to reach it no longer matter. Quiveut la fin veut les moyens. The anorexic pattern of behaviormakes sense within the context not of our nominal valuesbut of what we silently teach our children when we stopchattering about values.

Both the anorexic and the bulimic manage to reduce theircalorie intake to a level that will reach or exceed the degreeof thinness generally regarded as desirable at any given time.The true anorexic is able to reach this goal directly, simply byrefraining from eating. The bulimic reaches this goal indirectlyby eating as much as she pleases and then by vomitingmuch of the food she absorbs. In the competition for absolutethinness, the true anorexic is Julius Caesar, Alexander theGreat, and Napoleon all rolled into one. In quite a few cases,she does so well that she literally starves herself to death.

Contrary to what the etymology of the word deceptivelysuggests, the anorexic has an appetite. She still wants to eatjust as much as we do and much more, because she is hungrierthan we are. Some anorexic patients fear that if they ate asingle bite, they would never stop eating. In other words theywould become bulimic. And this is, indeed, what occasionallyhappens. That is why these people never relax. Through superhumaneffort, they have triumphed over their normal instinct,and now the spirit of unnatural thinness possesses them socompletely that the notion of demonic possession suits theircase better than the vocabulary of modern psychiatry. Thefood they formerly craved becomes truly repugnant. Everytime their doctor or some well-meaning relative tricks theminto absorbing some nourishment, they feel nauseated. Theyknow that, in a single instant, they may lose everything theyworked so hard to acquire. Their love-hate relationship tofood is understandable. Their tremendous energy in everythingthey undertake fulfills a dual purpose: it takes theirmind away from the desire to eat and it helps them lose moreweight.

Anorexia strikes the best and the brightest among ouryoung women. The typical victim is well educated, talented,ambitious, eager for perfection. She is the super-achiever typeand she knows she is playing by the rules suggested by themost powerful voices in our culture, including the medicalprofession. Researchers at the Harvard medical school haverecently “discovered” that the weight formerly regarded asideal for women is too high by twenty-five per cent and thelowering of it would give women “a much better chance ofsurvival.”

The anorexic is too loyal a citizen of our crazy world tosuspect that, as she listens to the unanimous spirit of weightreduction, she is being pushed towards self-destruction.No one can convince her that she is really ill. She interpretsall attempts to help her as envious conspiracies of peoplewho would like to cheat her out of her painfully acquiredvictory, being unable to match it. She is proud to fulfill whatis perhaps the one and only ideal still common to our entiresociety, slenderness.

Many women would like to be anorexics but, fortunately,very few succeed. Even though genuine anorexia is statisticallyas much on the rise as the other eating disorders, it remainsrare in absolute numbers. Success is so difficult to achievethat the failures are countless. The bulimics are would-beanorexics who, despairing of ever making it, go all the way tothe other extreme. And then, through artificial means, theymanage to cancel out the effects of their constantly repeateddefeats. Which explains why, in the vomiting type of bulimia,the prognosis is better than in true anorexia.

The vomiting bulimic is still a winner of sorts. As a matterof fact, unlike the true anorexic, she can be just as thin asfashion demands and no more. In the first stages of her illness,when the physical consequences of her eating practices havenot materialized, she may feel as satisfied with herself as heranorexic sister. She can eat her cake and yet not have it inher stomach long enough to assimilate the hated calories.Ultimately, her health deteriorates and she pays dearly forher binges—but not in respect to what matters most to her.She never becomes overweight.

Exercising

Given the topsy-turvy relationship of our culture to food, itis not the rise in eating disorders which is astonishing but thefact, rather, that so many people eat more or less normally.Contrary to what our nihilists and relativists tell us, there is ahuman nature, and its resiliency is such that it oft en managesto adjust to the weirdest cultural insanities.

In order to cope with the thinness imperative withoutgetting involved in practices that endanger their health ordestroy their self-respect, many people have a secret weapon:they exercise. Much of their time is spent walking, running,jogging, bicycling, swimming, jumping, climbing mountains,and practicing other horribly boring and strenuous activitiesfor the sole purpose of eliminating unwanted calories.

The irritating aspect of exercise is its politically correctjustification in terms of outdoor living, communion withnature, the earth mother, Thoreau, Rousseau, ecology, healthyliving, the plight of victims, and the other usual excuses. Theonly real motivation is the desire to lose weight.

A few months ago, The Stanford Daily published thestatement of some resident psychiatrist, I believe, assertingthat quite a few female students make an excessive andcompulsive use of gymnastic facilities. In the near future,I suppose, this person will be officially credited with thediscovery of an entirely new syndrome, gymnastica nervosaperhaps, or jogging bulimia …

Don’t we need a special label, as well, for these fattishprofessors who drag themselves up the Stanford hills carryingone heavy weight in each hand? They obviously believe thatthe more excruciating their ordeal, the more profitable itwill be in terms of personal rejuvenation. With perspirationstreaming down their faces, blinding their wildly imploringeyes, they evoke the more exotic tortures in Dante’s Inferno.Being tenured, they could spend their lives comfortably andsecurely. The spectacle they offer makes one wonder if thepoet’s description of hell is as outrageous after all as claimedby our humanists. If they, themselves, voluntarily recreatethe worst aspects of hell in their leisure time, with no outsidecompulsion, they unwittingly demonstrate the realism theyimprudently question.

What am I doing myself on these Stanford hills? … Is thatyour question? It has no relevance to our topic and deservesno answer. I will point out, though, that no one has ever seenme carrying anything in my hands for the purpose of makingmyself heavier than I am.

We live at a time when the healthiest and the unhealthiestactions can have the same motivation. The true reason whymany young people, especially women, join the ranks ofsmokers, these days, or do not give up smoking, not even atthe urging of their Government, is the fear of gaining weight,a fear which this same Government, curiously, does its bestto foster and intensify.

The Mimetic Nature of Modern Eating Disorders

What is the cause of all this? As I already observed, we canno longer blame the favorite institutional scapegoats beatento death by our master thinkers of the last two centuries.These beasts of burden have all collapsed long ago, just likeNietzsche’s famous horse in Turin. One can go on beatingdead horses for several decades, no doubt, especially ingraduate seminars but, even there, there will be an end. Noone can really believe that our families, the class system, themale gender as a whole, the Christian churches, or even arepressive university administration, might be responsiblefor what is going on.

Sooner or later, we must finally identify the fierce andlively obstacle that modern and postmodern theories neveranticipate, the uninvited guest that no one ever expects, themimetic rival. As long as they are respected, the hated prohibitionskeep this living commendatore out of sight. They makemimetic rivalry more difficult, if not impossible.

Both modernism and postmodernism are helpless whenconfronted with the intensification of mimetic rivalry thatnecessarily accompanies the dissolving of all prohibitions.Like those insects that go on building their nests when theireggs are gone, our modernists and postmodernist teacherswill keep blaming the dead prohibitions until doomsday,but their students, some day, should finally question thisdogma.

A few years ago, a popular formula of our contemporaryindividualism was: looking out for number one. If we werehappy with ourselves, we should not have to look out foranything, we should not always be on the lookout. When welook around, most of us discover that, far from being numberone, we are lost in the crowd. In everything that matters tous, there is always someone who seems superior, in looks, inintelligence, in wealth, and most dreadful of all these days, inslenderness. Even a radical shift from the deconstructors tothe Eastern mystics will not give us the peace we are lookingfor. Westerners are always forced into action, and when theyno longer imitate heroes and saints they are drawn into theinfernal circle of mimetic futility. Even at that level, especiallyat that level, the number one status can be achieved onlythrough hard work and cutthroat competition.
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