Desire and Anathema: Mimetic

Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude

K. Roberts Skerrett

Rene Girard argues that human desire based on a fundamental experi-

ence of lack leads inevitably to mimetic rivalry and violence. In response,
both secular and theological thinkers have tried to articulate modes of
desire based on plenitude rather than lack. This article compares efforts
by James Hans (from a secular perspective) and John Milbank (from a
theological perspective) to define modes of desire based on fullness.
While I affirm their objective, the article explores how arguments in
support of desire based on plenitude get implicated in mimetic rivalry.
I use political theorist William Connolly to trace connections between
the fullness of desire and the urge to anathematize, rather than oppose, a
rival position. I argue that affirmations of desire based on fullness must
remain alert to the emergence of rivalry and violence in their course.

W E DESIRE BEFORE we know what we want. Yet what we want is of

great consequence. In Violence and the Sacred Rene Girard develops a
systematic account of the connections among desire, rivalry, and vio-
lence. We are subject to intense desires, without knowing what we want,
according to Girard, because what we want is being. Desire expresses our
lack of being, a fundamental yet amorphous lack. We look around and
see others who seem to have being, and so we desire to be like them. We
orient our desires according to prestigious models, such as parents,
teachers, or leaders. We want to become like them by wanting what they
want and by acquiring what they have. This means, according to Girard,
that human desires inevitably converge on the same objects. Rivalry is the
consequence of mimetic desire, which leads to socially endemic envy,
frustration, and violence (1977: 145–149).

K. Roberts Skerrett is an assistant professor of religious studies at Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA

50112-1690.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion December 2003, Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 793–809
DOI: 10.1093/jarrel/lfg099
© 2003 The American Academy of Religion
794 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Girard’s assumption that desire expresses lack—and that we value

mimetically what others desire—has been challenged by theologians and
secular thinkers alike. These challengers argue that an account of desire
based on lack neglects the experience of gratification in desiring. For there
seem to be desires that do not find fruition in competition or appropriation
but, rather, create resonant spaces among beings. There are times when what
we desire is to enjoy proximity with others rather than possession of them or
their possessions. Such desire is not envious; it illumines the spaces between
beings, discovers patterns and fortuities everywhere; and those discoveries
regenerate our wonder at the plenitude of life. So it is possible to give an
account of desire based on fullness, of desire that is creative and affirming.
Yet theologians and secular philosophers who account for desire in
terms of fullness often isolate the connection between desire and lack in the
intellectual habits of those whose fundamental convictions they reject.1 The
purpose of this article is to analyze the uncanny return of mimetic rivalry in
accounts of desire based on fullness. I begin with a brief exposition of
Girard’s theory of desire and violence. I then explore two positions that
respond to Girard with accounts of desire based on fullness, a secular
account from James Hans and a theological account from John Milbank.
Both Hans and Milbank have wise things to say about desire, and their
positions converge at significant points. Both uphold the importance of
our fundamental convictions about the context in which we live to our
experience of desire; both view desire as a creative source of value in human
life. Yet a vengeful blade runs along the edges of their work where the
fundamental convictions of others are held off as pathological intrusions
on what is real. Each finds occasion to delineate a rival position, which he
anathematizes rather than opposes. By this I mean that the rival position
is not contested; it is, rather, treated as a parasitical formation, a non-
position taken up perversely by those who refuse the plenitude of life.
Desire based on lack is declared to spring from these rival beliefs, which
must be exposed as nothing in order to realize desire based on fullness. For
all their pleasure in generosity, Hans and Milbank end up issuing mutual
anathemas; they become mirror images of each other.2 After comparing

1
This rhetorical strategy has precedents. Anders Nygren, in his classic Agape and Eros,
distinguishes between acquisitive desire (eros) and unmotivated desire (agape). He claims: “Agape is
Christianity’s own original basic conception” (48). More recently, feminist theologians and theorists
have argued for a feminist eros in opposition to patriarchal forms of desire. See Brock; Heyward; and
Trask. But for criticism of this strategy in feminist theology, see Sands.
2
Girard anticipates that mimetic rivalry is likely to culminate in this mirroring effect: “The
resemblance between the combatants grows ever stronger until each presents a mirror image of the
other” (1977: 47). Meanwhile, Girard takes aim at every theological or antitheological perspective
that proposes to “liberate” desire by attacking a “scapegoat” that purportedly establishes a barrier to
desire (1987: 285).
 Skerrett: Mimetic Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude 795

Hans and Milbank, I turn to political theorist William Connolly for help
in considering why rivalry recurs even where desire based on fullness is
affirmed. My purpose is to consider how affirmations of fullness get caught
up in practices of anathema against others whose images of the funda-
mental context of life seem to compromise our own.

RENE GIRARD: RIVALRY AND VIOLENCE

In his influential book Violence and the Sacred (published in French
in 1972) Rene Girard describes what he takes to be the basic structure of
desire in human life. Our desires are mobilized according to prestigious
models that both attract and proscribe our imitation of them. We desire
to be like the model, who may actually encourage our imitation to a
point, but the more successful our mimetic desire becomes, the more
likely it is to inspire fear or rage in the model, who perceives it as a desire
to supplant him or her. The rivalry that mimetic desire inspires leads to
efforts to contain difference as disparity by threats, violence, and exclu-
sion. Conflict, frustration, and resentment, Girard argues, are the inevi-
table outcome of mimetic desire. Moreover, because the value of any
desired object is a function of it being desirable to someone else, inter-
est in competition can quickly supersede interest in the object itself.
Eventually, the desire to defeat the rival overtakes every other desire, so
that mimetic desire has no internal principle of satisfaction. Mimetic
desire leads to mimetic violence in a spiral that can escalate without
end (Girard 1977: 145–149).
In Girard’s account violence is a kind of infection. It is a force that must
be vented; it will be hurled upon some object, although it allows for sub-
stitutions among objects (Girard 1977: 45). Therefore, human societies,
over time, accumulate rifts of envy, frustration, and vengefulness, which
threaten to break out in the limitless violence of all against all. The only
solution to potentially cataclysmic violence that humans have discovered,
Girard argues, is sacrificial catharsis. Periodically, therefore, societies direct
all their accumulated animosity into a unanimous attack on a surrogate
victim. To break the cycle of violence requires a scapegoat, that is, a victim
who can be attacked without fear of reprisal. The attack on the victim
generates an extraordinary catharsis of unanimity, dissolving internal
rivalries and conflicts in a temporary peace. For Girard, this is the only
kind of peace that mimetic desire can enjoy. Yet it feels so extraordinary
to the members of the society that they attribute it to a supernatural
source. The victim him- or herself may come to be regarded as a holy
person, and the violence against the victim may be remembered as
a sacred moment in the life of the community (Girard 1977: 78–87, 1987:
796 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

92–95).3 Religion, law, and culture, then, emerge as institutional means

to mitigate, as well as to mystify, the necessity of sacrificial catharsis for
relieving the endemic tensions of mimetic desire (Girard 1977: 92–103).
Our sacred institutions and rituals work to hide the need for surro-
gate victims, who can be attacked without reprisal (Girard 1987: 23–27,
122–123). In Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (published
in French in 1978) Girard’s argument takes an apologetic turn. He argues
that Christian revelation exposes the connections among mimetic desire,
rivalry, and the limitless destructiveness of violence. Meanwhile, the
gospels take the side of the sacrificial victim, Jesus, in order to reveal the
rivalry and violence that are concealed by the very institutions that claim
to be the foundation of a peaceful community. Over against this exposure,
Jesus invites a simple mimesis, one that is nonacquisitive, noncompeti-
tive, and nonviolent. In other words, he inspires mimetic desire that
would compose the kingdom of God (Girard 1987: 429–431).
Girard’s theory is relentless and piercing.4 It explains how the
extraordinary conditions of plenty, in which many North Americans live,
have done little to defuse the experience of desire as lack. On the con-
trary, the richest and most privileged among us can be the most envious
of goods and status and the most vengeful when denied. Success at
mimetic rivalry is plainly not expansive satisfaction but, rather, more
expensive mimetic desire. The modern incitement of mimetic desire to
unbridled consumer consumption has unleashed systematic violence
against vulnerable communities, against the very conditions of life as we
know it. Girard’s analysis makes one thing clear: Mimetic desire, as he
describes it, is a disaster for the planet.
Yet there is more to desire than lack. We experience desire as lack but
also as praise, as frustration but also as enchantment. Mimetic desire
does not simply want objects; it wants meaningful life, higher life. I turn,
then, to explore two accounts of desire that highlight the creative and
life-affirming qualities of desire, one by literary critic James Hans and the
other by Anglican theologian John Milbank.

3
Anyone who was living in the United States after 11 September 2001 will recall the extraordinary
“violent unanimity” of the nation for a war against Afghanistan that miraculously resolved dramatic
political tensions and gave George W. Bush presidential authority that the electoral process had
failed to deliver. This violent unanimity in the American context made it almost impossible to notice
that the Taliban and Afghan people were surrogate victims, used to relieve the intolerable tensions of
rivalry and vengefulness generated by, first, a cliffhanger election and, second, the attacks of
(primarily Saudi) terrorists on American targets.
4
There is strong critical literature on Girard’s theory, which I will not engage here. See, e.g.,
Livingston. For feminist criticism, see, e.g., Jay and Moi. See also the review of Violence and the
Sacred by Ninian Smart.
 Skerrett: Mimetic Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude 797

JAMES HANS AND JOHN MILBANK: IN THE MIRROR

In The Fate of Desire James Hans observes that in contemporary western
societies mimetic desires are “avidly trained” (195). We are not supposed
to admit that our desires are mimetic; yet we are not taught to experience
the presence or possibility of any other kind of desire (Hans: 88). Hans,
therefore, distinguishes between a mode of desire based on “hostility and
territoriality (desire as lack)” and a mode based “on a sense of the abun-
dance of the world, on the sheer gratuitous excess of what is available to
us (desire as fullness)” (226). In order to diminish the power of the first
mode over our lives, Hans advocates a practice of self-discipline. A prac-
tice of self-discipline, as Hans intends it, means becoming aware of
the multiplicity of desires in order to discover those that contribute to
our sense of abundance. Self-discipline, Hans suggests, means learning
through experience how to discern those desires that are appropriate to
our particular history and context. Self-discipline means “simply know-
ing what one wants,” without claiming autonomy over those wants
(Hans: 99). The practice of self-discipline leads to the knowledge that
human selves are not autonomous subjects. The image of the autono-
mous self is “a definition in flight from the reality it purports to define”
(Hans: 29). We do not choose to be occupied by lust, envy, grief, or
resentment; they well up in us in the context of our relations with others.
Instead, Hans proposes, we should conceive of ourselves as “densities
within fields of play.” Our desires well up in the context of particular
relations; yet over time they accumulate a certain density and singularity
as we pursue certain opportunities, which foreclose others. Thus, the
experience of desire is composed of our relational context interwoven
with our singular attitudes and moods. If our attitude becomes closed
and defensive, then we are likely to experience new desires as threatening;
if our attitude becomes open, then we are more likely to interpret new
desires affirmatively. For there are many desires that express what Hans
calls our “simple delight in being.” Some desires direct us, like children who
love to twirl, to the pleasures of motion, vertigo, and surprise (Hans: 175).
Hans’s appreciation of the fullness of desire is indebted to his reading
of Milan Kundera’s “theory of fortuities.” In the narrative voice of The
Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera observes that his characters create
symbols of “higher life” out of coincidences over which they have no
control. The contingencies that flow over their lives are a matter of
chance, but their grasp of certain of these coincidences as fortuitous
events is the creative work of their desire and imagination. Kundera’s
basic metaphor is musical: “[Our lives] are composed like music. Guided
by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence . . .
798 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition

of the individual’s life” (cited in Hans: 158–160). An individual’s sense of
beauty makes one alert to fortuities that seem to “flutter down” on one’s
unforgettable moments of decision and love. The constant interplay
between one’s individual sense of beauty and the plenitude of con-
tingency shapes one’s singular response to the world. Every day we are
swept by contingencies, which offer innumerable possibilities of coin-
cidence to our imagination. Desire guides us among these coincidences,
urging us to construe some as fortuities and to realize beautiful forms in
our lives. It is this creative and beautifying movement, Hans argues, that
proves that desire must be more than lack.
Yet, for all its appeal, Hans’s account of desire as fullness is spiked
with contempt for a sketchy yet haunting philosophy that he calls “west-
ern ontotheology.” Hans does not engage any opponents in detail; rather,
“western ontotheology” is a rubric that consolidates historically diverse
theological positions that constitute “the great ‘No,’ the decisive oppos-
ition to what is” (72). Hans’s judgments are categorical: “God” is an
index of our disappointment with what we have and disgust with what
we are or “a pure and simple refusal to accept the conditions of exist-
ence” (204–205). “Man” is merely our fantastic effort to appropriate
for ourselves the role we created for god. Consciousness, presence, and
ego are just euphemisms for man. In our postmodern condition we are
now divided, Hans argues, between those who continue to “celebrate
the great ‘No’ upon which the West is based and those who are repulsed
by it” (73).
The urge to mimetic rivalry that underlies these judgments is exposed
most clearly where Hans anticipates with indignation the possibility that
his idea of desire as fullness might be accommodated by, or even worse,
ascribed to, western ontotheology. He worries that fullness of desire
might be viewed as a symptom of incurable complicity in “an ontotheo-
logical system of values that is totally corrupt and long since dead” (203).
So to resolve this mimetic tension Hans sets up clear lines of demarcation.
Desire as lack and desire as fullness are not the same, and we have a
choice to make between them, a choice that will “engender greatly different
worlds” (Hans: 212). The old syndrome of “god–man–consciousness” must
be anathematized—despite already being quite dead—as the symptom of
desire as lack. Faith in God is the habit of “others who don’t believe in
god’s death—either out of convenience or poor hearing—and we need to
be protected from them” (Hans: 188).
John Milbank would certainly not shrink from the charge that he is
one of “them,” being a leading figure among “radical orthodox” theolo-
gians. Yet in Theology and Social Theory he offers a sustained exposition
 Skerrett: Mimetic Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude 799

of the contingent plenitude of being and the creative goodness of desire.

Milbank describes a Christian “ontology of peace,” in which rivalry and
vengefulness should be understood as “secondary intrusions” on a con-
text where desiring beings create harmonious patterns. He suggests a
musical image of the ontological priority of harmonious difference,
unfolding ex nihilo in the infinite creativity of God (1993: 423–429). The
musical image (which he uses again in a later article) offers the possibility
of “a consistently beautiful, continuously differential, and open series,”
in which there are “endings and displacements, yet there is no necessary
violence” (1997: 268). The image implies that “there are no things, no
substances, only shifting relations and generations in time.” At the nexus
of these relations are beings whose “sounding” only makes musical sense
in the context of their relation to other soundings. These beings have
“intense” phases of corporeal resonance, but they also have “incorporeal”
phases of memory and anticipation, as the sense of their sounding
changes in relation to new developments and resolutions. Milbank has in
mind, particularly, Baroque music, in which motifs unfold with “an
increasing ‘delay’ of resolutions, and an increasing generation of new
developments out of temporary resolutions.” He argues that Baroque
offers a musical image of “consonance stretched to its limit,” even as the
possibility of harmonious resolution is never denied (1993: 423–429).
Because there is no way to “prove” the priority of an ontology of peace
over an ontology of violence, Milbank (1993: 279) argues, both the theolo-
gian and the secular theorist must admit that their image of the context of
desire is a myth. We cannot know whether the dissonance that we experi-
ence is “a Baroque risk of harmony stretched to its limits” or a jarring
cacophony. Our openness to or denial of “musical grace” is ultimately a
matter of faith; and yet the consequences of such faith are practical. Like
Hans, Milbank suggests that our attitudes as well as our contextual rela-
tions determine our experience of desire. If we believe that dissonance
expresses the inevitability of violence, then we may become more acquisi-
tive, competitive, and vengeful. But if we believe that dissonance occurs in
a musical process that may yet move toward new resolutions and new
harmonies, then we may become more patient, more forgiving, and more
generous. The conviction for one image or the other is ultimately a matter
of trust that our image of the context—and the social practices it
supports—is worthy. Milbank anticipates resistance to the idea of an
“ontology of peace”: “How does it help to imagine a state of total peace,
when we are locked in a world of deep-seated conflict, which it would be
folly to deny or evade?” It helps, he argues, because “it allows us to unthink
the necessity of violence, and exposes the manner in which the assumption
of an inhibition of an always prior violence helps to preserve violence in
800 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

motion” (1993: 441). Like Hans, Milbank is committed to the practical

necessity of cultivating an attitude of open joy, in which our desire meets
other desires with a sense of the beauty created through and among us.
But Milbank’s theological practice has roots in Augustinian “heres-
iology” as much as Augustinian cosmology. Like Hans, Milbank makes
some categorical distinctions. He treats diverse postmodern theorists,
including Rene Girard, as proponents of a “single nihilistic philosophy”
that promotes an “ontology of violence” (1993: 278). Milbank rejects
Girard on three grounds. First, he charges that Girard assumes the arbi-
trary nature of desire, which necessitates that the value of an object is
generated by competition for it. The theory of mimetic desire cannot
conceive of “desire for the objectively desirable.” Second, the inextricable
connection that Girard forges between desire and rivalry means that for
him violence is necessarily endemic in human lives. Third, Milbank criti-
cizes Girard’s Christology. In Girard’s account Jesus reveals the secret of
the scapegoating mechanism while offering the example of refusing to
become implicated in rivalry or violence. But, as Milbank rightly points
out, the revelation of Jesus Christ becomes for Girard merely the dis-
closure of this refusal. Insofar as desire, in Girard’s account, is essentially
arbitrary, Girard cannot explain what would cause someone to desire to
imitate Jesus (Milbank 1993: 394–398).
Milbank’s own temptation to mimetic rivalry, however, gets exposed
at those points where he dissects his opponents for the purpose of show-
ing that they have “nothing” to say. In Theology and Social Theory modern
and postmodern social theories are explicitly addressed as “theologies or
anti-theologies in disguise.” They are, Milbank charges, “actually consti-
tuted as ‘heresy’ in relation to orthodox Christianity” (1993: 3). For Milbank,
this justifies the reassertion of “theology as a master discourse” because
“theology, alone, remains the discourse of non-mastery” (1993: 6).
Milbank has studied his opponents well, but his “demolition” of them
exposes an urge to rivalry and dominance; he sometimes gives the
impression of boxing his way to ontological peace.5 This temptation
leaves more subtle traces in a later essay, where Milbank disavows the
attempt to secure peace by exclusion of “others.” He insists that “no
difference whatsoever” should be excluded by Christian practice, “only
the negative, that which denies and takes away from Being: in other
words, the violent” (1997: 269). But violence, for Milbank, includes

5
For criticism and documentation of Milbank’s rhetorical practice, see Faber: 80–83. For the
“demolition” reference, see Milbank 1993: 1. Kieran Flanagan’s review seems to catch Milbank’s
belligerent mood with apparently unselfconscious admiration for Milbank’s use of a “theological
knife [to make] small but devastating cuts,” his “splendid swipe at liberation theology,” and so on.
 Skerrett: Mimetic Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude 801

anything that “stunts a person’s capacity to love and conceive of the

divine beauty.” In terms of his musical ontology violence means “an
unnecessarily jarring note, a note wrong because ‘out of place,’ or else the
premature ending of a development.” These “notes” should be excluded
because they disturb our sense of divine beauty (Milbank 1997: 268–
269). For Milbank, such rival accounts of the context in which we live are
not merely dissonant themes that may or may not reach harmonious
resolution; they are outside the composition, empty noise.
The musical image is appealing; yet it does work for Milbank that he
does not acknowledge. The composition of harmony is not spontaneous.
Baroque music employs a tonic key to organize perception of the dominant
themes, their contrapuntal development, and their temporary or final
resolution. Tonal music creates an experience of tension and “harmonious
resolution” by eventually subordinating all contrapuntal developments
to the dominant key. Milbank rightly implies that our sense of different
desires as being dissonant or reconcilable, as creating tension or achiev-
ing resolution, depends on the “tonal field” in which we “hear” them
sound. For a Christian, that key is the revelation of Christ, which attunes
one to the possibility of difference unfolding harmoniously in time and
orients one’s sense of the “place” of each tone in relation to the others.
But to argue, beyond this, that notes that sound “jarring” in a Christian
key may be anathematized on the grounds that they diminish one’s
conception of divine beauty belies the possibility of other kinds of
music. The musical image, for example, might have different polemical
import if the example were modern twelve-tone music. The Baroque
example implicitly asserts the necessity of a tonic key to organize unfold-
ing difference. Here Milbank’s musical image quietly asserts the desire
for mastery that theology as a discourse of nonmastery promised to
eschew.6
My comparison between Hans and Milbank shows that while each is
a lyrical proponent of desire based on plenitude, both seem to be drawn

6
Musical images offer rich and contested sites for theological and political reflection. For
discussion of the theological significance of western tonal music, see Begbie: especially 45–51. For
feminist criticism of the political significance of music and musicology, see McClary; and for
criticism of musical images in contemporary theology, see Epstein. Meanwhile, political theorist
Morton Schoolman, for example, uses Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions as an image of
political practice that accepts “the opacity of difference” (85). (Interestingly, he develops this insight
in order to criticize William Connolly’s “agonistic” pluralism [85–90].) Schoolman observes that
Schoenberg abandoned the tonic key in order to create music in which no tones or musical ideas
dominate the others. His twelve-tone compositions were variations on an arbitrarily arranged row of
the twelve tones. While there are structure and order in these compositions, no difference can be
considered “outside” the work, which is theoretically infinite (Schoolman: 83). Yet Jeremy Begbie
argues that experiments in “total serialism” were often unintelligible as music (188).
802 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

back into a pattern of rivalry. Each exposes a temptation to “displace” an

opponent, even though each perceives the danger of mimetic desire as
being precisely this urge to rivalry and revenge. Moreover, each one
identifies a rival position and disavows the need for rivalry with it. The
rival is anathematized rather than contested. I consider below why this
temptation of mimetic desire should recur in this way.

WILLIAM CONNOLLY: “‘RIVAL’ YOU SHALL SAY,

BUT NOT ‘HERETIC’”
I turn now to political theorist William Connolly because he has sys-
tematically developed the links between claims to peace, harmony, and
abundance—which he idiosyncratically refers to as “fundamentalist”—
and the urge to anathematize heretics. In The Augustinian Imperative
(originally published in 1993) Connolly argues that Christian “funda-
mentalism” preserves a sense of human desire attuned to the divine
moral order by anathematizing those who have another sense of things.
The Augustinian construes desire based on lack as a symptom of original
sin. Connolly rightly understands that, for Augustine, the perversion of
the will means that desire is no longer moved by delight in the plenitude
and goodness of creation but, instead, keeps “falling” into the lack or
nothingness out of which it was created (ex nihilo). The result is the
perennial experience of restlessness and concupiscence that distort
human lives. Connolly (2002a: 34–55) observes that Augustine’s account
of original sin preserves the doctrine of a divine moral order while blam-
ing human beings for their experience of desire as lack. Those who reject
these doctrinal moves are treated as morally infirm and intellectually
deprived: they are heretics. And heresy is not just an opposing inter-
pretation of the evidence; heresy is a perverse interpretation that has the
effect of undermining faith that “whatever is, is good.” The Augustinian
imperative to affirm desire based on fullness requires that “there
must be heresies,” Connolly argues, so that one’s own sense of “full-
ness” can be relieved of any haunting sense of lack, rivalry, or doubt
(2002a: 78–79).
Connolly argues that heresies are latent in any “fundamentalist” doc-
trine that affirms the priority of plenitude and harmony over scarcity and
strife, because dissonant experiences of rivalry and conflict leave their
mark on the lines of reflection that constitute them. Heretical reflections
may indeed comprise some of the arguments that generate orthodox
belief; “heretics” may originate ideas that are eventually canonized as
orthodoxy. But, at a certain point, the “fundamentalist” community
relieves the tensions of rivalry in its midst by anathematizing certain
 Skerrett: Mimetic Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude 803

figures.7 Heresy comes to be construed as a symptom of desire as lack; the

subject of heresy speaks from the very condition that one’s analysis has
shown to be pathological or perverse. The heretic is, therefore, not a rival
or an opponent but, rather, someone who should be anathematized
(Connolly 2002a: 74–85). In this respect the heretic serves a structurally
similar role in the context of desire based on fullness as the scapegoat
serves in the context of lack. The heretic is one upon whom all those
moments of recognition, borrowing, comparing, imitating, and striving
to surpass—all those mimetic debts that have gone into constituting
whatever orthodoxy we proclaim—can be discharged without redemp-
tion. The peace and clarity of unanimity that follows upon anathema
confers sacred authority on “fundamentalist” doctrine while simultan-
eously relieving orthodox thinkers of legitimate opponents.
Connolly’s argument points to a temptation that both haunts and
energizes efforts to imagine one’s desire based on the plenitude of being.
The persistence of rivalry, then, has to be explained. And insofar as desire
as lack must be located in sources other than the plenitude of being, it
must emanate from illusory or erroneous interpretations of being. The
defense of desire based on plenitude may then circle back into rivalry
with another position that it wants to displace and supplant (Connolly
2002a: 112–116). So proponents of desire based on plenitude become
implicated, paradoxically, in desire based on lack through mimetic
rivalry and anathema. This is not to say that desire based on plenitude is
merely a sophisticated version of desire based on lack but, rather, that a
paradoxical structure links them. The point is not to outsmart this
paradox with more rigorous accounts of plenitude but, in fact, to
acknowledge the recurrence of mimetic rivalry in order to avoid the
covert violence of anathema.
One can see how this temptation emerges in Milbank’s defense of
radical orthodoxy.8 For Milbank, desire based on delight in the harmo-
nious play of difference entails faith in the priority of ontological peace.
Milbank’s musical ontology is a version of Augustinian cosmology;
indeed, Milbank borrows the image from Augustine.9 The Christian’s
sense of tension as the development of contrapuntal themes that can
nonetheless be brought to a harmonious resolution occurs in relation
to the tonic key of Christ. The tonic key establishes the possibility of

7
Fora brilliant historical theological critique of this process, see Williams.
8
For different purposes, Thomas Heilke compares John Milbank’s and William Connolly’s
readings of Augustine in “On Being Ethical without Moral Sadism.” See also Roberts.
9
For discussion of Augustine’s ideas and experience of music, see Holsinger: especially chap. 2.
On Augustine’s theomusicology, cf. Begbie: 78–85.
804 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

harmonious resolution; it does not guarantee it, but that very possibility
fosters desire as delight in the beauty of the whole composition. Tension
does not necessitate rivalry or violence because it is heard as contrapuntal
development in relation to the tonic key. But Milbank rejects as heretics
those who deny the harmonious order or, worse, who suggest that the
tonic key affords an illusion of reconciliation by eventually subordinating
all contrapuntal developments to the dominant idea. But he will “step
outside” to meet his opponents rather than encounter them within his
harmonious ontology; they offer a mutually exclusive alternative to it.
Milbank (1997: 267–270) sometimes enters into direct rivalry with such
positions, allowing the criteria of dominance to be set by them, with the
object of besting them at their own game, so to speak. Ironically, the
temptation to rivalry appears particularly acute for Milbank in relation to
Girard (Kerr). Milbank has been greatly influenced by Girard, yet
Milbank works to displace him, ultimately rejecting Girard as one of
those heretics who promotes an “ontology of violence.” If one believes
that there is a choice to make between desire based on plenitude and desire
based on lack, then what would cause someone to “prefer” desire based
on lack except some deprivation of faith, grace, or love? The “jarring
notes” of lack, on this account, must be excluded as unnecessary intru-
sions because they stunt one’s own and others’ capacity for living in
attunement to divine beauty. Thus, Milbank’s conviction for ontological
peace becomes implicated with a movement of rivalry and violence that
defends the border of plenitude. The anathema that excludes his oppon-
ents is attributed to their “self-constitution” as heretics rather than to the
Christian discourse of nonmastery.
Meanwhile, the same temptation emerges in Hans’s work. It would
be pressing things to call him a “fundamentalist,” although it is clear that
he has a faith. Hans affirms no moral order, no sociality of harmonious
difference, yet he wants to uphold the abundance of being, the sufficiency
of a world where the “honey of common summer seems to be enough.”
The “form of beauty” that guides our desire to meet contingencies as
fortuities is not an ontological image for Hans; it is a contingent image
that enables concrete and spontaneous delight in the shifting patterns of
coincidences that befall us. Desire can delight in beauty, Hans argues,
without appeals to harmonious design or ultimate reconciliation. The
“sheer gratuitous excess of what is available to us” is more than enough
to stimulate desire as fullness and to mitigate experiences of desire
as lack.
Yet Hans’s account of desire based on fullness both exposes and
disavows rivalry with western theological accounts. The urge to displace
western ontotheology is a temptation that can never be completely mortified
 Skerrett: Mimetic Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude 805

because “ontotheology” keeps importuning him through the very lang-

uage he must use to repudiate it. Hans is anxious about lapsing into
metaphysical nostalgia; he worries that his claims for the fullness of
desire may be construed as being symptomatic of a surreptitious lack. So
it is necessary, in his view, to anathematize certain terms. Forms of beauty,
densities in fields of play, and fortuities fluttering down are authorized; but
god, man, and consciousness are not. The open attitude and exuberant
mood that generate desire as fullness and delight must be protected from
those who have not heard that god is dead. If they are still around, then
they have no contemporary claim among us; they are not so much
secondary as anachronistic intrusions on reality. In any case, they have
“nothing” to say.
Hans distinguishes a mode of desire based on “hostility and territori-
ality (desire as lack)” from a mode based on “the sheer gratuitous excess
of what is available to us (desire as fullness)” (226). Connolly would
insist, I think, that themes of territoriality and the fullness of desire will
have to be engaged together. For we must learn to experience abundance
within the limits of contested territories. Any mode of desiring that does
not discern that the territory is one, and must be shared with our oppo-
nents, will lapse into rivalry and violence (Connolly 2002b). We live on
vulnerable territory, which is saturated with the memories and expect-
ations of incommensurable faiths, many of them profoundly deistic,
moralistic, dogmatic, and evangelical and others of them atheistic, hedon-
istic, relativist, and esoteric. And god knows these plural faiths engage in
frequent though furtive intercourse, so that we have moralistic atheists
and evangelical hedonists, too. We will have to learn to experience desire
based on the plenitude of contested territory without first banning the
fanatics and the heretics. There is no “elsewhere” for them to go. In that
case, one cannot defeat desire as lack or mimetic rivalry by anathema.
Spontaneous delight in the plenitude of being, which Hans advocates,
cannot depend for its security on the disappearance of western religions.
Likewise, desire based on delight in a divinely created harmonious order
cannot depend for its security on the “demolition” of secular atheists.
The image of contested territory makes more concrete the images of
Baroque tension or “densities in fields of play.” The fullness of desire
cannot be secured through rivalry and territoriality, even when these are
sublimated to an ontological register.
Connolly urges the practice of “agonistic reciprocity,” which means
acknowledging the value of the rival, whose vibrant presence helps to
define and invigorate one’s faith. It means contesting against the other
without declaring that the other is too neurotic, wicked, or perverse to
count as a rival; in other words, one takes the burden of contesting
806 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

seriously. He calls for an opposition that is “lively and firm” but “resists
and counters its adversaries without striving to eliminate them” (2002a:
89). Connolly puts it bluntly: “‘Rival’ you shall say, but not ‘heretic’”
(2002b: 88). Hans might well ask, along with Augustine, how we can take
seriously as rivals those followers of god who are striving to eliminate us!
We need to be protected from them! And here Milbank’s sensibility is
apt: to sustain our sense of desire as delight, it helps to “unthink” the
necessity of violence. But this may entail, paradoxically, in the context of
desire based on fullness, allowing the necessity of the rival.

CONCLUSION
On the one hand, Hans’s wholesale negation of historically diverse
theological traditions resumes one of the gambits of heresiologists, culling
without thanks and discarding without care those intricate and fluid
worlds of meaning in which others live. Western theology is not anachro-
nistic; indeed, it is no longer particularly western. The global context in
which we live demands a critique of theological imagination, not just as
sedative or compensation or consolation for lack but also as inciting
generosity of spirit and gratitude for all that is. On the other hand,
Milbank is deaf to the ways his argument for mastery, on the grounds
that theology is a discourse of nonmastery, sounds like the battle hymn of
the republic. Milbank portrays his opponents not only as lacking atten-
tion for harmonies and holiness in the world but also as posing a threat
to those who do. Yet it is precisely at such points in his argument that the
claims for ontological peace seem most ambiguous, as if exclusion were
the limit of plenitude and anathema were the precondition of peace.
Reflections on mimetic rivalry in the context of affirmations of full-
ness are required to supplement Girard’s account of desire based on lack.
Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry is totalizing in its ambition to see the
world from outside it—to see things hidden at its foundation. This is not
a perspective from which one can ordinarily capture the pleasure of desire
that befalls us in the midst of that world. In the midst of life (especially
life with small children) one observes that mimetic desire is not competi-
tive per se (Kerr: 395). It is one of the means by which we seek richer and
more demanding engagement with life. Mimetic desire is as much an
expression of the child’s delight in being as the desire to twirl. Yet it
appears to be relatively easy for mimetic desire to become implicated
with a sense of lack, where rivalry at minimum adds value to the object.
Perhaps this is because most of the objects with which we desire to live
are mutable and mortal; to desire, even in the midst of plenitude, means
that one always risks, not an incurable lack but, indeed, inevitable loss.
 Skerrett: Mimetic Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude 807

Perhaps rivalry in the midst of plenitude somehow insures the value of

objects against our premonition of their fragility and loss. In any event, it
is evident that desire based on fullness can become caught in practices of
mimetic rivalry and revenge as readily as desire based on lack. It is neces-
sary to acknowledge the rivalry rather than to disavow it, to be alert to its
structure and its danger, even as one seeks to reduce its potential vio-
lence. To meet the temptation to rivalry with the instrument of anathema
ironically undermines an account of desire based on fullness. We look
instead for an account of desire based on plenitude that neither seeks out
rivalry nor flees it but, rather, detects its operation and tries to mitigate
the effects, so that one’s delight in the fullness of being might even
rebound on the rival.
It is possible that Hans and Milbank might be brought closer to a
“harmonious resolution”—they both might see that they are not oppo-
nents when it comes to some crucial practical aims. But that would
not necessarily change the visceral repulsion each has for the other’s
cherished convictions. One can anticipate the protest, from either side,
that they represent mutually exclusive positions: they cannot both be
right; they cannot be reconciled. Confronted with recurrent problems
of mimetic desire and rivalry, what sort of response is required to the
other, who appears like an image in the mirror? Connolly might counsel
generosity; a Christian might counsel patience. These are not necessar-
ily virtues of reason; but they are virtues of generosity that we practice
when we let our fierce prosecution of an argument be stayed by the
living flesh of the other. They are virtues that fullness provides when we
see that the other—dogmatic, self-righteous, and wrong though he or
she may be—trembles before the rift in the moment, meets fortuities
as we do, with no recourse and no way back. Neither “ontological
peace” nor “necessary violence” captures this wounding imperative
that demands that we absorb some portion of the other’s rival faith into
ourselves.

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