René Girard’s mimetic theory and Generative Anthropology (subsequently GA) have produced conceptions of cultural and language origin that insist on the “interdividuality” [1] of desire as fundamental to, and constitutive of, human relations and experience. This paper will explore how interdividual desire in the sacred and aesthetic experience is the basis for the ongoing contemporary valorization of theories of immanence over and against theories of transcendence. Both Girard (in his study of social undifferentiation in religious rites) and Generative Anthropology (in its account of the appearance of language) locate the most powerful experiences of interdividuality in sacred awe, wherein a mimetically desired centre alternately attracts and repels a periphery of desiring subjects. To illustrate the important role of mimetic desire-driven violence in the appearance of the sacred as the foundation of culture, Girard foregrounds the Dionysian bacchanal by emphasizing its celebration of unrestrained interdividual desire ( Violence 126-27). For its part, GA highlights the way that the potentially violent volatility of such desire establishes the scenic configuration upon which the first sign and first language users appear. Desire’s continuous and unifying quality resonates with the metaphysics of immanence that has its roots in the thought of pre-Socratic philosophers (notably Heraclitus). The concept of immanent desire reappears during the Enlightenment in Spinoza’s conception of a single universal substance ( Ethics 1, Propositions 7 and 14), and it has continued to reappear up to the present day. In the first section of this paper, I will focus on the concept of immanence as it appears in Nietzsche’s aestheticized das Ur-Eine , or the primordially One in The Birth of Tragedy . In the second, I will consider how das Ur-Eine —as a manifestation of the will to power in the whole man—informs Georges Bataille’s immanentist, anti-linguistic vision of totality or general economy. Deploying both Girard’s anthropology and Eric Gans’s theory of cultural origin, I will suggest that the current posthumanist penchant for theories of language’s immanent embeddedness arises from Nietzsche’s and Bataille’s visions of totality insofar as posthumanism is informed by Derridian deconstruction (which is itself heavily influenced by Nietzsche and Bataille). In a final section, I will explore how the primordial self’s encounter with the face of the other—described by Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity (61)—brings about the transcendent experience of the infinite via interdividual desire. By setting Nietzsche, Bataille, and Levinas’s respective theories of immanence and transcendence alongside each other, I will illustrate how the mimetically engendered conception of immanence competes with mimetically generated theories of transcendence. I hope that, by placing these theories in mutual conversation through the medium of Girard’s mimetic theory and GA’s originary thinking, the tension between theories of transcendence and immanence—a tension which signals a kind of ideological mimetic doubling—may be deconstructed.
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