On Mimesis, Thick Desires, and the Four Layers of Happiness

Excerpt from my lecture at Notre Dame's Mendoza School of Business—Nov. 8, 2022

Friends,

I’ve had a very busy week—I flew out to Stanford over the weekend for a seminar on René Girard, then took a red-eye Sunday night straight to Chicago, where I rented a car, drove to South Bend, and launched straight into two days of meetings and activities, including a lecture I delivered yesterday evening at Notre Dame. This prevented me from writing a new essay here. But what I am doing is sharing an abridged portion of my lecture. (It’s not available anywhere else…unless you were at the talk.)

I used this lecture as an opportunity to begin working out some new ideas related to mimetic desire, happiness, and what I have called thick and thin desires.

For regular readers: what you find below might seem relatively basic. I was speaking largely to people with no familiarity with Girard, and I didn’t want to get into more detailed questions of how this all holds together (I only had 45 minutes). That’s what I plan to do here :)

So below is the text of my talk, which I will plan t…