the illusion of unmediated desire is shattered. If this desire were truly unmediated, it would not be diminished by the continuous enjoyment of its object;

The sacrificial misreading of the Gospels made the various phases of Christian culture possible. In the Middle Ages, for instance, Gospel principles were superficially reconciled with the aristocratic ethics of personal honor and revenge. With the Renaissance, this edifice began

Like all romantic thinkers, Orsino sees desire as an object/subject relationship exclusively; he systematically short-circuits the third dimension, the mimetic model/obstacle/rival that makes everything intelligible. This is an especially tempting illusion in cases of pseudonarcissism, when all roles are played by the same individual.

In that no-man’s-land it becomes impossible to define anything. All actions and motivations are their own opposites as well as themselves.

We

“Qui veut faire l’ange fait la

Thus imitation is a double-edged sword. At times it produces so much harmony that it can pass for the blandest and dullest of all human drives; at other times it produces so much strife that we refuse to recognize it as imitation.

This victim’s death reveals not only the violence and injustice of all sacrificial cults, but the nonviolence and justice of the divinity whose will is thus fully accomplished for the first and only time in history.

Literary genius spontaneously understands the mimetic substratum of mythology and provides