A Happy Contrarian

Metadata

• Author: [[Costica Bradatan]]
• Full Title: A Happy Contrarian
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/happy-contrarian

Highlights

• Even the stock market? Especially the stock market, Girard would respond. That’s “the most mimetic institution” of all—indeed, a textbook illustration of how mimetic theory works: “You desire stock not because it is objectively desirable. You know nothing about it, but you desire stuff exclusively because other people desire it. And if other people desire it, its value goes up and up and up.”
• “Just look at academia, that vast herd of sheep-like individualists,”
• There was another gift that Jean-Michel Oughourlian remembers receiving from Girard: “An utter irreverence with regard to canonical authors, that is to say, freedom of thought.”