Renéssance Men

In his review of All Desire Is a Desire for Being, Cynthia Haven’s selection of René Girard’s writings [“Overwhelming and Collective Murder,” Reviews, November], Sam Kriss contrasts Girard’s singular (not to say single-minded) vision of society with today’s scholars, who, he claims, are unable to generate “grand unifying theories.” Girard drew from his early-career studies of literary figures such as Proust the insight that desire is essentially imitative (or mimetic) rather than straightforwardly directed toward its apparent objects.

Eve Sedgwick, who made a similar point in Between Men, her foundational work of queer theory, later…