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June 9, 2025

Mimetic Desire and Resentment as Barriers to Human Fraternity

Event Series: Rome, June 2025

Mimetic desire, as René Girard pointed out, fuels social resentment and conflict within and across societies, producing doppelgangers on all sides of political divides and accelerating the search for scapegoats. How does contemporary politics, with its rival resentments and opposing narratives, relentlessly reproduce the pathology of mimetic desire, and what are possible ways to escape its trap? Is the parable of the good Samaritan, frequently invoked by Pope Francis, a resource? 

Participants

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra is a renowned Indian author, essayist, and literary critic with a global readership. Two of his prize-winning books, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (2012) and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), explore the history of colonialism and its enduring legacies in our contemporary global era. Mishra is also the author of two critically acclaimed novels: The Romantics (1999) and Run and Hide (2022). His columns and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books, among other outlets. Mishra is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and the international bestselling author of nine books published in over 35 languages including No Logo (2000), The Shock Doctrine (2007), This Changes Everything (2014), No Is Not Enough (2017), On Fire (2019), Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023) which won the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. A columnist for The Guardian, her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world. She is the honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, where she is the founding co-director of UBC's Centre for Climate Justice.

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