It was a relief, then, to ease into "Opus Jazz," in which Robbins presents a sheer wall of disaffected urban teenagers before quickly offering toe holds of nuance; soon enough, we reach their secret realm of desires, rivalries and play.
Pious Aeneas, passionate Dido, and raging Turnus are driven by the desires and rivalries of the gods — but even the gods recognize their obeisance to fate, and to the foretold Roman Empire that will produce Augustus, Virgil's patron.
These duplicated desires lead to rivalry and violence.
Applying neo-Freudian analysis to stories including Cinderella and Snow White, he showed how these narratives address the unconscious in a language similar to dreams, helping kids deal with a plethora of unspoken fears and desires, from sibling rivalry to ambivalence toward their parents.
This "mimetic desire" leads to rivalry and competition, and sometimes violence and war.
The world of childish desire, dashed hopes, rivalry, manipulation, sex and play is evoked with marvellous precision and intelligence in The Chip-Chip Gatherers.
Given that Girard believes our desires stem from social rivalry, his warning is: "Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them". Girard unfashionably denied that there is a significant moral difference between parties to violent conflict: Both are caught up in a demonic logic that will end in mutual destruction.
Mark is the editor of Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire by René Girard (Stanford, 2004).
And here, perhaps, the cruel notion that we call fashion, a coded expression of rivalry and desire, was born.
There is love and rivalry, a desire to embody the other person and to better them at the same time.
Although Mr. Nardelli could easily be forgiven if he felt at least a slight rivalry -- a desire to prove that maybe he should have been Mr. Welch's first choice -- he said he felt nothing of the sort.
