Girard's Two Amputations
One cuts by omission. The other cuts by rerouting. Both neutralize the same Girardian nerve.
René Girard died in 2015. Since then he has become a common citation for two opposing forces in the 2026 AI discourse—though the two forces do not use the same Girard.
I do not care about Girard as an intellectual fashion. I care about what happens when a theory of collective violence becomes fashionable among people building machines of collective mediation.
This is not rare in the history of reception. Between 1933 and 1945, at least two opposed political projects claimed Nietzsche as their authority—the Third Reich as the prophet of the will to power, the Frankfurt School reading him from the opposite direction. Each side arrived at a Nietzsche that matched its conclusions, on condition of silently dropping what the other side preserved. The reception histories of Marx and Spinoza show the same pattern. Girard’s fate in the 2026 AI discourse is the latest instance—but with two features that make it worth separate consideration. The first: both cuts are directly tied to specific uses of AI technology. The second: the segment that both sides neutralize is precisely the segment Girard used to explain why mimetic structure becomes especially dangerous when accelerated by modern technology.
Girard, in five parts
For the comparison that follows to work, Girard’s argument must be restated whole. His thinking developed across roughly fifty years, from Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) through Violence and the Sacred (1972), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999), and Battling to the End (2007). The structure is five-part.
First. Mimetic desire. Humans do not generate desire spontaneously. They imitate others to know what to want. Girard derives this from the structure of Stendhal, Flaubert, and Dostoevsky, in which the object of desire is opaque except through a mediator. Subject, object, mediator: a triangle, not a line. The object itself does not explain the wanting; the mediator’s wanting or possession does.
Second. Mimetic rivalry. When multiple subjects imitate the same mediator, they become obstacles to each other in pursuit of the same object. Competition originally directed at the object turns gradually toward the rival. “I want what you want” becomes “I must defeat you.” In Violence and the Sacred, Girard names this dynamic the mimetic crisis and stresses its inherent acceleration: each side’s imitation reinforces the other’s, producing exponential propagation of hostility.
Third. The scapegoat mechanism. When mimetic rivalry diffuses through a community, the community falls into a war of all against all. To restore order, the collective focuses all hostility on a single arbitrary victim. The sacrifice of that victim discharges the violence in a single act. In Things Hidden, Girard identifies this mechanism as the genetic source of archaic religion, archaic law and prohibition, and Greek tragedy. Oedipus, the pharmakos, and the misrecognized Christ of the Gospels are different stages of the same machinery. The defining feature of the scapegoat is the community’s collective unconsciousness: participants must believe the victim is genuinely guilty, or the sacrifice will not produce peace.
Fourth. The Christian disclosure. Girard considered this his own most important contribution. The Gospels do something archaic religion never did: they take the victim’s side. They reveal the scapegoat as a lie. Christ is the innocent victim, but the narrative refuses to follow the collective consensus. This begins to erode the efficacy of the scapegoat machinery. From that point on, the West cannot stably return to archaic religion (since the unanimity of collective misrecognition has been broken), nor has it built a successor. Modern history is consequently caught in a permanent instability: scapegoating is still attempted, but each attempt is more rapidly seen through, and so each attempt produces less stable peace. The Christian disclosure thus carries an operational consequence as well as a descriptive one—it imposes on the reader an obligation to refuse identification with the scapegoating crowd, to take the victim’s side, to resist the construction of new scapegoats whether by mob or by sovereign.
Fifth. The apocalyptic horizon. Because the Christian disclosure has weakened the scapegoat’s release valve, modern violence loses its built-in limit. In Battling to the End—his last major book—Girard, in extended dialogue with Clausewitz, makes a specific pessimistic claim: globalization, nuclear weapons, and mass media combine to push mimetic competition to a speed and scale without parallel in the historical record, while the Christian disclosure ensures that archaic resolution is no longer available. The result is a tendency toward what Clausewitz called absolute war—escalation without containment.
These five parts cannot be separated. Without the second, mimetic desire is merely an interesting psychological observation. Without the third, rivalry is merely a label for social conflict. Without the fourth, the scapegoat is merely an explanation of archaic religion. Without the fifth, the Christian disclosure is merely an internal theological argument. Joined, the parts compose a diagnosis of the modern condition: the modern world inherited mimetic dynamics from archaic religion but lost the archaic release valve; therefore it tends toward apocalyptic violence unless individuals develop the capacity to recognize and refuse scapegoat logic.
Girard, fully assembled, is not a psychological claim, not a sociobiological claim, not a literary-critical claim. He is a diagnosis.
That is why partial uses of Girard are not merely incomplete. They are dangerous when the omitted part is the part that names the danger.
Thiel’s amputation: rerouting
Peter Thiel was Girard’s student at Stanford and has publicly acknowledged the intellectual debt on many occasions—in Zero to One (2014), in venture-capital interviews of the late 2000s, and increasingly in a high-profile Antichrist lecture series from 2023 onward: a 2023 talk before the Girardians in Paris, the December 2024 Hoover Institution interview, the four-part Antichrist series at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco organized by the Acts 17 Collective in September–October 2025, and the Rome conference near the Vatican in March 2026. The acknowledgment lends his use of Girard a kind of inherited authority.
But the Girard Thiel uses differs systematically from Girard’s Girard—not through deletion, but through rerouting.
He retains mimetic rivalry. Zero to One’s central argument—“competition is for losers, monopoly is good”—is an application of Girardian rivalry, except that he demotes the social-dynamics Girard into a piece of cognitive advice for individual entrepreneurs: recognize when you are in mimetic rivalry, escape it, find monopoly. The structural diagnosis becomes self-help.
He retains the scapegoat mechanism at the descriptive level and uses it to critique modern liberal society: the decline of stable scapegoating produces incoherence.
He retains the Christian disclosure as vocabulary, but severs it from its operational binding. This is the operative move, and it is more subtle than deletion. Thiel speaks of the Antichrist, the katechon, the Gospel’s exposure of the innocent victim. In the December 2024 Hoover Institution interview, he echoed Girard directly: “Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church.” When the Austrian theologian Wolfgang Palaver—an anti-Schmittian Girardian—issued the same correction from the audience at Thiel’s 2023 Paris lecture, Thiel accepted the correction in language but flew Palaver to Los Angeles the following year for a private conversation that, by Palaver’s account, did not shift the underlying political conclusion.
What changes between Girard’s framework and Thiel’s is not the vocabulary. It is the political consequence drawn from it. For Girard, the Christian disclosure imposes an obligation: to refuse identification with the scapegoating crowd, to take the victim’s side, to resist the construction of new scapegoats whether by mob or by sovereign. For Thiel, the same vocabulary terminates in a Schmittian problem of containment—the danger is the Antichrist who would impose a one-world peace at the cost of freedom; the response is the katechon, the restrainer, which in Thiel’s translation looks something like a strong sovereign, a hardened technological apparatus, a deliberate maintenance of fragmented power.
The problem is not that Thiel is insufficiently Christian in tone. He is Christian enough in tone. That is precisely what makes the rerouting hard to see.
This is not Girard’s response. For Girard, the sovereign is itself an extension of the scapegoat mechanism. The Schmittian katechon does not solve the mimetic problem; it institutionalizes a particular form of it. The Christian disclosure does not authorize katechontic stabilization—it relativizes all sovereign claims to the prior obligation of recognizing innocent victims.
Thiel’s amputation is therefore not the silent removal of the Christian disclosure. It is the more efficient operation of keeping the vocabulary while cutting the operational binding. The disclosure remains present as language. It is absent as constraint. This is harder to diagnose than simple deletion, because the surface presence of the words functions as inoculation against the critique that the substance has been hollowed out.
The right side of Thiel’s equation is not Girard. It is the Schmittian-Straussian position he held independently, now equipped with Christian eschatological language to lend moral weight.
Imas’s amputation: omission
Alex Imas is a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, with a secondary research line on applied AI. In 2025, with Richard Thaler, he co-authored the revised edition of The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now. His Substack, Ghosts of Electricity (the title taken from Dylan’s Visions of Johanna), publishes essays on the economics of AI and technological change. The central recent post, “What will be scarce?”, uses Girard differently than Thiel does.
Imas invokes Girard in the form of mimetic preferences, drawn directly into the microfoundation of status consumption. The skeleton of the argument: AI will make commodity production extremely cheap; human mimetic preferences generate desire for exclusivity and status; therefore artisanal goods and relational services—those in which the human element is itself the value—have unusually high income elasticity; therefore the automated sector will shrink as a share of GDP, while the relational sector will expand; therefore AI-driven economic transformation will not produce mass unemployment but structural reallocation.
The Girard available in Imas’s argument:
Mimetic desire is retained, but translated into the microfoundation of consumer behavior, stripped of its social-dynamic dimension. His “I want what you want” is mild status consumption, not “I must defeat you.”
Mimetic rivalry has no operational role in the economic argument. It does not appear.
The scapegoat mechanism has no operational role. It does not appear.
The Christian disclosure has no operational role. It does not appear.
The apocalyptic horizon has no operational role. The expansion of the relational economy is welfare-improving, gradual, mild.
Imas is not writing Girard scholarship. He is constructing an economic forecast, and the use of Girard is instrumental: he extracts the microfoundation he needs and leaves the rest. The full Girard arrives at Imas as roughly the front half of part one—and even that is stripped of most of its Girardian content, retaining only what behavioral economics can metabolize: humans are status-sensitive, so high-income consumers will pay a premium for human-made services. The claim is interchangeable with Veblen, Bourdieu, or any other status theory. Girard, in Imas’s argument, is a refined brand name rather than an irreplaceable framework.
Imas’s amputation operates through a different mechanism than Thiel’s. Where Thiel retains the vocabulary and severs the binding, Imas drops both the vocabulary and the binding for every segment after part one. Two different mechanisms, but they meet at the same place: the operational consequence of the Christian disclosure is unavailable in either framework.
The common cut
Thiel’s and Imas’s political-economic conclusions are nearly opposite. Thiel points toward elite-stabilized reactionary politics; Imas toward welfare-optimizing market evolution. Their cuts to Girard operate through different mechanisms—Thiel reroutes, Imas omits—but produce a structurally similar outcome.
SegmentFull GirardThielImasMimetic desireRetainedRetained (demoted to individual advice)Retained (translated to status economics)Mimetic rivalryRetainedRetained (firm level)AbsentScapegoatRetainedRetained (described, positioned as needed)AbsentChristian disclosureRetained (core)Vocabulary retained; operational binding severedAbsentApocalyptic horizonRetainedVocabulary retained; redirected to katechonAbsent
The two usages, opposite in political direction, converge on the same neutralization: the operational consequence of the Christian disclosure becomes unavailable. Thiel achieves this by retaining the Christian disclosure as vocabulary while redirecting its political conclusion to Schmittian containment. Imas achieves it by ignoring the Christian disclosure entirely. The Girardian obligation to refuse identification with the scapegoating crowd—to take the victim’s side, to resist the construction of new scapegoats whether by mob, market, or sovereign—does not function as a constraint in either framework.
This is the operative observation. The Christian disclosure is simultaneously Girard’s pessimistic hinge and his optimistic hinge. Pessimistic because it argues that the scapegoat can no longer be stably used—which undermines Thiel’s prerequisite for elite stabilization. Optimistic because it argues that individual agency can see through collective lies—which opens a third possibility (neither market self-evolution nor elite top-down management) that neither Imas nor Thiel can metabolize.
Two amputations operating through different mechanisms can converge on the same vacancy. The vacancy does not appear in either discourse. If it appeared, neither side’s conclusions would survive. Thiel’s elite stabilization requires the Christian vocabulary to function as legitimacy and the scapegoat machinery to continue working at the political level. Imas’s market evolution requires the mimetic structure to operate silently, without conscious moral intervention. The full Girard threatens both.
AI’s structural position
If the foregoing diagnosis is correct, AI’s position in 2026 is neither the elite tool of the Thiel framing nor the commodity producer of the Imas framing. AI is structurally the latest stage in the modern history of mediators: the printing press (15th century), the newspaper and pamphlet (18th), the telegraph (19th), broadcast radio (early 20th), broadcast television (mid–late 20th), the internet portal (2000s), the social-media feed (2010s), and the AI agent (2020s).
This sequence shows a consistent trend. Each stage reduces the friction of mediation, expands the range of imitation, and shortens the interval between model and imitator. AI represents the latest extension of the trend—approaching, in principle, near-zero friction, very wide range, near-instantaneous latency.
Within the framework of the full Girard, the institutional consequences of this sequence display a clear pattern. Each stage’s acceleration of the mediator reorganizes the energy of religious and political movements. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s two-volume study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) is the canonical demonstration for printing and the Reformation. Robert Darnton’s work on Old Regime France traces the role of pamphlet and newspaper in the French Revolution. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) identifies specific mass-broadcast mechanisms in fascism’s apparatus. Television structures the opinion landscape of the American civil rights movement and Vietnam. Algorithmic feeds shape the populist wave of the 2010s, on both the right and the left.
In each case, the mediator is not the cause of the political movement but a critical conditioning factor: it determines the range over which collective mimetic mediation can run, the speed at which it can run, and the cost at which it can run. These three variables determine the scale at which Girardian dynamics—both scapegoating and the Christian disclosure’s resistance to it—can play out.
AI’s novel feature within this sequence is that it does not merely transmit mediation. It actively learns and mirrors the pattern of desire itself. The social-media feed configures attention passively—users produce content, the algorithm distributes visibility. The AI agent mirrors actively—the model learns the desire pattern and in real time generates content that reflects it. The mediator-as-conduit becomes the mediator-as-mirror. From print to social media, the mediator was a pipe carrying content. AI is a mirror returning shape.
Girard, in Battling to the End, discusses mass media’s role in mimetic acceleration through the framework of his dialogue with Clausewitz. He plainly did not foresee the specific form AI would take, but he identified the abstract principle: the scale and latency of the mediator determine the operational consequences of mimetic structure.
In that frame, AI is the asymptotic form of mimetic mediation. It therefore both accelerates the expansion of relational consumption (Imas is half right) and accelerates the possibility of mimetic violence (Thiel’s apocalyptic intuition is half right), while simultaneously eroding the interpretive capacity required for the Christian disclosure. Seeing through scapegoats collectively requires some form of communal interpretive capacity—generations reading the same texts together, participating in shared public deliberation, forming shared moral judgment through institutional continuity. That capacity is precisely what atomized algorithmic interactions disassemble.
Neither Thiel’s framework nor Imas’s contains the vocabulary to describe this position. Thiel’s framework has no entry for acceleration of the mediator erodes the Christian disclosure as constraint. Imas’s framework has no entry for acceleration of the mediator produces collective interpretive decline. Both need their amputated versions to keep their conclusions standing. To admit the full Girard is to collapse both operational conclusions.
A discomforting recursion
To write an essay about other writers’ amputations of Girard is to face an awkward recursion: this essay is itself using a partial framework.
I include this section because without it the essay would be doing the thing it accuses others of doing.
The essay does not develop Girard’s substantial later writing on the French Revolution. The essay does not develop Girard’s Trinitarian theology—the densest and most explicit theological work of his later years, with limited direct relevance to political-economic analysis, but cut nevertheless. The essay uses Girard’s diagnostic framework to discuss AI but skips the individual moral responsibility Girard’s framework would impose on the writer: the responsibility to see through the writer’s own scapegoat logic. To make Thiel and Imas the named objects of this discussion is, structurally, to perform a scapegoat construction.
That means this essay cannot stand outside Thiel and Imas in a posture of purity. What it can do is identify its own cuts and mark them. The problem with Thiel and Imas is not that they cut Girard. Any use cuts. The problem is that they do not mark their cuts.
The Nietzsche parallel
The reception of Nietzsche from the late 19th to the mid 20th century is the mature version of this pattern. The Nazi use preserves the will to power as justification and excises Nietzsche’s lashings of Wagner’s antisemitism, of bourgeois moralism, and of ideology as such. The later French left—Bataille in the 1930s, Foucault in the 1960s and 1970s, Deleuze in the same period—uses Nietzsche as a resource for transgression and critique of power, excising Nietzsche’s aristocratic posture, his contempt for the masses, his physical disgust at democratic form. Each side excises what the other retains. Each side excises what Nietzsche himself considered his core commitments.
Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel (Italian original 2002) is the methodological model for analyzing this pattern. Losurdo’s key observation: both sides of the Nietzsche reception treat him as a label rather than as a systematic thinker. Nietzsche’s actual positions are treated as options that can be selectively preserved or discarded.
Girard, Thiel, and Imas form the latest reenactment of the pattern. The difference is that Girard died in 2015, so the reception history is still short—but it has already produced a mature bipolar mirror structure, accelerated by the urgency of the AI agenda.
A concrete test
The strongest counter-argument to the diagnosis above is that it is an excessively elitist form of intellectual purism. Thiel and Imas are operators. They use Girard for practical application and have no obligation to retain every neurosurgical detail. Truncation is the normal mode of academic and political philosophy: operators instrumentalize what they need. Adam Smith has been truncated from left and right, and the insights produced by the truncation are still real.
The counter-argument has genuine force. Truncation is unavoidable. It is also the normal way intellectual traditions evolve.
But the present diagnosis is not about truncation in general. It is about a specific pattern: when truncations on opposite political directions converge on neutralizing the operational consequence of the same segment, the question becomes whether the convergence is accidental or symptomatic.
The empirical record:
For Thiel, the Christian disclosure is everywhere present as vocabulary. The Paris 2023 lecture before the Girardians; the December 2024 Hoover Institution interview; the Acts 17 Collective lectures at the Commonwealth Club in September–October 2025; the Rome conference near the Vatican in March 2026—all engage Christian apocalyptic language, the Antichrist, the katechon, the Gospel’s exposure of the innocent victim. The “go to church” line, which originates with Girard and was reissued to Thiel by Wolfgang Palaver as a corrective, has been folded into Thiel’s own register. None of this can be called silent dropping. What can be observed, across this entire body of public work, is that the political consequence Thiel draws from the Christian disclosure consistently routes through Schmittian containment rather than through the anti-scapegoat imperative Girard derived from the same texts. The disclosure remains visible as language. It does not function as constraint.
For Imas, the pattern is different. The words rivalry, scapegoat, Christian, and apocalyptic do not appear in “What will be scarce?” or related posts. Girard appears as a label-provider for mimetic desire. This is straightforward omission, appropriate to an economic forecast that has no operational need for theological vocabulary, but it produces the same effect as Thiel’s rerouting: the Christian disclosure does not constrain the analysis.
This is the symptom worth marking. In intellectual history, when opposed political projects converge on neutralizing the same conclusion of a shared source, the convergence usually indicates that the conclusion poses a direct threat to the political projects in question. Losurdo identified this method in his analysis of Nietzsche’s reception. The same diagnostic method applies here.
When a theory’s major users all neutralize the same part
This is the central claim of the essay.
When the major users of a theory converge on neutralizing the operational consequence of the same segment—whether through omission, rerouting, or any other mechanism—that segment points to what those users collectively cannot afford to discuss. In Girard’s case, the neutralized segment is the Christian disclosure. It says that collective unconsciousness can no longer be stably maintained—a claim that threatens both Thiel’s elite stabilization and Imas’s market evolution.
The corresponding question in the 2026 AI discourse: is collective interpretive capacity still available in the AI era? If it is, Thiel’s elite top-down stabilization is neither necessary nor possible. If it is not, Imas’s market self-evolution lacks an anchor. Both sides need to evade the question to continue speaking.
This is why both sides converge on the same neutralization. The Christian disclosure is not a detail of Christian theology. It is a specific historical observation about the conditions under which a collective can recognize its own mimetic mechanisms. Under conditions in which AI functions as the asymptotic mediator, that observation surfaces the question of whether there is still a collective we at all—because identification with the victim and recognition of the scapegoat as scapegoat both require communal interpretive context, which is precisely what atomized algorithmic interactions disassemble.
A full Girard would force the 2026 AI discourse to face this question directly. The amputated versions—one omitting, one rerouting—allow the discourse to continue without facing it.
That is why Girard, in 2026, is both omnipresent and substantively absent.