This session brings together two distinct yet complementary approaches to desire, conflict, and faith. The first paper examines Peter Thiel’s Girardian critique of climate-centered political rationality, focusing on how narratives of scarcity may intensify mimetic rivalry and social conflict. The second paper offers a Kierkegaardian reading of The Brothers Karamazov, exploring the problem of faith through the relationship between Alyosha and Ivan.
My paper examines the elements of René Girard’s mimetic theory that Peter Thiel uses to question the prioritization of environmental politics in parts of the contemporary Western discourse. Recalling the main patterns of Thiel’s long-standing engagement with Girard’s thought, my talk aims at demonstrating that Thiel interprets climate politics not merely as a dispute over environmental facts, but as a structural reorientation of political desire toward managed scarcity.
According to a Girardian framework, periods of stagnation or decline intensify mimetic rivalry as social actors compete for increasingly limited goods. Thiel’s critique, as reconstructed in my talk, suggests that political programs willing to accept economic contraction in the name of climate goals risk amplifying precisely these dynamics of envy, resentment, and rivalry. In such conditions, social cohesion becomes fragile, and political conflict is increasingly organized around moralized blame rather than productive cooperation.
In conversation with Friedrich Nietzsche and René Girard, this paper develops an account of Kierkegaard’s the stages on life’s way and applies them to a reading of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and especially to the relationship between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov.