Comrades

Cesáreo Bandera

This Spanish scholar and I were pretty tight. We forged a fierce bond over a mutual affection for Miguel de Cervantes, and we often wrote prologues for each other's works or articles praising the significance of each other's contributions to intellectual thought.

We also shared a passionate interest in religion and edgy topics such as the sacred and the profane. Above all, we both held tight to a belief that something was fishy: some artists and philosophers were part of a conspiracy to hide the real story behind the link between religion and violence. We believe you can't separate the two.

Scott R. Garrels

This clinical psychologist was a long-time fan of mine. It doesn't hurt to have support from people outside your field—it shows you have range, that your ideas matter to more than two other scholars. Anyway, Garrels gave me props for thoroughly dissecting what mimesis means (more on that later—much more) and praised me for explaining that imitation is a universal human quality.

Gil Bailie

Gil was one of my students—but he very quickly became a friend, too. This guy had my back when it came to all my work on desire. He wrote a mass of articles on my theory that when it comes to desire, people desire what other people desire (that's called mimetic desire). Mimetic desire leads to conflict. So if your friend has a crush on someone and talks up how great that person is, suddenly you might be thinking—Hey, now I have a crush on that person, too. That makes you human... but also a little threatening, and potentially not such a good friend.

Rivals

Thomas Molnar

This conservative thinker accused me—me—of positivism and antireligious materialism. Positivism pretty much says (among other things) that theology is not an adequate way of understanding the world and that knowledge can only be achieved through hard science (something I would never ever say).

Look, I'm a diehard Catholic, so I would never ever that it's better to interpret the world through logic and math than through spirituality. And Molnar's suggestion that I was a Marxist is just a load—Marx called religion "the opiate of the masses." Do you think a Catholic like myself would believe that nonsense? Sheesh.

Hayden White

Wild accusations again. Why do people hate so much? Pointing the finger at me for being a medievalist and a reactionary defender of religion may very well be taking it too far. Either way, it hurts. But this historian—a colleague of mine at Stanford—wrote a damning piece called "Ethnological 'Lie' and Mystical 'Truth,'" basically claiming that I attack any and all modern ways of looking at culture and society.

In essence, White was trying to make me look like an old fuddy-duddy who believes nothing good comes from scholars who believe in science and the Enlightenment rather than Christianity and religious faith. Did he even read my work?

Toril Moi

No one wants to mess with this feminist VIP—she's a tough one. So when she accused me of trying to one-up Freud, I got a little hot under the collar. Typically, she accused me of not taking into account how my theory of mimetic desire applies to women.

See, Toril's thing is that feminine desire is a separate category from men's desire, and that you can't just lump it all together. So what did she say? That I lumped it all together—or "universalized" it, as the academics would say. Is it true that women don't feel mimetic desire? You tell me.