Anthony Bartlett

“You could say then that desire creates a ‘lining’ around the surface, or just under the surface, of an object so that it works dynamically as a sign. The lining is put there by people and says in effect, ‘Here is the object to possess and the fact that both you and I desire it makes it powerfully significant.’ We are very close here of course to Girard’s mimetic desire; the only difference is that it is played out in a systemic collective form, in the world of economics, the marketplace of buying and selling. Here is another aspect then of our world of signs. They are not just about information. Many of them—perhaps today almost all of them—enlist our mimetic and possessive desire to achieve and communicate their meaning. However, the moment I say this a reaction surely sets in. People have a sense that the contemporary phenomenon covered by the word ‘desire’ is richer and more many-sided than sheer possessiveness, and immediately I will also agree. I said ‘almost all’ signs, not all. I believe in fact that before the motif of possessive desire at work in Western society there is an earlier, underlying and more wonderful level which it presupposes. In this case Girardian desire, although enormously cogent, is only a partial description of the historical and anthropological facts. Before people in the West learned to desire things as consumers they learned to do so as contemplatives! I”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New

“There was a natural resource in the affective devotion to the saints and to Jesus, and a similar intensity of devotion inevitably became directed to the ordinary human.7 Eleanor of Aquitaine, the paragon of courtly love at the courts of Angers and Poitiers, was a grandchild of Guillaume, duke of Aquitaine, the first known troubadour. In many of Guillaume’s love songs ‘the vocabulary and emotional fervor hitherto ordinarily used to express man’s love for God are transferred to the liturgical worship of woman, and vice versa.’8 The layering of Christian feeling and the new romantic spirit is also witnessed in the roman courtois, the epic stories filled with legendary material and hinged on figures of woman, mystery and quest.”
― Anthony Bartlett, Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New