This seems like a complicated backwards reading of Girard. Isn't the heart of mimetic desire that the qualities of the object are beside the point? "The object is only a means of reaching the mediator." To possess the object is to cease to desire it, because its virtues are illusory, being the product of the lover's self-hatred and vain search for a way out of self-hatred.
The essence of the Tao of Steve, I suppose, is to turn the self-hatred of the woman in your favor. But that just makes you the illusory object, possession of whom causes the desire to disintegrate. Unless you retreat endlessly, which seems hard to keep up, if you in fact desire the person and it was all a ruse. The way to successfully attract the other would surely be to actually not care, but this also seems a poor scheme, because if you don't in fact care, why bother?
If Girard were to go on the Oprah circuit, he would suggest there is a way out, at least according to Stendhal:
It is vanity which causes Julien's suffering when Mathilde turns away from him and this suffering is the most violent the hero has ever known. All the intense desires of Julien are imitated desires. [...] In the later Stendhal there is no longer spontaneous desire. Every "psychological" analysis is an analysis of vanity, in other words, a revelation of triangular desire. True passion eventually supplants this madness in the best of Stendhal's heroes. It comes to them in the calm of the summits which these heroes attain in their supreme moments.
But you will die to-day.
And there they died for me.
And died because they were.
And all you folk will die.
Before I die for ever.
To lay me down and die.
And I lie down alone.
And there lie they.
To-night to lie in the rain.
And cannot come again.
‘No, my lad, I cannot come.’
And wilt cast forth no more.
Sleep away, lad; wake no more.
Sleep on, sleep sound.
Lays lads underground.
There’s nothing but the night.
But this will last for long.
Whence he never shall arise.
"He's dead, Jim. You can stop now."
max
['I prescribe beaming down and finding some green alien existentialist chicks.']
You say "coquette" like it's a bad thing. And yet it's completely different from the advice not to care. The coquette cares; that is part of her attraction. The person who doesn't care is depression, a la Dostoyevsky.
Anyway, none of these moldy philosophers are nearly as fun as Sterne, which I think is significant. So there.
The way to successfully attract the other would surely be to actually not care, but this also seems a poor scheme, because if you don't in fact care, why bother?
And of course RG makes exactly this point about the Underground Man and neoromantics usw. It is neither a complicated nor a backward reading; it's perfectly in accordance with his own work. Steve was a schlub; it's because he seemed complete within himself—autonomous or spontaneous—and desirous of himself that he was able to be successful—that is, just as you said, the qualities of the object didn't matter, it was the mediator's desiring it: but the mediator and the object were the same.
I used "coquette" only because Freud uses it and Girard continues to use it.
the qualities of the object[Steve] didn't matter
That seems like a description from someone who didn't see the movie.
You, Steve, still seem to have the problem of attracting the self-hating, who not only want to date you, but want to be you.
the solution is obviously heterosexual man-on-man grinding.
I'm good with "coquette"--that's why I defended it from the implication that it's a bad thing! Try to pay attention to subtext.
The Tao of Steve has one of the best Godwinizations:
Doing stuff is overrated. Like Hitler. He did a lot. But don't we all wish he woulda just stayed home and gotten stoned?
Ah. And a Heidegger name-check:
Dex: Look at me. Look at me, okay? Technically, I shouldn't be getting laid, but I do. And do you know why, Dave? Because when I'm hanging out with a woman, that's all I'm doing is hanging out, talking, listening. I'm not sitting there thinking about how to get in bed with her. And this completely confuses them because they're saying "Wait a minute. I'm so much better looking than this guy. Isn't he attracted to me?" The basic principle: We pursue that which retreats from us.
Rick: It's from Heidegger.
The Tao of Steve takes place in Santa Fe, right?
I don't remember. Saw it a long time ago.
Although...wait...yes, it does.
I thought so.
As it happens, my mom went to college with Walter Kaufmann's daughter. In Santa Fe.