the book of Leviticus contains the famous commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18); that is, you shall love your neighbor … - René Girard

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT signals a revolution and prepares the way for it. This revolution comes to fruition in the New Testament. If Jesus never speaks in terms of prohibitions and always in terms of models and imitation, it is because he draws out the full consequences of the lesson offered by the tenth commandment. It is not due to inflated self-love that he asks us to imitate him; it is to turn us away from mimetic rivalries.

In myth, violent death is always justified.

We are quite ready to accuse others of ‘narcissism' in particular those whom we desire, with the aim of reassuring ourselves and relating their indifference, not to the very minor interest that we hold in their eyes or even perhaps in absolute terms […] but to a kind of weakness that afflicts others. When we do this, we credit them with an excessive and pathological concentration on themselves — with a kind of illness that makes them more sick than we are and consequently incapable of breaking out of their over-protected ego and meeting us half-way as they should.