Deviated Transcendence

Definition

Deviated transcendence is Girard’s term for a form of false transcendence in which the subject projects onto the model a fullness of being — a completeness, a wholeness, an ontological richness — that the model does not actually possess. The subject looks to another human being to supply what only the divine could provide.

The term comes from Girard’s reading of the novelists, particularly Stendhal and Dostoevsky, whose characters are possessed by an intense metaphysical hunger they attempt to satisfy through human relationships and social prestige.

The Metaphysical Dimension of Desire

Girard argued that mimetic desire is not merely about objects — jobs, money, relationships, status. Beneath the desire for these objects is a desire for being: the subject experiences themselves as somehow empty or incomplete, and the model appears to possess a fullness the subject lacks.

This is why rivalry is so intense and so unsatisfying: the subject is not really competing for the object. They are competing for the quality of being they project onto the model. Winning the object never resolves this because the emptiness was not actually about the object.

Deviated transcendence is the result: a metaphysical hunger deflected onto finite human beings, who cannot satisfy it.

The Religious Dimension

Girard saw deviated transcendence as a specifically modern phenomenon, connected to the decline of traditional religion. When authentic transcendence — genuine relationship with God — is unavailable or no longer credible, the metaphysical hunger does not disappear. It is redirected toward the immanent: other people, ideologies, celebrities, charismatic leaders.

The result is the peculiarly modern form of idolatry: not worship of stone gods but worship of humans. This is why modern culture produces such intense rivalries — and such intense disappointments.

Resolution

Girard’s work points toward authentic transcendence as the resolution of deviated transcendence: finding in the divine the fullness that cannot be found in human models. This was connected to his Catholic faith and to his reading of the Christian tradition as an antidote to the mimetic rivalries that destroy human community.