Critique from the Underground is a collection of essays by a celebrated French philosopher and anthropologist René Girard, whose works Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat are by now familiar to the Russian public. In Critique from the Underground Gerard defines one of the key concepts of his “fundamental anthropology” that he terms “mimetic desire” and he does so through the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Dante Alighieri, Victor Hugo, Gilles Deleuze and Marcel Proust, as well as through an exploration of the characters of their works. The essays included in this volume conceptualize the Other as our role model, rival and doppelganger, the dramatic competition with whom breeds and shapes our desire and our very self. Girard speaks of the rivalry that may prove to be more fundamental than the kind of relationship famously described by Freud through Oedipus complex.