The wish to be absorbed into the substance of the Other implies an insuperable revulsion for one’s own substance.

- Rene Girard, 54, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure

an anecdote on masochism.

A man sets out to discover a treasure he believes is hidden under a stone; he turns over stone after stone but finds nothing. He grows tired of such a full undertaking but the treasure is too precious for him to give up. So he begins to look for a stone which is too heavy to lift. He places all his hopes in that stone and will waste all his remaining strength on it.

Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, 176.

[The desire to become another] can never be satisfied, of course, because even in possessing the object, individuals can only be disappointed. Others are not divinities after all, and possessing them or the objects they desire can never truly transform the being of desiring individuals.

- Richard Golsan on internal mediation, Rene Girard and Myth: An Introduction , 13

jealous, we

The indifferent person seems to possess that radiant self-mastery which we all seek. He seems to live in a closed circuit enjoying his own being in a state of happiness which nothing can disturb. He is God.

- Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure

on becoming

In fact, the two men come to resemble each other a great deal through the identity of their desires. As the rivalry itself effaces what differences remain, they are finally no more than each other's desires.
- Richard Golsan on internal mediation, Rene Girard and Myth: An Introduction

bodies, i have in mind

A "discourse": in the first instance, a plurality of words, a diversity of elements come from elsewhere or a former time; but also a singularity, orienting these fragments of divers pasts, adjusting them to tally with the initial spell, and fashioning them into the language of the same ineffable something that had been given first in the form of a smell. (37)

Thus broken down into so many divisions and subdivisions, the primitive "flair" is transformed into verbal analysis.
That strange discourse [of questioning the possessed nuns] establishes a code. Proper names create points of reference and delimit regions within the neutral anonymity of the diabolical terrain. The naming might appear to be a deciphering, as if the goal were first to delineate, in that mass of gesticulations [which reveal the specific demon], the nocturnal forces moving the bodies from below, and then to give a verbal identity to those demons. In reality, the process is the opposite. Here, it is rather of the scientific type. The names of the demons superimpose a grid on the surface of phenomena. The task of exorcism is to draw out of the "mixture" presented to it by the possessed the body proper, the pure element corresponding to the conceptual model.
Today we can say that the verbal imperialism does not provide the necessary conditions for a real verification. It leaves the possessed few possibilities of resistance, since they themselves "enter" into the system and conform to it. The coding always "works" because the functioning is purely tautological, since the operation takes place within a closed domain. For the exorcists, the difficulty resides not in securing a means of verification of the code, but in keeping "the girls" within the closure of the discourse. (39)

…as is often done, they go to the next girl: In order to keep the discourse homogeneous, the terrain into which the outside has crept in is abandoned, and the work is resumed in a language demonologically "proper." (40)

…no personal element [must] be permitted to compromise the automatic functioning of the diabolical grammar. (40)

A question of language, then. But a closed language. It is reached through the unconsciousness, as in a dream. The devil’s language is an other language, into which one does not enter by means of an apprenticeship. One must be "possessed" by these words, without understanding them. (41)

- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, on the possession at Loudun