"Criticism from the Underground" is a collection of essays by the famous French philosopher, philologist and anthropologist Rene Girard. The heroes of these essays - Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus, Dante and Victor Hugo, Gilles Deleuze and Marcel Proust (as well as the characters of these authors) - allow Girard to formulate one of the central concepts of his "fundamental anthropology" - the concept of "mimetic desire." This book is about the Other as our model, rival and counterpart, in dramatic competition with which our desire arises, as well as our "I." This is a book about what may turn out to be a more fundamental type of rivalry than the relationship described by Freud through the Oedipus complex.