René Girard

René Girard is a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. He is the author of several books (see below), developing the idea that human culture is based on a sacrifice as the way out of mimetic, or imitative, violence between rivals. His writing covers anthropology, theology and literature, as well as philosophy. His work tends to be very controversial due to his harsh criticisms of modern philosophy and his outspoken Christian perspective. He focuses on three main ideas: (1) mimetic desire, (2) the scapegoat mechanism, (3) the Bible's unveiling of 1 and 2.

His thought

His best known works are "Violence and the Sacred" which explains the relations between myths and violence, and "Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World", in which he develops the particular relation between Judeo-Christianity (which he considers the destruction of myth), violence, and the development of Western civilization. The dichotomy he sees between myths and Judeo-Christianity is based on his claim that mythological narratives are based on the tendency to scapegoat. Girard claims that myths are records of actual events in which misfortunes were blamed on innocents, who were then murdered as a punishment; the story of the murder became a myth, which perpetuated the violence by reinforcing the tendency to scapegoat. Judeo-Christianity, on the contrary, seeks to counteract this tendency, asserting the innocence of the scapegoat. Myths mask the mechanism of victimization by asserting the guilt of the accused person (e.g. "Oedipus really did commit parricide and incest"), while Judeo-Christianity attempts to reveal the function of the victim (scapegoat) in mimetic desire, and thus restore the truth: the accused person is innocent (Job, whom the Bible depicts as an innocent man, is falsely accused by his "friends" of being responsible for the misfortunes that befall him).

The relation of desire is not binary (subject-object) but triangular (subject, mediator/model, object): the subject desires the objects which are desired by a third party, who is a model for the subject. In other words, the object of desire is not internal to the subject (the other, by his relation to the subject, would reveal this) but is pointed out to him by the model. We can desire anything, but we cannot desire it in any way. How we desire something is always shown to us (voluntarily or not) by a model. Desire aims not so much at ownership of the object as at the being of the mediator.

-This theory of desire can be applied to the Oedipus complex: the child does not desire his mother so much as want to imitate his father. That is, it is because the son must imitate the father "completely" that he will inevitably desire the mother (on the condition that the father desires — or seems to desire — the mother).

The consequence of this mimetic character of desire is that people enter into rivalry with each other because they desire the same objects. This rivalry brings about an increase in desire and leads to a fundamental danger, a threat of violence against society.

-Society exorcises this threat of violence through sacrifice. It can exist only by reference to a common enemy, a unifying victim, a scapegoat. So it is not the father who is put to death (as Freud's Totem and Taboo claims), but rather a unifying victim.

-So the mechanism of begetting the social is neither economic (Marx), nor sexual (Freud), but religious (Durkheim).

In his latest work, Les origines de la culture, he goes even further by saying that mimetic desire (and its corollary, the device of the scapegoat) are at the origin of the development of humanity via a double principle of natural selection:

Mimetic desire is, for him, the genesis of evolution that allowed the "pre-human beings" to acquire symbolic representation, and then language,
Those groups that developed mimetic desire needed to acquire the device of the scapegoat to avoid being annihilated by the endemic violence engendered by mimetic desire.

Life and career

René Girard was born in the southern French city of Avignon on December 25, 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied medieval history in Paris at the École des Chartes. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year's fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation as a literary critic by publishing influential essays on such authors as Albert Camus and Marcel Proust. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Moving back and forth between Buffalo and Johns Hopkins, he finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.

He is Honorary Chair of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion and was elected to the Académie Française, the highest rank for French intellectuals, on March 17, 2005.

The work of Rene Girard has been extended into numerous academic disciplines. Perhaps the best source for tracking the continued scholarship that operates within a Girardian framework is through the website maintained by the Colloquium on Violence and Religion ^*.

Bibliography

1961. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Grasset. (Trans. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1965)
1962. Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
1963. Dostoïevski, du double à l'unité. Paris: Plon. (Trans. Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. Crossroad Publishing Company. 1997)
1972. La violence et le Sacré. Paris: Grasset. (Trans. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)
1976. Critique dans un souterrain. Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme.
1978. To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
1978. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. Paris: Grasset. (Trans. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987)
1982. Le Bouc émissaire. Paris: Grasset. (Trans. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)
1985. La route antique des hommes pervers. Paris: Grasset. (Trans. Job, the Victim of His People. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987)
1991. A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press.
1994. Quand ces choses commenceront ... Entretiens avec Michel Treguer. Paris: arléa.
1996. The Girard Reader. Ed. by. James G. Williams. New York: Crossroad.
1999. Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair. Paris: Grasset. (Trans. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001)
2000. Um Longo Argumento do princípio ao Fim: Diálogos com João Cezar de Castro Rocha e Pierpaolo Antonello. (Trans: One long argument from the beginning to the end Rio de Janeiro, Topbooks)
2001. Celui par qui le scandale arrive. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
2003. Le sacrifice. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
2004. Les origines de la culture. Entretiens avec Pierpaolo Antonello et João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
2004. Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire. Ed. by Mark R. Anspach. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Books about Girard

Bailie, Gil (1995). Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. Introduction by René Girard. New York: Crossroad. ISBN 0824516451.
Bellinger, Charles (2001). The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil. New York: Oxford. ISBN 0195134982.
Dumouchel, Paul (Ed.; 1988). Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804713383.
Fleming, Chris (2004). René Girard: Violence and Mimesis. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0745629482.
Kirwan, Michael (2004). Discovering Girard. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. ISBN 0232525269.
Livingston, Paisley (1992). Models of Desire: René Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Swartley, Wiliam M. (Ed.; 2000). Violence Renounced: Rene Girard, Biblical Studies and Peacemaking. Telford: Pandora Press. ISBN 0966502159.

References

External links

L'Académie française
Are the Gospels Mythical? by René Girard (First Things); Follow-up correspondence
The Mimetic Desire
Was Christ Just Another ‘Scapegoat’?
Interview with Girard (New Perspectives Quarterly)
How To Scapegoat the Leader - an introduction to Girard
Girard among the girardians (First Things)
The René Girard Bibliography