Posts Tagged ‘René Girard’

Oedipus was one of René Girard‘s ongoing interests, and his interpretation of the Greek myth was controversial and groundbreaking. Hence, one of the liveliest presentations during last summer’s Paris conference for the French theorist’s centenary was anthropologist Mark Anspach‘s short talk on the subject. Anspach is the editor of 2020’s The Oedipus Casebook: Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. (You can read previous posts by and about him here and here and here and here, among other places.) He began this way:

Last year, French television broadcasted a noteworthy debate between two eminent figures. On one side, a 1960s student activist who later served in the European parliament. On the other, a philosophy professor and former minister of education known for his critiques of French theorists of the ‘60s. I will quote highlights from their debate in the original French to avoid losing any nuances, and then I will attempt an English translation.

And then there will be a quiz.

First in French:

––Tu dis que des conneries.
––Ta gueule!
––La tienne, pauvre crétin.

Now in English:

––You’re spouting pure BS.
––Shut your face!
––You shut yours, you pathetic dumbhead.

When I saw media accounts of this dialogue, I immediately thought of… Sophocles! That is because my view of the Greek playwright was shaped by the late, great Stanford thinker René Girard. As we will see, the quoted lines illustrate the same dynamic of conflict that Girard uncovers in the dialogues of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King.

So now the quiz. The first question is: what was the debate between the former student activist and the philosophy professor about?

Well, based only on the above excerpts, there is no way to know. I quoted from the most heated moment of the dispute, when passions ran highest. But in that moment, the original theme of the debate was forgotten. As Girard tells us, when a conflict escalates, the rivalry itself comes to the fore and the original object of the dispute is lost from view.

That doesn’t mean that the dispute is not originally motivated by real differences in political ideology or conceptual outlook. This brings us to my second question: which of the lines quoted were spoken by the activist and which expressed the Weltanschaung of the philosopher?

Once again, there is no way to know. Even if you studied for this quiz by reading every book either of them ever wrote, it would still be impossible to guess who said “Shut your face” and who replied “You shut yours.” No matter how far apart the antagonists were at the outset, their differences dissolve at the height of their rivalry. As Girard holds, the more a rivalry intensifies, the more the antagonists resemble each other.

Yet the more they resemble each other, the more each is convinced he is right and the other is wrong. As it happens, it was the philosophy professor who said “You shut yours.” At the moment he spoke, he had good reason to believe he was right. Was not his rival wrong to insult him by saying “Shut your face”? He should have kept his big mouth shut!

What the philosopher may not see in the heat of the moment is that, by opening his own mouth and saying “You shut yours,” he is behaving exactly like his antagonist. In fact, he is imitating him. Rivalry fueled by imitation is what Girard dubs mimetic rivalry. As Girard shows, conflicts intensify through mutual imitation, moving toward ever greater reciprocity and symmetry.

The more symmetrical a conflict is, the harder it is to say who’s right and who’s wrong. Indeed, if you look at the reasons invoked by each side, you will often find that both parties are right. The philosopher was right in that his antagonist should not have said “Shut your face.” But his rival was equally right in that the philosopher should not have said he was spouting BS.

Each party sees half the truth: the half that applies to the other. To speak the truth about the other’s role in a dispute without recognizing that the same truth applies to ourselves amounts to scapegoating the other. It amounts to scapegoating even if the other is guilty as charged.

This is a key point. A scapegoat does not have to be innocent. To single out one of the rivals as uniquely responsible for the rivalry is itself a form of scapegoating. If each of two antagonists is guilty, if each speaks only half the truth – the half that applies to the other – then the scapegoating is mutual or reciprocal. This kind of reciprocal scapegoating is typical of mimetic rivalry. It is part of the symmetry that characterizes the rivalry.

Tit-for-tat escalation

But symmetry is not the whole story. There is also a tendency to escalation. Each party tries to get the better of the other by launching a bigger insult, a bolder accusation, a stronger blow. This can be understood as an attempt to break free of the symmetry by establishing what Girard in Oedipus Unbound calls a “dissymmetry” capable of re-differentiating the antagonists.

The philosopher does not merely respond in kind to the phrase “Shut your face” by replying “Shut yours.” Responding in kind would leave both parties on the same footing. He also adds a new observation designed to transcend the tit-for-tat exchange. It is as if he were saying: “You tell me to shut my face. I tell you to shut your face. It may look like we are the same. But there is a difference between us. And that difference is that you are a pathetic dumbhead.”

The precise term used was “cretin.” Strictly speaking, cretinism is a form of mental disability caused by thyroid insufficiency. Now, our philosopher is a lucid and intelligent man. Do we take him at his word when he asserts that his adversary is suffering from cretinism? Of course not. We assume that he is speaking out of anger. We react as the chorus in Oedipus the King reacts amidst the debate between Oedipus and Tiresias. “It is anger, I think, that inspires Tiresias’s words,” says the chorus, “and yours too, Oedipus.”

The debate between Oedipus and Tiresias is at the heart of Girard’s analysis. Oedipus hopes Tiresias will shed light on the murder of the previous ruler, Laius. According to Creon, the oracle blames the plague in Thebes on the fact that this crime was left unpunished, and Oedipus has vowed to hunt down whoever is responsible. But when Oedipus questions Tiresias, the renowned prophet stubbornly refuses to answer.

Oedipus grows increasingly exasperated. Finally, he declares that Tiresias must be guilty himself. Tiresias retorts that it is Oedipus who is guilty. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard interprets Tiresias’s words as “an act of reprisal arising from the hostile exchange.” By accusing Tiresias of being behind the murder of Laius, Oedipus prods him into “hurling the accusation back at him.”

Oedipus dares Tiresias to repeat the accusation. Not only does Tiresias repeat it, he tops it with a new, more terrible charge, insinuating that Oedipus is the son of the man he killed and of the widow he married. It is as if Tiresias were saying: “You accuse me of killing Laius. I accuse you of killing Laius. It may look like we are the same. But there is a difference between us. The difference is that you, Oedipus, are a patricidal motherlover!”

Is Tiresias right? Is Oedipus guilty?

From hunter to hunted

Violence and the Sacred suggests that Oedipus is not guilty. In that book, Girard uses Sophocles’ tragedy to introduce the concept of the surrogate victim or scapegoat. Oedipus, an outsider with a lame foot, is a scapegoat made to bear sole blame for the plague in Thebes. The accusations of patricide and incest leveled against him are typical mythic accusations. As crimes that abolish the most fundamental kinship distinctions, patricide and incest are signifiers of raging undifferentiation.

The plague itself, an illness that strikes everyone without distinction, has the same meaning. The real plague, the gravest crisis afflicting Thebes, is the breakdown of distinctions, the plague of undifferentiation to which the protagonists contribute by hurling back and forth the same accusations. Each accuses the other of being responsible for the crisis.

The question is who will succeed in making the accusation stick. When Oedipus ultimately accepts the charge of patricide and incest, he becomes the monstrous embodiment of undifferentiation. The loss of difference is laid at the door “not of society at large, but of a single individual.” The social crisis is resolved at the expense of a lone victim. The mythic nature of the accusations of patricide and incest suggests that Oedipus is innocent. In his later works, Girard emphasizes the scapegoat’s innocence.

But in Violence and the Sacred, Girard also highlights the role played by Oedipus himself in the scapegoating process. In Sophocles’ play, Girard writes, the “entire investigation is a feverish hunt for a scapegoat, which finally turns against the very man who first loosed the hounds.” Oedipus is the man who loosed the hounds. He tried to pin the blame for the crisis on Tiresias and Creon. He took part in the game of reciprocal accusations that was one with the crisis afflicting Thebes.

If Girard is right, Oedipus may well be an innocent man wrongly accused of patricide and incest. As shown in The Oedipus Casebook, the evidence against him is not as solid as one might think. But Oedipus is not wholly innocent. He accuses others of responsibility for a crisis in which he himself shares the blame.

What is important for Girard in his early writings is not the substance of the accusations of incest or patricide or murdering Laius. It is the fact that Oedipus accuses others of guilt only to discover that he himself is guilty. That is the feature of Sophocles’ tragedy that first drew Girard’s attention and ultimately led him to his famous scapegoat theory.

In an early essay in Oedipus Unbound, Girard compares Sophocles’ hero to the Proustian snob: “The snob has no other model than the snob. He therefore has no other rival.” That is why the snob trumpets “his hatred of snobbery.” Seen in this light, “Oedipus’s excessive indignation, his zeal to track down the culprit, are revealing.” They call to mind the passion with which the Proustian snob denounces snobs. So it is that Oedipus “accuses Creon and Tiresias of the crime he himself committed.”

To use the language of Girard’s later writings, Oedipus scapegoats his rivals. To single out one’s rival as uniquely responsible for the rivalry is itself a form of scapegoating. This type of scapegoating is taking place all around us today. The degeneration of public debate into exchanges of insults is a clear sign of crisis. In this sense, the situation we are living through now is not unlike the one portrayed in Oedipus the King. If we see Oedipus purely as an innocent man accused of patricide and incest, then his experience will seem distant from our own. But if we see him as a person who accuses others before realizing that they are not free of blame themselves, then perhaps Sophocles’ play can help us navigate the present crisis.

It’s hard to pick a favorite essay from my new anthology, All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings – all of the pieces by French theorist René Girard are exceptional, otherwise I wouldn’t have picked them – but the essay on Peter’s Denial is certainly high on the list. So I was very pleased when the University of Notre Dame decided to publish the piece in its eminent Church-Life Journal, under the editor and friend Artur Sebastian Rosman, who is also a Czesław Miłosz scholar.

An excerpt from “The Question of Mimesis and Peter’s Denial“:

After Jesus had been arrested, the disciples fled in all directions, but Peter alone or, according to John, Peter and another disciple, followed at a distance right into the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace, and, I quote: “there he remained, sitting among the attendants, warming himself at a fire.” John says that “the servants and the police had made a charcoal fire, because it was cold, and were standing round it warming themselves.” And Peter too “was standing with them, sharing the warmth.”

The text shifts to inside the palace, where a hostile and brutal interrogation of Jesus was taking place. Then we shift back to Peter and, again I quote:

Meanwhile Peter was still in the courtyard downstairs. One of the High Priest’s servant girls came by and saw him there warming himself. She looked into his face and said, “You were there too, with this man from Nazareth, this Jesus.” But he denied it: “I do not know him,” he said. “I do not understand what you mean.” Then he went outside into the porch; and the girl saw him there again and began to say to the bystanders, “He is one of them,” and again he denied it.

Again, a little later, the bystanders said to Peter, “Surely you are one of them. You must be; you are Galilean.” At this he broke out in curses, and with an oath he said: “I do not know this man you speak of.” Then the cock crowed a second time; and Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, “Before the cock crows twice you will disown me three times.” And he burst into tears.

Auerbach makes some shrewd comments on that text: “I do not believe,” he writes, “that there is a single passage in an antique historian where direct discourse is employed in this fashion in a brief, direct dialogue.” He also observes that “the dramatic tension of the moment when the actors stand face to face has been given a salience and immediacy compared with which the dialogue of antique tragedy appears highly stylized.” It is quite true, and I am not averse to using such words as “mimesis” and “mimetic realism” to describe the feeling of true-to-life description which is created here, but I do not think that Auerbach really succeeds in justifying his use of the term “mimesis.”

Careful and sensitive as he is as a reader, Auerbach did not perceive something that is highly visible and which should immediately strike every observer: it is the role of mimesis in the text itself, the presence of mimesis as content. Imitation is not a separate theme but it permeates the relationship between all the characters; they all imitate each other. This mimetic dimension of behavior dominates both verbal and non-verbal behavior. Peter’s behavior is imitative from the beginning, before a single word is uttered by anyone.

In Mark and John, when Peter entered, the fire was already burning. People were “standing round warming themselves.” Peter too went to that fire; he followed the general example. This is natural enough on a cold night. Peter was cold, like everybody else, and there was nothing to do but to wait for something to happen. This is true enough, but the Gospels give us very little concrete background, very few visual details, and three out of four mention the fire in the courtyard as well as Peter’s presence next to it. They mention this not once but twice. The second mention occurs when the servant girl intervenes. She sees Peter warming himself by the fire with the other people. It is dark and she can recognize him because he has moved close to the fire and his face is lighted by it. But the fire is more than a dramatic prop. The servant seems eager to embarrass Peter, not because he entered the courtyard, but because of his presence close to that fire. In John it is the courtyard, upon the recommendation of another disciple acquainted with the High Priest.

A fire in the night is more than a source of heat and of light. A fire provides a center of attraction; people arrange themselves in a circle around it and they are no longer a mere crowd; they become a community. All the faces and hands are jointly turned toward the fire as in a prayer. An order appears which is a communal order. The identical postures and the identical gestures seem to evoke some kind of deity, some sacred being that would dwell in the fire and for which all hands seem to be reaching, all faces seem to be watching.

There is nothing specifically Christian, there is nothing specifically Jewish about that role of fire; it is more like primitive fire-worship, but nevertheless it is deeply rooted in our psyches; most human beings are sensitive to this and the servant girl must be; that is why she is scandalized to see Peter warm himself by that fire. The only people who really belong there are the people who gravitate to the High Priest and the Temple, those who belong to the inner core of the Jewish religious and national community. The servant maid probably knows little about Jesus except that he has been arrested and is suspected of something like high treason. To have one of his disciples around the fire is like having an unwelcome stranger at a family gathering.

The fire turns a chance encounter into a quasi-ritualistic affair and Peter violates the communal feeling of the group, or perhaps what Heidegger would call its Being-together, its Mitsein, which is an important modality of being. In English, togetherness would be a good word for this if the media had not given it a bad name, emptying it entirely of what it is supposed to designate.

This Mitsein is the servant girl’s own Mitsein. She rightfully belongs with these people; but when she gets there, she finds her place occupied by someone who does not belong. She acts like Heidegger’s “shepherd of being,” a role which may not be as meek as the expression suggests. It would be excessive in this case to compare the shepherd of being with the Nazi stormtrooper, but the servant maid reminds us a little of the platonic watchdog, or of the Parisian concierge. In John she is described as precisely that, the guardian of the door, the keeper of the gate.

This Mitsein is her Mitsein, and she wants to keep it to herself and to the people entitled to it. When she says: “You are one of them, you belong with Jesus,’ she really means, ‘You do not belong here, you are not one of us.”

We always hear that Peter acts impulsively, but this really means mimetically. He always moves too fast and too far; but still, why move so close to the center, why did the fire exert such an attraction on him?

Read the rest here.

Finally! All Desire is a Desire for Being, a Penguin Classics anthology of Stanford Prof. René Girard‘s “essential writings,” is officially out this week! To my knowledge, the French theorist is the first Stanford faculty to be celebrated in the eminent series. I was honored that Penguin invited me to create this collection of Girard’s finest essays.

Prof. William Johnsen, who directs the publication of a series of books on René Girard and his mimetic theory at the Michigan State University Press, spoke about All Desire is a Desire for Being at the Paris centenary conference for Girard’s 100th birthday, at the Institut Catholique de Paris last week. Here are Bill Johnsen’s words on that occasion:

Since All Desire is a Desire for Being is 95 percent pure Girard, it would seem that only the editor’s preface, selections and apparatus would be left to discuss. That’s all fine, I love what is in it, I am really happy to see especially the piece on Nietzsche from Paul Dumouchel‘s collection which shows the high-flying, often joyful colloques that Jean-Pierrre Dupuy and Dumouchel organized to integrate Girard with his intellectual peers in the Eighties, but I want to emphasize where Girard now appears (Penguin) and what that means: as my President says, this is a big deal.

In his interviews with Nadine Dormoy in 1988, René Girard attributes the 20,000 dependable French readers of serious books to the Écoles, and the smaller American audience to the silos of academic specialization. I have heard the same figure of 20,000 assured readers from Benoît Chantre so I assume that French readership is steady.

In 2006 I was invited by Girard and Robert Hamerton-Kelly to be Publications Chair of Imitatio, a project funded by The Thiel Foundation. One of the earliest projects was the public launch of Achever Clausewitz and Imitatio in Paris in 2007.

Imitatio had begun supporting production costs for books on mimetic theory at Michigan State University Press to find this readership. (We all should be grateful for their more than ten years of support, the slowest startup in Thiel’s stable). When Lindy Fishburne of The Thiel Foundation later assumed the directorship of Imitatio, she urged us to follow our core mission, to develop Girard’s ideas, to find them a greater recognition and circulation worldwide but also in the English-speaking world to catch up with the breadth of his readership in France and Europe.

I have spent my entire adult life in universities. As the editor of the series, I had some plans for how to spread ideas from the university to that outer world by influencing teachers who would influence their students who leave when they graduate, but I had no idea on how to approach the public directly, or whether America, despite its number of educated readers (my university alone granted 9,500 degrees this last spring), had any number approaching 20,000 dependable readers of serious books.

If Girard was besieged by reporters in Paris after Achever Clausewitz was published in 2007, nothing like that happened in America in 2009 when we published it in English as Battling to the End. In 2011, at a conference on Mimetic Theory and World Religions at Berkeley, I suggested to Cynthia Haven that she write a book about René Girard, something personal and accessible enough to help find him a wider audience in English. Girard had told me in appreciation that Haven had written specifically about the Clausewitz book in The San Francisco Chronicle, as well as other public venues in her one-person publicity campaign.

Evolution of Desire (2018) is informative both about Girard and his ideas, placing him effectively in a historical context by reference to his life and work and interviewing many people who knew him. She is both respectful and warm to her subject. It would be impossible to disentangle the circumstances that have made her book so popular: Girard himself, this century’s recognition of him with honorary degrees and awards, his election to the L’Académie Française, several organisations worldwide devoted to his work. But Haven has played a key role with her book and her reputation – she is a well-known and respected serious author for serious readers who bridges the academic and the public book world. She has her sights always on the dependable core readership of serious books in English.

My field is British Studies, I could go on and on about Penguin so I need to just summarize here. Penguin books has been the most successful venture in gaining a wide audience for serious books in English for the last one hundred years. Nothing else even comes close. So congratulations to Cynthia on publishing All Desire is a Desire for Being at Penguin, and to everyone else working in mimetic theory: this is a big deal, so buckle up.

All Desire is a Desire for Being is becoming a reality! I got my advance copies of the new Penguin Classics anthology of René Girard’s “essential writings” this week. (You can pre-order a copy here.) It was an honor to contribute to his legacy with Penguin Classics, as we near his hundredth birthday on Christmas Day. To celebrate, I am republishing an article you may not have seen before. It was published June 11, 2008, by Stanford News Service. I had met the “French polymath” (that’s how the Google “knowledge panel” identifies him nowadays) only a months before. This would become the first of many interviews, essays, and books about the French thinker.

This article and many others from the Stanford News Service are now archived and no longer publicly available. So in the centenary year of René’s birth, I thought I’d make at least this one available to all of you. Enjoy!

The story goes like this: In 2004, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a professor of  French at Stanford, is attending a conference in Berlin when he is  confronted by a man in a café who asks, “Why did you become a Girardian?” Dupuy replies in a beat: “Because it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis.”

Did it really happen? Although the event was witnessed, Dupuy responds  with a Gallic shrug and an Italian saying: “Si non e vero e ben trovato.” The American equivalent might be Ken Kesey‘s dictum, “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

In any case, the anecdote illustrates the kind of effect René Girard, the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and  Culture, Emeritus, at Stanford and one of the immortels of the  Académie Française, has had on people. Aficionados of the scholar even have a name: Girardians.

Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005,  published this spring by Stanford University Press, explores the  literary side of Girard’s thinking over his long career-a career that originally focused on literary scholarship but that has gradually embraced anthropology, religion, sociology, psychology, philosophy and  theology. French Professor Michel Serres, another immortel (America has only two, and both are at Stanford), has called him “the new Darwin of the human sciences.”

Girard’s Achever Clausewitz, published last year in France by Editions Carnets Nord, will be published in English by Michigan State University Press this winter. The book, which takes as its point of departure the Prussian military historian and theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), is considered by many to be groundbreaking. Its implications place Girard, known mostly for his studies of literature and archaic cultures, squarely in the 21st century.

“It doesn’t take much insight to realize that wars have been getting  worse every time – worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total. Well, Clausewitz is about that,” Girard explained. “Therefore my book is a very end-of-the-world sort of thing.”

Girard lives a sequestered life in the academic burrows of Stanford, but his influence abroad is seismic. Even French President Nicolas Sarkozy cites his writings. While Girard walks the Stanford campus virtually unnoticed and unrecognized, in Paris, visitors say, reporters were on his doorstep every day after the publication of last year’s book.

The “Girard Effect” may become more prominent worldwide with a foundation, Imitatio, that has been established to promote his ideas. (Dupuy is its director of research.) Imitatio launched its research program with a conference at Stanford in April, with about 40 scholars from around the world attending. The Colloquium on Violence and Religion, an independent association of international scholars, also studies mimetic theory and publishes an annual journal, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture.

Although Girard will turn 85 on Dec. 25 (he was born in Avignon), he is not resting on his laurels. Achever Clausewitz signals a new development of his line of thought, and he is already working on his next book, which will focus on St. Paul. Are there any more projects envisioned?

“Thousands more!” Benoît Chantre, his French editor and interlocutor for Achever Clausewitz, said and smiled.

Scapegoats and sacrifice

Girard’s thinking, including textual analysis, is a sweeping reading of human nature, human history and human destiny. His contention is controversial: Religion is not the cause of violence, as many suppose; it was, in archaic societies, a way of solving it.

Here’s why: People are social creatures, and their behavior is based on imitation to a much greater degree than generally supposed. How else to explain why a generation decides at once to pierce their tongues, or why stocks rise and fall? How to explain how a child learns language? Even our desires are not our own; we learn them from others.

“We don’t even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires,” he said during a lecture at Stanford’s Old Union in February. “We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths – but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.”

Envy and resentment are the inevitable consequences of this drive toward mimesis. These emotions, in turn, fuel conflict; it occurs whenever two or more “mimetic rivals” want the same thing, which can go to only one. It might be a woman, a presidency or a research grant. Many religious prohibitions are meant to regulate and control such 
conflict.

“When we describe human relations, we lie,” Girard said. “We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion.”

In literature, such mimetic desire can create comic masterpieces: A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a classic he frequently cites. Or it can inspire the novels of Balzac, in which the characters strive to outdo each other in snobbery and imitative social values. Such imitation can even be totally imaginary. Don Quixote wishes to be a knight errant, because he is imitating the heroes in the books he has read.

On a societal level, such conflict seeks a release, and the outlet is a scapegoat. A third party-often an outsider, a foreigner, a woman, someone who is disabled, the king or president-is blamed and demonized for having caused the conflict. Scapegoats are not seen as innocent victims; they are seen as the guilty cause of the disorder. The calls mount for the sacrificial victim, and the mob itself creates a sense of harmony.

“Joining the mob is the thing that people don’t realize. They feel the unity but don’t interpret it as joining the mob,” Girard said.

The mob prevails. The victim is killed, exiled, pilloried or otherwise dispensed with. Rivals reconcile, and peace and unity are restored to the community.

“If you scapegoat someone, it’s a third party that will be aware of it,” he said. “It won’t be you. Because you will believe you are doing the right thing. You will be either punishing someone who is guilty or fighting someone who is trying to kill you, but you are never the one who is scapegoating.”

In a sleight of hand that unsettles Girard’s critics, the fact that there is no proof is proof. It is not that the scapegoaters suppress the history of their scapegoating, he said, “scapegoating itself is the suppressing.”

For this reason, tragedy and religion in ancient Greece are inextricably entwined. Take the story of Oedipus. A plague is destroying Thebes, and whom does the mysterious oracle find at fault? The outsider, the lame newcomer king, whose expulsion brings peace to the city-state. Euripides’ The Bacchae is the same-disorder is tearing apart the society and the women are going crazy. Pentheus, the young leader, is at fault-his collective murder brings sanity and harmony to Thebes.

“The first culture which rebels against that system is the Jewish culture,” Girard said. He explains that the Bible is actually counter-mythical. Over a period of centuries, the books of the Old Testament begin to catch on to mankind’s scapegoating mechanism. While they describe and even celebrate violence, they gradually begin to question and fight it as well.

For example, many of the psalms “show a narrator who is surrounded by a crowd of good-for-nothings, who are trying to encircle him and turn him into a victim.” The story of Job also is revealing: “It’s a small community, but he’s been the dictator for years. Everybody loves him, he does no one any harm,” Girard said at the Old Union lecture. “One fine morning he wakes up, and everybody is against him. His three ‘friends’ are ready to explain how bad he is now. And everybody is ready to explain how bad he is at the same time. He has turned from the absolute hero to the scapegoat of the community. Job is like a long psalm and shows you what happens to communities. No myth will  ever show you that.”

The climactic victimization is with “the announcement of what we call the Passion.”

“Jesus accepts to be the victim, and we don’t really know why,” he said. “There, what the Gospel said is that it is God himself who has allowed all this scapegoating, and says, ‘You can forgive me, since now I am ready to become your victim myself.'”

Thus, the world has arrived at a dangerous point, Girard said. The mechanism of scapegoating has been seen through; the escape valve is gone. War no longer “works” and no longer resolves mimetic rivalry among nations. While wars were once organized and carried out by states, concluding with a treaty and one side’s defeat, now individual actors can instigate acts of war in a free-for-all.  Moreover, the actors may insist on their own martyrdom to aggravate the conflict, rather than resolve it.

In an interview in Le Point last year, Girard presented the dire worldview that made Achever Clausewitz controversial: “The world wars marked an important step in the rise of extremes. September 11, 2001, was the beginning of a new phase. Today’s terrorism still has to be thought through, because we haven’t yet grasped that a terrorist is ready to die in order to kill Americans, Israelis or Iraqis. What’s new here in relation to Western heroism is that suffering and death are called for, if necessary by experiencing them oneself.”  We search in vain for scapegoats: “The Americans made the mistake of ‘declaring war’ on al-Qaida without knowing whether al-Qaida exists at all.

“The era of wars is over: From now on war exists everywhere. Our era is one of universal action. There’s no longer any such thing as an intelligent policy. We’ve almost reached the end.”

An existential downfall

Girard’s misgivings about war and a potential apocalypse are the extension of a long thought that has evolved over decades. The road was marked by various points of illumination: One light-bulb moment occurred during a “conversion” experience when he was a young professor at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1950s.

He explained to James Williams, in an interview included in The Girard Reader, the epiphany that was connected with the writing of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: “I started working on that book very much in the pure demystification mode: cynical, destructive, very much in the spirit of the atheistic intellectuals of the time. I was engaged in debunking, and of course recognizing mimesis is a great debunking tool because it deprives us moderns of the one thing we still have left, our individual desire.”

“The debunking that actually occurs in this first book is probably one of the reasons why my concept of mimesis is still viewed as destructive,” he said. “Yet I like to think that if you take this notion as far as you possibly can, you go through the ceiling, as it were, and discover what amounts to original sin. An experience of 
demystification, if radical enough, is very close to an experience of conversion.”

He described his eventual realization this way: “The author’s first draft is a self-justification.” It may either focus on a wicked hero, the writer’s scapegoat, who will be unmasked by the end of the novel; or it may have a good hero, the author’s alter ego, who will be vindicated at novel’s end.

If the writer is a good one, he will see “the trashiness of it all” by the time he finishes his first draft-that it’s a “put-up job.” The experience, said Girard, shatters the vanity and pride of the writer. “And this existential downfall is the event that makes a great work of art possible,” Girard said.

While he speaks easily of conversion, original sin and redemption, however, one visiting scholar wondered why he seemed to circumvent a related theme: the imperative topic of forgiveness. But it’s hard to beat Girard at his own game. Only a few months earlier, Girard had spoken at an informal philosophical reading group in History Corner for several dozen faculty and students.

Girard recapitulated the story of the Old Testament Joseph, son of Jacob, bound and sold into slavery by his “mob” of 10 half-brothers: “They all get together and try to kill him. The Bible knows that scapegoating is a mob affair.” Joseph reestablishes himself as one of the leaders of Egypt and then tearfully forgives his brothers in a 
dramatic reconciliation. It is, he said, a story “much more mature, spiritually, than the beginning of Genesis.”

The story is unlike any in archaic literature: “It’s a very beautiful  story, which like many biblical stories, is a counter-mythical story,” he said, “because in myth, the lynchers are always satisfied with their lynching.”

But at the reading group, he suggested his audience might not have noticed this before. After all, they had been trained to think that the Bible was a completely backward book, superceded and preceded by better efforts, with little that was new to the world. In short, Girard dropped the cat among the pigeons.

They erupted into debate. Girard slouched back in his chair a little, smiling softly and watching the feathers fly.

A guest post from author Trevor Cribben Merrill:

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999) is perhaps the most complete and compact statement of René Girard‘s sweeping theory of scapegoating violence and the shattering revelation it brings. Now it’s been released as an audiobook, thanks to the late French theorist’s son Martin Girard, a businessman who devoted many hours of his time to narrating the work. Though he had no prior experience as a voice actor or reader, early reviews have been glowing. The audiobook is available on Amazon here.

Girard’s work is more relevant than ever today. Surely no other thinker can supply such a convincing explanation for the existence of the Twitter retweet button. But beyond the theory’s obvious ability to shed light on our online vices, it resonates because of the central place that Girard gives to competition and rivalry in his thought. Whether you’re working to get funding for your start-up, attract readers to a Substack post, or snag a house in a hot real estate market, competition is a daily reality in our world, yet one that we often prefer not to think or speak about too openly, even as we furtively check the amazon.com ranking of a colleague’s newest release. Speaking of amazon.com rankings: the audiobook of I See Satan has been selling briskly. I hope it can continue to bring new readers to René’s work, and introduce them to his compelling account of Christian truth. 

Earlier this month, Martin Girard and his wife Dee flew in from their home in Phoenix for a book launch and Q&A in Pasadena, CA to celebrate the I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Thiel Foundation) release.

First published in France in 1999 as Je vois satan tomber comme l’éclair (Grasset), and then translated into English by James G. Williams and published by Orbis Books in 2001, the new audiobook was published last month on October 20.

The event was held at the Pasadena home of Nicole and Ray Tittmann, who have hosted a number of book launch events in the last few years (including a launch of my novel Minor Indignities). A sumptuous spread of hors d’oeuvres greeted a crowd that included incoming Cornerstone Forum director Alex Lessard and documentary filmmaker Sam Sorich, who was in town from Chicago and photographed the event.  

Martin Girard was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the oldest of the three Girard children, while his father was teaching at Bryn Mawr College. He graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a degree in political science. He then became an entrepreneur, working between Paris and the US, and eventually founded a start-up that he later sold to a Fortune 500 company. He and his wife Dee are avid skiers, and in recent years Martin has been delving deeply into his father’s work.

I interviewed him at the event, in a conversation that included Martin’s youth and early adulthood, and touched on key milestones in René’s career. Martin recalled the buzz of excitement at the time of the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, and visits from Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort to the family’s home near Buffalo, New York, after his father took a professorship there and began writing the book that would eventually be published as Things Hidden since the Founding of the World. When Things Hidden was released in France to great critical and popular acclaim, Martin was in his early 20s and was working in France. Business associates were surprised to discover that Martin was, in fact, the son of the same René Girard they had heard interviewed on the radio or TV. 

Martin described a childhood of French immersion, with frequent trips to and long stays in Avignon, and dinner table conversation conducted in French, even when the family was in the U.S. He and his younger brother sometimes chafed against their dad’s determination to immerse them in French culture and the French language, but later discovered that their bilingual and bicultural upbringing was a gift that opened up many opportunities and instilled a lifelong love of France. 

Martin emphasized the key role his mother, Martha Girard, played in supporting his father’s work and career, as well as her role in teaching her children by example to avoid the drama and rivalries that René described in his works of literary theory.  “Martha Girard came from a family with traditional Scotch-Irish, midwestern American values,” he said. “These values were an important part of the family’s dynamic and the children’s upbringing. René’s career and the exoticism of the French connection tend unjustly to overshadow the importance of the other side of the family, including the impact on René.”

Postscript: The Book Haven made a difference today! I See Satan Fall Like Lightning is the #1 new release in Religion & Philosophy.

In the August edition of Kyiv’s Krytyka, a review of my Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard:

Євген Мінко, рецензючи книжку Синтії Гейвен «Еволюція бажання: життя Рене Жирара», зазначає, що для Жирара наука була полем передчуттів і осяянь, інструментом вивчення ефемерних, але фундаментальних елементів людського буття: бажання, відчуття сакрального, непереборного потягу до насильства.

In other words, (which is to say, English ones): Evgeny Minko, reviewing Cynthia Haven‘s book The Evolution of Desire: The Life of René Girard, notes that for Girard, science was a field of premonitions and insights, a tool for studying ephemeral but fundamental elements of human existence: desire, the feeling of a sacred, irresistible urge to violence.

Evgeny Minko is a writer, journalist, and psychoanalyst. The title of his article is “У полі передчуттів і осяянь,” in English, “In the Land of Premonition and Visions.” It begins, in translation:

One of the most enigmatic philosophers of the 20th century, René Girard, died in the fall of 2015, and three years later his first biography was published. Literary critic Cynthia Haven was friends with Girard during the last years of his life and de facto started work on the book with his participation: in Evolution of Desire conversations between the author and the hero are quoted abundantly. The result is a kind of hybrid of biography and memoir, and the requirements of distancing the researcher from the object of research for the sake of objectivity aren’t met. However, this fits perfectly into the coordinate system of thought created by Girard. Science — history, literary studies, anthropology — was for him a field of premonitions and revelations. A tool of careful (as if by the hands of an entomologist) study of ephemeral but fundamental elements of human existence: desire, feeling of sacred, irresistible urge to violence.

The “desire” in the title of the book for the reader, who is not familiar with Girard’s work, will primarily be a desire to understand who, in fact, we are talking about. After all, in the imaginary philosophical canon of modern times, Girard’s place is quite marginal, as it often happens (should happen!) with truly interesting and original phenomena.

René Girard was born in France in 1923, received a history education, and in 1947 emigrated to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life teaching literature at leading universities. A successful career path of a scientist, without upheavals and disasters.

However, a formal career does not convey the ambition of Girard’s entire life: to create a comprehensive system for explaining human behavior. Like the one created by Freud. And this system became his mimetic theory.

Read the whole thing here in Ukrainian. Otherwise, it’s off to Google Translate for you.