Evolution of Desire – the excerpt: “Haven’t read anything on the internet in a while that has given me so much pleasure.”
Monday, December 11th, 2017
Up at Quarterly Conversation, an excerpt from my Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard – to serve as appertif. The book will be officially out in April, and our kindly friends over at QC wanted to run an excerpt. Instead it became a whole chapter! “The French Invasion” describes a few wild days at Johns Hopkins University in 1966:
The conference has been called “epochal,” “a watershed,” “a major reorientation in literary studies,” “the French invasion of America,” the “96-gun French dispute,” the equivalent of the Big Bang in American thought.
To hear the superlatives, one would have thought that “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” symposium held at Johns Hopkins for a few frantic days from 18 to 21 October 1966 was the first gathering of its kind ever held. It wasn’t, but it did accomplish a feat that changed the intellectual landscape of the nation: it brought avant-garde French theory to America. In the years that followed, René Girard would champion a system of thought that was both a child of this new era and an orphan within it. He was at once proud of his role in launching the symposium, and troubled by some of its consequences.
René Girard was one corner of the triumvirate that instigated the conference, and the senior member of the trio. The others were his Johns Hopkins colleagues Richard Macksey (well, he will be familiar to Book Haven readers. We’ve written about him here) and Eugenio Donato. Donato was one of those rare birds in academia who “had a nose,” according to a French expression Dick Macksey borrowed. “He knew where the cooking was taking place.”
Dick Macksey: he’s left to tell the tale.
Only in the New World could such a meeting occur—certainly not in Paris, with its rivalries, tensions, and tectonic shifts. “The odd thing about it is, this struck me at the time even, these folks would not have gotten together under any circumstances in Paris under the same roof. There were enough lines already drawn in the sand, or drawn in blood, or whatever. So, a neutral ground,” Macksey explained.
The symposium was intended to be a crowning achievement for structuralism, but here’s the surprise: it signaled its end instead, as the movement slid into post-structuralism, so smoothly and effortlessly that the leading structuralists tend also to be the leading post-structuralists—Lacan, semiotician Roland Barthes, philosopher Michel Foucault, among them. The dark horse, Algerian-born Derrida, delivered the very last paper of the symposium, challenging the work of Lévi-Strauss and impishly skewering the structural weaknesses in the towering edifice the maestro had built. The paper, still a much-read classic of French theory, made the young philosopher’s reputation in America and everywhere else. America, not France, would become ground zero for the “deconstruction” he introduced.
Dark horse Derrida.
Everyone afterward sensed that there had been a metamorphosis. “It wasn’t clear whether it was a wedding gown for structuralism in America, or a winding sheet for structuralism in America,” Macksey told me. “Did we know what had happened? No, but there was a sense.”
In my conversations with him, Girard was consistently contemptuous about “la peste,” describing it as a kind of star thistle that had taken root across the United States and proved impossible to eradicate.
(Note bene: there have been a few adaptations to the text to accommodate names mentioned in earlier chapters and Quarterly Conversation style. Buy the book for all the footnotes!)
Anyway, the Quarterly Conversation piece is creating quite a conversation on Twitter.
Here’s one early reaction:
She’s referring to Laurent Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language (2015), which L’Express called “the most insolent novel of the year.” Insolent? Humble Moi?
Well, I’ll include a few more social media reviews, and let you read the whole Quarterly Conversation piece, here. Meanwhile, you can find us over at Twitter.
