Posts Tagged ‘Jean-Pierre Dupuy’

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.

Jean-Marie Apostolidès died on March 24. We are still living in the post-COVID world where news travels slowly – hence, I just heard the news this morning. (We wrote about him here and here.) French and Italian Prof. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who is also Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique in Paris, has given his permission to publish his tribute on the Book Haven:

Jean-Marie Apostolidès is dead. As I write these words, my hand is shaking, and I have to swallow back my tears. A little older than him, I never imagined that I would one day have to mourn his loss. This is what being old is like. Either you disappear yourself, and your worries go with you, or you are doomed to face your own condition in that of your fellow men, including your dearest family members and friends, who fade away one after the other. I repeat here almost word for word a thought of Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher and mathematician that Jean-Marie placed in the Pantheon of his models.

Like me, Jean-Marie arrived at Stanford University in 1987, hailing from Harvard. He was one of the pillars of the French and Italian Department at Stanford. In a university mostly driven by science and technology, the Humanities lose with him one of its most creative, productive, and endearing members. Jean-Marie was many things: a sociologist, a literary critic, a novelist, a playwright, a theater director, an activist and, of course, a teacher. Far from being a jack-of-all-trades, he was fully involved in each of these activities.

There will be tributes, conferences, seminars, devoted to his literary and scientific work. I am not proposing here, in this unprompted testimony which goal is neither to be exhaustive nor analytical, to list all his accomplishments. The source of these few words is my affection for a departed friend.

A work, his magnum opus, stands out from his production as an essayist: Heroism and Victimization. A History of Sensibility published first in French in Paris in 2003, and reissued in 2011, in a second version that he kindly asked me to preface. He diagnosed a change in collective sensitivities, relating to values, behaviors, and mores, moving abruptly from a culture of heroism, inherited from the Romans and Barbarians who founded the West, to a culture of victimization, inherited from Judeo-Christianity. The relevance of this book to understand the transformations that America is undergoing today is blatant.

Jean-Marie was a man of the left, but of a libertarian left stretching back to May 1968 and spiced up with shades of social democracy – what was called at the time in France the “Second Left,” which meant it was “non-Marxist.” He was keenly attentive to the excesses of the far left, in particular Guy Debord’s “situationisme” and the recourse to political assassination with the Unabomber, alias Theodore Kaczynski. He translated and prefaced the latter’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, reflecting on the thin line that separates this type of literature from the radical critique of industrial society presented, for example, by Ivan Illich, with whom I worked myself.

Jean-Marie was a provocateur, but used provocation with kindness, with no aggressiveness, wishing only to raise awareness and castigate stupidity. When the Marquis de Sade was fashionable in literature departments, he staged Sade’s Letters From Prison in a setting that was old latrines on campus. He got in trouble for that, because some had not grasped or appreciated the humor of this performance.

Jean-Marie loved women. He was a feminist in the traditional sense of the term, campaigning for equality of status, titles and salaries. A course he gave for several years was called “Women in French Cinema.” It attracted hundreds of students. But he witnessed with dismay the progress of “wokism,” “intersectionality” and “cancel culture” which according to him resulted in a “reification” of the great classics of literature or cinema. He saw with sadness that these American inventions were partly derived from French Theory. We shared the same fascination for the most metaphysical film ever made: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I very much hope that Jean-Marie had not heard before he died of the latest Hollywood project, which is said to consist of reversing the genders of the two protagonists. Madeleine, the fictitious woman, would become a man of flesh and blood, and Scottie, the transfixed lover, a woman. The shock would have hastened his death.

Jean-Marie was raised as a Catholic. He even considered becoming a priest. He broke up with the Catholic Church early and retraced the circumstances of this break-up in his moving book, L’Audience (2001). I have no doubt that the God of his childhood, if he exists, will welcome him nonetheless with mercy. Either way, he will remain a living presence in the minds of those of us who knew and loved him.

A postscript from Maria Adle Besson on April 28: Like Jean-Pierre Dupuy, I have tears in my eyes and a lump in the throat. When Jean-Marie Apostolidès arrived at Stanford, I had just been admitted in the PhD program at Stanford. From the first day in class, he stunned me. He challenged me to think anew. He shaped my understanding of societal, political, literary, economic, psychological phenomena. A true “Maître à penser,” he enabled me to see evolutions and links, he opened perspectives, he helped me develop critical thinking. A university professor “à l’ancienne”, he did not hesitate to challenge all his students to work harder, to think deeper, to read widely, well beyond literature, to see films, plays, exhibitions, and be self-demanding.

For my PhD exams, I chose the 17th Century and Theatre, because he was the 17th Century expert at Stanford. (He could have taught any century). He could take any work, ten times read since childhood, Le Misanthrope, Phedre, Andromaque (I remember his saying “I would have given an arm to be able to write this scene…” And suddenly the play was lit and revealed its multiple facets.

In 1981 he left for Harvard and advised me to turn to René Girard as PhD advisor. I left the same year for Paris in the exchange program with Ecole Normale Supérieure.

When my book came out in 1999, I sent it to him. He wrote me a wonderful two-page letter, telling me he found it deep, interesting and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. He urged me to continue writing – “ça sonne juste et on te découvre en lisant ce livre. Il y a des pépites dans ton livre que tu dois creuser dans d’autres. Tu as tellement de choses à dire. Puise dans ton enfance, en Iran et ailleurs… Relis Proust.” And to encourage me to work, he insisted, “Tu sais, la beauté ça passe, mais une femme intelligente reste toujours attirante.”

He was the epitome of the intellectual, while a specialist of cinema, theatre, literature, art, tapisserie, a bon vivant and an astute observer of society. He loved good food (he was himself a gourmet cook), wine, women, classical music but also Charles Aznavour songs, which he knew how to sing by heart. One of the times I saw him in Paris, at a dinner with his wife Danielle Trudeau and a friend of theirs, he went to get his computer and played “Pour Essayer de Faire une Chanson” then “La Salle et la Terrasse” (“une vraie pièce de théâtre” he mused). Danielle, also an author and a university professor, chided him for listening to such “light” songs. He was the first intellectual to find depth in Tintin and write a psychoanalysis of Hergé’s chef-d’oeuvres, titled Les Métamorphoses de Tintin. Well before philosopher Michel Serres and others.

I am forever indebted to Jean-Marie Apostolidès. In view of current societal changes, not a week passes when I do not think of him, wonder at his prescience, and do not thank destiny to have crossed the path of this brilliant thinker, professor and author. I had hoped he would stay alive a long time, giving me the occasion to write a Proustian books that would make him proud of me, and dedicate it to him.

 Postscript on May 24: John Sanford’s obituary for Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences is here. An excerpt:

“He was a true freethinker … who provocatively critiqued social and institutional norms,” said Christy Pichichero, a former student of Apostolidès’ who is now an associate professor of French and history at George Mason University and a Stanford Humanities Center fellow. “He brought something entirely unique and irreplaceable to the Stanford community.”

When asked about his diversity of interests in a 2010 interview with Post-Scriptum, a journal published by the University of Montreal, Apostolidès responded: “Peut-être l’unité de mon travail ne sera-t-elle perceptible qu’après ma mort.” (“Perhaps the unity of my work will only be perceptible after my death.”)

Michel Serres, a Stanford professor, a member of the Académie Française, and one of France’s leading thinkers, died on June 1 at age 88. Earlier this week, we published French Consul General Emmanuel Lebrun-Damiens‘s remarks at the memorial conference for him on Monday, Oct. 21. (Read it here.) Below, Robert Pogue Harrison‘s words on that occasion:

When I joined Stanford’s Department of French & Italian as a young assistant professor in the 1980s, I became close friends with Michel Serres. It was he who encouraged me to break out of the straightjacket of narrow academic specialization and to enlarge my conception of what it means to be a humanist. My first book offered an intensive textual analysis of Dante’s Vita Nuova. It was thanks to Michel that that I subsequently went on to write a history of forests in the western imagination, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to our own day. That book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, published in 1992, is dedicated to Michel Serres, yet he managed to beat me to the punch. Just before Forests came out, I received a copy of The Natural Contract, which, to my great surprise, Michel had dedicated to me. That dedication, with a quote from Livy (casu quodam in silvis natus), was for me a far bigger deal than the appearance of my book a month or two later.

In the late 80s and 90s, Michel’s seminars at Stanford were attended by a number of junior and senior faculty members. He was the only one I can remember who regularly drew other faculty to his classes. We went not only to learn but to experience the unique aesthetic flourish of his teaching. There was an Orphic quality to his seminars. Michel had a way of enchanting and entrancing his audience. His lectures were musical, operatic performances, with preludes, movements, arias, and crescendos. He created this musical effect by the lyricism of his voice; by the cadences of his sentences; by his measured use of assonance and alliteration; by the poetic imagery of his prose; and by what I would call the undulating quality of his thought. There was a distinct rhythm to his seminars that put their beginning, middle, and end in musical, rather than merely logical, relation to one another. A Michel Serres seminar was a highly stylized affair, both in content and rhetorical delivery – and the audience could not help but break into applause when he concluded with the words “je vous remercie.”

With Serres, the classroom became not only an intellectual space of illumination but also the site of revelations. In addition to what I’ve called the Orphic quality of his teaching, it also had a Pentecostal aspect. (I borrow the term from our onetime Stanford colleague Pierre Saint-Amand, who attended many of Michel’s seminars in the early years.) Michel himself speaks of that particular type of communication in his book, Le Parasite. With Michel, one had the impression at times that something was speaking through him, that he was bringing to the surface deep, long-buried sources of knowledge and wisdom. It was very close to what Hannah Arendt, with reference to Heidegger’s teaching in the 1920s, called “passionate thinking.”

Whether he was teaching literary works or the origins of geometry, you could be sure that Michel would bring together religion and ancient history, anthropology and mathematics, law and literature. He had a wholly new way of reading philosophy, literature, and the tradition in general. Those of us who were drawn to his thought and his seminars developed a taste for complexity. In the heyday of deconstruction, Serres taught us that textualization led to inanition. The surest way to zombify philosophy, literature, or science was to textualize them. He taught by counter-example how to bring into play a heterogeneous plurality of perspectives. Texts were not folded in upon themselves but contained different strata of historical knowledge, of cultural instantiations and practices.

Serres’s model of reading is not easily duplicated. He would bring any number of scientific, religious, and historical deliberations to bear on his reading of authors like Pascal, Balzac, or La Fontaine like Serres was able to do. Serres provided us with a model of complexity for which the word “interdisciplinarity” does not do justice. One could call it a “new encyclopedianism,” but why not call it by a term that he himself coined in his book Genese – “diversalism.”

The concept of diversalism is not opposed to universalism but represents a very different declension of it than the German metaphysical one – a declension that finds universality in multiplicity rather than unity, contingency rather than necessity, and singularity rather than generality. The confluence of different streams of knowledge, diversalism is the very lifeblood of complexity, that is to say the lifeblood of life itself, not to mention of human culture in general.

I would like to think that diversalism – as Michel understood it – defines what Stanford University stands for among institutions of higher learning. In that sense Michel Serres is the local unsung hero of Stanford’s greater ambition to bring all fields of knowledge and research into productive conversation with one another. I would go so far as to say that Serres is – without Stanford even knowing it – this institution’s ego ideal. Let me go even further and say that, in his diversalism, Serres was a very representative member of the Department of French & Italian, which by any measure has been the department of diversalism par excellence. Our colleague Elisabeth Boyi, who is here today, reminds us that diversalism also includes what her friend and fellow traveler Eduard Glissant called “diversality,” namely the admixture of languages, cultural legacies, and ethnic origins in an “archipelago” of diversity, where archipelago means interrelated associations that are not organized hierarchically but laterally.

When you think of colleagues like René Girard, Jean-Marie Apostolides, Sepp Gumbrecht, Brigitte Cazelles, Elisabeth Boyi, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, as well as the younger generation of scholars in French & Italian, many of whom are present here today, you start to wonder whether there is another universe or timeline in which Donald Trump did not win the 2016 presidential election and that the Department of French & Italian figures as the fully acknowledged, rather than discrete, crown jewel of Stanford University. I mean Stanford in its commitment to a genuine diversalistic pursuit of knowledge. But as they say, nemo profeta in patria sua.

If Michel Serres is indeed Stanford’s ego ideal, the institution itself is largely unaware of it. Stanford and Serres always had a courteous but altogether perfunctory relationship. Neither was the explicit champion of the other. That is not unusual. Stanford has a history of accommodating but not exalting some of its most creative endeavors and ventures. Maybe it’s better that way. Be that as it may, Serres was always grateful to Stanford for allowing him to visit twice a year for some three decades. He did much of his best thinking here, interacting with colleagues and walking to the Dish daily. He used to say that he had no complaints about Stanford whatsoever. “Je vie comme un moine et je suis payé come une putain.” Wherever he is now, I’m sure he’s looking on Stanford fondly. Those of us he left behind here in California miss him dearly, and it is fair to say there will never be another one like him in our midst.

A memorial service will be held Tuesday, Jan. 19, at 2 p.m. in Stanford Memorial Church for the renowned French theorist René Girard, who died in November at age 91. We have written about him so many places on the Book Haven, it is hard to know where to begin, but you might try here and here and here and here. We’ve even written about the memorial service before, a month ago here. Consider this a final reminder.

Prof. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Peter Thiel, and René’s son Martin Girard will be among those speaking at the service.

A reception will follow at the McCaw Hall at Arrillaga Alumni Center at 326 Galvez on the Stanford campus, from 3 to 5:30 p.m.

The renowned Stanford French professor was one of the 40 immortels of the prestigious Académie Française. René Girard joined the Stanford faculty in 1981.

He is the author of nearly thirty acclaimed books, including the provocative and seminal Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), Violence and the Sacred (1972), and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978). His last major work was Battling to the End (2007).

He died at his Stanford home on Nov. 4 at the age of 91, after long illness.

Read the full obituary here.

The Stanford Memorial Church is one of the easiest places to find on the Stanford campus – you can see it as you drive down the campus’s landmark Palm Drive. The century-old building has been called “the University’s architectural crown jewel.” The Arrillaga Alumni Center is a few minutes away on foot, and I’ve been promised there will be signage (plus a lot of other people heading in the same direction).

Arrive early to find parking. And bring an umbrella. It looks like rain.

 

Is nuclear holocaust inevitable?  Can we back away from the cliff we have been anxiously gazing over for 70 years – or in many cases, simply trying to ignore? Some say there’s no turning back. The German philosopher Günther Anders noted, after his visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1958: “Now that humanity is is capable of destroying itself, nothing will ever cause it to lose this ‘negative all-powerfulness,’ not even a total denuclearization of the world’s arsenals. Now that apocalypse has been inscribed in our future as fate, the best we can do is to indefinitely postpone the final moment. We are living under a suspended sentence, as it were, a stay of execution – a reprieve.”

Not everyone is so pessimistic. California Governor Jerry Brown joined Stanford historian David Holloway, who studies atomic energy during the Cold War years; Stanford cryptologist Martin Hellman, known for his risk analysis studies on nuclear threats; environmentalist and historian Jon Christensen, and Stanford philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who writes about the nexus of ethics and technology, for a conversation on “The Nuclear Menace” this week. Jean-Pierre was the principal reason I accepted the invitation to the event in Stanford Libraries’ Bender Room. He credited the man he called his mentor, René Girard, for some of his insights, which were also drawn from his recent book, The Mark of the Sacred, from Stanford University Press.

It was a dynamite panel all round, and Jerry Brown’s presence was enormously cheering. Why a California governor on a panel discussing nuclear deterrence? Brown reminded the group that, decades ago during his first stint as governor, he had been nicknamed “Governor Moonbeam” for his tendency to roam outside “the very narrow range of permissible topics. … The end of humanity ought to be a permissible topic.”

Back to the “Mark of the Sacred”: Jean-Pierre described how, in our world, “rationality appears to have relegated all remnants of the religious mind to the past” and yet is still greatly influenced by it. “The problem is not to reconcile reason and faith. It is to recognize the marks of the sacred in the most outstanding and the most terrifying achievements of the rational mind.”

Wait a minute. That’s where René Girard’s influence comes in. “The sacred” is a term that carries a lot of baggage, but it’s used here in a very precise Girardian way. “The sacred” is the way archaic societies bonded through rituals of sacrifice and violence. Jean-Pierre reminded us that the Latin root of sacred is sacer, which gives two faces to the sacred: a saint on one hand, the accursed on the other; the veneration on one, an abomination on the other. “One of the marks of the sacred is radical ambivalence. It is infinitely good, as it protects us from our own violence; it is infinitely evil, as it is intrinsically violent.” Elements of the archaic persist into our postmodern era for, as Hellman noted, we have powers that were once considered godlike. “Only God could destroy a city; we can do that now,” he said – but would anyone consider the human race godlike in its maturity? he asked. Crickets.

Our attitude towards nuclear weapons matches this ancient pattern: “Their only usefulness today is said to be the fact that they protect us from others using them against us. In Biblical terms: Satan casts out Satan, and he is the only one capable of casting out Satan, that is, himself,” said Jean-Pierre.

While our nuclear arsenals are said to protect us against nuclear war, their absence would arguably be an even greater deterrent – a modern paradox. Dupuy cited military strategist Bernard Brodie: “one of the foremost factors making deterrence really work and work well is the lurking fear that in some massive confrontation crisis it may fail. Under these circumstances one does not tempt fate.” Jean-Pierre considered the interplay of accident and fate in our nuclear future – Oedipus’s fate required an “accident” at the crossroads for fulfilment, said Jean-Pierre. We are now dealing with “blind mechanisms, which make human passions, moral categories, intentions and strategic planning obsolete,” he said. In today’s world, “it may be rational to pretend to be irrational.” For example, Putin seems to prefer a chaotic, dangerous Ukraine rather than a democratic one that tilts towards European integration. “Putin’s behavior is a powerful generator of unpredictability. Strategic or not, this card may trump all the others.”

According to Dupuy, a nuclear holocaust could occur even without hatreds or passions. He reminded us of the dozens of times we were on the brink of nuclear war during the Cold War. Anders anticipated a “paradise inhabited by murderers without malice and victims without hatred. … No war in history will have been more devoid of hatred than the war by tele-murder that is to come … this absence of hatred will be the most inhuman absence of hatred that has ever existed; absence of hatred and absence of scruples will henceforth be one and the same.” (Sounds like warfare by drones, doesn’t it?)

A nuclear holocaust can occur even if no one wills it, given the automatic human tendency of escalation to extremes, as military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted, and as Girard elaborated in Battling to the End. The stakes that trigger such reactions can be ridiculously small – witness our entry into World War II, or the bickering between China and Japan over small islands in the Pacific. “All of this points to a new regime of violence in which human intentionality and human agency have become irrelevant.”

Dupuy noted,”Linking Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Hannah Arendt and Günther Anders probed the scandalous reality that immense harm may be caused by a complete absence of malignity; that a monstrous responsibility may go hand in hand with an utter absence of malice. Our moral categories, they discovered, are powerless to describe and judge evil when it exceeds the inconceivable.”

Philosopher David K. Lewis summarized the situation this way: “You don’t tangle with tigers – it’s that simple.” The “tigers” are our own violent tendencies. Luck, chance, fate, and the tiger “point to a world in which humanity itself has become irrelevant and miscalculation can carry the day.”

Another Girardian note during the question-and-answer period: Jean-Pierre suggested that not all nations, even belligerent ones, aim for the annihilation of the other – for example, Iran may not be nuking up to destroy Israel, but rather because, in mimetic fashion, nations imitate each other, and “to be taken seriously on the world scene, you have to be nuclear.” He recommended that we “sever the link between prestige and nuclear possession.”

Someone quoted Whole Earth Catalog’s Stewart Brand, who updated his comment from 40 years ago, “we are as gods, we might as well get good at it” to the more imperative “what I’m saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it.” Jerry Brown offered what might be considered an “action point” for the afternoon: “Techno-optimism is a view that leaves out the virtue of humility. Optimism can be as lethal as pessimism,” he said, recalling the Tower of Babel. “Humility is in short supply among scientists and politicians and others as well.”  Well, that’s something we can start working on today.