Posts Tagged ‘William Johnsen’

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.

When I ran across Bill Johnsen at the 50th anniversary fête for the seminal Deceit, Desire and the Novel a few months back he gave me three copies of René Girard‘s newest volume, a small, elegant paperback called Sacrifice.  One was for me, he said.

“Who are the other two for?” I asked.  “Two famous people you know,” said the Michigan State University professor.   Did he have anyone in mind?  “Yes, Dana Gioia,” he said.

The turnabout was sweet.  In 2007, when Dana was invited to be a commencement speaker at Stanford, Dana was knocked for not being famous enough.  Gioia acknowledged some students’ disappointment: “A few students were especially concerned that I lacked celebrity status. It seemed I wasn’t famous enough. I couldn’t agree more,” he said. “As I have often told my wife and children, ‘I’m simply not famous enough.'”

I sent him the book with that comment, and added a poem by Tomas Venclova and another little-known one by Rainer Maria Rilke, in the James Leishman translation.

Bill gift was a nice followup to an earlier event: One of the joys of life is being to introduce your favorite people to each other – so I was honored to have the chance to invite Dana to Palo Alto to meet René some months back.  I hoped the meeting would be fruitful.

And it was, I learned, in the followup that followed the followup.  A few minutes ago, jazz scholar Ted Gioia‘s Facebook page offered a link about his big bro.  From Evan R. Goldstein Q&A in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “My Daily Read: Dana Gioia“:

Q: What books have you recently read?  Do they stand out?

Not famous enough in 2007 (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

A. I still read a great many books. I travel almost every week, so I have long stretches of quiet time on planes and in hotel rooms. I’m also a terrible insomniac so I read for hours late at night.  At the moment I’m reading Meryle Secrest’s Modigliani as well as Peter Humfrey’s Painting in Renaissance Venice, which must seem like an odd pair chronologically.  I’ve also been reading through René Girard’s books on mimetic theory and just finished Sacrifice, which deals with religious violence in the classical Vedic texts. I also enjoyed Kevin Starr’s survey of  California historians, Clio on the Coast.

During my visit to his Santa Rosa home last summer, we had discussed some of the same themes that emerged in the Q&A.  Here’s what I wrote then:

“Dana, Mary, and I sipped wine on the balcony overlooking the valley and the hills.  We talked about the increasing commercialization of society, where marketed celebrities famous for being famous in turn market corporate brands for us to buy — how to keep Guess jeans, Netflix, Jimmy Choo shoes, and apps from monopolizing our remaining memory banks and our lives?  We discussed the crazily increasing speed of 21st century communications and life.  He liked, he said, living in a place where impressions are taken in and thought occurs no faster than the speed of walking.”

He’s clearly still of the same mind – and he dismisses the celebrity phenomenon he had decried in 2010 (and been denied in 2007):

Q. Do you use Twitter?  If so, whom do you follow?

A. I  never use Twitter. In fact, I am deeply suspicious of the massive communications overload that the media obsesses over and glorifies. So much of this activity is just covert advertising for products and celebrities. The objective is to capture and commercialize every moment of people’s time. What we really need is more quiet and less phony connectivity.

Dana’s reading is far more disciplined than my own.  My attention, admittedly, has been blown to bits by the world wide web.  Meanwhile, it’s good to know Dana and I have something in common:  I am currently making my way through René’s classic Deceit, Desire and the Novel, with plans to hit Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World next.