René Girard

For the French footballer, see René Girard (footballer).

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

Life and career

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

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

The work of Rene Girard has been extended into numerous academic disciplines. Perhaps the best source for tracking the continued scholarship that operates within a Girardian framework is through the website maintained by the Colloquium on Violence and Religion [1].

His thought

Mimetic desire

René Girard was a professor of French literature in the United States at the end of the 1950s and sought a new way of speaking about literature. Beyond the "uniqueness" of individual works, he tried to discover what they have in common and he noticed that the characters created by the great writers evolved in a system of relationships that was common to the works of many authors: "Only the great writers succeed in painting these mechanisms faithfully, without falsifying them: we have here a system of relationships that paradoxically, or rather not paradoxically at all, has less variability the greater a writer is." So there did indeed exist "psychological laws" as Proust calls them. These laws and this system are the consequences of a fundamental reality grasped by the novelists, which Girard called the mimetic character of desire. This is the content of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961). We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person – the model - for this same object. This means that the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: there is always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator: it is in fact the model who is sought. René Girard calls desire "metaphysical" in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something more than a simple need or appetite, "all desire is a desire to be" , it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.

Mediation is external when the mediator of the desire is socially beyond the reach of the subject, namely beyond the real world, as in the case of Amadis of Gaul for Don Quixote. The hero lives a kind of folly that nonetheless remains optimistic. Mediation is internal when the mediator is real and at the same level as the subject. The mediator then transforms into a rival and an obstacle to the acquisition of the object, whose value increases as the rivalry grows. This is the universe of the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoyevsky, which are particularly studied in this book.

Through their characters, our own behavior is displayed. Everyone holds firmly to the illusion of the authenticity of one's own desires; the novelists implacably expose all the diversity of lies, dissimulations, maneuvers, and the snobbery of the Proustian heroes; these are all but "tricks of desire", which prevent one from facing the truth: envy and jealousy. These characters, desiring the being of the mediator, project upon him superhuman virtues while at the same time depreciating themselves, making him a god while making themselves slaves, in the measure that the mediator is an obstacle to them. Some, pursuing this logic, come to seek the failures that are the signs of the proximity of the ideal to which they aspire. This is masochism, which can turn into sadism.

This fundamental discovery of mimetic desire would be pursued by René Girard throughout the rest of his career.

Violence and the Sacred

Since the mimetic rivalry that develops from the struggle for the possession of the objects is contagious, it leads to the threat of violence. René Girard himself says, "If there is a normal order in societies, it must be the fruit of an anterior crisis." Turning his interest towards the anthropological domain, René Girard began to read all the anthropological literature and proposed his second great hypothesis: the victimary process, which is at the origin of archaic religion and which he sets forth in his second book Violence and the Sacred (1972).

If two individuals desire the same thing, there will soon be a third, a then fourth. This process quickly snowballs. The object is quickly forgotten and the mimetic conflict transforms into a general antagonism. A paroxysm of violence would tend to focus on an arbitrary victim and a unanimous antipathy would grow against him. The brutal elimination of the victim would reduce the appetite for violence that possessed everyone a moment before, and leaves the group suddenly appeased and calm. The victim lies before the group, appearing simultaneously as the origin of the crisis and as the one responsible for this miracle of renewed peace. He becomes sacred, that is to say the bearer of the prodigious power of defusing the crisis and bringing peace back. René Girard had just discovered the genesis of archaic religion, of ritual sacrifice as the repetition of the original event, of myth as an account of this event, of the taboos that forbid access to all the objects at the origin of the rivalries that degenerated into this absolutely traumatizing crisis. This religious elaboration takes place gradually over the course of the repetition of the mimetic crises whose resolution brings only a temporary peace. The elaboration of the rites and of the taboos constitutes a kind of empirical knowledge about violence.

If explorers and anthropologists have not been able to witness events similar to these, which go back to the earliest times, indirect proofs for them abound, such as the universality of ritual sacrifice in all human communities and the innumerable myths that have been collected from the most varied peoples. If Girard's theory is true, then we will find in myths the culpability of the victim-god, depictions of the selection of the victim, and his power to beget the order that governs the group. And René Girard found these elements in numerous myths, beginning with that of Oedipus, which he analyzed in this and later books. On this question he opposes Claude Lévi-Strauss.

In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), Girard develops the implications of this discovery. The victimary process is the missing link to the boundary between the animal world and the human world, the principle that explains the hominization of the primates. It allows us to understand the need for sacrificial victims, which in turn explains the hunt which is primitively ritual, and the domestication of animals as a fortuitous result of the acclimatization of a reserve of victims, or agriculture. It shows that at the beginning of all culture is archaic religion, which Durkheim had sensed. The elaboration of the rites and taboos by proto-human or human groups would take infinitely varied forms while obeying a rigorous practical sense that we can detect: the prevention of the return of the mimetic crisis. So we can find in archaic religion the origin of all political or cultural institutions.

As the theory of natural selection of species is the rational principle that explains the immense diversity of forms of life, the victimary process is that which explains the origin of the infinite diversity of cultural forms. The analogy with Darwin also extends to the scientific status of the theory, as each of these presents itself as a hypothesis that is not capable of being proven experimentally, given the extreme amounts of time necessary to the production of the phenomena in question, but which imposes itself by its great explanatory power.

The Judeo-Christian Scriptures

• The biblical text as a science of man

In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, René Girard discusses for the first time Christianity and the Bible. The Gospels ostensibly present themselves as a typical mythical account, with a victim-god lynched by a unanimous crowd, an event that is then commemorated by Christians through ritual sacrifice - symbolic in this case - in the Eucharist. The parallel is perfect except for one detail: the victim is innocent. The mythical account is built on the lie of the guilt of the victim inasmuch as it is an account of the event seen from the viewpoint of the anonymous lynchers. This ignorance is indispensable to the efficacy of the sacrificial violence. The evangelical "good news" clearly affirms the innocence of the victim, thus becoming, by attacking ignorance, the germ of the destruction of the sacrificial order on which rests the equilibrium of societies. Already the Old Testament shows this turning inside-out of the mythic accounts with regard to the innocence of the victims (Abel, Joseph, Job, ..) and the Hebrews were conscious of the uniqueness of their religious tradition. With the Gospels, it is with full clarity that are unveiled these "things hidden since the fondation of the world" (Matthew 13:35), the fondation of the order of the world on murder, described in all its repulsive ugliness in the account of the Passion. This revelation is even clearer because the text is a work on desire and violence, from the serpent setting alight the desire of Eve in paradise to the prodigious strength of the mimetism that brings about the denial of Peter during the Passion. Girard reinterprets certain biblical expressions in light of his theories; for instance, he sees "scandal" as signifying mimetic rivalry. No one escapes responsibility, neither the envious nor the envied: "Woe to the man through whom scandal comes" (Matthew 18:7).

• Christian society

The evangelical revelation contains the truth on the violence, available for two thousand years, René Girard tells us. Has it put an end to the sacrificial order based on violence in the society that has claimed the gospel text as its own religious text? No, he replies, since in order for a truth to have an impact it must find a receptive listener, and men do not change that quickly. The gospel text has instead acted as a ferment that brings about the decomposition of the sacrificial order. While medieval Europe showed the face of a sacrificial society that still knew very well how to despise and ignore its victims, nonetheless the efficacy of sacrificial violence has never stopped decreasing, in the measure that ignorance receded. And here René Girard sees the principle of the uniqueness and of the transformations of the Western society whose destiny today is one with that of human society as a whole. Does not the retreat of the sacrificial order mean less violence? Not at all; rather, it deprives modern societies of most of the capacity of sacrificial violence to establish temporary order. The "innocence" of the time of the ignorance is no more. On the other hand, Christianity, following the example of Judaism, has desacralized the world, making possible a utilitarian relationship with nature. Increasingly threatened by the resurgence of mimetic crises on a grand scale, the contemporary world is on one hand more quickly caught up by its guilt, and on the other hand has developed such a great technical power of destruction that it is condemned to both more and more responsibility and less and less innocence. So, for example, while empathy for victims manifests progress in the moral conscience of society, it nonetheless also takes the form of a competition among victims that threatens an escalation of violence.

Critics

The main source of criticism of Girard's work is his unfairness in comparing Judeo-Christianity vis-a-vis the rest of religions. Girrd has a tendency to highlight only those texts favorable to his interpretation. He dedicates almost no attention to the promient violent character of Yahvew in the Hebrew Bible, and immediatley disregards any non-violent aspect of non-Christian religion. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World he claims he is not ashamed of Old Testament texts that mistify violence, but he only dedicates attention to the story of Lot's wife and Jacob's blessing. In the same manner, he also ignores most New Testament passages where violence is attributed to God. In matters of mythology and the Bible, Girard's opinions tend to be over generalized, as he has not studied enough myths to sustain his claims.

Bibliography

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

Books about Girard

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

References

• Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary
• On René Girard
• Stanford University on René Girard
• Homepage of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion
• Template:Fr icon Reception speech of René Girard

External links

• Template:Fr icon L'Académie française
• Are the Gospels Mythical? by René Girard (First Things); Follow-up correspondence
• The Mimetic Desire
• Was Christ Just Another ‘Scapegoat’?
• Interview with Girard regarding Pope Benedict XVI and relativism (New Perspectives Quarterly)
• Violence & the Lamb Slain - a short, accessible introduction to Girardian thought, plus an interview with Girard
• How To Scapegoat the Leader - an introduction to Girard
• Girard among the girardians (First Things)
• The René Girard Bibliography
• ProgressiveBaptist.net - Essays about Girard and Christian Theology at ProgressiveBaptist.net