One of the great original thinkers of the twentieth century died today. René Girard's thinking and writing were so expansive that he is difficult to classify as a scholar. He was a literary critic to be sure, but he was also a philosopher, cultural anthropologist, theologian, and sociologist.
Here is today's release for Stanford University, where he held his final faculty position,
René Girard was one of the leading thinkers of our era – a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies and "isms" to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history and human destiny.
In particular, Girard was interested in the causes of conflict and violence and the role of imitation in human behavior. Our desires, he wrote, are not our own; we want what others want. These duplicated desires lead to rivalry and violence. He argued that human conflict was not caused by our differences, but rather by our sameness. Individuals and societies offload blame and culpability onto an outsider, a scapegoat, whose elimination reconciles antagonists and restores unity.
He first achieved renown with his 1961 book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Here is an article in The Guardian that addresses the impact of that work fifty years after its publication.
Discovering Deceit, Desire and the Novel is like putting on a pair of glasses and seeing the world come into focus.
With Deceit, Desire and the Novel, René Girard wanted to demonstrate that the truly "great novelists reveal the imitative nature of desire" in their works. In the process, he reinterpreted some of the most important novels ever written, launched a devastating broadside against the inheritors of Romantic individualism and spawned a whole new sub-genre — mimetic theory — which has been applied to almost everything, from psychology to economics.
I discovered Girard twenty-five years ago when I read
Violence and the Sacred. Since that day he has been my constant intellectual companion. It was as if every thought I'd ever had, every question that I carried, was addressed in that book in a way that made it seem he had written it just for me. It is the prism through which I see the world. Civilization is a mechanism through which humans channel and control violence. Without it violence proceeds uncontrolled, but the mechanism itself is violent. It functions by choosing unanimous victims who become the focus of those violent tendencies. The only solution to the brutality of such systems is to unmask and expose them, which is what all great literature does. Yet that makes great stories a threat, because, if understood, they might remove the controls we have placed on our own violent tendencies. We are caught in a bind.
Girard was a Roman Catholic Christian. His most powerful contribution to Christian thought was the reject of the common understanding of the death of Jesus as some kind of sacrifice. Sacrificial systems are an example of the victimage mechanism, using a unanimous victim to manage violence through a transactional system. He insisted that Jesus did not play along with that system, but exposed it by refusing to play along. Jesus died not to pay a price so that humans could be forgiven but because he declared that forgiveness was available without any transaction. I heard him speak in person one time, in 1992, and he talked mostly about the gospel of Mark in the New Testament. One of the texts he addressed was the story of Jesus casting demons out of a man in Mark 5:1-20. The man roamed the local graveyard and people had attempted to chain him, but their reaction to seeing him healed, clothed, and calm in 5:15 had puzzled me. They were afraid and begged Jesus to leave. Girard's view explained why this man was so essential to the community. They piled all of their undesirable aspects onto him. They defined themselves as good and healthy by seeing themselves as not like him. When they saw him looking like one of them they were undone, no longer certain of their own identity.
If you don't care for the Bible, then read his work on Shakespeare.
For all of his work I am grateful.