Rene Girard

Rene Girard , born in 1923, is professor emeritus of Littérature compared with the Université of Stanford and the Université Duke (the United States) and member of French l academy since 2005. He is the inventor of the theory on the mimetic desire which, starting from the discovery of the mimetic character of the desire, provided the foundations of a news Anthropologie. He is defined itself as an anthropologist of the Violence and religious. The theory of the mimetic desire of Rene Girard constitutes a rare example of a theory in social sciences which preceded new discoveries in sciences " dures" several decades. Indeed, recently of the researchers in clinic psychology like Andrew Meltzoff and of the neurologists as Vittorio Gallese (the Italian researcher which discovered the “neurons mirrors” with Giacomo Rizzolatti) started to be interested in the mimetic theory (p. ex conference Stanford 2007). The agreement between the studies of Girard and their scientific discoveries are indeed surprising, `extraordinary' like says it Dr. Scott Garrels:

" The parallels between Girard' S insights and the only recent conclusions made by empirical researchers concerning imitation (in both development and the evolution off species) are extraordinary." (Garrels, 2006).

Biography

Rene No5el Theophilus Girard is married and father of three children. He was born in Avignon (France) the December 25th 1923. His/her father, conservative of the museum of this city, was anticlerical and republican. His/her mother, who was the first graduate of the department of Drome, was catholic. From 1943 to 1947, he studies with the National school of the charters in Paris, where he specializes in medieval history.

In 1947, it leaves for the United States, where it obtains a fellowship. He will marry and carry out the totality of his career to the the United States. He obtains a doctorate of history in 1950 at the university of Indiana where he starts to teach the literature, the field which will ensure its reputation to him. From 1957 to 1968, it integrates the Université Johns Hopkins. In 1961 is published its first book, romantic Mensonge and romantic truth , where it exposes its discovery of the mimetic desire. It starts to think of the aspects anthroplogic of the imitation: the question of the sacrifice. It will be the object of its book more known, violence and crowned the , published in 1972. In October 1966, it organizes an international symposium, the languages of criticism and the social sciences , making discover the Structuralisme with American. Y took part, inter alia, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan. In 1968, it joined the university of Buffalo until 75 where it turns over to John Hopkins. It binds to Michel Serres with which it collaborates. It starts to think of its third work, things hidden since the foundation of the world , since 1971. The relative incomprehension which met violence and crowned the makes him test the difficulty in making its ideas accessible. With the assistance of Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, two French psychiatrists, it finalizes the work during the summer 1977. This one is well accommodated by the general public French but been sulky by the intellectual mediums.

It finishes its academic career, of 1980 with its retirement in 1995, Stanford where it always resides. It directs there, with Jean-Pierre Dupuy the Program for interdisciplinary research which organizes several important conferences

The March 17th 2005, Rene Girard is elected with the French Academy, with the armchair 37, succeeding the Reverend Square Père, deceased the January 15th 2004. It is received under the Cupola on December 15th, 2005 (speech of reception and answer of Michel Serres).

Its thought

The mimetic desire

Mimetic character of the desire

Rene Girard is professor of French literature in the United States at the end of the years 1950 and seeks a new way of speaking about literature. Beyond the “singularity” of works, he seeks what they have of commun run and realizes that the characters created by the great writers evolve/move in a mechanics of reports/ratios which one finds from one author to another: “Only the great writers make a success of the painting of these mechanisms without distorting it for the benefit of their Me: there one holds a system of reports/ratios which paradoxically or rather not paradoxically of the whole, varies from as much less than the writers are taller. ” There would thus exist many “psychological laws” like says it Proust. These laws, or this mechanics, described so well by the novelists, Rene Girard releases and formulates the base clearly from it: mimetic character of the desire. Such is the contents of its first book: romantic Lie and romantic Truth (1961). We borrow our desires. Far from being autonomous, our desire is always caused by the desire that another - the model - same object has. What means that the report/ratio is not direct between the subject and the object: there is always a triangle. Through the object, it is the model, which Girard calls mediator , which attracts; it is the being of the model which is required. Rene Girard qualifies the desire of metaphysics insofar as, since it is other thing that a simple need or appetite, “any desire is desire to be” , it is aspiration, dream of a plenitude allotted to the mediator. In that, and always contrary if need be, it is infinite.

External mediation, internal mediation

The mediation is external when the mediator of the desire is socially out of reach of the subject, even out of the real-world like the east Amadis de Gaulle for Don Quichotte. The hero saw a kind of madness which remains however optimistic. The mediation is internal when the mediator is real and on the same level as the subject. It is transformed then into a rival and obstacle for the appropriation of the object whose value increases as the competition grows. It is the universe of the novels of Stendhal, Proust or Dostoïevski particularly studied in this book.

Metamorphoses of the desire

Through their characters, these are the behaviors which are put in scene. Each one is due absolutely to the illusion of the authenticity of its desires; the novelists implacably expose all the diversity of the lies, dissimulations, operations - as the “snobbery” of the heroes proustiens - who are only the “tricks of the desire” to avoid seeing opposite his truth: the desire and jealousy.

Such characters, fascinated by the mediator, relative this last of superhuman virtues at the same time as themselves depreciate themselves, make a god of it by doing themselves of the slaves, this in a all the more large measurement as the mediator their fact obstacle. Some, pushing this logic, come from there to continue the failures which are the surest signs of the proximity of the ideal to which they aspire. It is the masochism which can change in sadism.

Literature

To accept the autonomy of our desire it is the romantic illusion which is at the base of the broadest literature. To discover the reality of the desire, to reveal the mediator, it is what carry out the large novelists as those which are studied in this book, it is to reach the romantic truth. It is in particular through the example of the evolution of Proust that Rene Girard describes this " conversion" romantic necessary to the true literary size. In Jean Santeuil , first unfinished novel of Proust, the writer places his hero in the cabin of Mrs. de Guermantes, " arrivé" , happy and triumphing. In With the research of time lost , Proust reverses its point of view, and places the narrator in the obscure floor, contemplating with greed the inaccessible object of its desire, the cabin of Mrs. de Guermantes. This inversion, revealing of the true nature of the desire, gives to the scene the depth and the literary size which were lacking with the corresponding scene of Jean Santeuil . Indeed, the true experiment of the desire is that of the lack, of humiliation and of the reduction to be, vis-a-vis a mediator who seems the Almighty, whatever the position objectifies occupied by the subject. It is while renonçant with the romantic dream of the triumph and individual plenitude, such as they are phantasms in the representation that the wishing subject is made of its mediator, that Proust finds the inspiration which will enable him to complete the immense romantic nap that constitutes Research.

Critical of the psychoanalysis

Because it did not perceive the mimetic character of the desire and the dynamics of the mimetic competition which results from this, and to give a theory of the conflict triangle that it meets everywhere through its patients, Freud postulated the Oedipus complex . Where the mimetic design detaches the desire of any object, Freud is due to the desire based on the object (the mother). Where it makes violence a consequence of the competition, Freud must suppose a conscience of the paternal competition and its fatal consequences. This incredible conscience in a child to want to have his mother and to kill her kind father Freud to introduce the Unconscious and the repression , and gradually all these “authorities” and “instincts”, like as many superfluous assumptions. Where, it was seen, the logic of the mimetic desire can produce conduits seeming voluntary research of the failure, Freud must for example postulate a “instinct of death”.

Violence and crowned

Its discovery of the mimetic desire leads Rene Girard to wonder about violence, thus directing its interest in the field of anthropology: the mimetic competition which develops starting from the conflicts for the appropriation of the objects being contagious, it is the violence which threatens at any moment and this must affect the organization of the human groups. Rene Girard says himself: “If there is a normal order in the companies, it must be the fruit of a former crisis, he must be the resolution of this crisis” . He undertakes lira all the ethnological literature and leads to his second great assumption: the mechanism victimaire or mechanism of the emissary victim , at the origin of the antiquated monk, whom it exposes in its second book violence and crowned the (1972).

The mechanism victimaire

If two individuals wish the same thing there will be of it soon a third, a fourth. The process makes snowball easily. The object is quickly forgotten, the mimetic competitions are propagated like a powder trail, and the mimetic conflict is transformed into generalized antagonism: chaos, contagious lack of differentiation, “the war of all against all” of Hobbes, which Girard calls the " crisis mimétique". How this crisis can be solved, how peace can it return?

For Girard, this enigma does only one with the problem of the appearance of crowned. It is precisely that with the paroxysm of the crisis of all against all can intervene a saving mechanism: the all against all violent one can transform into a all against a . If it does not start, it is the destruction of the group. Why mechanism ? It is that it does not depend on anybody but rises from the imitation itself. The more the mimetic competitions are exasperated, the more the rivals tend to forget the objects which were the origin, the more they are fascinated the ones by the others. At this stage of heinous fascination the selection of antagonists will be done more and more fixes quotas for, unstable, quickly changing, and it could be whereas an individual, because one of his characters supports it, polarizes the appetite of violence then. That this polarization starts, and by a mimetic snowball effect it packs. Very whole community (unanimous!) will be then gathered against a single individual.

Thus violence with its paroxysm will then tend to be focused on an arbitrary victim and the unanimity to be done against it. The elimination of the victim makes brutally fall the appetite from violence of which each one was had the moment of before and leaves the group suddenly alleviated and stupefied. The victim to lie in front of the group, appearing all at the same time like the origin of the crisis and it responsible for this miracle of found peace. It becomes crowned i.e. carrying the extraordinary capacity to unchain the crisis like bringing back peace. It is the genesis of the antiquated monk whom Rene Girard has just discovered, of the ritual sacrifice like repetition of the originating event, of the myth like account of this event, prohibited which is the prohibition of access to all the objects at the origin of the competitions which degenerated in this crisis absolutely traumatisante. This religious development is gradually made with the length of the repetition mimetic crises of which the resolution brings the temporary peace only of way. The development of the rites and the interdicts constitutes a kind of knowing empirical about violence.

If the explorers and ethnologists could not be the witnesses of similar facts which go back to mists of time, the indirect evidences abound, like the universality of the ritual sacrifice in all the human communities and the innumerable myths which were collected among most various people. If the theory is true, then one will find in the myth of the recurring characters: one will see there a victim-god, who is guilty, which carries preferential features of selection victimaire (for example an infirmity), which is at the origin of the production of the order which governs the group. And Rene Girard finds these elements in the many myths, to start with that of Oedipus, whom it analyzes in this book and posterior books.

Critical of Lévi-Strauss

The design which arises thus from the myth opposes Rene Girard to Claude Lévi-Strauss. This last does not consider the myths of people that as they constitute a genesis of the significances, but a purely logical genesis. the structuralist thought is spread in a universe of symbols which does not want to see in the myths the trace of a real event. For Rene Girard there is at the bottom a retreat in front of the revelation of violence and its arbitrary at the origin of the culture. It is what explains the little of interest of structuralism for the study of ritual which commemorates the violent event a little too much in a “real” way.

The process of hominisation

The mechanism victimaire will provide the key of the challenge which the question of the passage of the animal to the man constitutes, challenge that the scientific community gave up facing fault of having the beginning of a solution of it. In Of the things hidden since the foundation of the world (1978), Girard develops the implications on this question of its discovery. To give an account of this passage, indeed, one should not anything suppose of other but what one already finds in the animal world, in the primates anthropoïdes: a strong degree of imitation. What prevents in these companies violence resulting from the mimésis of appropriation to degenerate is the instinctual system of the tender to the dominant individuals. Once established, the tender of an individual with dominating remains stable the life lasting. It is enough to consider that, the degree of increasing imitation, the rage is exasperated and that it makes burst this stability, and that then a first mimetic crisis develops which is solved by the release of the mechanism victimaire.

The prevention of the return of this terrifying crisis is an existential need for the group and one can imagine the intense concentration which is done on the victim which saved it: first noninstinctual attention. Because the men want to remain reconciled, they stick to the maintenance of this miraculous peace in substituent with the originating victim, in the rites, of the new victims. The conditions are met for the appearance of the first meaning, simplest - unit being detached on an undifferentiated mass - through the need for the choice of a victim. This first symbol, the victim, all first of all that means is in connection with the mechanism reconciler: crowned, which has the character of an at the same time beneficial and malefic terrifying transcendence. One can think just as the first monument was a tomb: that of the victim. This simple first meaning is different then: “the ritual requirement does only one with the handling of the signs, their multiplication and, constantly, then offer new possibilities of differentiation and cultural enrichment.” What emerges, and develops gradually over a period of million years, it is a novel mode of management of the violence, which consists to differ it, it is substitution, with instinctual protections, of protections - prohibited and rites - which one can describe as cultural, and parallel development of the thought symbolic system. These protections of an incomparable effectiveness will authorize the development of the imitation related to that of the volume of the brain specific to the Hominides.

The antiquated monk appears as the original form of the culture, which had had a presentiment of Durkheim. He makes it possible to include/understand the need for sacrificial victims, which makes it possible in its turn to explain the hunting which is originally ritual, the domestication of the animals like fortuitous result of the acclimatization of a reserve of victims, or agriculture.

The development of the rites and of prohibited by the proto-human or human groups will take forms infinitely varied while obeying a rigorous practical direction which one can locate: prevention of the return of the mimetic crisis. One can thus find in the antiquated monk the origin of all the political institutions or cultural.

The scientific statute of the assumption

As the theory of the natural selection of the species is the rational principle of explanation of the immense diversity of forms of the life, the mechanism victimaire is that of the explanation of the production of the infinite diversity of the cultural forms. The analogy with the assumption of Darwin also extends to the scientific statute from the theory, which in both cases is presented in the form of an assumption nonlikely to be proven in experiments being given the infinite period of time necessary to the production of the phenomena in question, but like assumption imposing itself by its incomparable explanatory capacity.

The writing Judeo-Christian

The biblical text like social science

In Of the hidden things Rene Girard approaches for the first time Christianity and the bible.

The Gospels are presented apparently in the form of an any mythical account, with a victim-god lynched by a unanimous crowd, event reminded then by the sectateurs of this worship by the ritual sacrifice - symbolic system that one - eucharistic. The parallel is perfect except on a point: the victim is innocent. The mythical account is built on the lie of the culpability of the victim as it is account of the event seen from the point of view of the unanimous lyncheurs. It is the ignorance essential to the effectiveness of sacrificial violence.

The “good news” evangelic affirms the innocence of the victim clearly, thus becoming, while attacking the ignorance, the germ of the destruction of the sacrificial order on which rests the balance of the companies. Already the old will shows this reversal of the mythical accounts in the direction of the innocence of the victims (Abel, Joseph, Job, Suzanne…) and Hebrew became aware of the singularity of their religious tradition. With the Gospels, it is in all clearness that are revealed these “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Mathieu 13,35) , the foundation about the world on the murder, described in all its ugliness pushing back in the account of Passion.

The revelation is all the more clear as the text is a knowledge on the desire and violence, since the metaphor of the snake lighting the desire of Eve to the paradise until the extraordinary force of the imitation which involves the disavowal of Pierre at the time of Passion. Explicit RG of the biblical expressions as “scandal” which means the mimetic competition, the obstacle which the rival constitutes, or Satan which symbolizes the entire mimetic process since the competition until the resolution victimaire founder of a new order. In the Gospels, God of violence entirely disappeared. Nobody escapes his responsibility, the envieux one like envied: “Misfortune with that by which the scandal arrives”. Like said it Simone Weil: “Before being a theory of God, a theology, the Gospels are a theory of the man, an anthropology”

The Christian company

The evangelic revelation has contained the truth on violence, available for two thousand years, tells us Rene Girard. Did it put an end to the sacrificial order founded on violence in the company which claimed text evangelic like its own religious text? Not, he answers, so that a truth has an impact it is necessary still that it meets a receptive listener and the men do not change like that. The text evangelic acted well rather as a leaven of decomposition of the sacrificial order. If medieval Christendom showed the face of a sacrificial company still knowing very well to scorn and be unaware of its victims, the sacrificial effectiveness did not cease being reduced, as the ignorance moved back and there Rene Girard sees the principle of the singularity and the transformations of the Western company whose destiny today does nothing any more but one with that of the human society in its entirety.

Does the retreat of the sacrificial order mean less violence? At all, it deprives the modern societies of most of the capacity that to sacrificial violence to install an at least temporary order. The “innocence” of times of the ignorance is not any more. In addition, Christianity, following the Judaism, désacralisé the world making possible a utility report/ratio with nature. More threatened by resurgence of mimetic crises to large scales, the contemporary world is at the same time more quickly caught up with by its culpability and in addition developed such a technical power of destruction which he is condemned at the same time to more and more responsibility and less and less innocence.

It is thus for example which the valorization of the victims, at the same time as it expresses the progress of the moral conscience takes the form of a competition victimaire making weigh the threat of a climbing of violence.

The question of the faith

Rene Girard is believer since his conversion with the Catholicism occurred at the time where it prepared its first book. But he always affirmed that its work must be received for its anthropological contents like any scientific assumption, that it must be judged with the ell of its explanatory power and its simplicity, that the discussion and criticism must thus be exerted on the scientific mode and without presupposed religious. That one believes or not in the resurrection of Christ, the biblical text is there at the disposal of any reader.

Developments

Rene Girard did not cease in his following books reconsidering his analyzes to deepen them and specify them.

the Scapegoat (1982) analyzes inter alia the texts of persecution, going back to XIIIe century and showing the Jews of child murder, poisoning, etc like the myths. Is the fallacious character of the charges an obviousness for all in the case of these texts, why not in the case of the myths? It contains luminous mimetic analyzes of passages of the Gospels.

When these things begin (1994) is a discussion with a journalist where one finds many elements autobiographical.

In That by which the scandal arrives (2001) Rene Girard reconsiders, in particular, the delicate question of the sacrifice which he had believed to be able to draw aside in the interpretation of the Passion of Christ.

Critical

Works of Rene Girard

romantic Lie and romantic truth (1961) ISBN 2012789773
Dostoïevski: double with the unit (1963)
Violence and crowned the (1972) ISBN 2012788971
Critical in an underground (1976) ISBN 2253032980
Of the things hidden since the foundation of the world (1978) ISBN 2253032441 Research with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort.
the Scapegoat (1982) ISBN 2253037389
the ancient Road of the perverse men (1985) ISBN 2253045918
Shakespeare: fires of the desire (1990)
When these things begin (1994)
I see Satan falling as the flash (1999)
That by which the scandal arrives (2001) ISBN 2220050114, including/understanding three short tests and a discussion with Maria Stella Barberi.
the ignored voice of reality (2002) ISBN 2253130699
the sacrifice (2003) ISBN 2717722637
origins of the culture (2004) ISBN 2220053555, discussions with Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar of Castro Rocha, follow-up of an answer to Governed Debray on its criticisms published in fire crowned in 2003.
Truth or weak faith. Dialog on Christianity and relativism (2006) ( Verità O fede debole. Dialogo known cristianesimo E relativismo ), with Gianni Vattimo. Cleaned di P. Antonello, Transeuropa Edizioni, Massa has.
God, an invention? (2007) ISBN 2708239228 with Andre Gounelle and Alain Houziaux.
Of violence to the divinity (2007) ISBN 2246721113.
To complete Clausewitz (2007) ISBN 2355360022. Discussions with Benoit Chantre.

Rewards

Shakespeare, fires of the desire received the Prix Médicis Essai

the May 10th 2004, the Prix Today is allotted to him for the Origins of the culture .

Guggenheim Fellow (1960, 1967)

price of Modern Language Association (1965)

honorary doctor of the universities of Amsterdam, Innsbruck, Antwerp, Padoue, Montreal, and of St Mary' S University and Seminary (Baltimore)

Academician since 2005

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