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The Girard Reader
In one volume, an anthology of seminal work of one of the twentieth century's most original thinkers.
310 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1996
About the author
René Girard
119 books703 followersRené Girard was a French-born American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy.
He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. 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. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.
René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.
He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. 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. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.
René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.
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March 23, 2022Reading Girard is a good antidote for misanthropy; he is able to show how even the most brutal and absurd rituals represent a genuine effort to resolve the predicament of being human. He is a pacifist, but his pacifism if never glib or naive. On the contrary, it is born of a deep understanding of violence.
Without sacrificing rigor, he is able to reverse the usual hermeneutics of suspicion. Rather than debunk ritual in the light of the modern, he debunks modernity in the light of the sacred.
Without sacrificing rigor, he is able to reverse the usual hermeneutics of suspicion. Rather than debunk ritual in the light of the modern, he debunks modernity in the light of the sacred.
December 24, 2017
Life changing. Girard's unified theory of human nature explains so many life experiences. Also, Girard's reinterpretation of Jesus' death is super interesting (I'm still contemplating if I agree, but I'm glad to have a new set of ideas to consider).
November 26, 2012
In the main, René Girard's own books are not the best introductions to his thought as his writing can be a bit dense and difficult. This collection of key chapters and important essays, especially the essay on Scandal the defines what Satan really means in the Bible, is the best entree into Girard's writing for someone beginning to explore his thought. For more of my reflections on Girard's thought see my blog at http://bit.ly/Tqbeqw
October 29, 2021
I'll be thinking about and wrestling with Girard's thought for a LONG time to come.
July 31, 2020
I won't insult this book with a review. A week of very fruitful new ideas. 4 articles based on little more than a single paragraph each. More than I can say about all the other books I read this month combined.
Notes
Desire triangle: external mediation - not directly in my life, like Quixote. Internal - close proximity. Mediator comes before object of desire, though I don’t want to admit it. I hate myself for wanting what the mediator wants, then I hate mediator for being an obstacle. Object becomes totally irrelevant soon.
With jealousy/envy, it is clear to see triangular desire, but hatred is the same, harder to see.
Envy isn’t just wanting something someone else has. It is imitating someone to get what they have, failing, feeling incompetent.
Only great artists refocus attention on mediator from object of desire.
Circular paradox of sacrifice: wrong to murder the sacrifice, but it is meant to be murdered.
More difficult to quell the impulse for violence than it is to rouse it. Prompts physical changes in the body.
When object of hostility is out of reach, violence gets diverted to a substitute, a sacrifice. Konrad Lorenz fish deprived of male rivals will turn on own family and destroy them.
Sacrifice tends to be as close to human nature as possible, hence domestic animals which are as close to our daily lives.
Violence cannot be denied, but can be diverted. Cain tilled soil offered fruit to God. Abel sacrificed first-born from herd. Cain’s violence had no outlet. Is OT God (and most primitive Gods) pure distillation of human nature? That’s why can be cruel but always eventually pro-survival. NT God is the one that’s moralistic. Substitute Jaynes’ bicameral mind with instinctive human nature
So much more compelling view of sacrifice than JP’s paternalistic idea of giving up something now for future gain, that’s an NT moralistic idea. Girard’s idea is one of human nature, of scapegoating. Jacob not only kills kid for Isaac, but wears its skin, so animal replaces human being. Can both RG and JP view co-exist? Personal sacrifice for growth vs public sacrifice for order?
Gods being ‘propitiated’ is only the collective violence built up in society that is being propitiated. Communal harmony, social order.
The presence of a functional judicial system masks the purpose of religion, we don’t face the issue of runaway violence and vengeance because a state authority conducts one-time violence against perpetrator. Once Rome/Greece had a judicial system, the irrationality of sacrifice is exposed and it fades away as an institution
OT tried to subvert primitive religions but not far enough (NT takes it through to completion), so sacrifice is called out but left in diluted form, laws are called out but left alone, god is still violent, but nowhere near as violent as the primitive religions it differentiated from.
Apo kataboules kosmou: I will reveal what has been hidden to the world.
Tombs are built around the dead bodies they conceal. So we use murder for order and then conceal this fact from ourselves. Tombs splendid from outside, unclean/death inside. Like individuals.
Pharisees, you are like graves which are not seen, men walk over them without knowing it. Double concealment: tomb concealing death, and concealing itself.
Jesus reveals this concealed truth that we are borne of founding murder, and a society of laws has hidden this knowledge from us. For this he is reviled, and yet by making himself the scapegoat, he proves the truth, which even though not immediately apparent, will go down in history as the data point that proved a truth, to be discovered eventually. History and future are same, so prophecy is same as memory.
Mimetic rivalry positive feedback. Object of desire quickly fades into background. Only rivalry remains. Violence emergent.
Normally prohibitions work. But when perturbed, rather play out violence to climax of sacrifice to reconcile and reorder.
Mob really believes guilt of scapegoat, otherwise it wouldn't work. Animals?
Consumers of sacrifice increase dose when effect not clear
Stories tell tale of victim, not of the persecutors. Joseph. Judah. Job.
Sacrifice ends with Christ as unworkable.
We think of games as secular activity upon which religious themes are added, it's the opposite, games originate in rites divested of sacred character.
Chance represents the will of Divinity
Uses mimesis or mimetic desire rather than imitation to highlight the conflictual nature.
We paint desire as subject to object straight line. Premodern had only mediator of desire going toward both subject and object. Triangle of desire. Genetic vehicles?
At some point, Jews started seeing history as perspective of victims, because of own history of victimhood?
Sacrificial lamb, like Abel, Jacob. Jesus whose scapegoating has brought order to outside community, perspectives reversed to see them as chosen ones for community of fellow scapegoats. Chosen one would never have happened if not for scapegoating. Trump. All these scapegoats, in changed perspective, instead of being the only death become the only survivor: Noah, lot.
Victimhood mechanism works well, so can be hijacked by persecutors also.
Once sacrificial benefits to society of violence of founding murder have dissipated, it becomes culture of violence.
Exodus? Or kicked out of Egypt into the desert because of 10 plagues?
Primitive religion had myth, sacrifice, and prohibitions. Prophets subverted all 3 of these, by casting light on mechanisms like scapegoat.
Skandalon, stumbling block, a trap laid for enemy
Satan, false accuser. Jesus first Paraclete, lawyer for defense, victims, rejecting scapegoating.
Mimetic mechanism of Oedipus. Freud rejected it,
Assbackwards Oedipus. Adult male who is threatened by cub, not other way around. Oedipus is last to know. Oracle puts thoughts in Laius head.
Not perversion but maladjusted. We have contradictory drives that need to coexist
Identification with father, then object-desire of mother, ambivalence and hostility towards father now a rival. Girard: Ambivalence was always there, father was always a rival whose objects of desire I inherited through mimesis, I only have eyes for those objects, everything else is an obstacle.
Ressentiment: French translation of resentment. Sublimated desire for vengeance by history’s victims. Jewish ‘slave morality’.
Kindle Notes
great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries.
Cervantes's work is a long meditation on the baleful influence that the most lucid minds can exercise upon one another.
The vaniteux -- vain person -- cannot draw his desires from his own resources; he must borrow them from others. Thus the vaniteux is brother to Don Quixote and Emma Bovary. A vaniteux will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is already desired by another person whom he admires. The mediator here is a rival,
Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred.
In the sphere of individual action they correspond to the global consequences of an epidemic of the plague or of any comparable disaster. It is not enough for the social bond to be loosened; it must be totally destroyed.
rehabilitating the victim has a desacralizing effect is well demonstrated by the story of Joseph, who ends up having no demoniac or divine aspects but simply being human
theology is not being hyperbolic when it proclaims the divinity of Jesus. The belief is not just an excessive piece of praise, the product of a kind of rhetorical overkill. It is the only fit response to an inescapable constraint.
A nonviolent deity can signal his existence to mankind only by becoming driven out by violence -- by demonstrating that he is not able to remain in the Kingdom of Violence.
If fidelity and steadfastness can be expected from anyone, they must be expected from Peter. The purpose of the scene is not to humiliate Peter but to reveal the immense power, the evil power of mimetic contagion.
The whale is an image of the violent crowd, and this is what Hobbes obviously understood when he entitled his famous work Leviathan.
Satan imitates God in a spirit of rivalry. Jesus imitates God in a spirit of childlike and innocent obedience and this is what he advises us to do as well. Since there is no -197- acquisitive desire in God, the docile imitation of God cannot generate rivalry.
The skandalon designates a very common inability to walk away from mimetic rivalry which turns it into an addiction. The skandalon is anything that attracts us in proportion to the suffering or irritation that it causes us.
We feel this way because, as a rule, we are scandalized. Jesus is not and he feels differently. He knows that scandals are mimetic from the start and they become more so as they are exacerbated.
Men become so burdened with scandals that they desperately, if unconsciously, seek the public substitutes upon whom to unburden themselves.
The unveiling of mimetic violence has had a more and more powerful influence on our history and on the entire modern world.
All of Western and then world history can be interpreted as a turbulent, chaotic, but constantly accelerating process of devictimization that is unique in all of world history and it can be traced only to Christianity.
depriving ourselves as well of the fascinating spectacle of Freud's intellect at work, of the gradual and halting evolution of Freudian doctrine.
The most remarkable aspect of this moment of unobstructed consciousness, which Freud posits as the basis for man's psychic existence, is its sheer uselessness.
Many psychic catastrophes misunderstood by the psychoanalyst result from an inchoate, obstinate reaction against the violence and falsehood found in any human society.
Notes
Desire triangle: external mediation - not directly in my life, like Quixote. Internal - close proximity. Mediator comes before object of desire, though I don’t want to admit it. I hate myself for wanting what the mediator wants, then I hate mediator for being an obstacle. Object becomes totally irrelevant soon.
With jealousy/envy, it is clear to see triangular desire, but hatred is the same, harder to see.
Envy isn’t just wanting something someone else has. It is imitating someone to get what they have, failing, feeling incompetent.
Only great artists refocus attention on mediator from object of desire.
Circular paradox of sacrifice: wrong to murder the sacrifice, but it is meant to be murdered.
More difficult to quell the impulse for violence than it is to rouse it. Prompts physical changes in the body.
When object of hostility is out of reach, violence gets diverted to a substitute, a sacrifice. Konrad Lorenz fish deprived of male rivals will turn on own family and destroy them.
Sacrifice tends to be as close to human nature as possible, hence domestic animals which are as close to our daily lives.
Violence cannot be denied, but can be diverted. Cain tilled soil offered fruit to God. Abel sacrificed first-born from herd. Cain’s violence had no outlet. Is OT God (and most primitive Gods) pure distillation of human nature? That’s why can be cruel but always eventually pro-survival. NT God is the one that’s moralistic. Substitute Jaynes’ bicameral mind with instinctive human nature
So much more compelling view of sacrifice than JP’s paternalistic idea of giving up something now for future gain, that’s an NT moralistic idea. Girard’s idea is one of human nature, of scapegoating. Jacob not only kills kid for Isaac, but wears its skin, so animal replaces human being. Can both RG and JP view co-exist? Personal sacrifice for growth vs public sacrifice for order?
Gods being ‘propitiated’ is only the collective violence built up in society that is being propitiated. Communal harmony, social order.
The presence of a functional judicial system masks the purpose of religion, we don’t face the issue of runaway violence and vengeance because a state authority conducts one-time violence against perpetrator. Once Rome/Greece had a judicial system, the irrationality of sacrifice is exposed and it fades away as an institution
OT tried to subvert primitive religions but not far enough (NT takes it through to completion), so sacrifice is called out but left in diluted form, laws are called out but left alone, god is still violent, but nowhere near as violent as the primitive religions it differentiated from.
Apo kataboules kosmou: I will reveal what has been hidden to the world.
Tombs are built around the dead bodies they conceal. So we use murder for order and then conceal this fact from ourselves. Tombs splendid from outside, unclean/death inside. Like individuals.
Pharisees, you are like graves which are not seen, men walk over them without knowing it. Double concealment: tomb concealing death, and concealing itself.
Jesus reveals this concealed truth that we are borne of founding murder, and a society of laws has hidden this knowledge from us. For this he is reviled, and yet by making himself the scapegoat, he proves the truth, which even though not immediately apparent, will go down in history as the data point that proved a truth, to be discovered eventually. History and future are same, so prophecy is same as memory.
Mimetic rivalry positive feedback. Object of desire quickly fades into background. Only rivalry remains. Violence emergent.
Normally prohibitions work. But when perturbed, rather play out violence to climax of sacrifice to reconcile and reorder.
Mob really believes guilt of scapegoat, otherwise it wouldn't work. Animals?
Consumers of sacrifice increase dose when effect not clear
Stories tell tale of victim, not of the persecutors. Joseph. Judah. Job.
Sacrifice ends with Christ as unworkable.
We think of games as secular activity upon which religious themes are added, it's the opposite, games originate in rites divested of sacred character.
Chance represents the will of Divinity
Uses mimesis or mimetic desire rather than imitation to highlight the conflictual nature.
We paint desire as subject to object straight line. Premodern had only mediator of desire going toward both subject and object. Triangle of desire. Genetic vehicles?
At some point, Jews started seeing history as perspective of victims, because of own history of victimhood?
Sacrificial lamb, like Abel, Jacob. Jesus whose scapegoating has brought order to outside community, perspectives reversed to see them as chosen ones for community of fellow scapegoats. Chosen one would never have happened if not for scapegoating. Trump. All these scapegoats, in changed perspective, instead of being the only death become the only survivor: Noah, lot.
Victimhood mechanism works well, so can be hijacked by persecutors also.
Once sacrificial benefits to society of violence of founding murder have dissipated, it becomes culture of violence.
Exodus? Or kicked out of Egypt into the desert because of 10 plagues?
Primitive religion had myth, sacrifice, and prohibitions. Prophets subverted all 3 of these, by casting light on mechanisms like scapegoat.
Skandalon, stumbling block, a trap laid for enemy
Satan, false accuser. Jesus first Paraclete, lawyer for defense, victims, rejecting scapegoating.
Mimetic mechanism of Oedipus. Freud rejected it,
Assbackwards Oedipus. Adult male who is threatened by cub, not other way around. Oedipus is last to know. Oracle puts thoughts in Laius head.
Not perversion but maladjusted. We have contradictory drives that need to coexist
Identification with father, then object-desire of mother, ambivalence and hostility towards father now a rival. Girard: Ambivalence was always there, father was always a rival whose objects of desire I inherited through mimesis, I only have eyes for those objects, everything else is an obstacle.
Ressentiment: French translation of resentment. Sublimated desire for vengeance by history’s victims. Jewish ‘slave morality’.
Kindle Notes
great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries.
Cervantes's work is a long meditation on the baleful influence that the most lucid minds can exercise upon one another.
The vaniteux -- vain person -- cannot draw his desires from his own resources; he must borrow them from others. Thus the vaniteux is brother to Don Quixote and Emma Bovary. A vaniteux will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is already desired by another person whom he admires. The mediator here is a rival,
Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred.
In the sphere of individual action they correspond to the global consequences of an epidemic of the plague or of any comparable disaster. It is not enough for the social bond to be loosened; it must be totally destroyed.
rehabilitating the victim has a desacralizing effect is well demonstrated by the story of Joseph, who ends up having no demoniac or divine aspects but simply being human
theology is not being hyperbolic when it proclaims the divinity of Jesus. The belief is not just an excessive piece of praise, the product of a kind of rhetorical overkill. It is the only fit response to an inescapable constraint.
A nonviolent deity can signal his existence to mankind only by becoming driven out by violence -- by demonstrating that he is not able to remain in the Kingdom of Violence.
If fidelity and steadfastness can be expected from anyone, they must be expected from Peter. The purpose of the scene is not to humiliate Peter but to reveal the immense power, the evil power of mimetic contagion.
The whale is an image of the violent crowd, and this is what Hobbes obviously understood when he entitled his famous work Leviathan.
Satan imitates God in a spirit of rivalry. Jesus imitates God in a spirit of childlike and innocent obedience and this is what he advises us to do as well. Since there is no -197- acquisitive desire in God, the docile imitation of God cannot generate rivalry.
The skandalon designates a very common inability to walk away from mimetic rivalry which turns it into an addiction. The skandalon is anything that attracts us in proportion to the suffering or irritation that it causes us.
We feel this way because, as a rule, we are scandalized. Jesus is not and he feels differently. He knows that scandals are mimetic from the start and they become more so as they are exacerbated.
Men become so burdened with scandals that they desperately, if unconsciously, seek the public substitutes upon whom to unburden themselves.
The unveiling of mimetic violence has had a more and more powerful influence on our history and on the entire modern world.
All of Western and then world history can be interpreted as a turbulent, chaotic, but constantly accelerating process of devictimization that is unique in all of world history and it can be traced only to Christianity.
depriving ourselves as well of the fascinating spectacle of Freud's intellect at work, of the gradual and halting evolution of Freudian doctrine.
The most remarkable aspect of this moment of unobstructed consciousness, which Freud posits as the basis for man's psychic existence, is its sheer uselessness.
Many psychic catastrophes misunderstood by the psychoanalyst result from an inchoate, obstinate reaction against the violence and falsehood found in any human society.
July 31, 2018
I finally decided to read Rene Girard, and all I can fit into a one paragraph review are statements, so let’s just make them bullet points:
Girard thinks like Darwin. I don’t mean that he’s as important a thinker as Darwin was, but that he has a simple but effective mechanism that may tie the social level together the same way Darwin’s mechanism tied together biology. Girard’s scapegoat mechanism functions like Darwin’s variation + selection. (One could argue both are Malthusian.)
It’s highly significant that Girard came to his Catholic faith through his academic work. It’s hard to find these stories, but it shouldn’t be. They’re surprisingly common.
Williams's editorial selections answered most of my questions. I was curious about the implications for the creation of humans and also how this fits with scripture. I would have liked a little more on the former is all, but otherwise this Reader is remarkably balanced. The sections on literature and Freud/Nietzsche were less relevant but the inclusion of the interview at the end is perfect – in fact, I read it first and recommend you do the same.
I’m still digesting Girard but I only get rocked by a new (to me) thinker about once per year, and this is Girard’s year. You’ll hear more about Girard in my future scribblings, of that I’m sure.
Girard thinks like Darwin. I don’t mean that he’s as important a thinker as Darwin was, but that he has a simple but effective mechanism that may tie the social level together the same way Darwin’s mechanism tied together biology. Girard’s scapegoat mechanism functions like Darwin’s variation + selection. (One could argue both are Malthusian.)
It’s highly significant that Girard came to his Catholic faith through his academic work. It’s hard to find these stories, but it shouldn’t be. They’re surprisingly common.
Williams's editorial selections answered most of my questions. I was curious about the implications for the creation of humans and also how this fits with scripture. I would have liked a little more on the former is all, but otherwise this Reader is remarkably balanced. The sections on literature and Freud/Nietzsche were less relevant but the inclusion of the interview at the end is perfect – in fact, I read it first and recommend you do the same.
I’m still digesting Girard but I only get rocked by a new (to me) thinker about once per year, and this is Girard’s year. You’ll hear more about Girard in my future scribblings, of that I’m sure.
February 15, 2020
This gets four stars because Part 5 is going to keep me thinking for a long time, not because the book is a particularly enjoyable read. It’s really a philosophy textbook so it’s dense and hard to read straight through. I read it because it was referenced in The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr. I followed the editors suggestion and started with the interview at the end of the book. I eventually just skipped to Part 5, The Bible, The Gospels and Christ, which was the most interesting to me by far.
I liked the constant reminder that the Gospels are way deeper than the specific details they describe. I knew that but I think it’s easy to stick with the obvious stuff and ignore the deeper meanings that are really more interesting and profound.
I liked the chapter about Satan and how he defines that word. I also loved the reference to the word “skandalon” (like scandal) as something that attracts us in proportion to the suffering or irritation that it causes us.
I liked the constant reminder that the Gospels are way deeper than the specific details they describe. I knew that but I think it’s easy to stick with the obvious stuff and ignore the deeper meanings that are really more interesting and profound.
I liked the chapter about Satan and how he defines that word. I also loved the reference to the word “skandalon” (like scandal) as something that attracts us in proportion to the suffering or irritation that it causes us.
June 22, 2021
Beginning from his mimetic theory, Girard points out the cycle of sacrificial violence (scapegoating) that recurs throughout history, as revealed in the world's myths. He then shows how Christ breaks the cycle as God takes the part of the scapegoat. If you find it a difficult read, don't worry: The explanations are repetitive enough so that you will have multiple opportunities to comprehend what Girard is saying, and eventually it all comes together. Ultimately it is about recognizing and aligning ourselves with God's triumph over the world's cyclical violence.
October 17, 2021
Girard's work provides much food for thought, yet ultimately I find the construct of mimetic violence to be an incomplete one. It presents one understanding of violence that is helpful but needs to be combined with other methodologies and perspectives to have balance. Feminist, queer, non-violent, and post modern thought have added a lot to academic discourse that is overlooked in Girard's theory.
Want to read
October 2, 2023Recommendation from Richard Rohr (The Universal Christ). “Notions of sacrifice [Jesus��s death on the cross as payment our sins] keep us in the retributive Justice framework and outside of the essential Gospel of grace and undeserved love. This is major for understanding the Gospel. René Girard goes to great length to demonstrate that Jesus put an end to all notions of sacrificial religion, which only maintain our quid pro quo worldviews.”
March 27, 2024
Did not read all of this, about 60% of the essays for class. Really interesting theory, but hard to follow at times. I thought it was really cool and layered, explained a lot about literature and the world. 3.5 stars???
January 2, 2023
Great introduction to his work.
October 31, 2016
Fascinating study of scapegoating and of sacrifice in ancient religious history, in the Hebrew Scriptures, and in Christian theology. As a literary critic, Girard's familiarity with literary masterpieces and the functioning of language in society enables him to give specific illustrations of his theory being played out. I was especially struck by the analogy of the Hebrew story of Joseph and his brothers to the story of Jesus in the New Testament as regards the idea of substitution for offenses.
Girard's work has created a breakthrough in many disciplines, and is affirmed in neuroscience and various social sciences. In terms of theology, it certainly throws a spotlight on the human phenom of scapegoating that repeats in societies through the ages, but which was corrected in the crucifixion of Jesus and recorded in the Gospels. History changing--- then, and now.
Girard's work has created a breakthrough in many disciplines, and is affirmed in neuroscience and various social sciences. In terms of theology, it certainly throws a spotlight on the human phenom of scapegoating that repeats in societies through the ages, but which was corrected in the crucifixion of Jesus and recorded in the Gospels. History changing--- then, and now.
December 30, 2009
girard's fascinating concept of mimetic violence of individual or collective behavior, stems from his critique on nietizche's anti-christian and pro-dionysian (pagan ritual) concept and freud's oedipal complex theory, and through these critiques he shapes a new foundation for mimetic desire before the birth of Christ, which is visible in Hebrew Scripture (beginning with cain). he exemplifies how Christ was the ending of such violence because he chose to not take part in it, but absorb all violence of the world, as the ultimate innocent victim. this theory of Christ as a victim, as other lesser examples, lends to girard's big campaign of the scapegoat mechanism, or how the victim of a society, through it's sacrificial allowance, gives order back to the culture of a society, thus silencing the disturbance of the crowd. not entirely conclusive, especially as a reader, but it does have seriously powerful claims for christian ideology and linguistic/cultural study, in general. it's definitely worth a read, if you're interested in critical research of scripture, especially the Gospels, or of mythological and historical conditions of collective behavior.
January 18, 2009
Interesting. I'll have to stick this in the hopper and let it rattle around for a while before I know what I think of it.
March 13, 2013
A great general over view of Girard's theories. Well worth reading, especially if you only have time for one of his books.
Read
May 29, 2013I gave up. Kind of heavy going for me.
January 14, 2009
Fantastic.
Want to read
September 24, 2017Pretty dry and academic.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews