René Girard
Literary critic and anthropologist: we desire through a model, and the rivalry that results lies at the heart of human conflict.
Life
René Girard (1923-2015), born in Avignon, was a literary critic turned anthropologist who taught mostly in the United States (Johns Hopkins, Stanford). He argues that our desires are imitated from the desires of others, which breeds rivalry, violence and, to contain it, the scapegoat mechanism, which he sees at the origin of religion and culture. He also reads Christianity as the revelation of that mechanism. He was elected to the Académie française in 2005.
Main works
Great novels show that desire runs through a model, a mediator, rather than through the object itself.
Sacrifice and religion channel the violence born of mimetic rivalry by turning it onto a victim.
A synthesis of the theory: mimetic desire, scapegoat, the origin of institutions, and a reading of the Gospels.
In his own words
« It was Plato who determined once and for all the cultural meaning of imitation, but this meaning is truncated, torn from the essential dimension of acquisitive behavior, which is also the dimension of conflict. »
« Few people want to be saints nowadays, but everybody is trying to lose weight. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe holds that God exists and that the Gospels reveal the truth about human violence by exposing the scapegoat mechanism, something no myth could do on its own.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999)
We desire what others desire, which breeds rivalry and violence that societies contain by sacrificing a scapegoat.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1972)