For Rene Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth

by Sandor Goodhart (Editor), Jorgen Jorgensen (Editor), Tom Ryba (Editor), James Williams (Editor)

Overview

In his explorations of the relations between the sacred and violence, René Girard has hit upon the origin of culture—the way culture began, the way it continues to organize itself. The way communities of human beings structure themselves in a manner that is different from that of other species on the planet.
     Like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Martin Buber, or others who have changed the way we think in the humanities or in the human sciences, Girard has put forth a set of ideas that have altered our perceptions of the world in which we function. We will never be able to think the same way again about mimetic desire, about the scapegoat mechanism, and about the role of Jewish and Christian scripture in explaining sacrifice, violence, and the crises from which our culture has been born.
     The contributions fall into roughly four areas of interpretive work: religion and religious study; literary study; the philosophy of social science; and psychological studies.
     The essays presented here are offered as "essays" in the older French sense of attempts (essayer) or trials of ideas, as indeed Girard has tried out ideas with us. With a conscious echo of Montaigne, then, this hommage volume is titled Essays in Friendship and in Truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870138621
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	06/17/2009
Series:	Derecho
Pages:	289
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Sandor Goodhart is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University, former President of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R), and author of Sacrificing Commentary, as well as more than ninety essays.

Jørgen Jørgensen edited a collection of essays on Girard titled Syndens sold.

Tom Ryba is Notre Dame Theologian-in-Residence at the Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center at Purdue University.

James Williams is the author of The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred and editor of The Girard Reader.

Read an Excerpt

For René Girard

Essays in Friendship and in Truth

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Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2009 Michigan State University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-862-1

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Chapter One

Receiving René Girard into the Académie Française

Michel Serres

Des lambeaux pleins de sang et des membres affreux Que des chiens dévorants se disputaient entre eux

How does that barking come in here? And where does it come from? In the récit of Théramène, do we know the meaning of those runaway horses dragging the torn and quartered cadaver of Hippolyte along the beach? Who are these serpents hissing about our heads?

My dear sir, we thank you for making us understand that these whinnyings, these howlings of enraged animals, are our own shouts; we thank you for revealing, in this bloody pack, in that breakaway carriage team, in this nest of vipers, in these fierce beasts, the abominable violence of our own society; we thank you for revealing, finally, in these bodies torn to pieces, the innocent victims of lynchings that we ourselves perpetrate.

This human bestiary is drawn from Racine, but it could have escaped in its fury from Greek antiquity, where the Thracian women cut up Orpheus, from the English Renaissance, or from our own classical seventeenth century, where every tragedy carries in itself, imagined or real, an unmistakable trace of this putting to death. The Imprécations of Camille, in Corneille, call everyone to unite against Rome. In Shakespeare, the assembled senators plant their double-edged knives in the chest of Caesar. The origin of tragedy, which Nietzsche sought without finding, you have discovered; it lay, totally available, in the Greek root of the term itself: tragos means, in effect, the goat, this scapegoat that the crowd leads to the slaughter. The crowd expels it while accusing it of the sins of the world, the crowd's own sins. The Lamb of God reverses the image. Thank you for having brought light into the black box we hide among ourselves.

It's about us.

We are the patricians, assembled in concentric circles around the king of Rome, in the "She-Goat's Marsh" (paludum Capriae) where Romulus disappeared; we are among the shadows of a thunderstorm pierced by clashes of lightning; we cut up Romulus into pieces and, as daylight returns, evasive, ashamed, each one of us hides within the fold of his toga a portion of the dismembered king of Rome; we are the Roman soldiers, pressed around Tarpeia, throwing our bracelets, our shields on the virginal body of the chaste vestal; we are the stoners of the woman taken in adultery; we are the persecutors who throw stone after stone at St. Stephen, who in his agony sees the heavens open.

We banish or elect this candidate by inscribing his name on shards of pottery, this forgotten clue of stonings; we indicate a candidate by casting our vote, without remembering that this phrase for casting a vote is a fractal that recalls the same broken stones thrown at the victim; with these lethal stones, we build our cities, our houses, our monuments, our Coupole; we name the king or the victim in the midst of our furor, temporarily channeled by the voting itself; we, your brothers, who have chosen you by casting a vote; we, wisely seated around you, discoursing on our dear Father Carré who is dead.

Thanks to you, I see for the first time the primitive, archaic sense of this ceremony, the concentric circles of those seated, fixed to the floor, immobile, separated; I hear the silence of the public, appeased by fascination, listening to you who are chosen, standing; I discover as well for the first time this round chapel around Mazarin's tomb, these two structures constructed of a stoning smoothed over, reproducing, like a reduced model, the pyramids of Egypt. They also arose (among the first no doubt) from the prolonged stoning long ago of the pharaoh, condemned to lie under that heap. Do institutions arise each as a nekropolis, as a metropolis, thanks to this primitive torture? Does this very Coupole yet describe the forgotten scheme?

What is the meaning of the subject that we call "you" and "me"? Sub-jectus, that which lies thrown underneath, thrown under the stones, dies beneath the shields, under the votes, under our acclamations. And what abominable glue holds together the collective in this plural subject that we call "we"? This cement is composed of the sum of our hatreds, of our rivalries, of our resentments. Unceasingly reborn, mimetic mother of itself, terrible mother of groups: behold violence, molecule of death as implacably replicated, imitated, reprised, and reproduced as the molecules of life. Here is the unmoved Mover of history. A profound lesson of elementary grammar and political sociology: you, under the black ballot box of stones, you are the scapegoat here; we (without knowing it) are in the black box of the night of ancient persecutions. Here is a lesson in anthropology and hominization.

Where does this violence come from?

Look at our green robes. Why does a group parade itself in uniform? Why do women and men follow codes of dress, intellect, speech? Why do we wish to be seen as unique only by acting like the rest of the world? Why does political correctness hold such power over freedom of thought? Why does it require such courage to say what is not said, to think what is not thought, to do what is not done? Why does willing obedience create the foundation for those in power? Why do we prostrate ourselves before the grandeur of the establishment, of which today's ceremony is so perfect an example?

You have discovered as well this other, primordial glue whose adhesiveness makes up a good part of personal and social bonds: mimicry. Gestures, conduct, words, and thoughts show our kinship to apes, chimpanzees, and bonobos, whom (Aristoteles dixit) we exceed in imitation. How many times have you seen in government, at an official reception or in a hospital, the visit of a professor of medicine to the bedside of a patient?—have I not seen with my own eyes the dominant male parading before his vanquished males or submissive females, enacting the derisory play of anthropoid hierarchies? Imitation produces the more or less ferocious domination that we employ or submit to.

The model that you propose for our consideration, by illuminating our experience derived from imitation and imitated desire, is both anthropological and tragic. In this way, the man loves his friend's mistress or his mistress's friend; another man is jealous of the position of his neighbor. What child does not cry "me too" when a brother or sister receives a present, and what adult can defend himself from the same refl ex? The state of equality creates a rivalry that, in turn, transforms us into twins, reactivating at the same time hatred and attraction. The entire range of violent feelings, basic emotions, diverse and particular in appearance, springs from this uniform and always productive twinness. We desire the same things, desire makes us the same, and sameness makes desire, which is depicted, in a monotone, by mimicry's brushstrokes, on the two-faced playing card of Tenderness and Hatred.

Better still, this mimeticism springs from the body, from the nervous system, which contains mirror neurons recently discovered by Italian cognitive scientists. We know today that these neurons are activated both when we perform an action and at the moment when we see another perform it, as if the representation is equivalent to the act itself. Thus, imitation becomes one of the universal formats of our behavior. We imitate, we reproduce, we repeat. Replication propagates and diffuses individual desire and collective cultures like DNA genes that reproduce and disseminate life: strange dynamism of the identical whose redundant automatism replicates indefinitely, continuing to repeat itself.

You have grasped one of the great secrets of human cultures, especially of those that we know today, whose codes invade the world exponentially, more quickly than those of life—three billion eight hundred million years for one, scarcely a few millennia for the other—because the great revolutionary discoveries—stone blades in the Paleolithic period, writing in antiquity, printing in the Renaissance, industrial assembly line production and the new technologies more recently—all were invented without exception by means of replicators, codes, or codifying operations whose invasive superabundance characterizes our civilization of communication and publicity. These replicators, whose similitude to us excites and reproduces the mimeticism of our desires, seem to imitate, on their side, the process of reproduction of living DNA.

The objects that surround us from now on, cars, planes, household appliances, clothes, displays, books, and computers ... all address themselves to our desires. What would one call them except the reproductions of a model, with scarcely a variation? What are we to say, as well, of what the insider culture of our elites calls management for private enterprise, or administration for public services, if not that the horrifying weight of this form of organization has the goal of rendering homogenous and reproducible every human activity and of giving the power to those who have no practical skill in its exercise? And what should we say of trademarks, propagated everywhere? Do we not know the origin of trademarks: the footprints left in walking, printed on the beach sand, by the whores of Alexandria, revealing both their names and the direction of their beds? Doesn't this long duplicated stride lead us back to desire? What president of a grand trademark, replicated everywhere, knows (if he doesn't know, I would enjoy telling him), knows himself, I say, as a son of these whores? We have created an environment where success itself, where creation itself, depends on reproduction more than on the inimitable.

The danger that our children run is here: these sons of whores, whose dignified lineage I have recalled, plunge them into a world of replicated codes: we overwhelm them with redundancy. The crisis of their education is here: founded naturally on imitation, apprenticeship teaches them to become inimitable singularities. The media, advertising, commerce, and leisure repeat to them, on the contrary: imitate me, become the automatic vehicle of the repetition of our trademark, so that your body and your repeated behavior will repeat and multiply our commercial success. Timid and almost voiceless in the face of these potentates, education whispers to them: imitate no one except yourselves, become your own liberty. Becoming pedagogical, our society has therefore made education contradictory. The crisis of creation is finally here: in a universe of replicators, of modes and codes of replication, of clones, the inimitable work remains hidden until the foundation of a new world. You have revealed to us how personal desire and human culture amplify one of the secrets of life, of birth, of nature.

Blinded by the monotony of the same, we look down on repetition. Do we understand, for example, how simple machines, extensions of our bodies, reproduce the simple functions of our organs: the hammer hits like a fist; the wheel turns like the articulations of the knees and the ankles; the newborn head turns to the bottle as if to his mother. They imitate, ultimately, the systems: combustion engines mimic the thermodynamics of the organism; telescopes and microscopes mimic the sensorial system. They mimic, finally, certain tissues; they mimic, ultimately, the imitative process of DNA itself ...?

Here is another hidden mimeticism: extensions of the body, these simple machines ultimately discover the secret of their own reproduction. Thus they amount to a biotechnology. They are taking the body's place, these apparatuses (a good name for them). Their history tells how the objects we make probe, one after the other, the living functions. I once called this the exo-Darwinism of technics; thanks to you, I understand that it continues, imitates Darwinism culturally as it is found in nature. I name you henceforth the new Darwin of the human sciences.

I wish by two avowals to complete this tableau of mimeticism that you describe: the first concerns our psychologies. If, by will or necessity, we seek faithfully that which we truthfully desire, here and now, or throughout our life, don't we enter finally into another, more intimate black box, where we mislead ourselves, without discovering, in this black box of ourselves, the smallest element of response to this exigency of pleasure or of well-being? Confronted by the uneasiness caused by such self-delusion, we throw ourselves into imitation because we cannot not fill up immediately so anguishing an emptiness.

On the other hand, does not the most austere morality, no matter how difficult it appears, also constitute an easy substitute for the same absence? This is evidence, not paradox: the enfeebled path of morality, like the road made easy by mimicry, appears like an entry ramp as more accessible than the inaccessible quest of authentic pleasure. Since I don't know what I want, I might as well desire what others seem to want or whatever these ferocious norms impose on me.

The second avowal, at once more logical and more personal: according to Karl Popper, theories such as Marxism and psychoanalysis disqualify themselves as science because they are always right—a very bad sign because exact or rigorous knowledge recognizes itself as such by what it always knows of the places where it would fail. There is only falsifiable science. Here and there we have heard it said that your model is too universal and thus falls under this executioner's blade. There is no exception, they say, to your theory of the double and mimetic rivalry. One can only verify it; if it is to become a science, it must be falsifiable.

I assign myself this task. It is almost thirty years since you called me your friend and I received from you the signs of amicable reciprocity. In public, this evening, I can swear by the heavens, before the altars of the world, without risk of perjury, that I have never resented you or been jealous of you, whatever admiration I feel for you. You must consider me, then, as a monster, a double without rivalry, and therefore a falsifier of your model. Now we can admit you into the rigorous exactitude of knowledge. What could be more joyful, you must admit, than for a true friend to play you false in order to be able to demonstrate, in falsifying it, the truth described by his friend?

And then, going further into confidences, why not admit that I am jealous of you on one single point? You were born "in Avignon," an expression that leads me (and here is the exception) into mimetic rivalry, because I, always your double, am also from a town whose name begins with A, but I don't benefit, as you do and certain of your friends, born, by chance, in Haiti, from the preposition "in," whose euphony avoids in your compatriots the hiatus whose hateful horror haunts those who live "at" Agen. I am burning in the "fires of envy." But if you have the advantage of me on this point of grammar that separates us, two bridges, as it turns out, gather us together: you dance "on the bridge of Avignon," while we pride ourselves on our own Pont-Canal.

Almost twins, we were born in the same latitude, but only tone-deaf Parisians believe that we speak with the same accent, the same langue d'oc. They believe France is only divided into a north and a south, not seeing as we do that it is separated also into east and west: we are Celts, even Iberian-Celts, and you are Latinized Gauls of Arles or Milan, faithful to the Roman-Germanic Holy Empire. We are Atlantics, turned to an open sea; you are continentals from an inland sea. We are from the Pyrenees Barrier; you are from the Alpine Arch; we are Aquitains, Gallic and Breton, humid and soft; you Mediterraneans are windy, sharp, and dry. We are Basques and Gascons, cousins of the Scots, Irish, and Portuguese; you are Provençals, cousins of the people of the Rhine and the Po; you, Zola, Daudet, Giono; we, Montaigne; you, Cézanne; we, Fauré.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................1
Receiving René Girard into the Académie Française, Michel Serres....................19
René et moi, Eric Gans....................27
Great Books, Andrew J. McKenna....................39
My Encounter with René Girard, Cesáreo Bandera....................51
My Life with René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian....................57
Detour and Sacrifice: Illich and Girard, Jean-Pierre Dupuy....................79
Already from the Beginning, Paul Dumouchel....................87
Literature, Myth, and Prophecy: Encountering René Girard, Sandor Goodhart....................101
A Phenomenology of Redemption?, Robert J. Daly....................111
The Girard Effect, William A. Johnsen....................119
René Girard: The Architect of My Spiritual Home, Jozef Niewiadomski....................131
Eucharisto, René Girard: Searching for a Pacifi st Theology, Jacques-Jude Lépine....................139
The Way to More Insight and Personal Freedom, Sonja Pos....................147
Girard, Buddhism, and the Psychology of Desire, Eugene Webb....................159
Magister Lucis: In the Light of René Girard, James G. Williams....................169
Breakout from the Belly of the Beast, Robert Hamerton-Kelly....................179
On Paper and in Person, Gil Bailie....................189
Drawn into Conversion: How Mimetic Theory Changed My Way of Being a Christian Theologian, Wolfgang Palaver....................199
For René Girard: In Appreciation, Richard J. Golsan....................211
Dispatch from the Girardian Boundary, Charles Mabee....................223
Things Still Hidden ... , Anthony Bartlett....................235
The Mimeticist Turn: Lessons from Early Girard, Chris Allen Carter....................247
Sacrifice and Sexual Difference: Insights and Challenges in the Work of René Girard, Martha Reineke....................259
"The Key of Knowledge": A Brief and Entirely Insufficient Account of a Discovery, Giuseppe Fornari....................265
Mimetic Theory and Christian Theology in the Twenty-first Century, Michael E. Hardin....................273
René Girard's Hermeneutic: Discovery and Pedagogy, Tyler Graham....................283