Home › Rene Girard

Rene Girard

Rene Girard

Rene Girard in 2007

Activity (s)	Philosopher, an anthropologist at the violence and religious.
Birth	25 December 1923 Avignon , Vaucluse
Writing language	French
Honors	member of the French Academy , professor emeritus of comparative literature at the Stanford University and the Duke University in the United States.

Rene Girard Christmas Theophilus, born in Avignon on 25 December 1923 , is a French philosopher, member of the French Academy since 2005. Alumnus of the Ecole des Chartes and professor emeritus of comparative literature at the Stanford University and the Duke University in the United States , he is the inventor of the mimetic theory, which, from the discovery of the mimetic desire, laid the foundations for a new anthropology. He defines himself as an anthropologist of violence and religious.

Summary

1 Biography
2 His thought
3 Work
4 Awards and honors
- 4.1 Notes and references
5 See also

/ / Biography

Rene Girard Christmas Theophilus is married and father of three children. His father, Joseph Girard , paleographer archivist , curator of the library and the Muse Calvet in Avignon from 1906 to 1949, the trend was anticlerical and republican. Her mother, who was the first Bachelor's department of Drome , was Catholic. From 1943 to 1947 he studied at the Ecole Nationale des Chartes in Paris and maintains its position as an archivist paleographer on Privacy in Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth ^century.

In 1947 , he moved to the United States , where he earned an academic scholarship. He married and makes his entire career in the United States. He earned a doctorate in history in 1950 at the Indiana University , where he began to teach literature, the area that gives it its reputation. From 1957 to 1968 , he is at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In October 1966 , he organized an international symposium, The languages of criticism and the sciences of man to discover the structuralism Americans. Attended, among others, Roland Barthes , Jacques Derrida , Jacques Lacan. In 1968 , he joined the University of Buffalo until 1975 , when he returned to Johns Hopkins. It binds to Michel Serres , with whom he collaborates.

His first book was published in 1961 , Deceit and the Novel , where he presents his discovery of mimetic desire. Then he begins to consider anthropological aspects of mimicry: the question of sacrifice. This will be the subject of his most famous book, Violence and the Sacred, published in 1972. He is preparing his third book, Things Hidden since the foundation of the world, from 1971. The relative lack of understanding has encountered violence and the sacred makes him feel the difficulty of making his ideas accessible "in academia. He continued his research since his thought and said in many books.

He ended his academic career, from 1980 until his retirement in 1995 at Stanford , where he still resides. He leads, with Jean-Pierre Dupuy , the Program for Interdisciplinary Research, which organizes several major symposia.

On 17 March 2005 , Girard was elected to the French Academy , the chair 37 , succeeding the Rev. Father Ambroise-Marie Carr , who died on January 15 2004. He was received under the Dome on 15 December 2005 .

His thought

Mimetic desire

The mimetic character of desire

Ren Girard is a professor of French literature in the United States in the late 1950s and seeks a new way of talking about literature. Beyond the "singularity" of works, he seeks what they have in common and finds that the characters created by the great writers operate in a mechanical reports found an author to another: "Only great writers succeed in painting these mechanisms without distorting the benefit of their ego: it takes is a reporting system that, ironically or rather not at all paradoxically, varies much less than the greatest writers . . There is therefore a lot of "psychological laws", as said Marcel Proust. These laws, or the mechanics, so well described by novelists, Rene Girard identifies and articulates the foundation: the nature of mimetic desire. This is the content of his first book, Deceit and the Novel (1961). We borrow our desires. Far from being autonomous, our desire is always motivated by a desire another - the model - has the same object. This means that the relationship is not direct between subject and object: there is always a triangle . Through the object, the model, which Girard called mediator that attracts: it is the model that is being sought. Ren Girard calls the desire of metaphysics since, if it is anything but a simple need or desire, "all desire is desire to be ' , it is aspiration, dream of a full attributed to the Ombudsman. In this, unlike the always necessary, it has an infinite character.

Third-party mediation, internal mediation

Mediation is external when the mediator of desire is socially out of reach of the subject, even from the real world is like Amadis of Gaul to Don Quixote. The hero lives a kind of madness but remains optimistic. Mediation is internal when the mediator is real and at the same level as the subject. He becomes a rival and an obstacle for the appropriation of the object whose value increases as the rivalry grows. Is the universe novels of Stendhal, Proust or Dostoevsky particularly studied in this book.

The Metamorphoses of Desire

Through their characters, it is our behavior that are staged. Everyone insists on the illusion of the authenticity of his desires; novelists relentlessly expose the full diversity of lies, cover-ups, maneuvers - such as "snobbery" of Proust's hero - who are the "tricks of the desire" to avoid see in his face truth: envy and jealousy.

Such characters, fascinated by the mediator, obviating the latter of superhuman virtues at the same time they themselves are depreciated, make a god by making themselves slaves, this to an extent even greater than the impedes their mediator. Some pushing this logic, come to continue the failures that are the surest signs of the proximity of the ideal to which they aspire. It's masochism, which can spill into sadism.

Literature

Believe in the autonomy of our desire is the romantic illusion that is the basis of the wider literature. Discover the reality of desire, revealing the mediator is realizing what the great novelists such as those studied in this book is fiction from the truth. It is particularly through the example of the evolution of Proust, Ren Girard describes this conversion necessary fiction to the real literary greatness. In John Santeuil first novel (unfinished) Proust, the writer places his hero in the box of Madame de Guermantes, come, happy and triumphant. In In Search of Lost Time , Proust opposite point of view, and places the narrator in the dark pit, watching eagerly the inaccessible object of his desire, the box of Madame de Guermantes. This inversion reveals the true nature of desire, gives the scene the depth and greatness of literature that was lacking in the corresponding scene of Jean Santeuil. Indeed, the actual experience of desire is the lack of humiliation and diminution of being faced with a mediator who seems all-powerful, regardless of the objective position occupied by the subject. It is abandoning the dream of romantic triumph and the fullness individual, as fantasized in the representation that the desiring subject is its mediator, that Proust found the inspiration that will enable it to complete the huge The sum is romantic Research.

Critique of Psychoanalysis

Rene Girard, in his Violence and the Sacred, devotes an entire chapter to critically analyze the works of Freud. By analyzing the successive versions of Freudian theory being developed, Ren Girard believes that Freud in his early works and also in Totem and Taboo touches the concept of mimetic desire, but never formalized, and this for the benefit of Freudian concepts current.

Because he did not perceive the nature of mimetic desire and the dynamics of mimetic rivalry that results, and to give a theory of the triangle of conflict that he met all over his patients, Freud postulated the complex of Oedipus. Where the design off the mimetic desire of anything, Freud is the desire based on the object (the mother). Where it makes violence a result of the rivalry, Freud must assume an awareness of paternal rivalry and its deadly consequences. This incredible consciousness in a child wanting his own mother and kill his father forcing Freud to introduce the unconscious and repression , and gradually all of these "instances" and "instincts", as so unnecessary assumptions. Where, as we have seen, the logic of mimetic desire can produce lines that appear as voluntary searches of failure, for example Freud must apply a " death instinct ".

And Ren Girard believes that his concept of mimetic desire, to better explain and make more consistent observations of psychoanalysis.

Violence and the Sacred

His discovery of mimetic desire leads to question Rene Girard on Violence, directing his interest in the field of anthropology. Aristotle had noticed that the man was the species most suitable for imitation . This explains the extraordinary learning capacity of humans, but also the ease with which the mimetic rivalry develops from conflicts over ownership of objects. This rivalry is contagious, is the violence that threatens at any moment and this must affect the organization of human groups. Ren Girard says, "If there is a normal order in society, it must be the result of an earlier crisis, it must be the resolution of this crisis" . He began to read all the ethnological literature and leads its second major assumption: the mechanism of victimhood or the scapegoat mechanism, the origin of archaic religion, which he exhibited in his second book, Violence and the Sacred (1972).

The mechanism of victimhood

If two people want the same thing there will soon be a third, a fourth. The process is easily snowball. The subject is quickly forgotten, mimetic rivalries spread, and mimetic conflict becomes generalized antagonism: chaos, lack of differentiation, "war of all against all" Hobbes, what Girard calls mimetic crisis. How can this crisis be resolved it, how peace can she come back?

For Girard, this puzzle is one with the problem of the appearance of the sacred. It is precisely at the height of the crisis of all against all that may involve a saving mechanism: the all against all violence can be transformed into an all against one. If it does not fire is the destruction of the group. Why the term mechanism? Is that it depends on no one but from the imitation itself. Mimetic rivalry more exasperated over rivals tend to forget things that were originally more they are fascinated by each other. At this stage of fascination hate the selection of antagonists will be increasingly contingent, unstable, rapidly changing, and it can then that individual, because one of his characters the favors, then focus on him 'appetite for violence. That this bias is beginning, and a snowball effect mimetic she gets carried away: the whole community (unanimous!) Is then collected against a single individual.

And violence at its height will tend to focus on an arbitrary victim and be unanimously against it. The elimination of the victim dropped sharply appetite of violence that each was possessed moment before leaving the group and suddenly subsided and dazed. The victim lying in front of the group, appearing at once as the cause of the crisis and the author of this miracle of peace restored. It becomes sacred is to be positive for prodigious power to unleash the crisis as bring peace. This is the genesis of archaic religion that Ren Girard has discovered: the sacrificial ritual as a repetition of the originary event, the myth as a narrative of the event, which are prohibited denial of access to all objects in origin of the rivalries that have degenerated in this crisis absolutely traumatic. This is a gradual religious development during the repetition of mimetic crisis whose resolution brings peace only temporarily. The development of the rites and taboos is a kind of empirical knowledge about violence.

If explorers and ethnologists have been witnesses to similar facts in the mists of time, circumstantial evidence abounds, as the universality of ritual sacrifice in all human communities and the many myths that have been collected from most diverse peoples. If the theory is true, then one will find in the myth of recurring characters: there will be a victim-god, who is guilty, which bears features of victimhood preferential selection (eg disability), which is responsible for the generation of the order that governs the group. And Ren Girard finds these elements in the many myths, starting with that of Oedipus, he analyzes in this book and in later books.

Critique of Levi-Strauss

The design that emerges between the myth and Rene Girard Claude Levi-Strauss. The latter considers the myths of a people to the extent that they constitute a genesis of meanings, but a purely logical genesis. Structuralist Thought unfolds in a universe of symbols that do not want to see in myths trace of a real event. For Rene Girard, there is basically a retreat from the revelation of the violence and its arbitrary origin of culture. This explains the lack of interest of structuralism to the study of rituals that commemorate the violent event in a little too "real."

The process of man

The mechanism of victimhood will provide the key challenge is the issue of transition from animal to man, that challenge the scientific community has given up because they had not faced the beginning of a solution. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), Girard developed the implications of his discovery on this issue. To account for this passage, in fact, we can assume anything other than what already exists in the animal world, among anthropoid primates: a high degree of mimicry linked to a large volume of the brain. What keeps these companies in violence resulting from the mimesis of appropriation of the degenerate system is instinctual submission to dominant individuals. Once established, the submission of a dominant individual to remain stable throughout life. Just consider that the degree of mimicry increasing, and she exasperated rage explodes this stability, and then a first mimetic crisis develops which is solved by the triggering mechanism of victimhood.

Preventing the return of this crisis is a terrifying existential necessity for the group and one can imagine the intense concentration that is the victim who was rescued, the first non-instinctual attention. Because they want to be reconciled, our proto-human ancestors endeavor to maintain this miraculous peace by replacing the original victim in the rituals, new victims. Conditions are fulfilled for the appearance of the first meaning, the simplest - a unit set against an undifferentiated mass - through the need of choosing a victim. The first symbol, the victim, means first of all everything that is related to the mechanism reconciling: the sacred, which has the character of transcendence terrifying both beneficial and malevolent. Presumably as the first monument was a tomb, that of the victim. This first simple meaning is different then: "The imperative ritual is one with the handling of signs, with their multiplication and constantly open up new opportunities while differentiating and cultural enrichment." What emerges, and develops gradually over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, it is a new mode of management of violence, which is to defer it, it's replacing instinctual protections, protections - banned and rites - which can be described as cultural, and the parallel development of symbolic thought. These protections incomparable efficiency will permit the development of mimicry in tandem with the increased volume of the brain characterized by hominids.

The archaic religious appears as the original form of culture, what had sounded Durkheim. It helps to understand the need for sacrificial victims, which in turn allows to explain that hunting is primarily ceremonial, domestication of animals as fortuitous result of acclimation to a pool of victims , or agriculture.

The development of rituals and forbidden by the proto-humans or humans take infinitely varied forms while obeying a rigorous practical sense that one can identify: the prevention of the return of the mimetic crisis. We can find in the archaic religious origin of all political institutions or culture.

The scientific status of the hypothesis

As the theory of natural selection of species is the principle of rational explanation of the immense diversity of life forms, the mechanism of victimhood that is the explanation of the generation of the infinite diversity of cultural forms. The analogy with the hypothesis of Darwin also extends to the scientific status of theory, which in both cases this assumption may not be proven experimentally since the infinite period of time necessary for the production of phenomena concerned, but hypothesized by winning its explanatory power unrivaled.

Judeo-Christian Scripture

The biblical text as a science of man

In Things Hidden, Girard discusses for the first time Christianity and the Bible.

The Gospels themselves are apparently like any mythic narrative with a victim-god lynched by a unanimous crowd, then event remembered by the followers of the cult by the ritual sacrifice - symbolic than this - the Eucharist. The parallel is perfect except for one thing: the victim is innocent. The mythical story is built on the lie of the guilt of the victim as it is an account of the event was seen in the context of lynch mob unanimous. The dearth essential to the efficiency of sacrificial violence.

The Good News Gospel clearly states the innocence of the victim, thus becoming, by attacking the ignorance, the seed of destruction of the sacrificial order on which the equilibrium of societies. Already the Old Testament shows this reversal of myths in the sense of innocence of the victims (Abel, Joseph, Job, Suzanne ...) and the Hebrews were aware of the uniqueness of their religious tradition. With the Gospels, it is very clearly revealed that these are "things hidden since the foundation of the world" (Matthew 13, 35), the foundation of the world order the murder, described in all its ugliness, repulsive in the Passion narrative.

The revelation is all the more clear that the text is more about desire and violence, from the metaphor of the snake turning the desire of Eve in paradise until the prodigious strength of mimicry leads to Peter's denial at the time of the Passion. Rene Girard explicit biblical expressions such as "scandal" which means mimetic rivalry, the obstacle posed by the rival, or Satan, who symbolizes the whole process from mimetic rivalry until the resolution of victimhood founder of a new order. In the Gospels, the God of violence has completely disappeared. Nobody can escape his responsibility, as the envious envy: "Woe to him by whom the offense cometh." As stated by Simone Weil : "Before being a theory of God, theology, the Gospels is a theory of man, an anthropology "

The Christian society

Revelation Gospel contains the truth about violence, available for two thousand years, "says Girard. Has ended the sacrificial order based on violence in society has claimed that the Gospel text as his own religious text? No, he answers, for truth that has an impact it must also meet a receptive listener and men do not change like that. The Gospel has acted rather as a ferment of decomposition of the sacrificial order. If medieval Christianity showed the face of a sacrificial society yet knowing very well despise and ignore its victims, the sacrificial efficiency has steadily diminishing, as the ignorance receded and Ren Girard sees this as the principle of singularity and transformation of Western society today whose fate becomes one with that of human society as a whole.

The decline of the sacrificial order means there is less violence? Not at all, it deprives modern societies of much of the capacity of sacrificial violence to install an order at least temporarily. The "innocence" of time is more ignorance. On the other hand, Christianity, Judaism as a result, has desecrated the world makes possible a report utility to nature. More threatened by the resurgence of large-scale crises mimetics, the contemporary world is simultaneously more quickly overtaken by guilt and the other has developed such a powerful technique that is doomed to destruction both more and more responsibility and less and less innocence.

For example, the recovery of victims, while it shows the progress of moral conscience in the form of a competition of victimhood posing the threat of escalating violence.

The question of faith

Ren Girard is a believer since his conversion to Catholicism took place at the time he was preparing his first book. But he developed his work rigorously: "No appeal to the supernatural should break the thread of anthropological analysis. , and has always maintained that the mimetic theory must be judged by its explanatory power and its simplicity. His work can be characterized as an "evangelical anthropology" to the extent that, for him, as is apparent mimetic theory of biblical and evangelical who "can solve puzzles that modern thought has never resolved, primarily that of archaic religious is one with the enigma of social foundation " .

Developments

Rene Girard has been on its books following its reverse for further analysis and details.

The Scapegoat (1982) analysis include the texts of persecution, back in the thirteenth ^century and accusing Jews of infanticide, poisoning, etc.. like myths. The fallacy of the charges is obvious to all in the case of these texts, why not in the case of myths? It contains analysis mimics bright passages of the Gospels.

When these things begin (1994) is an interview with a journalist where there are many autobiographical elements.

In Him by whom the offense cometh (2001) Rene Girard returns, in particular, on the delicate question of the sacrifice he had hoped to avoid in the interpretation of the Passion of Christ.

Criticism

Main article: Ren Pommier

The academic and writer Ren Pommier in 2010 published a critique of the thought of Rene Girard, in his book Rene Girard, a lit which makes for a lighthouse

From the experimental side of science

The theory of mimetic desire of Rene Girard is a rare example of a theory in the humanities has been accelerated by new discoveries in experimental science for decades. Indeed, researchers in clinical psychology as Andrew Meltzoff and Vittorio Gallese as neurologists (the Italian scientist who discovered mirror neurons with Giacomo Rizzolatti) became interested in the mimetic theory . The concordance between studies of Girard and their discoveries are amazing, "extraordinary" as stated by Dr. Scott Garrels .

For an overview of the issue, see Revolutionary discoveries in cognitive science: paradoxes and dangers of imitation of Simon De Keukelaere .

Work

Truth and falsehood romantic fiction ( 1961 ) ISBN 2012789773
Dostoevsky's Double Unit ( 1963 )
Violence and the Sacred ( 1972 ) ISBN 2012788971
Critical in an underground ( 1976 ) ISBN 2253032980
To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ( 1978 ) ISBN 0801836557
Things hidden since the foundation of the world ( 1978 ) ISBN 2253032441 Research with Jean-Michel and Guy Lefort Oughourlian.
The Scapegoat ( 1982 ) ISBN 2253037389
Route perverse old men ( 1985 ) ISBN 2253045918
Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith is Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation. Ed Robert Hamerton-Kelly. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804715181
Shakespeare: the fires of desire ( 1990 )
When these things begin ... ( 1994 ), interviews with Michel Treguer
I see Satan Fall Like Lightning ( 1999 )
He by whom the offense cometh ( 2001 ) ISBN 2220050114 , which includes three short essays and an interview with Maria Stella Barberi.
Voice of the real unknown ( 2002 ) ISBN 2253130699
The Sacrifice ( 2003 ) ISBN 2717722637
The Origins of Culture ( 2004 ) ISBN 2220053555 , interviews with Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha, followed by a response to Regis Debray in his criticisms published in The sacred fire in 2003.
Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire. Ed Mark R. Anspach. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804747806
Truth or weak faith. Dialogue on Christianity and Relativism ( 2006 ) (Verit o fede debole. Dialogo su Cristianesimo relativismo e), with Gianni Vattimo. At cura di P. Antonello, Transeuropa Edizioni, Massa.
God invented? ( 2007 ) ISBN 2708239228 with Gounelle Andre and Alain Houze.
( 2007 ) ISBN 2246721113.
( 2007 ) ISBN 2355360022. Entretiens avec Benot Chantre.
( 2008 ), Ed. de L'Herne , ISBN 2851978632.
Sous la direction de Robert Doran. Stanford University Press, 2008. ISBN 0804755809
. Paris: Carnets Nord. (livre + DVD) ISBN 2355360162

Rcompenses et distinctions

a reu le prix Mdicis Essai
le 10 mai 2004 , le prix Aujourd'hui lui est attribu pour .
Guggenheim Fellow (1960, 1967)
Prix de la Modern Language Association (1965)
Docteur honoris causa des universits d'Amsterdam, Innsbruck, Anvers, Padoue, Montral, et de St. Mary's University and Seminary (Baltimore)
Acadmicien depuis 2005

God's Guarantees for Giving!

Categories

Live Search

Sign In

Rene Girard

Summary