Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük – René Girard
In 2008, René Girard gave a keynote lecture at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion about how the dynamics of mimetic desire were playing out thousands of years ago. With a focus on what he called “Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük”, he analyzes the rituals that are contained in humanity’s earliest forms of artwork. Çatalhöyük was a […]
Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World: Book Launch
Why is human violence the much-neglected key to understanding human emergence and development? How does it differ from animal violence? How was it controlled by the victimary or scapegoat mechanism? How does this stabilize human communities and lead to the creation of natural or archaic religion (‘the sacred’); and then to the development of our […]
Imitation, Mirror Neurons, and Mimetic Desire: Convergence Between the Mimetic Theory of René Girard and Empirical Research on Imitation – by Scott Garrels
Scott Garrels, of Fuller Theological Seminary in California, says this: “Psychological mimesis is the tendency of human beings to imitate the gestures, behaviors, and intentions of other persons; it is the very cornerstone upon which the entire work of René Girard is constructed. From this foundation, Girard has made a number of bold claims about […]
The Deepening Impasse of Modernity – by Stephen Gardner
University of Tulsa Philosophy Professor Stephen Gardner writes about René Girard’s book Battling to the End. Battling to the End is about Girard’s view on war and how he believes Mimetic Theory plays an explanatory role in human violence. Girard introduces readers to von Clausewitz, an eighteenth-century Prussian military officer and strategist, and reflects on […]
Desired Possessions: Karl Polanyi, Rene Girard, and the Critique of the Market – by Mark Anspach
The market illusion—the idea of an “invisible hand”—perpetuates the idea of “market motives,” or purely economic motives. These do not exist. Social relationships are embedded deeply in the market, and there is no desire that is not social. As Mark Anspach observes, “faith in the naturalness and inevitability of the “economic motive” absolves those who […]
What has Deviated Transcendency: Woolf’s “The Waves” as a Textbook Case – by Simon de Keukelaere’s
From the article, drawing heavily on Max Scheler: “Humankind––according to mimetic theory––is not (as Marx thought) homo economicus but rather homo religious. Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, Girard’s first essay (1961), evocatively opens with a saying by Max Scheler: “L’homme possède ou un Dieu ou une idole” (Man has either a God or an idol). […]
The Evangelical Subversion of Myth – by René Girard
Girard begins this subversive exploration of the evangelical (Gospel) subversion of myth by quoting Sigmund Freud in his famous work, Totem and Taboo. Freud recognizes that long before he intuited the violent origins of human culture, the Gospels had already revealed them. “In the Christian doctrine,” he writes, “men were acknowledging in the most undisguised […]
Violence
Violence in mimetic theory is not a discrete event or even an external action. Violence is the consequence of a relationship—always a relationship—and never a “lone-wolf” or “random act”. While the victims may be random, the violence is always the result of a mimetic process that unfolds with its own scandals, conflict, and resentment long […]
Scapegoat
A person, group, or thing that a community chooses—through a mimetically-driven process— to expel or eliminate in the midst of a mimetic crisis in order to bring about a resolution. The scapegoat absorbs all of the mimetic tension and violence, which had previously been undirected and chaotic, onto itself.
Scandal
From the Greek word skandalon, a scandal is a stumbling block—something which is an obstacle to the fulfillment of a person’s desire. In mimetic theory, the model of desire is always a scandal. The model, by its very nature, blocks the way to possessing the object. Because it’s the model who mediates the objects of […]