René Girard and Creative Reconciliation – edited by Vern Neufeld Redekop and Thomas Ryba
The contribution of this book to the field of reconciliation is both theoretical and practical, recognizing that good theory guides effective practice and practice is the ground for compelling theory. Using a Girardian hermeneutic as a starting point, a new conceptual Gestalt emerges in these essays, one not fully integrated in a formal way but showing a clear understanding of some of the challenges and possibilities for dealing with the deep divisions, enmity, hatred, and other effects of violence. By situating discourse about reconciliation within the context of Girardian thought, it becomes clear that—like Peter who vowed he would never deny Jesus but ended up doing it three times—any of us is susceptible to the siren call of angry resentment and retaliation. It is with a profound awareness of the power of violence that the emergence of mimetic discourse around reconciliation takes on particular urgency. Check out René Girard and Creative Reconciliation on Amazon!
Mimetic Theory and Islam: “The Wound Where Light Enters” – by Michael Kirwan & Ahmad Achtar
This volume explores mimetic theory and its shared ground between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the Abrahamic religions—which seems to have a spiritual and ethical breakthrough: a move away from scapegoating rituals and toward a concern for innocent victims. This is a move away from negative cycles of desire that lead to violence and toward positive cycles of desire that lead to communion. The table of contents of the book is as follows: Part I: THE ARGUMENT 1:The Wound Where Light Enters: Mimetic Theory and IslamMichael Kirwan and Ahmad Achtar Part II: TEXTS 2: Islamic Anthropology, based on Key Passages in the Qur’anZekiriga Sejdini 3: Adam and Eve in the Qur’an: A Mimetic PerspectiveAhmad Achtar 4: The Becoming of a Model: Conflictive Relations and the Shaping of the Quranic IbrahimMichaela Quast-Neulinger 5: Fathers and Sons, Sacrifice and Substitution: Mimetic Theory and Islam in Genesis 22 and Sura 37Sandor Goodhart 6: From Structure to Interpretation of the Joseph SuraMichel Cuypers PART III: TRADITIONS 7: Spiritual Love and Sacred Suffering: Mimetic Theory from the Shi’ah PerspectiveHabibollah Babaei 8: The Philosophy of Dialogic Engagement: Two Muslim Dialogue Thinkers vis-a-vis Mimetic TheoryOemer Sener PART IV: CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM IN RESENTFUL MODERNITY 9: Islam and Islamism in the Mirror of Girard’s Mimetic TheoryThomas Scheffler 10: Prison Violence in France and Mimetic TheoryYaniss Warrach 11: Muslim Brotherhood, Social Justice and ResentmentWilhelm Guggenberger 12: Vox victima, vox moderna? Modernity and Its DiscontentsMichael Kirwan Check out Mimetic Theory & Islam on Amazon
Desire: Flaubert, Proust, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lana Del Rey – by Per Bjørnar Grande
“A common theme in films, novels, or plays is how desire works in characters and how it creates and changes their destinies.” So begins this work by Norweigen professor and Girard scholar Per Bjørnar Grande in this Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory series by Michigan State University Press, a series supported by Imitatio, a project of the Thiel Foundation. This book is comprised of 5 chapters: Chapter 1: The Nature of DesireChapter 2: Desire in Madame BovaryChapter 3: Proustian DesireChapter 4: Desire in The Great GatsbyChapter 5: Desire in Death of a SalesmanChapter 6: Desire in Lana Del Rey A highlight of this work is Chapter 4 on The Great Gatbsy, in which Grande frames F. Scott Fitzgerald in terms of his tortured mimetic relationship with his own characters, and how The Great Gatsby is actually a step forward for Fitzgerland in removing himself from the story. “Fitzgerald writes from a distance that enables him to discover a more refined literary structure,” notes Grande. “There is no longer any authorial voice or narrator with full access to the characters.” He continues: “In his previous novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), Fitzgerald was playing out his own life, letting his protagonists wrestle with his own conflicting ideas regarding such philosophical perspectives as Nietzscheanism, naturalism, Romanticism, and Catholicism. The omniscient narrators in these novels are therefore constantly shifting perspectives in order to explore the author’s ideological frustrations. In contrast, the story told in The Great Gatsby is narrated by a character with limited access to the other characters.” Check out Desire: Flaubert, Proust, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lana Del Rey on Amazon
Living with Robots —by Paul Dumouchel and Luisa Damiano
Living with Robots is a fascinating exploration of artificial intelligence that draws on mimetic theory to understand the phenomenon of social robots that exist in the real world, with real bodies, and interact with humans. The book is deeply philosophical and contemplates the possibility that we are at an inflection point in human evolution due to the ability of robots to have what the authors refer to as “artificial empathy.” What are the rules governing social behavior? Human desire, according to Girard, is one of the most powerful forces guiding human behavior. If that is true, then designers of AI cannot ignore the impact of mimetic desire and the role that it plays in making us uniquely human—and mimetic. This book is particularly concerned with the “moral behavior” and ethical concerns of robots, and explores the possibility of robots having agency. This is a fundamental text for any exploration of the relationship between mimetic desire and freedom.
The Humble Story of Don Quixote: Reflections on the Birth of the Modern Novel—by Cesáreo Bandera
The Humble Story of Don Quixote, written by a master of mimetic theory (Bandera), applies mimetic theory to better understand what is arguably the greatest novel ever written—or at least the first modern novel ever written. Don Quixote occupied such a high place in the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s opinion that he said this of it: “In the whole world there is no deeper, on mightier work. This is, so far, the last and greatest expression of human thought…And if the world were to come to an end, and people asked there, somewhere: “Did you understand your life on earth, and what conclusions have you drawn from it?”—man could silently hand over Don Quijote.” The epitaph which opens Chapter 1 of this book. Don quixote is the mimetic man par excellence. Everything he does is motivated by imitation, from his initial reading of novels of chivalry to the suggestions of his squire, Sancho Panza. This book is the best explanation of Don Quixote available, and it is thoroughly Girardian in nature. Of particular interest in this book is chapter 10: The Desire of the Obstacle. The chapter concerns itself with the self-inflicted failure that one caught in the cycle of destructive mimetic desire is subjected to, much like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. About the Author Cesáreo Bandera was Professor Emeritus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, former Director of the Program in Comparative Literature at SUNY at Buffalo, and former President of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion.
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature —by Erich Auerback
[Note: We chose to display the cover from the French edition from the 60’s rather than the modern cover.] Erich Auerback did one of the most extensive studies of mimesis in literature before Girard. Auerback, professor or Romance Languages at Yale University, makes a sweeping account of European literature from the Odyssey to Ulysses and includes passages from Virginia Woolf and Proust, Tacitus, Petronius, St. Augustine, St. Francis, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Standhal, Flaubert and Zola, among many others. His recounting of the story of Adam and Eve and the role of mimesis in original sin is particularly striking. This work was the forerunner to Girard’s much more complex Deceit, Desire, and the Novel where he goes beyond mere representation and explores the imitation, or mimesis, of desire in the characters of important works of Western literature. Auerbach’s book focuses more on surface-level artistic imitation; Girard on the imitation of desire, around which he constructed his anthropology of the human person. Auerbach is sure to still fascinate scholars of literature, though, and his work dovetails with Girard’s mimetic theory.
The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes — by James Alison
The Joy of Being Wrong is a work of theological anthropology that looks at original sin (in the Christian tradition) in light of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. James Alison, the author, is a Catholic theologian who is intimately familiar with Girard’s thought and so his anthropological perspective is thoroughly mimetic—he views mimesis as fundamental to what it means to be human. In one striking passage, Alison compares mimesis to gravity. Mimesis is to psychology what gravity is to psychics. Here he comments on the “draw” of a child to an adult (like its mother): “This draw, which is what enabled all of us to have access to language and human society, has the same relationship to humans as gravity does to planets. It is the mysterious movement which is nevertheless evidently there (evidently as soon, that is, as it has occurred to someone to ask why things are as they are) and without which there would be chaos. This movement, Oughourlian, following Girard, calls mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity is to psychics. It is made concrete in the imitation, learning, and repetition which is what enables an infant to become a socialized human being. “ The contents of the book are: Foreword by Sebastian MooreIntroduction Part IConstructing a Theological Anthropology 1.René Girard’s Mimetic Theory2. The Search for a Theological Anthropology3. The Search for a Soteriology Part IIStretching the Shape of Forgiveness 4. The Resurrection and Original Sin5. The Intelligence of the Victim and the Distortion of Desire6. Original Sin Known in Its Ecclesial Overcoming7. The Trinity, Creation, and Original Sin8. Hope and Concupiscence9. Reimagining the Symbol of Original Sin Part IIIIs This What the Church Believes? 10. Is this what the Church Believes? BibliographyIndex
Intersubjectivity in Economics: Agents and Structures – edited by Edward Fullbrook
The editor of this volume is Edward Fullbrook, who is founder and editor of the Real-World Economics Review and a research fellow in the School of Economics at the University of the West of England. The volume explores the notion of intersubjectivity in economics and explodes the is of neoclassical economics of an atomistic economic ma—one who determines his preferences and choices entirely on his own. Individuals are not monadic, isolated things but interdividuals who are relational creatures and whose being and subjectivity is dynamic because it is constituted in relationship with others. Only by understanding those relationships, and especially their mimetic forces, can we approach economics with a robust understanding of the complex forces at work in the world on both a micro and macro scale. In the introduction to the book, the authors set out the fundamental problem with a Newtonian, atonomistic concept of the human person on which most of economics was built beginning in the late nineteenth century. “Application of atomism to the economic realm means treating human desires and proclivities as fundamental data, which, like the masses of physical bodies in classical mechanics, are not affected by the relations being modeled.” In mimetic theory, in which every desire has a relational aspect, this construction of economics falls apart as absurd. “It often happens,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “that the universal belief of one age of mankind…becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible.” This book unveils one such absurdity. The contributors to the volume include Frank Ackerman, John B. Davis, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Armin Falk, Ernst Fehr, Edward Fullbrook, Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Frederic Lebaron, Thierry Levy, Paul Lewis, Roger Mason, Anne Mayhew, Paul Ormerod, Ralph William Pfouts, Jochen Runde, S. Abu Turab Rizvi, Laurent Thevenot, and Peter Wynarczyk. Check out Intersubjectivity in Economics on Amazon
The Mimetic Brain – by Jean-Michel Oughourlian
The well-known psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, a collaborator with René Girard on the book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, referred to the Mimetic, or third, brain as the part of the brain which has the function of relationship, reciprocity, mimeticism. Obviously, every person only has one biological brain—but different functions of the brain have been recognized for some time. Oughourlian wrote this book in an attempt to highlight an often overlooked part of the brain which is responsible for the highly mimetic function of humans, which Aristotle noticed 2,500 years ago as the thing that sets us apart the most from animals. Oughourlian writes: “It seems to me that the misery of the human condition lies in the difficulty of accepting the otherness of one’s own being, of accepting that myself is an “other” and that this other who constitutes me is anterior to me. The tragedy of the human comes from denying having been created by the desire, the breath of God, out of nothing (or almost: dust) and that one is permanently re-created by the desire of the other at each instant of one’s life.” The Mimetic Brain explains this great mystery of desire through the lens of psychology, and Oughourlian has a profound grasp of philosophical and theological concepts to supplement his professional work. Check out The Mimetic Brain on Amazon
Prophet of Envy: Conversations with René Girard – edited by Cynthia Haven
Prophet of Envy: Conversations with René Girard is a bold new book that contains a carefully curated and well-edited collection of interviews that René Girard had given over the course of his life. Some of them are scholarly, others are fiery. All are tantalizing. Some of these interviews were formerly behind paywalls on obscure websites and in other hard-to-find places. Cynthia Haven has brought together some of the best work of Girard in the format that he liked best: a dialogical encounter where his ideas can be wrestled with and worked out in the company of others. The book contains: Introduction: Socrates in the Digital Age Cynthia 1 “There Are Real Victims Behind the Text” Discussion 2 Opera & Myth Philippe Godefroid 3 Technological Power in the Post-Sacrificial World Scott Walter 4 The Logic of the Undecidable Thomas F. Bertonneau 5 Violence, Difference, Sacrifice Rebecca Adams 6 “Revelation Is Dangerous. It’s the Spiritual Equivalent of Nuclear Power.” Michel Treguer 7 “What Is Happening Today Is Mimetic Rivalry on a Global Scale.” Henri Tincq 8 “How Should Mimetic Theory Be Applied?” Maria Stella Barberi 9 Shakespeare: Mimesis and Desire Robert Pogue Harrison 10 Why Do We Fight? How Do We Stop? Robert Pogue Harrison 11 “War Is Everywhere” Elisabeth Lévy 12 “I have always tried to think inside an evolutionary framework.” Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha 13 The J’Accuse of René Girard: The Audacious Ideas of a Great Thinker Giulio Meotti 14 A Passion Born of Rivalry Mark R. Anspach and Laurence Tacou Conversations with René Girard.i 15 Apocalyptic Thinking after 9/11 Robert Doran 16 “I am first and foremost a social scientist.” Pedro Sette-Câmara, Alvaro Velloso de Carvalho, and Olavo de Carvalho 17 “Christianity Will Be Victorious, But Only in Defeat” Cynthia L. Haven 18 Postscript: “René Girard Never Played the Great Man,” Says Girard Biographer Cynthia L. Haven