Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life — by Luke Burgis
WANTING is a large-scale exposition of mimetic theory and its practical applications, especially the positive potential of mimesis, written by entrepreneur, author, and professor of business Luke Burgis. This book is the most ambitious and engaging explanation of mimetic theory for someone new to Girard’s thought. The book has a wide, sweeping range, moving from […]
Compassion Or Apocalypse?: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of Rene Girard – by James Warren
Apocalyptic Future, Warren’s written a gem, a much-needed “comprehensive” guide to Girard’s thought. It does an excellent job of starting “in the beginning,” with Genesis, and moving all the way through what Girard worried would be a man-made apocalypse. The table of contents is sweeping: Part I: MIMESIS Chapter 1: Mimesis and DesireChapter 2: Mimesis […]
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future – by Peter Thiel
What do you believe is true that almost nobody else believes is true? This is the question that the contrarian entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel poses at the beginning of his book, Zero to One. It’s a question especially important for startup founders to answer. In this book, Thiel himself answers it in the most […]
Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth – by Nidesh Lawtoo
Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo furthers his previous diagnostic of crowd behavior, identification, and mimetic contagion to account for the growing shadow cast by authoritarian leaders […]
Vengeance in Reverse: The Tangled Loops of Violence, Myth, and Madness – by Mark Anspach
How do humans stop fighting? Where do the gods of myth come from? What does it mean to go mad? Mark R. Anspach tackles these and other conundrums as he draws on ethnography, literature, psychotherapy, and the theory of René Girard to explore some of the fundamental mechanisms of human interaction. Likening gift exchange to […]
A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis – by Jean-Pierre Dupuy
In 1755 the city of Lisbon was destroyed by a terrible earthquake. Almost 250 years later, an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean unleashed a tsunami whose devastating effects were felt over a vast area. In each case, a natural catastrophe came to be interpreted as a consequence of human evil. Between these two events, two […]
Shakespearean Cultures: Latin America and the Challenges of Mimesis in Non-Hegemonic Circumstances
by João Cezar de Castro Rocha In Shakespearean Cultures, René Girard’s ideas on violence and the sacred inform an innovative analysis of contemporary Latin America. Castro Rocha proposes a new theoretical framework based upon the “poetics of emulation” and offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding the asymmetries of the modern world. Shakespearean cultures are those whose […]
The Sacrifice of Socrates: Athens, Plato, Girard – by Wm. Blake Tyrrell
When Athenians suffered the shame of having lost war from their own greed and foolishness, around 404 BCE the public’s blame was directed at Socrates, a man whose unique appearance and behavior, as well as his disapproval of the democracy, made him a ready target. The Sacrifice of Socrateswas subsequently put on trial and sentenced […]
René Girard’s Mimetic Theory – by Wolfgang Palaver
A systematic introduction into the René Girard’s mimetic theory of the French-American literary theorist and philosophical anthropologist René Girard, this essential text explains its three main pillars (mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and the Biblical “difference”) with the help of examples from literature and philosophy. This book also offers an overview of René Girard’s life […]
A Refuge of Lies: Reflections on Faith and Fiction – by Cesáreo Bandera
Erich Auerbach’s seminal Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature was published more than sixty years ago and is deservedly considered a classic. The book brought into focus the fundamental difference that exists between the two basic approaches to the textual representation of reality in Western culture. These two “styles,” as Auerbach called them, were archetypically […]