The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice – by Brian Collins
In the beginning, says the ancient Hindu text the Rg Veda, was a man. And from man’s sacrifice and dismemberment came the entire world, including the hierarchical ordering of human society. The Head Beneath the Altar is the first book to present a wide-ranging study of Hindu texts read through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory of […]
A God Torn to Pieces: The Nietzsche Case – by Giuseppe Fornari
Giuseppe Fornari’s groundbreaking inquiry shows that Friedrich Nietzsche’s neglected importance as a religious thinker and his “untimeliness” place him at the forefront of modern thought. Capable of exploiting his own failures as a cognitive tool to discover what other philosophers never wanted to see, Nietzsche ultimately drove himself to mental collapse. Fornari analyzes the tragic […]
Giving Life, Giving Death: Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy – by Lucien Scubla
Although women alone have the ability to bring children into the world, modern Western thought tends to discount this female prerogative. In Giving Life, Giving Death, Lucien Scuba argues that structural anthropology sees women as objects of exchange that facilitate alliance-building rather than as vectors of continuity between generations. Examining the work of Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and Girard, […]
The Genesis of Desire – by Jean-Michel Oughourlian
We seem to be abandoning the codes that told previous generations who they should love. But now that many of us are free to choose whoever we want, nothing is less certain. The proliferation of divorces and separations reveal a dynamic we would rather not see: others sometimes reject us as passionately as we are […]
For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth
by Sandor Goodhart, Jørgen Jørgensen, Tom Ryba, James Williams 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 […]
Flesh Becomes Word: A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea
by David Dawson Though its coinage can be traced back to a sixteenth-century translation of Leviticus, the term “scapegoat” has enjoyed a long and varied history of both scholarly and everyday uses. While William Tyndale employed it to describe one of two goats chosen by lot to escape the Day of Atonement sacrifices with its […]
Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard – by Cynthia L Haven
René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the leading thinkers of our era—a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history, and human destiny. His oeuvre, offering a “mimetic theory” of cultural origins and human behavior, inspired such writers as Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee and […]
Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916
by Mc Cormack, W. J. Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916 is the first critical study of the religious poet and militarist Joseph M. Plunkett, who was executed with the other leaders of the Dublin insurrection of 1916. Through Plunkett, the author gains access to areas of […]
Economy and the Future: A Crisis of Faith – by Jean-Pierre Dupuy
A monster stalks the earth—a sluggish, craven, dumb beast that takes fright at the slightest noise and starts at the sight of its own shadow. This monster is the market. The shadow it fears is cast by a light that comes from the future: the Keynesian crisis of expectations. It is this same light that […]
Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory – by Nidesh Lawtoo
Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths? Drawing on an anti-Platonic tradition in critical theory, Lawton adopts ethical, anthropological, and philosophical lenses to offer new readings of Joseph Conrad’s novels and the postcolonial and cinematic works that respond to his oeuvre. He argues that Conrad’s fascination with […]