Can We Survive Our Origins? – by Pierpaolo Antonello, Paul Gifford
Are religions intrinsically violent (as is strenuously argued by the ‘new atheists’)? Or, as Girard argues, have they been functionally rational instruments developed to manage and cope with the intrinsically violent runaway dynamic that characterizes human social organization in all periods of human history? Is violence decreasing in this time of secular modernity post-Christendom (as argued by Steven Pinker and others)? Or are we, rather, at increased and even apocalyptic risk from our enhanced powers of action and our decreased socio-symbolic protections? Rene Girard’s mimetic theory has been slowly but progressively recognized as one of the most striking breakthrough contributions to twentieth-century critical thinking in fundamental anthropology: in particular for its power to model and explain violent sacralities, ancient and modern. The present volume sets this power of explanation in an evolutionary and Darwinian frame. It asks: How far do cultural mechanisms of controlling violence, which allowed humankind to cross the threshold of hominization—i.e., to survive and develop in its evolutionary emergence—still represent today a default setting that threatens to destroy us? Can we transcend them and escape their field of gravity? Should we look to—or should we look beyond—Darwinian survival? What—and where (if anywhere)—is salvation? Check out Can We Survive Our Origins on Amazon.
Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses: Reading Scandalous Texts – by Jeremiah L. Alberg
Jeremiah Alberg’s fascinating book explores a phenomenon almost every newsreader has experienced: the curious tendency to skim over dispatches from war zones, political battlefields, and economic centers, only to be drawn in by headlines announcing a late-breaking scandal. Rationally we would agree that the former are of more significance and importance, but they do not pique our curiosity in quite the same way. The affective reaction to scandal is one both of interest and of embarrassment or anger at the interest. The reader is at the same time attracted to and repulsed by it. Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses describes the roots out of which this conflicted desire grows, and it explores how this desire mirrors the violence that undergirds the scandal itself. The book shows how readers seem to be confronted with a stark choice: either turn away from scandal completely or become enthralled and thus trapped by it. Using examples from philosophy, literature, and the Bible, Alberg leads the reader on a road out of this false dichotomy. By its nature, the author argues, the scandal is the basis of our reading; it is the source of the obstacles that prevent us from understanding what we read, and of the bridges that lead to a deeper grasp of the truth. Check out Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses on Amazon.
The Barren Sacrifice: An Essay on Political Violence
According to political theory, the primary function of the modern state is to protect its citizens—both from each other and from external enemies. Yet it is the states that essentially commit major forms of violence, such as genocides, ethnic cleansings, and large-scale massacres, against their own citizens. In this book, Paul Dumouchel argues that this paradoxical reversal of the state’s primary function into violence against its own members is not a mere accident but an ever-present possibility that is inscribed in the structure of the modern state. Modern states need enemies to exist and to persist, not because they are essentially evil but because modern politics constitutes a violent means of protecting us against our own violence. If they cannot—if we can not—find enemies outside the state, they will find them inside. However, this institution is today coming to an end, not in the sense that states are disappearing, but in the sense that they are increasingly failing to protect us from our own violence. That is why the violent sacrifices that they ask from us, in wars and even in times of peace, have now become barren. Check out The Barren Sacrifice on Amazon.
The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays – by Paul Dumouchel
First published in French in 1979, “The Ambivalence of Scarcity” was a groundbreaking work on mimetic theory. Now expanded upon with new, specially written, and never-before-published conference texts and essays, this revised edition explores René Girard’s philosophy in three sections: economy and economics, mimetic theory, and violence and politics in modern societies. The first section argues that though the mimetic theory is in many ways critical of modern economic theory, this criticism can contribute to the enrichment of economic thinking. The second section explores the issues of nonviolence and misrecognition (méconnaissance), which have been at the center of many discussions of Girard’s work. The final section proposes mimetic analyses of the violence typical of modern societies, from high school bullying to genocide and terrorist attacks. Politics, Dumouchel argues, is a violent means of protecting us from our own violent tendencies, and it can at times become the source of the very savagery from which it seeks to protect us. The book’s conclusion analyzes the relationship between ethics and economics, opening new avenues of research and inviting further exploration. Dumouchel’s introduction reflects on the importance of René Girard’s work in relation to ongoing research, especially in social sciences and philosophy. Check out The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays on Amazon.
When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer – by René Girard
In this lively series of conversations with writer Michel Treguer, René Girard revisits the major concepts of mimetic theory and explores science, democracy, and the nature of God and freedom. Girard affirms that “our unprecedented present is incomprehensible without Christianity.” Globalization has unified the world, yet civil war and terrorism persist despite free trade and economic growth. Because of mimetic desire and the rivalry it generates, asserts Girard, “whether we’re talking about marriage, friendship, professional relationships, issues with neighbors or matters of national unity, human relations are always under threat.” Literary masters including Marivaux, Dostoevsky, and Joyce understood this, as did archaic religion, which warded off violence with blood sacrifice. Christianity brought a new understanding of sacrifice, giving rise not only to modern rationality and science but also to a fragile system that is, in Girard’s words, “always teetering between the new golden age and a destructive apocalypse.” Treguer, a skeptic of mimetic theory, wonders: “Is what he’s telling me true…or is it just a nice story, a way of looking at things?” In response, Girard makes a compelling case for his theory. Check out When These Things Begin on Amazon
Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation
by Walter Burkert, René Girard, Jonathan Z. Smith Burkert, Girard, and Smith hold important and contradictory theories about the nature and origin of ritual sacrifice, and the role violence plays in religion and culture. These papers and conversations derive from a conference that pursued the possibility and utility of a general theory of religion and culture, especially one based on violence. The special value of this volume is the conversations as such—the real record of working scholars engaged with one another’s theories, as they make and meet challenges, and move and maneuver. Girard and Burkert present different versions of the same conviction: that a single theory can account for ritual and its social function, a theory that posits original acts of group violence. Smith sharply questions both the possibility and the utility of such a general theory. Among the highlights of this stimulating interchange of ideas is a searching criticism of Girard’s theory of generative scapegoating, which he answers with clarity and conviction, and a challenging of Burkert’s theory of the violent origin of sacrifice in the hunt by Smith’s argument, posed as a jeu d’esprit, that sacrifice originates with the domestication of animals. Check out Violent Origins on Amazon.
Violence and the Sacred – by René Girard
His fascinating and ambitious book provides a fully developed theory of violence as the ‘heart and secret soul’ of the sacred. Girard’s fertile, combative mind links myth to prophetic writing, primitive religions to classical tragedy. Check out Violence and the Sacred on Amazon.
To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology – by René Girard
An individual desires an object, not for itself, but because another individual also desires it. This mimetic desire, Rene Girard contends, lies at the source of all human disorder and order. In brilliant readings of Dante, Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and others, Girard draws out the thesis of mimetic desire — and ponders its suppression in the West since Plato: “The historical mutilation of mimesis … was no mere oversight, no fortuitous ‘error.’ A real awareness of mimetic desire threatens the flattering delusion we entertain not only about ourselves as individuals but also about the nature and origin of that collective self we call our society.” Check out To Double Business Bound on Amazon.
The Scapegoat – by René Girard
Girard, professor of the French language, literature, and civilization at Stanford, builds on his notable previous anthropological and literary examinations of myth and ritual in human society. Here he applies his appraisals of Freud and Levi-Strauss to demonstrate how religion functions to keep violence outside society by deflecting it onto a scapegoat whose sacrifice restores the social order. Using a rich variety of resources from Greek to biblical, primitive to modern, he cites the Gospel Passion as a myth with the power to break the evil of collective violence and the corporate murder it conceals. Girard’s use of structuralism to analyze biblical texts will stir much discussion, and the book as a whole is bound to be considered provocative by specialists Check out The Scapegoat on Amazon.
The Girard Reader (Edited by James G. Williams)
In one volume, an anthology of seminal work of one of the twentieth century’s most original thinkers, René Girard. This is a great place to start for newbie’s to Girard’s mimetic theory. The only drawback is that this book is out of print and thus is ridiculously expensive; however, it does contain essential nuggets of Girard’s thought and worth the read for those who want to drop the coin. This book includes Girard’s seminal insights into literary theory, the scapegoat mechanism, mimetic rivalries, and the foundational role of mimetic desire in all of this. Check out The Girard Reader on Amazon.