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 the way he intuited some of the key principles of mimetic theory over a hundred years before Girard. Check out The Deepening Impasse of Modernity
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 conform to it from direct responsibility for the suffering caused by their treating other people as commodities.” The market, or “market processes,” has taken on a level of being which the market does not possess. So when there is a collapse or catastrophe in the economy, people do not have to shoulder individual responsibility for it. It’s always just “the market” — with its cycles, it’s randomness, its impersonal nature to whom nobody can ascribe any real blame. Check out Desired Possessions
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). If we may believe Girard, the Enlightenment profoundly misunderstood human beings because it naively assumed that doing away with “ancient superstitions” would fully liberate them: “denial of God does not eliminate transcendence but diverts it from the au-delà to the en-deçà” (Girard 1965, 59).” Check out What is Deviated Transcendency
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 manger the guilty primeval deed.” The Gospels, according to Girard, were the only text in which the Truth—a truth that had been expelled from human cultures—occupied the central place. The Gospel is true revelation, revealing the “things hidden since the foundation of the world,” including the founder murder of Cain and Abel and the founding murder that is at the heart of every culture but which humans have done their best to hide behind myths, rituals, and taboos. Check out The Evangelical Subversion of Myth