The Oedipus Casebook: Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus the King
by Mark R. Anspach and Wm. Blake Tyrrell Who killed Laius? Most readers assume Oedipus did. At the play’s end, he stands convicted of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and triggering a deadly plague. With selections from a stellar assortment of critics including Walter Burkert, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, René Girard, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, this book […]
Mimetic Theory and World Religions
by Wolfgang Palaver and Richard Schenk Those who anticipated the demise of religion and the advent of a peaceful, secularized global village have seen the last two decades confound their predictions. René Girard’s mimetic theory is key to understanding the new challenges posed by our world of resurgent violence and pluralistic cultures and traditions. Girard sought to […]
Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion
by Scott R. Garrels This exciting compendium brings together, for the first time, some of the foremost scholars of René Girard’s mimetic theory of culture, with leading imitation researchers from the cognitive, developmental, and neuro-sciences. These chapters explore some of the major discoveries and developments concerning the foundational, yet previously overlooked, role of imitation in […]
Machado de Assis: Toward a Poetics of Emulation – by João Cezar de Castro Rocha
This book offers an alternative explanation for one of the core dilemmas of Brazilian literary criticism: the “midlife crisis” Machado de Assis underwent from 1878 to 1880, the result of which was the writing of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, as well as the remarkable production of his mature years—with an emphasis on his masterpiece, Dom […]
Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan
by Simon Simonse, Foreword by Mark Anspach The long-awaited, revised, and illustrated edition of Simon Simonse’s study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan marks a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless […]
Intimate Domain: Desire, Trauma, and Mimetic Theory – by Martha J. Reineke
For René Girard, human life revolves around mimetic desire, which regularly manifests itself in acquisitive rivalry when we find ourselves wanting an object because another wants it also. Noting that mimetic desire is driven by our sense of inadequacy or insufficiency, Girard arrives at a profound insight: our desire is not fundamentally directed toward the […]
Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes – by Paolo Diego Bubbio
Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes is an account of Paolo Diego Bubbio’s twenty-year intellectual journey through the twists and turns of Girard’s mimetic theory. The author analyzes philosophy and religion as “enemy sisters” engaged in an endless competitive struggle and identifies the intellectual space where this rivalry can either be perpetuated or come to a […]
How We Became Human: Mimetic Theory and the Science of Evolutionary Origins
by Pierpaolo Antonello and Paul Gifford From his groundbreaking Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, René Girard’s mimetic theory is presented as elucidating “the origins of culture.” He posits that archaic religion (or “the sacred”), particularly in its dynamics of sacrifice and ritual, is a neglected and major key to unlocking the enigma […]
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 […]