Satan
Satan is the principle that drives discord, chaos, and confusion among humans. Satan is the embodiment and incarnation of mimetic rivalry and violence, the force behind conflict and conflict that operates through mimetic rivalries and the scapegoating mechanism. Whether you view “Satan” in the traditional, incarnate way like a ‘devil with horns’ or in a […]
Sacrifice
Sacrifice is literally the “making sacred” (sacer facere) of a victim of violent unanimity, the victim who is the effective substitute for the violence of all and whose unanimous destruction ensures social concord. The substitution of animals for human victims only replicates the original substitutive mechanism, while clearly reflecting the need for victims whose destruction […]
Religion
Religion may have its etymological roots in Latin Religare, to bind up or tie together, as a community is united by its devotion to a divinity which it fails to see as the victim of its unanimous, sacrificial violence. Often described as an ensemble of beliefs and practices that organize a culture, religion consists chiefly of […]
Apocalyptic
See apocalypse. Apocalyptic events bring about the destruction of the world and of humanity. In Girard’s mimetic theory, apocalyptic things happen as the result of human violence—specifically, the mimetic cycle which starts with Mimetic Desire, gives way to Mimetic Rivalry, leads to collisions, and eventually is resolved through either war (violence) or the scapegoat mechanism […]
Mimetic Theory of René Girard and Asian Culture
The thought of Girard is beginning to infiltrate Asian countries. This is the site of Korean professor Ilkwaen Chung, for example, who have begun to explore the origins of Buddhist through the lens of Girardian theory. He asks many fascination questions like, “Is Buddha a scapegoat?” Professor Chung is perhaps the foremost Girardian scholar in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]