René Girard
René Noël Théophile Girard was a French academic best known for developing mimetic theory, which posits that human desire is fundamentally imitative, leading to rivalry, violence and the scapegoat mechanism as foundations of religion and culture. Holding academic appointments primarily in literature departments in the United States, his interdisciplinary work influenced fields ranging from theology to economics to psychology and cultural studies.
Girard first outlined the foundations of mimetic theory in his debut book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, a work of literary criticism, and extended it to anthropology in Violence and the Sacred. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, considered his magnum opus, synthesized these ideas while applying them to a reinterpretation of Judeo-Christian scriptures. Later accessible works, such as The Scapegoat and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning further elaborated his biblical insights.
In 2005, he was elected to the Académie Française, one of its 40 "immortals".
Early life
Girard was born in Avignon on 25 December 1923. René Girard was the second son of historian Joseph Girard.He studied medieval history at the École des Chartes, Paris, where the subject of his thesis was "Private life in Avignon in the second half of the 15th century".
In 1947, Girard went to Indiana University Bloomington on a one-year fellowship. He received his PhD in 1950 on the subject "American Opinion of France, 1940–1943". He stayed at Indiana University until 1953.
Although his research was in history, he was also assigned to teach French literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation as a literary critic by publishing influential essays on such authors as Albert Camus and Marcel Proust.
Career
Girard occupied positions at Duke University and Bryn Mawr College from 1953 to 1957, after which he moved to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he became a full professor in 1961. In that year, he also published his first book: . For several years, he moved back and forth between the State University of New York at Buffalo and Johns Hopkins University. Books he published in this period include La Violence et le sacré and .In 1966, as the Chair of the Romance Languages Department at Johns Hopkins, Girard helped Richard A. Macksey, the Director of the newly founded Humanities Center, to organize a colloquium on French thought. The event was titled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" and was held from 18 to 21 October 1966. Featuring prominent French academics such as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, it is often credited with having launched the post-structuralist movement.
In 1981, Girard became Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1995. During this period, he published , La route antique des hommes pervers, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare and .
In 1985, he received his first honorary degree from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands; several others followed.
In 1990, a group of scholars founded the Colloquium on Violence and Religion with the goal to "explore, criticize, and develop the mimetic model of the relationship between violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture." This organization organizes a yearly conference devoted to topics related to mimetic theory, scapegoating, violence, and religion. Girard was Honorary Chair of COV&R. Co-founder and first president of the COV&R was the Roman Catholic theologian Raymund Schwager.
René Girard's work has inspired interdisciplinary research projects and experimental research such as the Mimetic Theory project sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.
On 17 March 2005, Girard was elected to the Académie française.
Personal life
René Girard's wife, Martha, was American; they were married from 1952 until his death. They had two sons, Martin Girard and Daniel Girard, and a daughter, Mary Brown-Girard.Girard converted from agnosticism to Christianity while reading Dostoevsky, in preparation for his first book in 1961. For the rest of his life, he was a practising Catholic.
On 4 November 2015, Girard died at his residence in Stanford, California, at the age of 91.
Girard's thought
Overview
Girard's first main contribution is in the psychology of desire. Girard claimed that human desire functions imitatively, or mimetically, rather than arising as the spontaneous byproduct of human individuality, as much of theoretical psychology had assumed. Girard proposed that human development proceeds triangularly from a model of desire that indicates some object of desire as desirable by desiring it themselves. We copy this desire for the object of the model and appropriate it as our own, most often without recognizing that the source of this desire comes from another apart from ourselves completing the triangle of mimetic desire. This process of appropriation of desire includes identity formation, the transmission of knowledge and social norms, and material aspirations which all have their origin in copying the desires of others who we take, consciously or unconsciously, as models for desire.The second major proposition of the mimetic theory proceeds from considering the consequences of the mimetic nature of desire as it relates to human origins and anthropology. The mimetic nature of desire allows for the anthropological success of human beings through social learning but is also laden with potential for violent escalation. If the subject desires an object simply because another subject desires it, then their desires are bound to converge on the same objects. If these objects cannot be easily shared, then the subjects are bound to come into mimetically intensifying conflict over these objects. The simplest solution to this problem of violence for early human communities was to polarize blame and hostility onto one member of the group who would be killed and interpreted as the source of conflict and hostility within the group. The transition from the violent conflict of all-against-all would be transformed into the unifying and pacifying violence of all-except-one whose death would reconcile the community together. The victim who was persecuted as the source of disorder would then become venerated as the source of order and meaning for the community and seen as a god. This process of engendering and making possible human community through arbitrary victimization is called, within mimetic theory, the scapegoat mechanism.
Eventually, the scapegoat mechanism would be exposed within the Biblical texts which categorically reorient the position of the Divinity to be on the side of the victim as opposed to that of the persecuting community. Girard argues that all other myths, such as Romulus and Remus, for example, are written and constructed from the point of view of the community whose legitimacy depends on the guilt of the victim in order to be brought together as a unified community. Once the relative innocence of the victim is exposed, the scapegoat mechanism is no longer able to function as a vehicle for generating unity and peace. The categorical moral innocence of Christ therefore serves to reveal the scapegoating mechanism in scripture, thus enabling the possibility that humanity might overcome it by learning to discern its continued presence in our interactions today.
Mimetic desire
After almost a decade of teaching French literature in the United States, Girard began to develop a new way of speaking about literary texts. Beyond the "uniqueness" of individual works, he looked for their common structural properties, having observed that characters in great fiction evolved in a system of relationships otherwise common to the wider generality of novels. But there was a distinction to be made:Girard saw Proust's “psychological laws” mirrored in reality. These laws and this system are the consequences of a fundamental reality grasped by the novelists, which Girard called mimetic desire, "the mimetic character of desire." This is the content of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel. We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person—the model—for this same object. This means that the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: but unrolls within a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through the model, one is drawn to the object.
Girard calls desire "metaphysical" in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something more than a simple need or appetite, "all desire is a desire to be", it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.
Mediation is called "external" when the mediator of the desire is socially beyond the reach of the subject or, for example, a fictional character, as in the case of Amadis de Gaula and Don Quixote.
Mediation is called "internal" when the mediator is at the same level as the subject. The mediator then transforms into a rival and an obstacle to the acquisition of the object, whose value increases as rivalry grows.
This is the universe of the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, which are particularly studied in this book.
Through their characters, our own behaviour is displayed. Everyone holds firmly to the illusion of the authenticity of one's own desires; the novelists implacably expose all the diversity of lies, dissimulations, manoeuvres, and the snobbery of the Proustian heroes; these are all but "tricks of desire", which prevent one from facing the truth: envy and jealousy. These characters, desiring the being of the mediator, project upon him superhuman virtues while at the same time depreciating themselves, making him a god while making themselves slaves, in the measure that the mediator is an obstacle to them. Some, pursuing this logic, come to seek the failures that are the signs of the proximity of the ideal to which they aspire. This can manifest as a heightened experience of the universal pseudo-masochism inherent in seeking the unattainable, which can, of course, turn into sadism should the actor play this part in reverse.
This fundamental focus on mimetic desire would be pursued by Girard throughout the rest of his career. Farneti also discusses the role of mimetic desire in intractable conflicts, using the case study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and referencing Girard's theory. He posits that intensified conflict is a product of the imitative behaviours of Israelis and Palestinians, entitling them "Siamese twins".
The idea that the desire to possess endless material wealth was harmful to society was not new. From the New Testament verses about the love of money being the root of all kinds of evil, to Hegelian and Marxist critique that saw material wealth and capital as the mechanism of alienation of the human being both from their own humanity and their community, to Bertrand Russell's famous speech on accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, desire has been understood as a destructive force in all of literature – with the theft of Helen by Paris a frequent topic of discussion by Girard.
What Girard contributed to this concept is the idea that what is desired fundamentally is not the object itself, but the ontological state of the subject which possesses it, where mimicry is the aim of the competition. What Paris wanted, then, was not Helen, but to be a great king like Menelaus or Agamemnon.
A person desires to be like the subject he imitates through the medium of the object that is possessed by the person he imitates. Girard claims:
This was, and remains, a pessimistic view of human life, as it posits a paradox in the very act of seeking to unify and have peace, since the erasure of differences between people through mimicry is what creates conflict, not the differentiation itself.