Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
instances only main entries have been so indicated, although some cases I marked
subcategories I considered important (e.g., "Internal and External Mediation" under
"Model/Mediator").
This book was put together with the continual support and encouragement of Michael Leach
of Crossroad, the fine editorial work of John Eagleson of Crossroad, and the expert,
sometimes amazing clerical assistance of Deborah Pratt. I thank them warmly. And to
Yvonne: once more,
betach bah lev ba'elah
( Proverbs 31:11).
-x-
Acknowledgments
Permission is gratefully acknowledged to reprint the following articles and excerpts:
René Girard, "Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism,"
Berkshire
Review 14
( 1979): 9-19. This periodical is no longer published. It is reprinted here by
approval of Williams College through Michael Bell, former editor.
René Girard,
Violence and the Sacred
, trans. Patrick Gregory ( Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977), 1-18; 39-44; 169-85; 309-14, reprinted by permission
of Johns Hopkins University Press and the author.
René Girard,
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
, trans. Yvonne Freccero ( Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1-17; 290-314, reprinted by permission of Johns
Hopkins University Press and the author.
René Girard,
The Scapegoat
, trans. Yvonne Freccero ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1986), 1-23, reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University
Press and the author.
René Girard, "Dionysus versus the Crucified,"
Modern Language Notes 99
( 1984): 816-
35, reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press and the author.
"Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: An Interview with René Girard," interview by Rebecca
Adams,
Religion and Literature 25
( 1993): 22-26, reprinted by permission of The
University of Notre Dame Press.
René Girard, "A Venda Myth Analyzed," in
René Girard and Myth: An Introduction
by
Richard J. Golsan ( New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 151-79,
reprinted by permission of Richard J. Golsan.
René Girard,
Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World
, trans. Stephen Bann and
Michael Metteer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), pages 141-79; 180-
82; 205-20), reprinted with the permission of Stanford University Press. English
translation copyright
-xi-
© 1987 The Athlone Press. English edition originally published by The Athlone Press,
London.
René Girard, "How Can Satan Cast Out Satan?" in Georg Braulik, Walter Gross, and
Sean McEvenue, eds.,
Biblische Theologie und gesellschaftlicher Wandel
( Freiburg im
Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1993), 12541, reprinted by permission of Verlag Herder.
René Girard, "Is There Anti-Semitism in the Gospels?"
Biblical Interpretation 1
, no. 3 (
1993): 339-49, 351-52, reprinted by permission of E. J. Brill.
Bibliography of René Girard's writings in French and English provided by Girard-
Dokumentation, University of Innsbruck.
-xii-
René Girard: A Biographical Sketch
René Girard was born in 1923, in Avignon on Christmas day. He received his Baccalaureate
in Philosophy at the Lycée of Avignon in 1941 and attended the Ecole des Chartres in Paris
from 1943 to 1947. He graduated as an archiviste-paléographe, i.e., a specialist in medieval
studies. It was in Paris that he had his only brush with the occupying Germans. His primary
academic interest at that stage of his life was history and cultural patterns. His thesis was
"La
vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle" (Private life in Avignon in the
second half of the fifteenth century)
.
At this point, in 1947, he had an opportunity to spend a year in the United States. It turned out
to be forty-nine years and counting. He matriculated at Indiana University in history, where
he received his Ph.D. in 1950. His dissertation topic was
"American Opinion of France,
19401943."
It may seem quite removed from his later turn to literature and interdisciplinary research, and in some respects that perception is correct. However, it is related to his later
work to the extent that he has always been interested in cultural modes, fashions, and
opinions, all of which express and revolve around mimetic desire, the core of his thought.
Moreover, as a private citizen he continues to take a lively interest in Franco-American relations specifically and international affairs generally.
The young Girard was assigned to teach courses in French at Indiana. When he was asked to
offer courses in literature which he had never read, a fateful period for his career began,
although he could not have been clearly aware of this at the time. His doctoral work was in
history, but he started to become more and more fascinated with the literature that he was
assigned to teach. He would eventually, certainly by the time of his first book, be identified
as a literary critic. However, some of Girard's early published research was historiographical
(e.g., marriage in Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth century; Voltaire and classical
historiography), and one can see in some other early articles that the creative work of writers
in relation to their historical circumstances was one of his main concerns (e.g., articles about
reflections on art in Malraux's novels; history in the work of Saint-John Perse; the situation of
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the American poet; Saint-Simon and literary criticism). His
Dostoevsky
, first published in
1963, was composed as a kind of running commentary on Dostoyevsky's life and the
intellectual and social movements, as seen through Dostoyevsky's eyes, of that period of
Russian history.
But Girard's initial articles did not appear soon enough to win him tenure at Indiana
University. He succeeded in publishing a great burst of articles by 1953 (seven in all), but it
was too late, as the decision had already been made at Indiana not to keep him. He went to
Duke University as an instructor and occupied a position of assistant professor at Bryn Mawr
from 1953 to 1957. From there he accepted a position as associate professor at Johns Hopkins
University, becoming a full professor in 1961. He served as chair of the Department of
Romance Languages from 1965 to 1968.
It was early in this first Johns Hopkins period that he underwent a momentous spiritual
change. In the winter of 1959 he experienced a conversion to Christian faith which had been
preceded by a kind of intellectual conversion while he was working on his first book. These
two conversions are described in the interview at the end of the Reader
. 1.
It was during his tenure as chairman of Romance Languages that he facilitated a symposium
at Johns Hopkins which was to be important for the emergence of critical theory in America.
With Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato he organized an international conference in
October of 1966, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man." Participants
included Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldman, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan,
Georges Poulet, Tsvetan Todorov, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and others. It was at this symposium
that Derrida gave his widely read and cited paper,
"La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le
discours des sciences humaines" (Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human
sciences)
. This paper confirmed for Girard that Derrida was a critic to be reckoned with, and
he found Derrida's subsequent essay
"La pharmacie de Platon"
( Plato's pharmacy) to be particularly significant. Girard would develop the
pharmakos
or scapegoat aspect of Derrida's
analysis of writing/poison, placing it within history and actual social existence rather than
restricting it to language and intertextuality like Derrida.
With his first two books,
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
and
Dostoievski: du double à l'unité
,
2. G
irard had rejected the literary retreat of the 1950s and early 1960s from concern with
history, society, and the psyche. However, his first two books did not scandalize the
intellectual world like his later writings, beginning with
Things Hidden sincethe Foundation
of the World
____________________
1. See also
Quand ces choses commenceront
, 190-95, in the bibliography of Girard's
writings.
2. Scheduled to be published by Crossroad Publishing Co. in 1997 as
Resurrection from the
Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky
, trans. James G. Williams.
-2-
the Foundation of the World. These initial works seemed to stay within a literary context and
they focused on desire, which enjoyed a vogue by the 1960s. He analyzed the work of
Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoyevsky in terms of "triangular" or "mimetic"
desire: our desires are copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our
objects of desire. But the model or mediator we imitate can become our rival if we desire
precisely the object he is imagined to have. Or other imitators of the same model may
compete with us for the same objects. Jealousy and envy are inevitably aroused in this
mimetic situation. The romantic concept of a spontaneous desire is illusory.
As he began to study primitive religions from the standpoint of the mimetic concept, he saw
that mimesis usually led to collective violence against a single victim. He turned to the great
Greek tragedians. Once the
pharmakos
idea took hold in his thinking, he became more and
more convinced of the power and relevance of these dramatists, particularly Sophocles'
Oedipus cycle and Euripides with his stunning exposure of mimetic violence in
The Bacchae
.
He found fascinating Freud's insight in
Totem and Taboo
, although Freud turned violent
origins into a onceand-for-all myth rather than understanding the scapegoat mechanism as a
constant factor in human culture and human relations. The mimetic concept, extended to
include the scapegoat mechanism and refined by the explication of
The Bacchae
and the
critique of Freud: to grasp these developments in his thinking is to grasp the essential
argument of
Violence and the Sacred
.
In 1971 Girard accepted a distinguished professor position at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, where he remained until 1976. During this period he became a close friend
of Cesáreo Bandera, now University Distinguished Professor of Spanish Literature at the
University of North Carolina. Bandera was and has remained an important conversation
partner for Girard. In 1972
La violence et le sacré
was published in France (in English
Violence and the Sacred
, 1977). He had published scarcely anything on Christianity and the
Bible, but that was about to change, and a new stage of his career was imminent as he left
SUNY/ Buffalo in 1976.
In 1976 Girard accepted a second appointment at Johns Hopkins University, with the title of
John M. Beall Professor of the Humanities. The English translation of
La violence et le sacré
came out in 1977, and for the first time he became the subject of reviews, interviews, and
scholarly forums in North America.
Violence and the Sacred
is the one work by Girard that
many American scholars have read, although some literary critics have read only
Deceit,
Desire, and the Novel
.
The most important book Girard has produced appeared in French in 1978,
Des choses
cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World)
. In
the form of a dialogue with two
-3-
psychiatrists, Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, its format is a triptych: (1)
Fundamental Anthropology, (2) The Judeo-Christian Scriptures, (3) Interdividual
Psychology. In this book Girard declared himself, in effect, as a Christian and advocated a
nonsacrificial reading of the Gospels and the divinity of Christ. In France he was a
cause
célèbre
or a
bête noire
, because his argument for a universal anthropological theory,
combined with the position that the deepest insights of Western culture stem from biblical
revelation, shocked and alienated those who held to the assumption of the all-encompassing
nature of language and who tended to ignore Christianity or view it with contempt. However,
for many who were seeking a way to affirm the reality of human experience as a referent
outside of language or for those who were searching for a way of talking about the biblical
God of history, his clear concepts and outspoken positioning of himself against fashionable
intellectual modes came across as the discovery of treasure hidden in a field.
This public discussion of Girard's work happened primarily in France, and to some extent in
other European countries. Due to the impact of
Things Hidden
, there was a new reading
audience for
Violence and the Sacred
. Interest in Girard and the spread of his influence have