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Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and itnerest it can be compared with Freud's Totem and Taboo, the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the reader compelled to respond, one way or another.
This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall. In a dialogue with two psychiatrists (Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort), Girard probes an encyclopedic array of topics, ranging across the entire spectrum of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cultural production.
Girard's point of departure is what he calles "mimesis," the conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all difference dissolves in indiscriminate violence. In primitive societies, such crises were resolved by the "scapegoating mechanism," in which the community, en masse, turned on an unpremeditated victim. The repression of this collective murder and its repetition in ritual sacrifice then formed the foundations of both religion and the restored social order.
How does Christianity, at once the most "sacrificial" of religions and a faith with a non-violent ideology, fit into this scheme? Girard grants Freud's point, in Totem and Taboo, that Christianity is similar to primitive religion, but only to refute Freud—if Christ is sacrificed, Girard argues, it is not becuase God willed it, but because human beings wanted it.
The book is not merely, or perhaps not mainly, biblical exegesis, for within its scope fall some of the most vexing problems of social history—the paradox that violence has social efficacy, the function of the scapegoat, the mechanism of anti-semitism.
This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall. In a dialogue with two psychiatrists (Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort), Girard probes an encyclopedic array of topics, ranging across the entire spectrum of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cultural production.
Girard's point of departure is what he calles "mimesis," the conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all difference dissolves in indiscriminate violence. In primitive societies, such crises were resolved by the "scapegoating mechanism," in which the community, en masse, turned on an unpremeditated victim. The repression of this collective murder and its repetition in ritual sacrifice then formed the foundations of both religion and the restored social order.
How does Christianity, at once the most "sacrificial" of religions and a faith with a non-violent ideology, fit into this scheme? Girard grants Freud's point, in Totem and Taboo, that Christianity is similar to primitive religion, but only to refute Freud—if Christ is sacrificed, Girard argues, it is not becuase God willed it, but because human beings wanted it.
The book is not merely, or perhaps not mainly, biblical exegesis, for within its scope fall some of the most vexing problems of social history—the paradox that violence has social efficacy, the function of the scapegoat, the mechanism of anti-semitism.
470 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
René Girard
123 books655 followersRené Girard was a French-born American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy.
He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year’s fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.
René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.
He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year’s fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.
René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.
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August 31, 2012
Girard's basic thesis is well known; Human culture arose out of the resolution of mimetic desire. By nature we desire what is desired by others, this leads to conflict and ultimately murder. Institutions and rituals arise out of this act. Girard sees the Gospel texts of the New Testament as a revolutionary exposing of this basic mechanism. However, the church has continued to offer a sacrificial reading of the Gospel which undermines its revelatory potential.
This book is an excellent and accessible overview of his thought. What I found interesting was his conclusion. At the end of the book Girard suggests we suffer most basically from a lack of meaning. I find this to be a bit dissonant from much of his work. Perhaps he is was still too heavily influenced by the existential angst that seemed to exist in the middle of the twentieth century but I expected him to move in a much more 'material' direction in his conclusion. Here are some of his parting lines,
"What is important above all is to realize that there are no recipes; there is no pharmakon anymore, not even a Marxist or a psychoanalytic one. Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured - our need is to escape from meaninglessness.
. . .
I hold that truth is not an empty word, or a mere 'effect' as people say nowadays. I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth. But I do not know how to speak about these matters. I can only approach texts and institutions, and relating them to one another seems to me to throw light in every direction.
. . .
Present-day thought is leading us in the direction of the valley of death, and it is cataloguing the bones one by one. All of us are in this valley but it is up to us to resuscitate meaning by relating all the [Judeo-Christian] texts to one another without exception, rather than stopping at just a few of them. All the issues of 'psychological health' seem to me to take second place to a much greater issue - that of meaning which is being lost or threatened on all sides but simply awaits the breath of the Spirit to be reborn."
At which point Girard concludes by quoting Ezekiel 37's vision of the valley of dry bones.
This book is an excellent and accessible overview of his thought. What I found interesting was his conclusion. At the end of the book Girard suggests we suffer most basically from a lack of meaning. I find this to be a bit dissonant from much of his work. Perhaps he is was still too heavily influenced by the existential angst that seemed to exist in the middle of the twentieth century but I expected him to move in a much more 'material' direction in his conclusion. Here are some of his parting lines,
"What is important above all is to realize that there are no recipes; there is no pharmakon anymore, not even a Marxist or a psychoanalytic one. Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured - our need is to escape from meaninglessness.
. . .
I hold that truth is not an empty word, or a mere 'effect' as people say nowadays. I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth. But I do not know how to speak about these matters. I can only approach texts and institutions, and relating them to one another seems to me to throw light in every direction.
. . .
Present-day thought is leading us in the direction of the valley of death, and it is cataloguing the bones one by one. All of us are in this valley but it is up to us to resuscitate meaning by relating all the [Judeo-Christian] texts to one another without exception, rather than stopping at just a few of them. All the issues of 'psychological health' seem to me to take second place to a much greater issue - that of meaning which is being lost or threatened on all sides but simply awaits the breath of the Spirit to be reborn."
At which point Girard concludes by quoting Ezekiel 37's vision of the valley of dry bones.
October 11, 2018
Le cose così come non sono
“Le vittime ci sono sempre e ci sono sempre delle armi che ciascuno affila contro il vicino in uno sforzo disperato per procurarsi da qualche parte, fosse pure in un avvenire utopico indeterminato, una zona d'innocenza da abitare da solo o in compagnia di un'umanità rigenerata”.
Muovendo dall'etnologia all'antropologia culturale, dalla filosofia delle religioni alla psicologia interindividuale, Girard riconosce nelle Scritture il testo da analizzare per cercarvi una rivelazione profonda, una verità inestimabile: la natura intimamente violenta della genesi umana, la radice vittimaria ed espiatoria nella fondazione culturale della società. Contro lo strutturalismo e superando le idee freudiane, Girard con notevole profondità intellettuale racconta la dimensione del sacro e del vero attraverso la teoria del desiderio mimetico; alla base delle relazioni umane c'è la mimesi di appropriazione, dove si crea un triangolo soggetto-oggetto-rivale, nella quale diversi esseri bramano il medesimo oggetto e su questa antitesi si fonda una crisi simbolica. Gli antagonisti si polarizzano su un medesimo avversario, fino a far scomparire del tutto l'oggetto desiderato e quindi divinizzandolo. Un'idea suggestiva espressa dallo studioso, per il quale non c'è enigma complesso che alla fine non venga risolto, è che se gli uomini, a un tratto, cessassero di imitare, tutte le forme culturali svanirebbero; il conflitto che nasce quando più mani avide convergono su un oggetto si sviluppa nella creazione di un capro espiatorio. È singolarmente interessante che ci sia una relazione di proporzione diretta tra l'aumento delle forze di elaborazione culturale e il diffondersi di minacce di autodistruzione di ogni forma di organizzazione umana. La violenza che unifica non è solo l'origine del religioso, ma l'origine dell'umanità stessa. La vittima diviene un significante universale: malvagia e buona, pacifica e violenta, fa morire e assicura la vita. L'impotenza collettiva genera miti che si sforzano di rinchiudere la comunità su se stessa. La rinuncia alla violenza è per questa ragione una necessità implacabile, a rischio di estinzione. Girard espone poi il sapere perduto e le cose dissimulate che vengono alla luce ad una lettura autentica e semplice dell'Antico Testamento e dei Vangeli; spiega come questi rendono impossibile la mitizzazione, esponendo alla verità il meccanismo vittimario e risolvendosi nel martirio come testimonianza, non di sofferenza, ma di rinuncia alla violenza, alla volontà di distruggere e di espellere, a rifiutare la contraddizione della natura umana, uccidere o essere ucciso. E così le parole del testo, ”misericordia io voglio, non sacrificio e amate i vostri nemici". I saggi e i furbi, nel logos greco come in quello giovanneo, devono imparare a vedere quel che vedono i fanciulli, a pensare scandalosamente. Qui un altro concetto centrale per Girard: quello di skandalon. Esso è l'ostacolo, la pietra d'inciampo, la trappola posta lungo il nostro cammino. È la tentazione che si fa ossessione, il contrario dell'amore; diviene esso stesso pietra angolare, essenza personale, preziosismo del prossimo, innocenza perfetta e non violenta. È positivo cancellare ogni forma di complicità con la violenza da cui siamo sorti. Un testo ricchissimo, da osservare e riprendere in mano, per smettere di inseguire rivali invincibili e ripensare se stessi secondo l'Altro, per raggiungere un desiderio che accetta le ambivalenze e sigilla al di fuori la ricchezza narcisistica, riconoscendo l'Altro reale, umano e portatore di valore, non un doppio, non un'immagine, non un fantasma.
“La lettura non sacrificale ci fa vedere come la crisi attuale non sia un assurdo vicolo cieco in cui ci saremmo cacciati senza alcuna ragione, per un semplice errore di calcolo scientifico. Invece di conferire dei significati superati alla nuova situazione dell'umanità, oppure far di tutto per impedirle di avere significato, questa lettura rinuncia alle scappatoie. Se ci siamo forgiati un destino così strano, è solo per rendere evidente, nello stesso istante, che cosa sia sempre stata la cultura umana e l'unica via che ormai ci resta aperta, quella di una riconciliazione che non escluderà nessuno e non dovrà più nulla alla violenza”.
“Le vittime ci sono sempre e ci sono sempre delle armi che ciascuno affila contro il vicino in uno sforzo disperato per procurarsi da qualche parte, fosse pure in un avvenire utopico indeterminato, una zona d'innocenza da abitare da solo o in compagnia di un'umanità rigenerata”.
Muovendo dall'etnologia all'antropologia culturale, dalla filosofia delle religioni alla psicologia interindividuale, Girard riconosce nelle Scritture il testo da analizzare per cercarvi una rivelazione profonda, una verità inestimabile: la natura intimamente violenta della genesi umana, la radice vittimaria ed espiatoria nella fondazione culturale della società. Contro lo strutturalismo e superando le idee freudiane, Girard con notevole profondità intellettuale racconta la dimensione del sacro e del vero attraverso la teoria del desiderio mimetico; alla base delle relazioni umane c'è la mimesi di appropriazione, dove si crea un triangolo soggetto-oggetto-rivale, nella quale diversi esseri bramano il medesimo oggetto e su questa antitesi si fonda una crisi simbolica. Gli antagonisti si polarizzano su un medesimo avversario, fino a far scomparire del tutto l'oggetto desiderato e quindi divinizzandolo. Un'idea suggestiva espressa dallo studioso, per il quale non c'è enigma complesso che alla fine non venga risolto, è che se gli uomini, a un tratto, cessassero di imitare, tutte le forme culturali svanirebbero; il conflitto che nasce quando più mani avide convergono su un oggetto si sviluppa nella creazione di un capro espiatorio. È singolarmente interessante che ci sia una relazione di proporzione diretta tra l'aumento delle forze di elaborazione culturale e il diffondersi di minacce di autodistruzione di ogni forma di organizzazione umana. La violenza che unifica non è solo l'origine del religioso, ma l'origine dell'umanità stessa. La vittima diviene un significante universale: malvagia e buona, pacifica e violenta, fa morire e assicura la vita. L'impotenza collettiva genera miti che si sforzano di rinchiudere la comunità su se stessa. La rinuncia alla violenza è per questa ragione una necessità implacabile, a rischio di estinzione. Girard espone poi il sapere perduto e le cose dissimulate che vengono alla luce ad una lettura autentica e semplice dell'Antico Testamento e dei Vangeli; spiega come questi rendono impossibile la mitizzazione, esponendo alla verità il meccanismo vittimario e risolvendosi nel martirio come testimonianza, non di sofferenza, ma di rinuncia alla violenza, alla volontà di distruggere e di espellere, a rifiutare la contraddizione della natura umana, uccidere o essere ucciso. E così le parole del testo, ”misericordia io voglio, non sacrificio e amate i vostri nemici". I saggi e i furbi, nel logos greco come in quello giovanneo, devono imparare a vedere quel che vedono i fanciulli, a pensare scandalosamente. Qui un altro concetto centrale per Girard: quello di skandalon. Esso è l'ostacolo, la pietra d'inciampo, la trappola posta lungo il nostro cammino. È la tentazione che si fa ossessione, il contrario dell'amore; diviene esso stesso pietra angolare, essenza personale, preziosismo del prossimo, innocenza perfetta e non violenta. È positivo cancellare ogni forma di complicità con la violenza da cui siamo sorti. Un testo ricchissimo, da osservare e riprendere in mano, per smettere di inseguire rivali invincibili e ripensare se stessi secondo l'Altro, per raggiungere un desiderio che accetta le ambivalenze e sigilla al di fuori la ricchezza narcisistica, riconoscendo l'Altro reale, umano e portatore di valore, non un doppio, non un'immagine, non un fantasma.
“La lettura non sacrificale ci fa vedere come la crisi attuale non sia un assurdo vicolo cieco in cui ci saremmo cacciati senza alcuna ragione, per un semplice errore di calcolo scientifico. Invece di conferire dei significati superati alla nuova situazione dell'umanità, oppure far di tutto per impedirle di avere significato, questa lettura rinuncia alle scappatoie. Se ci siamo forgiati un destino così strano, è solo per rendere evidente, nello stesso istante, che cosa sia sempre stata la cultura umana e l'unica via che ormai ci resta aperta, quella di una riconciliazione che non escluderà nessuno e non dovrà più nulla alla violenza”.
July 27, 2020
Girard'ın "kurban," "kutsal," "şiddet," "günah keçisi," "mimetik arzu" ile ilgili tezlerine yapılan itirazların görüşüldüğü; mevcut tezlerinin detaylandırıldığı ve örneklerle somutlandığı; bu tezlerin İncil ve Eski Ahit gibi kutsal metinlerin yanı sıra, Michel Foucault, Levi-Strauss ve Sigmund Freud gibi bazı düşünür ve araştırmacıların tezlerine yakınlığı ve uzaklığının incelendiği bir çalışma. Özetle Girard'ın tezlerini öğrenmek isteyenler yazarın Şiddet ve Kutsal ile Günah Keçisi adlı kitaplarını okuduktan sonra öğrendiklerini detaylandırmak, örneklendirmek ve somutlamak için bu kitabı okuyabilirler...
November 24, 2012
This is one of the most seminal books I know from the second half of the twentieth century. As a religious person, a monk as it happens, and a yearner for peace, I have been perplexed by the intertwining of violence with religion, which supposedly preaches peace, and especially perplexed by the violence within Christianity itself in contradiction to Jesus' teaching in the Gospels. It is Girard who has pointed the way to how violence happens in religious contexts and where religions resources are to reverse violent trends. Anyone with anywhere near the same concerns as I have would do well to ponder this book and then ponder books by others developing his thought. For my own reflections on Girard & Christian spirituality as well as some interesting fantasy literature for readers young & old see http://bit.ly/Tqbeqw
November 4, 2017
When we think about who we consider the most influential thinkers in continental philosophy (and of adjacent fields such as psychology and sociology), those that come to mind from the past few centuries include the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Each of them proposed monolithic theories of human history, motivation, conflict, values, and behaviors; for Hegel it was the teleology of the world spirit, Nietzsche the will to power, Marx the class struggle, and Freud his psychoanalysis.
Things Hidden puts Girard in that lineup. Building upon the work of those before him, Girard argues that all of human culture, behavior, and conflict can be explained by a single mechanism – mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. The simplicity of the model he presents belies how momentous its findings are; as a result, I would not be able to do it justice by summarizing it here.
One thing to note is that there is undoubtedly a religious tint to Girard's work. Throughout the book, Girard extols the prescience of Judeo-Christian texts – “How does it come about that our sciences still cannot measure up to the most humble religious insight?” Well aware of academia's tendency to ridicule religiosity, Girard actually doubles down on the religious undertone of his work: "I am not embarrassed to admit that an ethical and religious dimension exists for me, but it is the result of my thinking rather than an external preconception that determined my research."
And this is precisely what makes Things Hidden a bold and refreshing work. It is polemically critical of modernity's will to meaninglessness and offers a truly holistic, anthropological account of human history and teleology, devoid (in my view) of unnecessary metaphysical speculation
Things Hidden puts Girard in that lineup. Building upon the work of those before him, Girard argues that all of human culture, behavior, and conflict can be explained by a single mechanism – mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. The simplicity of the model he presents belies how momentous its findings are; as a result, I would not be able to do it justice by summarizing it here.
One thing to note is that there is undoubtedly a religious tint to Girard's work. Throughout the book, Girard extols the prescience of Judeo-Christian texts – “How does it come about that our sciences still cannot measure up to the most humble religious insight?” Well aware of academia's tendency to ridicule religiosity, Girard actually doubles down on the religious undertone of his work: "I am not embarrassed to admit that an ethical and religious dimension exists for me, but it is the result of my thinking rather than an external preconception that determined my research."
And this is precisely what makes Things Hidden a bold and refreshing work. It is polemically critical of modernity's will to meaninglessness and offers a truly holistic, anthropological account of human history and teleology, devoid (in my view) of unnecessary metaphysical speculation
June 8, 2019
SUMMARY
BOOK 1
Mimesis, roughly imitation, is the fundamental learning mechanism of humans as evidenced by e.g. neuroscience.
Acquisitive mimesis is when people desire to acquire objects partly because they in turn are desired by others. Examples of objects include food, weapons, and women.
This gives occasion to mimetic conflict. Many prohibitions have been enacted by law to avoid mimetic conflict, such as prohibitions against copying or emulating others and against eye-for-eye-revenge. There have even been prohibitions against twins and mirrors. And indigenous peoples have been afraid of cameras. These prohibitions exist because of fear of mimetic conflict and violence.
But violent conflict may yet arise, and cultural mechanisms have developed to prevent violence from devastating tribes entirely: Scapegoats. When warring factions can blame a minority group or, least costly, a single individual as the source of the conflict, then a single sacrifice can once again bring peace and unity to the tribe and prevent a costly civil war.
This forms the basis of many religions and mythologies, where a founding murder or sacrifice brings unity and coherence to a group of people. It has also resulted in the concept of initiation rites, where the new initiate must traditionally undergo trials and torture "so that the salutary effect of sacrifice will be released for his benefit".
Girard further claims that the institution of monarchy is akin to preselection of a scapegoat, thus minimizing risk that the process of selecting a scapegoat itself may give rise to conflict and violence.
A primary function of religion is then to prevent conflict and violence. But as religion in recent times has been deconstructed, and the innocence of the sacrificial victim has become apparent, the mechanism loses its effect and great violence and divide once again becomes a larger risk.
BOOK 2
In Judaism, Moses plays the role of scapegoat in Egyptian myth. To resolve conflict, Moses and the Jews are expelled from society and begins the Exodus. Thus there is something unique in the founding of Judaism where the Jewish people themselves play the role of the scapegoat.
Christianity is seemingly the only religion to expose the founding murder as the scapegoating of an innocent victim. The New Testament gospels claim both absolute innocence and absolute willingness on the part of Christ, the scapegoat.
P. 176: Girard quotes Matthew 5, 43-45 as an example of how “the Gospels can pass for having established a kind of practical atheism,” where an impassive God makes the sun rise on both evil and good people, and makes it rain on both the just and unjust people.
On p. 210, Girard suggests the following as indication of Christ’s divinity:
“G. L.: So theology is not being hyperbolic when it proclaims the divinity of Jesus. The belief is not just an excessive piece of praise, the product of a kind of rhetorical overkill. It is the only fit response to an inescapable constraint.
R. G.: To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. This is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception.”
On p. 250, Girard claims the world is today at a high risk of immense violence because of the combination of having revealed and deconstructed the founding murder and thus scapegoats are hard to come by, together with the nihilistic rejection that truth, meaning and value can be extracted from the non-violent message of Christ because it has religious origins.
BOOK 3
Explorations of how mimetic theory applies to psychology, including psychoanalysis.
P. 282: “All that capitalism, or rather the liberal society that allows capitalism to flourish, does, is to give mimetic phenomena a freer rein and to direct them into economic and technological channel.”
Mimetic acquisition explains desires to have mates and sexual partners that others also want (social proof), and why you may lose interest when the object of desire actually becomes available.
P. 380: “At the present moment, sacrifice is being sacrificed; culture in its entirety, especially our own culture, historic Christianity, is playing the role of the scapegoat. We attempt to wash our hands of any complicity with the violence that lies at our origins, and this very attempt perpetuates the complicity. We all say: ‘If we had lived in the times of our forefathers, we would not have joined ourselves with them to spill the blood of the artists and philosophers.”
BOOK 1
Mimesis, roughly imitation, is the fundamental learning mechanism of humans as evidenced by e.g. neuroscience.
Acquisitive mimesis is when people desire to acquire objects partly because they in turn are desired by others. Examples of objects include food, weapons, and women.
This gives occasion to mimetic conflict. Many prohibitions have been enacted by law to avoid mimetic conflict, such as prohibitions against copying or emulating others and against eye-for-eye-revenge. There have even been prohibitions against twins and mirrors. And indigenous peoples have been afraid of cameras. These prohibitions exist because of fear of mimetic conflict and violence.
But violent conflict may yet arise, and cultural mechanisms have developed to prevent violence from devastating tribes entirely: Scapegoats. When warring factions can blame a minority group or, least costly, a single individual as the source of the conflict, then a single sacrifice can once again bring peace and unity to the tribe and prevent a costly civil war.
This forms the basis of many religions and mythologies, where a founding murder or sacrifice brings unity and coherence to a group of people. It has also resulted in the concept of initiation rites, where the new initiate must traditionally undergo trials and torture "so that the salutary effect of sacrifice will be released for his benefit".
Girard further claims that the institution of monarchy is akin to preselection of a scapegoat, thus minimizing risk that the process of selecting a scapegoat itself may give rise to conflict and violence.
A primary function of religion is then to prevent conflict and violence. But as religion in recent times has been deconstructed, and the innocence of the sacrificial victim has become apparent, the mechanism loses its effect and great violence and divide once again becomes a larger risk.
BOOK 2
In Judaism, Moses plays the role of scapegoat in Egyptian myth. To resolve conflict, Moses and the Jews are expelled from society and begins the Exodus. Thus there is something unique in the founding of Judaism where the Jewish people themselves play the role of the scapegoat.
Christianity is seemingly the only religion to expose the founding murder as the scapegoating of an innocent victim. The New Testament gospels claim both absolute innocence and absolute willingness on the part of Christ, the scapegoat.
P. 176: Girard quotes Matthew 5, 43-45 as an example of how “the Gospels can pass for having established a kind of practical atheism,” where an impassive God makes the sun rise on both evil and good people, and makes it rain on both the just and unjust people.
On p. 210, Girard suggests the following as indication of Christ’s divinity:
“G. L.: So theology is not being hyperbolic when it proclaims the divinity of Jesus. The belief is not just an excessive piece of praise, the product of a kind of rhetorical overkill. It is the only fit response to an inescapable constraint.
R. G.: To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. This is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception.”
On p. 250, Girard claims the world is today at a high risk of immense violence because of the combination of having revealed and deconstructed the founding murder and thus scapegoats are hard to come by, together with the nihilistic rejection that truth, meaning and value can be extracted from the non-violent message of Christ because it has religious origins.
BOOK 3
Explorations of how mimetic theory applies to psychology, including psychoanalysis.
P. 282: “All that capitalism, or rather the liberal society that allows capitalism to flourish, does, is to give mimetic phenomena a freer rein and to direct them into economic and technological channel.”
Mimetic acquisition explains desires to have mates and sexual partners that others also want (social proof), and why you may lose interest when the object of desire actually becomes available.
P. 380: “At the present moment, sacrifice is being sacrificed; culture in its entirety, especially our own culture, historic Christianity, is playing the role of the scapegoat. We attempt to wash our hands of any complicity with the violence that lies at our origins, and this very attempt perpetuates the complicity. We all say: ‘If we had lived in the times of our forefathers, we would not have joined ourselves with them to spill the blood of the artists and philosophers.”
January 28, 2019
Like everyone else I know that has read this book, I read it because venture capitalist Peter Thiel said it was his favorite book ever and he seems pretty smart so I figured there was something there. Things Hidden is Girard’s most famous work on Mimetic Theory.
Mimetic Theory’s key insight is that human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. We want things because other people want them. As more and more people want something and that “thing” remains scarce, there is conflict. Most conflict then is not because humans want different things, but because they want the same thing.
Girard believed that human societies managed mimetic conflict through the scapegoat mechanism. If the conflict over a scarce object became too intense, the community subconsciously choose a scapegoat which was sacrificed (literally or metaphorically). The obvious example might be a literal sacrifice in pre-modern societies, but Girard extended it to present day. CEOs are sacrificed after too many bad quarters in a row, coaches after bad seasons and presidents after stock market collapses.
The purpose of the scapegoat mechanism is not that it is correct, but that everyone believes it is correct. The data is very clear that presidents have very limited impact on the stock market but the voting public broadly believes that they do and so voting out a president after a market downturn produces the needed catharsis and belief that things will turn around.
Things Hidden is dense and long-winded and a couple blog post summaries get the main points (which are definitely compelling) across. I did a tweetstorm summary (which a couple of Girard scholars responded too — yet another example of Twitter being awesome) and a longer form blog summary. If you like the summaries, but want to go deeper, the book may be worth it.
Mimetic Theory’s key insight is that human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. We want things because other people want them. As more and more people want something and that “thing” remains scarce, there is conflict. Most conflict then is not because humans want different things, but because they want the same thing.
Girard believed that human societies managed mimetic conflict through the scapegoat mechanism. If the conflict over a scarce object became too intense, the community subconsciously choose a scapegoat which was sacrificed (literally or metaphorically). The obvious example might be a literal sacrifice in pre-modern societies, but Girard extended it to present day. CEOs are sacrificed after too many bad quarters in a row, coaches after bad seasons and presidents after stock market collapses.
The purpose of the scapegoat mechanism is not that it is correct, but that everyone believes it is correct. The data is very clear that presidents have very limited impact on the stock market but the voting public broadly believes that they do and so voting out a president after a market downturn produces the needed catharsis and belief that things will turn around.
Things Hidden is dense and long-winded and a couple blog post summaries get the main points (which are definitely compelling) across. I did a tweetstorm summary (which a couple of Girard scholars responded too — yet another example of Twitter being awesome) and a longer form blog summary. If you like the summaries, but want to go deeper, the book may be worth it.
December 8, 2023
All of Girard seems to be presented in this book, all the pseudoscientific nonsense in all its absurdities dressed up in an absoluteness guise with the revealing of the esoteric beyond the exoteric and Girard claims to be the only one who understands the foundation. I enjoyed the book immensely and recommend it. There’s just something about a book where the author takes Frazier (“Golden Bough”), Freud and Lacan seriously and tweaks their nonsense with even greater made-up absolute truths while staying within the paradigms of his special brand of psychoanalysis.
Freud’s neurosis and oedipal complexes, for Girard can be replaced with the realization that our rivals who we must imitate need to be destroyed for us to fully actualize ourselves. Oh yeah, he also takes Hegel seriously in as much at the heart of Hegel one needs another to separate self from outsider, and Girard needs the rival to be destroyed and will replace Freud’s complexes with mimetic desire. As for me, I love my Hegel, but I never take him too seriously.
There’s a part in the mimetic desire chapter where the pseudoscience shouts its name to the modern reader. Ouch, I just implied that Girard is pre-modern and he writes in 1975. The homosexual explanation that Girard attempts belongs in the realm of what was wrong about the 1970s and thank goodness we no longer have such rubbish prevalent today except among evangelical Christians or MAGA hat simpletons. He’ll ‘improve’ on Freud’s latent and overt homosexual explanations by hypothesizing a male rivalry between another man in an imitative (mimetic) desire such that the rival must be conquered and subdued. He believes what he is writing, and I dis evangelicals and MAGA because they want to blame the outside that makes the person and ignore the fact that sometimes people are just born that way. Girard also generalized his theory to pansexual, and today I would like to note that evangelicals and MAGA just can’t properly wrap their heads around transgender as a reality and they want to make the person a victim that needs to be punished because of their action and character since it does not align with evangelicals or simpleton’s default categories they grew-up with. I always wonder why MAGA don’t read books like this one in defense of their absurdities.
Girard covers and reinterprets ethnography, theology, historiology, sociologoy and psychology through his one groundless ground of finding a scapegoat and then destroying it. For him, the presence of the absence is as real as Lacan says it is. I want to note as a brief aside, Deleuze uses the paradigms of psychoanalyses and destroys it through his immanent critique, while Girard uses the paradigms to reinterpret them as truths. Deleuze is one of my favorite authors because I love the way he writes and I love the destruction of the absurd. Girard just creates another myth to support the silly. Girard quotes Nietzsche frequently in his own defense, I could just as easily quote Nietzsche to bash Girard and, of course, when Dionysia is mentioned, one thinks of Nietzsche.
There’s a double bind of truth that Girard asserts. The closer we get to the truth the further we are from ourselves and therefore the less we can know, according to Girard. The circle never quite gets closed as we reside in the circle. When we are aware of killing our imitation of ourselves than we are not closing the circle. There is an unconscious part of us that never becomes conscious until we move on. This explains how Girard keeps his psychoanalysis paradigm as he resolves the great universal truths and satisfies himself that only he can reinterpret the foundation of everything. Girard frequently quotes from Proust and used one of his quotes to fully illustrate what he meant by his double bind of truth. Proust is well worth reading and Girard illustrates why that is so.
The heart of the book was a reinterpretation of the Bible in terms of Girard’s esoteric (known only to him) knowledge and explaining all the prophets, Jesus, Gospels, and The Book of Hebrews (which, in my opinion is the only well written book in the New Testament) through his one great truth that imitation needs a bacchanal buffet with Dionysian retribution hence for Girard Christ is not a sacrifice, for Girard Christ's sacrifice on the cross satisfies a mimetic desire we have within us, and for Girard God’s son was necessarily slated since “in the beginning was the word” (he has a long section on the first chapter in the Book of John). Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” is a masterpiece and is well worth rereading for understanding Girard. Last week I read C. S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity,” and it's banality wrapped in simplicity in the defense for Christianity, once again I wonder why evangelical Christians don’t latch onto arguments like what Girard presents, because Girard is making a real apologia for Christianity within this book, and they should just ignore everything C. S. Lewis says on the topic.
After I read Jung or Freud (but not Lacan, Deleuze, Hegel, Proust or Frazier), I react to what they are saying and always think that they are each sick individuals and give their books one star. Girard is just as absurd in his theory, but I don’t think of him as sick. I see him as sincere and he’s doing what he can to save psychoanalysis from the reality that is unfolding around him. He creates mythical truths to get at what he believes are universal certainties to bring meaning to existence while not quite admitting that he is just as mythical. He did mention something that was wise, Heidegger makes being spiritual, and Girard is similarly reinterpreting myth making in his search for the meaning of being.
Freud’s neurosis and oedipal complexes, for Girard can be replaced with the realization that our rivals who we must imitate need to be destroyed for us to fully actualize ourselves. Oh yeah, he also takes Hegel seriously in as much at the heart of Hegel one needs another to separate self from outsider, and Girard needs the rival to be destroyed and will replace Freud’s complexes with mimetic desire. As for me, I love my Hegel, but I never take him too seriously.
There’s a part in the mimetic desire chapter where the pseudoscience shouts its name to the modern reader. Ouch, I just implied that Girard is pre-modern and he writes in 1975. The homosexual explanation that Girard attempts belongs in the realm of what was wrong about the 1970s and thank goodness we no longer have such rubbish prevalent today except among evangelical Christians or MAGA hat simpletons. He’ll ‘improve’ on Freud’s latent and overt homosexual explanations by hypothesizing a male rivalry between another man in an imitative (mimetic) desire such that the rival must be conquered and subdued. He believes what he is writing, and I dis evangelicals and MAGA because they want to blame the outside that makes the person and ignore the fact that sometimes people are just born that way. Girard also generalized his theory to pansexual, and today I would like to note that evangelicals and MAGA just can’t properly wrap their heads around transgender as a reality and they want to make the person a victim that needs to be punished because of their action and character since it does not align with evangelicals or simpleton’s default categories they grew-up with. I always wonder why MAGA don’t read books like this one in defense of their absurdities.
Girard covers and reinterprets ethnography, theology, historiology, sociologoy and psychology through his one groundless ground of finding a scapegoat and then destroying it. For him, the presence of the absence is as real as Lacan says it is. I want to note as a brief aside, Deleuze uses the paradigms of psychoanalyses and destroys it through his immanent critique, while Girard uses the paradigms to reinterpret them as truths. Deleuze is one of my favorite authors because I love the way he writes and I love the destruction of the absurd. Girard just creates another myth to support the silly. Girard quotes Nietzsche frequently in his own defense, I could just as easily quote Nietzsche to bash Girard and, of course, when Dionysia is mentioned, one thinks of Nietzsche.
There’s a double bind of truth that Girard asserts. The closer we get to the truth the further we are from ourselves and therefore the less we can know, according to Girard. The circle never quite gets closed as we reside in the circle. When we are aware of killing our imitation of ourselves than we are not closing the circle. There is an unconscious part of us that never becomes conscious until we move on. This explains how Girard keeps his psychoanalysis paradigm as he resolves the great universal truths and satisfies himself that only he can reinterpret the foundation of everything. Girard frequently quotes from Proust and used one of his quotes to fully illustrate what he meant by his double bind of truth. Proust is well worth reading and Girard illustrates why that is so.
The heart of the book was a reinterpretation of the Bible in terms of Girard’s esoteric (known only to him) knowledge and explaining all the prophets, Jesus, Gospels, and The Book of Hebrews (which, in my opinion is the only well written book in the New Testament) through his one great truth that imitation needs a bacchanal buffet with Dionysian retribution hence for Girard Christ is not a sacrifice, for Girard Christ's sacrifice on the cross satisfies a mimetic desire we have within us, and for Girard God’s son was necessarily slated since “in the beginning was the word” (he has a long section on the first chapter in the Book of John). Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” is a masterpiece and is well worth rereading for understanding Girard. Last week I read C. S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity,” and it's banality wrapped in simplicity in the defense for Christianity, once again I wonder why evangelical Christians don’t latch onto arguments like what Girard presents, because Girard is making a real apologia for Christianity within this book, and they should just ignore everything C. S. Lewis says on the topic.
After I read Jung or Freud (but not Lacan, Deleuze, Hegel, Proust or Frazier), I react to what they are saying and always think that they are each sick individuals and give their books one star. Girard is just as absurd in his theory, but I don’t think of him as sick. I see him as sincere and he’s doing what he can to save psychoanalysis from the reality that is unfolding around him. He creates mythical truths to get at what he believes are universal certainties to bring meaning to existence while not quite admitting that he is just as mythical. He did mention something that was wise, Heidegger makes being spiritual, and Girard is similarly reinterpreting myth making in his search for the meaning of being.
February 27, 2013
Exceptional. Girard's thoughts will change your life. You must read this book.
February 3, 2024
“Man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation” - Aristotle, Poetics
"I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I my brothers and my cousins against the world." - Bedouin saying
This book contains some of the most high-voltage ideas I've ever come across, presented in an impenetrable and challenging style replete with hundreds of references, some more compelling than others. It's not really a great book, but is an incredible intellectual achievement.
Less a thesis than a journey, the book consists of three interrelated Socratic dialogues between Girard and two other French psychologists - the first is focused on anthropology, the second on Judeo-Christian scripture, and the third on psychology.
The scope of ambition is massive - ultimately, Girard's work posits a universal theory for religion at the same level as Darwin's theory of evolution or Smith's theory of economics. And while the book communicates this theory obtusely, it's not obviously wrong.
The first apes evolved 10M years ago. Chimps splintered off around 8M years ago, and the first bipedal species emerged between 7 and 4M years ago. The first tools are 3M years old, and fire started to be used around 2M years ago. This all culminated in the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, and in the emergence of human civilization in 4,000 BC.
This period, from 5M BC to the present, represents a radical transition in the mechanism of evolution. Prior to 5M, all human evolution was genetic; after 200,000 years ago, almost all human evolution has been cultural. But in between, the homogenization process was a progressively titrating estuary of both genetic and cultural evolution in which nearly 200,000 generations of progressively smarter monkeys duked it out for survival.
Like a detective solving a crime, Girard uses clues from across this timespan to piece together a theory of the case:
* Genetic evolution developed a memetic drive - smart monkeys that imitated one another got smarter, faster and outcompeted ones that didn’t.
* This led to memetic competition - smart monkeys wanted objects solely because their memetic rivals had them.
* This led to violence - smart monkeys killed other smart monkeys, not for survival, but out of memetic rivalry.
This violence was kept in check by genetic evolution until the development of tools; as soon as the first smart monkey picked up a rock and struck their neighbor, they had escaped the genetic regulatory mechanism which had thus forth constrained their capacity for violence. Only culture could protect the monkeys now!
So what kind of proto-culture (again, this is hundreds of thousands of years ago) could solve this problem? Girard postulates, very literally, that the very first cultural circuit was the victimage mechanism in which all members of a small tribe identify a scapegoat and kill it as a solution to out-of-control memetic contagion (using a collective technique like stoning in which the blame is shared). Over time, this low-level “firmware” level of culture evolved into a “software level” of sacrificial religion, in which structured rituals and taboos progressively were developed to fight the hardware-level memetic drive (“thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife”) and human sacrifice was progressively replaced by animal sacrifice as a further de-escalation. In his theory, religion exists before culture; it is the necessary precursor to human culture.
The next section of the book was about the rise of Judeao-Christian culture as a radical rebuttal to sacrificial religion - a religion in which the victim is actually innocent, and the weak is actually strong. Reading this section felt like reading the Da Vinci Code - the moment he referenced the Matthew 13:35 was mind-blowing. Even Dan Brown couldn't pull off a twist like that.
“Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth… The blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. Truly, I say to you all this will come upon this generation… I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.”
The first murder in the Old Testament is Abel; the last was Zechariah. This is a seriously wild coincidence (and just so happens to include the title of the book!) and truly positions humanity as being stuck in a cycle of violence which only radical non-violence (radical because it accepts death in the face of violence) can break, thus unmasking the hidden truth that human civilization has been built on top of Satan who is violence and deceipt. In Girard’s exegesis, non-sacrificial Christianity (which has never truly been tried) is not just one of many religions - it’s a radical reconstruction of the foundation of religion itself.
Most fascinatingly, because Christianity revealed the futility of violence, it has actually robbed the rituals of their power. This, in turn, is somewhat risky, because it means we could quickly return to a much more violent state - which Girard thinks of as the Apocalypse as the alternative to the Kingdom of Heaven.
The final third of the book is focused on psychology - how the hominization process impacted our cognition, and how that changes how we perceive the world. It was deep in Freud and made me realize how little I’ve read of Freud - who came up a tremendous amount in both this book and The Western Canon.
This is a long review, but it’s a complex book. The brilliance of its author is evident, but I suspect I’ll need to spend some more time reading a summary like this one to really get at all of it. It certainly made me think a lot - about culture, about humanity, and about myself, but exactly how it will change my life is not clear. What is clear is that unlike many books, this one has left me changed.
"I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I my brothers and my cousins against the world." - Bedouin saying
This book contains some of the most high-voltage ideas I've ever come across, presented in an impenetrable and challenging style replete with hundreds of references, some more compelling than others. It's not really a great book, but is an incredible intellectual achievement.
Less a thesis than a journey, the book consists of three interrelated Socratic dialogues between Girard and two other French psychologists - the first is focused on anthropology, the second on Judeo-Christian scripture, and the third on psychology.
The scope of ambition is massive - ultimately, Girard's work posits a universal theory for religion at the same level as Darwin's theory of evolution or Smith's theory of economics. And while the book communicates this theory obtusely, it's not obviously wrong.
The first apes evolved 10M years ago. Chimps splintered off around 8M years ago, and the first bipedal species emerged between 7 and 4M years ago. The first tools are 3M years old, and fire started to be used around 2M years ago. This all culminated in the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, and in the emergence of human civilization in 4,000 BC.
This period, from 5M BC to the present, represents a radical transition in the mechanism of evolution. Prior to 5M, all human evolution was genetic; after 200,000 years ago, almost all human evolution has been cultural. But in between, the homogenization process was a progressively titrating estuary of both genetic and cultural evolution in which nearly 200,000 generations of progressively smarter monkeys duked it out for survival.
Like a detective solving a crime, Girard uses clues from across this timespan to piece together a theory of the case:
* Genetic evolution developed a memetic drive - smart monkeys that imitated one another got smarter, faster and outcompeted ones that didn’t.
* This led to memetic competition - smart monkeys wanted objects solely because their memetic rivals had them.
* This led to violence - smart monkeys killed other smart monkeys, not for survival, but out of memetic rivalry.
This violence was kept in check by genetic evolution until the development of tools; as soon as the first smart monkey picked up a rock and struck their neighbor, they had escaped the genetic regulatory mechanism which had thus forth constrained their capacity for violence. Only culture could protect the monkeys now!
So what kind of proto-culture (again, this is hundreds of thousands of years ago) could solve this problem? Girard postulates, very literally, that the very first cultural circuit was the victimage mechanism in which all members of a small tribe identify a scapegoat and kill it as a solution to out-of-control memetic contagion (using a collective technique like stoning in which the blame is shared). Over time, this low-level “firmware” level of culture evolved into a “software level” of sacrificial religion, in which structured rituals and taboos progressively were developed to fight the hardware-level memetic drive (“thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife”) and human sacrifice was progressively replaced by animal sacrifice as a further de-escalation. In his theory, religion exists before culture; it is the necessary precursor to human culture.
The next section of the book was about the rise of Judeao-Christian culture as a radical rebuttal to sacrificial religion - a religion in which the victim is actually innocent, and the weak is actually strong. Reading this section felt like reading the Da Vinci Code - the moment he referenced the Matthew 13:35 was mind-blowing. Even Dan Brown couldn't pull off a twist like that.
“Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth… The blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. Truly, I say to you all this will come upon this generation… I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.”
The first murder in the Old Testament is Abel; the last was Zechariah. This is a seriously wild coincidence (and just so happens to include the title of the book!) and truly positions humanity as being stuck in a cycle of violence which only radical non-violence (radical because it accepts death in the face of violence) can break, thus unmasking the hidden truth that human civilization has been built on top of Satan who is violence and deceipt. In Girard’s exegesis, non-sacrificial Christianity (which has never truly been tried) is not just one of many religions - it’s a radical reconstruction of the foundation of religion itself.
Most fascinatingly, because Christianity revealed the futility of violence, it has actually robbed the rituals of their power. This, in turn, is somewhat risky, because it means we could quickly return to a much more violent state - which Girard thinks of as the Apocalypse as the alternative to the Kingdom of Heaven.
The final third of the book is focused on psychology - how the hominization process impacted our cognition, and how that changes how we perceive the world. It was deep in Freud and made me realize how little I’ve read of Freud - who came up a tremendous amount in both this book and The Western Canon.
This is a long review, but it’s a complex book. The brilliance of its author is evident, but I suspect I’ll need to spend some more time reading a summary like this one to really get at all of it. It certainly made me think a lot - about culture, about humanity, and about myself, but exactly how it will change my life is not clear. What is clear is that unlike many books, this one has left me changed.
April 27, 2018
This is a pretty astounding book. The concept of mimesis is posed as a relational configuration by which humans interact and propagate social meaning and structure. I thought Girard spent maybe a little too long on Christianity, but it's still a good exegesis.
He flips the idea of sacrifice on its head and instead notes how mimesis is really about the social management of feelings. Instead of concerning ourselves with the group/hierarchy as the main focus of mimesis we can instead get that each individual has a placement of emotions within their cognition and that placement is how we understand ourselves and those around us. The behaviors of others reinforce our emotional selves so that we become shaped by our standard assortment of feelings. This lets us get back through psychology, religion and sociology towards true spirituality, with deep segways into philosophy, mysticism and existential questions.
In some ways I find Girard's book radical because he doesn't seem to realize what he hits upon, instead of limiting his book to cultural criticism... which is merely the expressive window dressing of human emotional well-being.
He flips the idea of sacrifice on its head and instead notes how mimesis is really about the social management of feelings. Instead of concerning ourselves with the group/hierarchy as the main focus of mimesis we can instead get that each individual has a placement of emotions within their cognition and that placement is how we understand ourselves and those around us. The behaviors of others reinforce our emotional selves so that we become shaped by our standard assortment of feelings. This lets us get back through psychology, religion and sociology towards true spirituality, with deep segways into philosophy, mysticism and existential questions.
In some ways I find Girard's book radical because he doesn't seem to realize what he hits upon, instead of limiting his book to cultural criticism... which is merely the expressive window dressing of human emotional well-being.
January 21, 2022
really fascinating. had minor theological beefs with the reading of the crucifixion as non-sacrificial.
November 2, 2019
One of the best and most profound books I have ever read. The great criticism I would suggest is overreach, in that Girard is trying to create a Copernican revolution that merges historical agency, metaphysics, psychology, and anthropology into a combined construct, and as such must at some point overreach himself (especially perhaps in his theist conclusions outside scriptural criticism which seemed much less well formed than his anthropological and literary conclusions). Anyways, few dense works give me chills and I probably will read the rest of his works from the publication date on. Even if you want to dispose of some aspects of his theory or theology, the concept of mimetic desire driving human tragedy is very hard to argue against.
September 11, 2019
In a recent podcast with Eric Weinstein, Peter Thiel pegged Girard as his biggest intellectual influence, making it pretty clear that I can’t avoid reading “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of World” any longer. So a friend and I committed to a two-week Girard immersion and off we went.
And now, let me give away the store, and tell you what’s been hidden – all of human culture is held up in place by diverting human propensity to mimetic violence towards a sacrifice. Here is how it works.
Humans are genetically hard-wired for advanced mimicry. There shouldn't be any surprises here, all gene-culture co-evolutionary theories (Kevin Laland, Joseph Henrich, Boyd & Richarson) make a big deal of high-fidelity strategic copying which becomes the root of all culture. What they all miss is that humans copy not just cultural artifacts, learning algorithms and tools, but acquisitive and violent behaviors as well. Mimetic desire is simply a tendency to want (copy) what another person wants. Left unchecked, mimetic desire leads to rivalry and violence, and this contagion of mimetic violence threatens the survival of the community.
So how did humans manage to evolve without destroying themselves? Well, religions (or “cultures” if you like) have all figured out the same trick, and it relies on prohibitions, rituals and sacrifice.
Prohibitions are placed on situations or objects that can most easily trigger mimetic desire. But the hard-wired tendencies aren’t going anywhere, so rituals are established allowing mimetic rivalry to be simulated in a symbolic form (e.g. group warrior dances).
Thus, rituals enable the collective to playact its violent impulses. But the impulses are absolutely real and must be satisfied, and so the final step is to redirect the collective violence onto a single scapegoat, which is typically murdered or expelled from the community. This expulsion restores the order in the community, brings about the sense of the sacred, and unifies the group.
That’s the rough sketch of the Girard’s victimage mechanism. Part I of the book goes through this in great detail drawing heavily on ethnographical work of structural anthropologists, such as Claude Levi-Strauss.
Girard criticizes structuralists for failing to see “what is right in front of their faces” – the murder or expulsion of a scapegoat is at the root of all human cultures. Instead, anthropologists come up with convoluted theories of immutable structures common to all human societies, and claim that these structures are somehow symbolic, despite the physical reality of murder in most rituals. Go figure. But then again, anthropologists have also been known to advocate “cultural diffusion” theories while standing on a tomb filled with skeletons and battle-axes…
Part II of the book deals with Christianity, and it is a deep and rewarding read. Girard’s central claim is that canonical Gospels were unique in identifying and rejecting the founding murder mechanism. But, Gospels’ subtle key message was largely ignored by posterity, because the Epistle to the Hebrews blatantly reframed the crucifixion of Jesus in strictly sacrificial terms, and this is how New Testament is interpreted to this day. The subsequent implications of this interpretation for Western Culture are rather unfortunate.
Part III of the book deals with some of these implications. Girard describes the status of mimetic mechanism in modernity, and it is not pretty – incremental removal of constraints intensifies mimetic rivalry, and the deflection to the sacrifice is no longer available because of advanced technology (atomic bomb makes the prospect of Apocalypse perfectly real). I suspect this is what might be keeping Peter Thiel up at night.
Part III has some fun parts as well. For example, Girard serves up another round of bashing to structural anthropologists, and delivers a pretty heavy whipping to psychoanalysts. A special spanking is reserved for Freud, where we find out that Dostoevsky was not a latent homosexual after all.
In the final analysis, Part III is mostly optional, but Parts I and II are an essential read. Yes, Girard uses his theory to explain just about everything, so he often overshoots, over-predicts, and establishes dubious causal links. That said, without his theory we are missing a chunk of reality that is absolutely indispensable to the understanding of human condition.
And now, let me give away the store, and tell you what’s been hidden – all of human culture is held up in place by diverting human propensity to mimetic violence towards a sacrifice. Here is how it works.
Humans are genetically hard-wired for advanced mimicry. There shouldn't be any surprises here, all gene-culture co-evolutionary theories (Kevin Laland, Joseph Henrich, Boyd & Richarson) make a big deal of high-fidelity strategic copying which becomes the root of all culture. What they all miss is that humans copy not just cultural artifacts, learning algorithms and tools, but acquisitive and violent behaviors as well. Mimetic desire is simply a tendency to want (copy) what another person wants. Left unchecked, mimetic desire leads to rivalry and violence, and this contagion of mimetic violence threatens the survival of the community.
So how did humans manage to evolve without destroying themselves? Well, religions (or “cultures” if you like) have all figured out the same trick, and it relies on prohibitions, rituals and sacrifice.
Prohibitions are placed on situations or objects that can most easily trigger mimetic desire. But the hard-wired tendencies aren’t going anywhere, so rituals are established allowing mimetic rivalry to be simulated in a symbolic form (e.g. group warrior dances).
Thus, rituals enable the collective to playact its violent impulses. But the impulses are absolutely real and must be satisfied, and so the final step is to redirect the collective violence onto a single scapegoat, which is typically murdered or expelled from the community. This expulsion restores the order in the community, brings about the sense of the sacred, and unifies the group.
That’s the rough sketch of the Girard’s victimage mechanism. Part I of the book goes through this in great detail drawing heavily on ethnographical work of structural anthropologists, such as Claude Levi-Strauss.
Girard criticizes structuralists for failing to see “what is right in front of their faces” – the murder or expulsion of a scapegoat is at the root of all human cultures. Instead, anthropologists come up with convoluted theories of immutable structures common to all human societies, and claim that these structures are somehow symbolic, despite the physical reality of murder in most rituals. Go figure. But then again, anthropologists have also been known to advocate “cultural diffusion” theories while standing on a tomb filled with skeletons and battle-axes…
Part II of the book deals with Christianity, and it is a deep and rewarding read. Girard’s central claim is that canonical Gospels were unique in identifying and rejecting the founding murder mechanism. But, Gospels’ subtle key message was largely ignored by posterity, because the Epistle to the Hebrews blatantly reframed the crucifixion of Jesus in strictly sacrificial terms, and this is how New Testament is interpreted to this day. The subsequent implications of this interpretation for Western Culture are rather unfortunate.
Part III of the book deals with some of these implications. Girard describes the status of mimetic mechanism in modernity, and it is not pretty – incremental removal of constraints intensifies mimetic rivalry, and the deflection to the sacrifice is no longer available because of advanced technology (atomic bomb makes the prospect of Apocalypse perfectly real). I suspect this is what might be keeping Peter Thiel up at night.
Part III has some fun parts as well. For example, Girard serves up another round of bashing to structural anthropologists, and delivers a pretty heavy whipping to psychoanalysts. A special spanking is reserved for Freud, where we find out that Dostoevsky was not a latent homosexual after all.
In the final analysis, Part III is mostly optional, but Parts I and II are an essential read. Yes, Girard uses his theory to explain just about everything, so he often overshoots, over-predicts, and establishes dubious causal links. That said, without his theory we are missing a chunk of reality that is absolutely indispensable to the understanding of human condition.
June 12, 2022
I don't even know where to begin with this. René Girard was recommended to me from several different *trusted* sources over the last several years, and this book is considered to be the best 1 volume collection of his most important thought.
Is there a warning about reading French Intellectuals? Similar to not starting a land war in Asia? If not I feel like there should be. To begin with, it is very rare that I cannot understand what is even being discussed, but I had no clue what the author and the 2 psychiatrists were talking about until about page 50. The book is arranged in a conversational format as the 2 men mentioned above probe Girard with questions about his thought and theories. They are just as smart as he is, and none of them are the least bit interested in catering to the lay intellectual. At all. Sink or swim, they do not care. A final warning to anyone who may seek to follow me - if you are not very fluent with both the Old and New Testament of the Bible, you will not get much of the central section of this book. Move on. A warning I may have been wise to heed had it been granted me would have been "if you are not very fluent with Freud and psychotherapy beyond a surface understanding of it, you will not get much out of the 3rd section of this book." And, I struggled.
OK. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a title derived from Matt. 13:35 regarding the Gospels. It is an apt title for this book, which is really 3 books collected into one.
BOOK 1: FUNDAMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY:
The 1st book covers Girard's primary theory which revolves around the concept of "acquisitive mimesis" and the "victimage mechanism" - basically (from my understanding) the concept of original sin (Girard calls it original violence), the sacrificial system and the scapegoat. This was completely new to me, but it did establish a few things necessary for me to understand what came later. The first is that Girard seeks to reconcile evolutionary and cultural anthropology, history, psychology, religion, meaning and the scriptures. He is attempting to construct a sort of unified theory of, well, almost everything human. He is interested in the point of "hominization" where humanity 1st grew from primates - the birth of culture. He speculates it was at the point of the "original murder." The original murder was a result of wrong desire where one saw another and wanted to be that same thing, eventually killing him (Cain and Abel archetype, and Cain's following plea to God). This spawned a never-ending cycle of violence that could only ever be stopped through some method of sacrifice - a kind of group catharsis. This theory explains human group dynamics and the need to find victims or out-groups to persecute or destroy. This was also the origin of religion and even such things as domestication of animals, who were likely first domesticated to be used as sacrifices, not as a source of food. As human culture evolved and advanced, the sacrificial-scapegoat system became ever more layered in ritual, often to the very point of completely obscuring what it's original purpose was. These systems were all constructed to keep the natural violence of humanity in check. It is tempting to read Girard's original murder as the original sin of orthodox Christianity, but it is not exactly the same thing, due to Girard's need to place his theory within the confines of eons of human evolution. It is important to remember that the conversations this book collects were initially published in 1975, so a lot has happened since then. As a result of his total belief in the evolutionary theory of his time, he makes many concessions that may have otherwise been unnecessary, and unfortunately led him to cast away much of the New Testament scriptures outside of the Gospels, except when they agree with his theory. I think this is really what results in his missing some of the most important wisdom found there. It certainly isn't his lack of familiarity with the scripture text. He knows it deeply, as he does virtually anything else he talks about. This leads to the second, and central part of this tome:
BOOK 2: THE JUDAEO-CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES:
Girard has a brilliant mind, and is considered by some to be a Christian intellectual, which I suppose he is, but certainly not an orthodox one (he claims Catholicism, and that he arrived to it from the studies that resulted in these theories, his background prior being scientific and athiestic). Indeed, his complete renunciation of the sacrificial aspect of Christ's work in the passion would classify him as a heretic. He promotes a "non-sacrificial" reading of the Gospels. He views the scriptures as a God of non-violence slowly weaning humanity off violence and blood sacrifices as history progresses, culminating in the life and death of Christ, which was NOT a sacrifice from God's perspective, but rather an inevitable and absolutely necessary result of man's inability to escape the mimetic trap he is in and to understand that the sacrificial victim is unnecessary. Again, because of his bondage to evolutionary theory, Girard seems to feel each of us has the opportunity to renounce violence and choose the message of love and non-violence made plain to us through Christ. He doesn't deal with the sin problem of each human, or the "violence" our sin does to a Holy God. Indeed, Girard himself admits that his "anthropological perspective is not competent to address"... "questions of faith and grace." Girard's theory is more man-centered. He rejects the need for any kind of forgiveness from God for our sin against His holiness, and views orthodox Christianity's understanding of Christ's sacrifice as merely a mistaken continuation of the mimetic cycle of sacrificial violence. He thinks humanity is on the very cusp of agreeing with him in adopting the non-sacrificial reading of the Gospels (in 1975 - viewing this from 2022 is amusing). To quote:
"Sacrifice... (is not meant) as an eternal institution that God genuinely wished to be found, but as a temporary crutch made necessary by the weakness of humankind. Sacrifice is an imperfect means, which humanity must do without."
Christianity is superior to all previous religions and systems of thought because it points the way to de-mystification (de-mythologizing) of everything that went before and that supported the violent sacrificial system. The misunderstanding and rejection of Christianity left humanity with a huge problem, because while the myths were being destroyed, science and atheism could not satisfy the memetic crisis, resulting in the bloody and murderous catastrophes of the modern technological age. There is some truth in Girard's observations. For instance, he points out that in great irony, Judeo-Christianity itself is becoming the actual "last sacrifice" as the world turns on it and brands it as the final primary scapegoat for expelling from human society - the very system that alone is attempting to erase the sacrifice. It is being expelled on the basis of the world's view that it is exclusionary! Who says René Girard doesn't have a sense of humor?
BOOK 3: INTERDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY:
I don't have a lot to say about this 3rd section, quite frankly because I didn't understand much of it. There is a discussion of desire, which actually is interesting since I never really thought specifically about it from a metaphysical perspective before. Much of this section revolves around the intersection of Girard's thinking with Freud's, and I just didn't get much out of it. Partly that is also due to the fact that I have never had much time for Freud, finding his thinking and theories to be largely farcical. Again, this book was compiled in 1975, and psychotherapy reigned supreme at that time, so Girard can be excused for engaging so heavily with it. Girard respects Freud's intellect and his honesty, but he largely deconstructs it and several times labels much of his work to be "pseudo-scientific phantasmagoria." Points for Girard. LOL There is an interesting word study of "scandal" in this section as well - particularly of course as it applies to Christ.
Girard has no use for post-modernism and mocks it. In fact, he views the field of philosophy itself as largely spent of any new ideas - the death of philosophy, so to speak. He also makes several very prescient observations at the end of the book about the course of human sexuality and cultural devolution - including the modern ideological "puritanism" we see today among the "woke" elements of our western societies. "Man cannot live on bread and sexuality." And: "Our effort to prove that we are free of ethnocentric bias may well be part of a new ethnocentrism that consists in Western thinkers immolating their own cultural and religious treasure on an altar of false renunciation, in hypocritical imitation of Jesus."
I could go on, but this book really tired me out. I took a lot of notes as I went along. It was a grueling mental exercise and it's time for a couple good fantasy novels to cleanse the palate.
Is there a warning about reading French Intellectuals? Similar to not starting a land war in Asia? If not I feel like there should be. To begin with, it is very rare that I cannot understand what is even being discussed, but I had no clue what the author and the 2 psychiatrists were talking about until about page 50. The book is arranged in a conversational format as the 2 men mentioned above probe Girard with questions about his thought and theories. They are just as smart as he is, and none of them are the least bit interested in catering to the lay intellectual. At all. Sink or swim, they do not care. A final warning to anyone who may seek to follow me - if you are not very fluent with both the Old and New Testament of the Bible, you will not get much of the central section of this book. Move on. A warning I may have been wise to heed had it been granted me would have been "if you are not very fluent with Freud and psychotherapy beyond a surface understanding of it, you will not get much out of the 3rd section of this book." And, I struggled.
OK. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a title derived from Matt. 13:35 regarding the Gospels. It is an apt title for this book, which is really 3 books collected into one.
BOOK 1: FUNDAMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY:
The 1st book covers Girard's primary theory which revolves around the concept of "acquisitive mimesis" and the "victimage mechanism" - basically (from my understanding) the concept of original sin (Girard calls it original violence), the sacrificial system and the scapegoat. This was completely new to me, but it did establish a few things necessary for me to understand what came later. The first is that Girard seeks to reconcile evolutionary and cultural anthropology, history, psychology, religion, meaning and the scriptures. He is attempting to construct a sort of unified theory of, well, almost everything human. He is interested in the point of "hominization" where humanity 1st grew from primates - the birth of culture. He speculates it was at the point of the "original murder." The original murder was a result of wrong desire where one saw another and wanted to be that same thing, eventually killing him (Cain and Abel archetype, and Cain's following plea to God). This spawned a never-ending cycle of violence that could only ever be stopped through some method of sacrifice - a kind of group catharsis. This theory explains human group dynamics and the need to find victims or out-groups to persecute or destroy. This was also the origin of religion and even such things as domestication of animals, who were likely first domesticated to be used as sacrifices, not as a source of food. As human culture evolved and advanced, the sacrificial-scapegoat system became ever more layered in ritual, often to the very point of completely obscuring what it's original purpose was. These systems were all constructed to keep the natural violence of humanity in check. It is tempting to read Girard's original murder as the original sin of orthodox Christianity, but it is not exactly the same thing, due to Girard's need to place his theory within the confines of eons of human evolution. It is important to remember that the conversations this book collects were initially published in 1975, so a lot has happened since then. As a result of his total belief in the evolutionary theory of his time, he makes many concessions that may have otherwise been unnecessary, and unfortunately led him to cast away much of the New Testament scriptures outside of the Gospels, except when they agree with his theory. I think this is really what results in his missing some of the most important wisdom found there. It certainly isn't his lack of familiarity with the scripture text. He knows it deeply, as he does virtually anything else he talks about. This leads to the second, and central part of this tome:
BOOK 2: THE JUDAEO-CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES:
Girard has a brilliant mind, and is considered by some to be a Christian intellectual, which I suppose he is, but certainly not an orthodox one (he claims Catholicism, and that he arrived to it from the studies that resulted in these theories, his background prior being scientific and athiestic). Indeed, his complete renunciation of the sacrificial aspect of Christ's work in the passion would classify him as a heretic. He promotes a "non-sacrificial" reading of the Gospels. He views the scriptures as a God of non-violence slowly weaning humanity off violence and blood sacrifices as history progresses, culminating in the life and death of Christ, which was NOT a sacrifice from God's perspective, but rather an inevitable and absolutely necessary result of man's inability to escape the mimetic trap he is in and to understand that the sacrificial victim is unnecessary. Again, because of his bondage to evolutionary theory, Girard seems to feel each of us has the opportunity to renounce violence and choose the message of love and non-violence made plain to us through Christ. He doesn't deal with the sin problem of each human, or the "violence" our sin does to a Holy God. Indeed, Girard himself admits that his "anthropological perspective is not competent to address"... "questions of faith and grace." Girard's theory is more man-centered. He rejects the need for any kind of forgiveness from God for our sin against His holiness, and views orthodox Christianity's understanding of Christ's sacrifice as merely a mistaken continuation of the mimetic cycle of sacrificial violence. He thinks humanity is on the very cusp of agreeing with him in adopting the non-sacrificial reading of the Gospels (in 1975 - viewing this from 2022 is amusing). To quote:
"Sacrifice... (is not meant) as an eternal institution that God genuinely wished to be found, but as a temporary crutch made necessary by the weakness of humankind. Sacrifice is an imperfect means, which humanity must do without."
Christianity is superior to all previous religions and systems of thought because it points the way to de-mystification (de-mythologizing) of everything that went before and that supported the violent sacrificial system. The misunderstanding and rejection of Christianity left humanity with a huge problem, because while the myths were being destroyed, science and atheism could not satisfy the memetic crisis, resulting in the bloody and murderous catastrophes of the modern technological age. There is some truth in Girard's observations. For instance, he points out that in great irony, Judeo-Christianity itself is becoming the actual "last sacrifice" as the world turns on it and brands it as the final primary scapegoat for expelling from human society - the very system that alone is attempting to erase the sacrifice. It is being expelled on the basis of the world's view that it is exclusionary! Who says René Girard doesn't have a sense of humor?
BOOK 3: INTERDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY:
I don't have a lot to say about this 3rd section, quite frankly because I didn't understand much of it. There is a discussion of desire, which actually is interesting since I never really thought specifically about it from a metaphysical perspective before. Much of this section revolves around the intersection of Girard's thinking with Freud's, and I just didn't get much out of it. Partly that is also due to the fact that I have never had much time for Freud, finding his thinking and theories to be largely farcical. Again, this book was compiled in 1975, and psychotherapy reigned supreme at that time, so Girard can be excused for engaging so heavily with it. Girard respects Freud's intellect and his honesty, but he largely deconstructs it and several times labels much of his work to be "pseudo-scientific phantasmagoria." Points for Girard. LOL There is an interesting word study of "scandal" in this section as well - particularly of course as it applies to Christ.
Girard has no use for post-modernism and mocks it. In fact, he views the field of philosophy itself as largely spent of any new ideas - the death of philosophy, so to speak. He also makes several very prescient observations at the end of the book about the course of human sexuality and cultural devolution - including the modern ideological "puritanism" we see today among the "woke" elements of our western societies. "Man cannot live on bread and sexuality." And: "Our effort to prove that we are free of ethnocentric bias may well be part of a new ethnocentrism that consists in Western thinkers immolating their own cultural and religious treasure on an altar of false renunciation, in hypocritical imitation of Jesus."
I could go on, but this book really tired me out. I took a lot of notes as I went along. It was a grueling mental exercise and it's time for a couple good fantasy novels to cleanse the palate.
November 21, 2011
In this text, Girard and his interlocutors range widely in their discussion of mimetic behavior and the way in which it takes shape within human culture. At various points, the results seem to overstate and overreach the evidence available and are used to dismiss, too quickly, other forms of cultural study. The modern 'mimetic crisis' seems too crudely put, derived from a too narrow consideration of the contemporary world.
With all that said, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World demonstrates how essential an account of mimetic behavior is to understanding human culture. The centrality which he ascribes to sacrificial violence is compelling and persuasive. If I do not entirely accept that Girard provides us with as many answers as he and his interlocutors suggest, I do accept that he provides one of the most powerful articulations of the questions and challenges for which we need to find answers.
The dialogue format employed here is very effective, unfolding clarification after clarification. The tone is serious, focused, but not without wit. Because our interlocutors are French, the reader is subjected to a somewhat tangential and unnecessary detour in regard to the import of Proust, but otherwise the discussion proceeds organically, leading the reader through the theory's application to ethology, ethnology, psychology, and religion.
With all that said, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World demonstrates how essential an account of mimetic behavior is to understanding human culture. The centrality which he ascribes to sacrificial violence is compelling and persuasive. If I do not entirely accept that Girard provides us with as many answers as he and his interlocutors suggest, I do accept that he provides one of the most powerful articulations of the questions and challenges for which we need to find answers.
The dialogue format employed here is very effective, unfolding clarification after clarification. The tone is serious, focused, but not without wit. Because our interlocutors are French, the reader is subjected to a somewhat tangential and unnecessary detour in regard to the import of Proust, but otherwise the discussion proceeds organically, leading the reader through the theory's application to ethology, ethnology, psychology, and religion.
June 27, 2019
This man of powerful assertion turns out to actually have something shining and deep to say. Girard very elegantly pulls his argument for culture arising from mimesis and resultant rivalry through the postulated logical loops and then again through the Bible and Freud – and I find I am listening.
Violence is poking us in the back whether we acknowledge him or not.
Violence is poking us in the back whether we acknowledge him or not.
March 14, 2020
I picked up this book as renowned investor and entrepreneur, Peter Thiel, has mentioned that this is the single most influential book he has ever read.
The mimetic theory brings a fundamentally different perspective on human behaviour. The reasons we act like we do, desire the things we desire, build our society the way we do etc. Very thought-provoking!
The mimetic theory brings a fundamentally different perspective on human behaviour. The reasons we act like we do, desire the things we desire, build our society the way we do etc. Very thought-provoking!
Read
October 22, 2008though decidedly a work of christian apologetics, some interesting anthropological observations.
September 30, 2017
"Il modo migliore di castigare gli uomini è di dargli sempre quello che reclamano." (p. 354)
February 8, 2020
one must understand religion in order to understand philosophy. Since the attempt to understand religion on the basis of philosophy had failed, we ought to try the reverse method and read philosophy in the light of religion
Human beings are soon moved to make religion itself into a new scapegoat, failing to realize once more that the violence is theirs. To expel religion is, as always, a religious gesture - as much so today when the sacred is loathed and abhorred as in the past when it was worshipped and adored. All attitudes that do not recognize the founding victim are never anything more than opposing errors, doubles that eternally exchange the same gesture without ever ‘hitting the mark’ and collapsing the structure if sacrificial misrecognition.
I believe this is what Nietzsche is alluding to, on the threshold of madness, when his long-standing opposition between Dionysus and Christ completely disappears. Instead of writing Dionysus against the Crucified, he writes Dionysus and the Crucified. What Nietzsche never detected in his researches, what he was unable to make his own on the level of knowledge- the identity of God and the scapegoat - he was able to realize in his madness. Wishing to be God, he became the victim, his own, primarily: he experienced the destiny of the scapegoat.
Human beings are soon moved to make religion itself into a new scapegoat, failing to realize once more that the violence is theirs. To expel religion is, as always, a religious gesture - as much so today when the sacred is loathed and abhorred as in the past when it was worshipped and adored. All attitudes that do not recognize the founding victim are never anything more than opposing errors, doubles that eternally exchange the same gesture without ever ‘hitting the mark’ and collapsing the structure if sacrificial misrecognition.
I believe this is what Nietzsche is alluding to, on the threshold of madness, when his long-standing opposition between Dionysus and Christ completely disappears. Instead of writing Dionysus against the Crucified, he writes Dionysus and the Crucified. What Nietzsche never detected in his researches, what he was unable to make his own on the level of knowledge- the identity of God and the scapegoat - he was able to realize in his madness. Wishing to be God, he became the victim, his own, primarily: he experienced the destiny of the scapegoat.
May 23, 2023
[audio] It isn't that I didn't enjoy this book (although I certainly did not). It's really more that I couldn't understand it. This is a dense philosophical text (which I should have guessed at the outset). I have ordered a physical copy that's coming, but oh my God this was like audio booking Hume or something. I am an auditory learner, but I'm certainly not that good.
I get the general premise, and there were a few nuggets that I was able to pick out. [Thanks, Tyler, for the reading guide! That really helped frame things for me].
But it's after works like these that I wonder...are people who love this book just operating at such a higher level than I am? Or will I one day reach that nirvana? And right now I'm in my cotton candy phase.
I get the general premise, and there were a few nuggets that I was able to pick out. [Thanks, Tyler, for the reading guide! That really helped frame things for me].
But it's after works like these that I wonder...are people who love this book just operating at such a higher level than I am? Or will I one day reach that nirvana? And right now I'm in my cotton candy phase.
September 25, 2021
Girard delivers on his promise; if one can take such an appealing book title, as one. And he had his foot in so many ponds - fundamental anthropology, literary criticism, biblical theology, psychology, et cetera. His theory of mimesis explains quite a lot of things - one is tempted to say it explains everything. Why are humans violent? Why does it seem many of us never get satisfied by anything? What explains our obsession with prestige? What is the origin of culture, religion, political institutions? How does Christianity destroy myths? In my estimation, there is a small price to pay for such deep insights like Girard’s: “Things Hidden...” is a difficult book to read.
March 25, 2021
Much of this book was fascinating, insightful, and thought provoking. However it is one of Girards more dense books and can be difficult to read at points. Hard to understand without a lot of fundamental knowledge on Freud and Levi Strauss.
Though one of the best critiques of Freud I have heard.
Though one of the best critiques of Freud I have heard.
January 28, 2020
Total banger
January 24, 2019
must read book about mimetic mechanism that may explain lot of things in Human life. Enjoyable reading where authors cover the religion and bible, scapegoating mechanism, relationship, psychology.
January 2, 2024
You can go anywhere in the world and find ornate old temples and all kinds of religious art. Every culture also has its longstanding rituals, taboos, and myths. To borrow from molecular biology: something that is so conserved across human civilization must be important to its function. But what is it? What is all this religion really about?
It's obviously not just that "gods explain what people can't" (e.g. myth of Persephone explaining the seasons). There's also a more sophisticated idea put forward by say Charles Taylor or Ernest Becker that religion creates "systems of transcendence" that fulfill an important psychological need. But even these two explanations combined don't really account for a lot. Think about the practice of burning a Yule log, Roman Saturnalia, and most human and animal sacrifice rituals.
Renee Girard asks this very question at the beginning of Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World: "Why the belief in the sacred? How can one explain the ubiquitous existence of rites and prohibitions? Why, before our own, has there never been a social order that was not thought to be dominated by a supernatural being?" [3]
Girard posits that religion actually arose as a common solution to a very old human problem of two people competing for the same scarce resource -- what he calls "mimetic violence".
He also shows us how Christianity (prefigured by Judaism) is a very different "religion" from every other. He believes Christianity proposes a new and better solution to mimetic violence that simultaneously weakens the power of all older religions. And as a result, in the modern age we are faced with a choice to either embrace the Christian message or to face apocalypse as mimetic violence eventually engulfs the world.
----
When humans first picked up rocks and realized they could whack other people with them, it created a big problem. If two people are vying for the same exhaustible resource then the existence of tools means conflict can very readily result in murder.
Girard believes that this is no mere possibility but was probably a normal state of affairs in prehistory. Girard believes that people are innately compelled by mimetic desire: the mere fact of someone else desiring something or possessing something makes us want it too. And without much cultural "software" to run on it isn't clear that early ape-like humans would have had a problem killing a rival for food, a mate, or shelter. Again, Girard believes it probably happened a lot.
We obviously haven't lived in that world since the dawn of the neolithic or earlier. Girard believes that religion was and has been the solution: "Until now thinkers have always centered religious systems on the effects of external threats and natural catastrophes, or in the explanation of natural and cosmic phenomena. In my opinion, mimetic violence is at the heart of the system. We need to see what results can be obtained if we suppose that such violence is in effect the motor of the religious system." [13]
My friend Jonathan Bi does an excellent job summarizing Girard's proposed "victimage mechanism" that draws the line from acquisitive mimesis to the solution of scapegoating and sacrifice of an individual, to the development of sacred prohibitions and rituals -- of religion itself.
While I recommend checking out Jonathan's summary, in short: mimetic rivalry in any group of people invariably yields a crisis, invariably resulting in identification of victim who is blamed and scapegoated and whose eventual murder provides catharsis and unity to the group. The victim is at once hated but also sacralized for his association with conflict resolution. He is memorialized in prohibitions and rituals that maintain the "lessons" of this crisis and prevent a similar mimetic crisis from arising again [46]. The victim may even become a mythologized god-figure [111]. The collection of taboos, rituals, and myths comprise religious belief.
Religion is like a societal immune system that progressively builds up defenses to types of mimetic violence that would otherwise make collaboration at scale impossible.
Girard believes this mechanism gives us religious ritual but also institutions like monarchy. Ancient kings and pharoahs had expropriative powers over huge groups of people, the capability to prescribe and proscribe certain behaviors, and were believed to be, well, god-like. Girard: "[royal power] is much too complex to have been the invention of power-hungry individuals... the king is not a glorified gang-leader, supported by pomp and decorum, capable of dissimulating its origin with deft propaganda concerning 'divine right'" [54]. Rather, the institution of kingship comes from victimage. The first kings were actually sacrificial victims that were accorded prestige and power before their sacrifice. Prolong the period before the sacrifice long enough and you've got a divine right monarch. [53]
Girard: "Every god, ultimately, conceals a dead man" [82]. And: "the tomb is nothing but the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first most elemental and fundamental matrix of meaning. There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol" [83].
In our modern era, myths and taboos have lost much of their power. If you suggest performing an animal sacrifice today -- to say nothing of sacrificing a human -- you'd rightly be considered crazy*. Myths are old curiosities and taboos are the subject of academic inquiry but tend to have very little purchase over how we live in 2024.
*Although perhaps not entirely. I think you can read the sentencing of Derek Chauvin as some type of Girardian sacrifice. The whole summer of 2020 around the Floyd / Chauvin incident had elements of a mimetic struggle and victimage. And there was a fair amount of art and sanctification of Floyd in the aftermath.
Girard believes the power of the victimage mechanism to reliably prevent mimetic crisis is contingent on us not perceiving them [134-5]. You actually have to believe e.g. the witch brought about the bad luck to buy that stoning her to death will bring us any resolution. But increasingly we have the clarity that myths are texts of persecution, that the victims are innocent, and that what was sacred is no longer. Uh oh! Why did this happen, who lifted the veil? And will mimetic violence engulf the world?
The victimage mechanism is first unraveled by Christian scripture [138]. Quoting Psalm 78, Jesus gives us the very name of this book [159-60]:
There is a lot of biblical exegesis that I won't get in to. This whole section was pretty cool.
Girard makes a compelling case that the main story of the New Testament shows us that we are trapped as a humanity in cycles of murdering innocent victims so that we do not all murder each other. In revealing our murderous foundations, the Gospels sap these old rituals of their power. "The Christian and modern worlds produce no mythologies, no rituals, no prohibitions" [195].
Christianity proposes a radical alternative to victimage and sacrifice in agape. "[The Kingdom of God] is the substitution of love for prohibitions and rituals -- for the whole apparatus of the sacrificial religions" [196]. Accepting Christ means "the complete and definitive elimination of every form of vengeance and every form of reprisal in relations between men" [197].
So if prehistoric human violence is cultural operating system v0, sacrificial religion is a sort of v1. Christianity and to some degree Judaism represents a v2 that if realized proposes a culture that is universal and utterly nonviolent.
But what if we don't hear Jesus? Girard wrote in 1978 that two millenia after the death of Christ we are in the process of sorting ourselves out and deciding between a Kingdom of God or an apocalypse of escalating violence without sacrificial religion to save us.
To some degree we have created systems to focus us on non-rivalrous pursuits like science, art, and commerce [285]. And there is a system of laws, enforced by violence, that further supports this equilibrium.
While these buy us time we have yet to realize the possibility of Christianity. We find ourselves in a middle position: "the nations [of the world] are not wise enough to abandon the power of creating mutual terror, nor are they made enough to unlease irreversible destruction. So we must reckon with a complex situation that falls between these two positions, and all the forms of mankind's past and future behavior can be discerned there. Either we are moving ineluctably toward non violence, or we are about disappear completely" [258]
The last 100 pages or so of the book is a treatise on psychology and comparing and contrasting Freudian theories of human behavior with Girard's mimetic model. I glossed over this part and found it interesting but frankly it would work better if you have read a lot of Freud before hand since almost all of it is framed as a rebuttal of sorts. I put my airpods in and read this with audio chatGPT open to check various references and get a bit of a Freud primer along the way -- this worked reasonably well and I'll experiment more the next book I read.
----
I didn't read Girard with a particularly critical eye. But I do think that mimesis and victimage is a more compelling explanation for ancient religion than I'd realized.
The points about Christianity require a lot more reflection.
It's obviously not just that "gods explain what people can't" (e.g. myth of Persephone explaining the seasons). There's also a more sophisticated idea put forward by say Charles Taylor or Ernest Becker that religion creates "systems of transcendence" that fulfill an important psychological need. But even these two explanations combined don't really account for a lot. Think about the practice of burning a Yule log, Roman Saturnalia, and most human and animal sacrifice rituals.
Renee Girard asks this very question at the beginning of Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World: "Why the belief in the sacred? How can one explain the ubiquitous existence of rites and prohibitions? Why, before our own, has there never been a social order that was not thought to be dominated by a supernatural being?" [3]
Girard posits that religion actually arose as a common solution to a very old human problem of two people competing for the same scarce resource -- what he calls "mimetic violence".
He also shows us how Christianity (prefigured by Judaism) is a very different "religion" from every other. He believes Christianity proposes a new and better solution to mimetic violence that simultaneously weakens the power of all older religions. And as a result, in the modern age we are faced with a choice to either embrace the Christian message or to face apocalypse as mimetic violence eventually engulfs the world.
----
When humans first picked up rocks and realized they could whack other people with them, it created a big problem. If two people are vying for the same exhaustible resource then the existence of tools means conflict can very readily result in murder.
Girard believes that this is no mere possibility but was probably a normal state of affairs in prehistory. Girard believes that people are innately compelled by mimetic desire: the mere fact of someone else desiring something or possessing something makes us want it too. And without much cultural "software" to run on it isn't clear that early ape-like humans would have had a problem killing a rival for food, a mate, or shelter. Again, Girard believes it probably happened a lot.
We obviously haven't lived in that world since the dawn of the neolithic or earlier. Girard believes that religion was and has been the solution: "Until now thinkers have always centered religious systems on the effects of external threats and natural catastrophes, or in the explanation of natural and cosmic phenomena. In my opinion, mimetic violence is at the heart of the system. We need to see what results can be obtained if we suppose that such violence is in effect the motor of the religious system." [13]
My friend Jonathan Bi does an excellent job summarizing Girard's proposed "victimage mechanism" that draws the line from acquisitive mimesis to the solution of scapegoating and sacrifice of an individual, to the development of sacred prohibitions and rituals -- of religion itself.
While I recommend checking out Jonathan's summary, in short: mimetic rivalry in any group of people invariably yields a crisis, invariably resulting in identification of victim who is blamed and scapegoated and whose eventual murder provides catharsis and unity to the group. The victim is at once hated but also sacralized for his association with conflict resolution. He is memorialized in prohibitions and rituals that maintain the "lessons" of this crisis and prevent a similar mimetic crisis from arising again [46]. The victim may even become a mythologized god-figure [111]. The collection of taboos, rituals, and myths comprise religious belief.
Religion is like a societal immune system that progressively builds up defenses to types of mimetic violence that would otherwise make collaboration at scale impossible.
Girard believes this mechanism gives us religious ritual but also institutions like monarchy. Ancient kings and pharoahs had expropriative powers over huge groups of people, the capability to prescribe and proscribe certain behaviors, and were believed to be, well, god-like. Girard: "[royal power] is much too complex to have been the invention of power-hungry individuals... the king is not a glorified gang-leader, supported by pomp and decorum, capable of dissimulating its origin with deft propaganda concerning 'divine right'" [54]. Rather, the institution of kingship comes from victimage. The first kings were actually sacrificial victims that were accorded prestige and power before their sacrifice. Prolong the period before the sacrifice long enough and you've got a divine right monarch. [53]
Girard: "Every god, ultimately, conceals a dead man" [82]. And: "the tomb is nothing but the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first most elemental and fundamental matrix of meaning. There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol" [83].
In our modern era, myths and taboos have lost much of their power. If you suggest performing an animal sacrifice today -- to say nothing of sacrificing a human -- you'd rightly be considered crazy*. Myths are old curiosities and taboos are the subject of academic inquiry but tend to have very little purchase over how we live in 2024.
*Although perhaps not entirely. I think you can read the sentencing of Derek Chauvin as some type of Girardian sacrifice. The whole summer of 2020 around the Floyd / Chauvin incident had elements of a mimetic struggle and victimage. And there was a fair amount of art and sanctification of Floyd in the aftermath.
Girard believes the power of the victimage mechanism to reliably prevent mimetic crisis is contingent on us not perceiving them [134-5]. You actually have to believe e.g. the witch brought about the bad luck to buy that stoning her to death will bring us any resolution. But increasingly we have the clarity that myths are texts of persecution, that the victims are innocent, and that what was sacred is no longer. Uh oh! Why did this happen, who lifted the veil? And will mimetic violence engulf the world?
The victimage mechanism is first unraveled by Christian scripture [138]. Quoting Psalm 78, Jesus gives us the very name of this book [159-60]:
'I will open my mouth in parables,
I will utter what has been hidden since the
foundation of the world' (Matthew 13, 35)
There is a lot of biblical exegesis that I won't get in to. This whole section was pretty cool.
Girard makes a compelling case that the main story of the New Testament shows us that we are trapped as a humanity in cycles of murdering innocent victims so that we do not all murder each other. In revealing our murderous foundations, the Gospels sap these old rituals of their power. "The Christian and modern worlds produce no mythologies, no rituals, no prohibitions" [195].
Christianity proposes a radical alternative to victimage and sacrifice in agape. "[The Kingdom of God] is the substitution of love for prohibitions and rituals -- for the whole apparatus of the sacrificial religions" [196]. Accepting Christ means "the complete and definitive elimination of every form of vengeance and every form of reprisal in relations between men" [197].
So if prehistoric human violence is cultural operating system v0, sacrificial religion is a sort of v1. Christianity and to some degree Judaism represents a v2 that if realized proposes a culture that is universal and utterly nonviolent.
But what if we don't hear Jesus? Girard wrote in 1978 that two millenia after the death of Christ we are in the process of sorting ourselves out and deciding between a Kingdom of God or an apocalypse of escalating violence without sacrificial religion to save us.
To some degree we have created systems to focus us on non-rivalrous pursuits like science, art, and commerce [285]. And there is a system of laws, enforced by violence, that further supports this equilibrium.
While these buy us time we have yet to realize the possibility of Christianity. We find ourselves in a middle position: "the nations [of the world] are not wise enough to abandon the power of creating mutual terror, nor are they made enough to unlease irreversible destruction. So we must reckon with a complex situation that falls between these two positions, and all the forms of mankind's past and future behavior can be discerned there. Either we are moving ineluctably toward non violence, or we are about disappear completely" [258]
The last 100 pages or so of the book is a treatise on psychology and comparing and contrasting Freudian theories of human behavior with Girard's mimetic model. I glossed over this part and found it interesting but frankly it would work better if you have read a lot of Freud before hand since almost all of it is framed as a rebuttal of sorts. I put my airpods in and read this with audio chatGPT open to check various references and get a bit of a Freud primer along the way -- this worked reasonably well and I'll experiment more the next book I read.
----
I didn't read Girard with a particularly critical eye. But I do think that mimesis and victimage is a more compelling explanation for ancient religion than I'd realized.
The points about Christianity require a lot more reflection.
July 7, 2021
The three Magi have always held a certain mystique in popular imagination. Who were these three men—outsiders, really—who saw something in the night sky that ultimately leads them to worship Christ?
There's a similar mystique I'd argue that surrounds Girard, as we wonder what could have moved a secular anthropologist to leave behind the comforts of mainstream academia to place his heart beside the Manger.
Like the Magi, he's clearly guided by a star, which for Girard, is his theory of mimetic violence. Unfortunately for the reader, this star is not something you can point to quite as readily as the one in Bethlehem. His guiding principle takes about 140 pages to explain, after which, you likely still only vaguely make out the outline.
The forward to the book indicates that customary "concessions to the reader" were left out to "make the texts less heavy." I'm not sure if that was intended to be a little academic humor, but this is a heavy text. Take your average reading speed and divide it by four; then halve it again because you'll likely need to re-read the page. This journey to the manger is not a Hallmark Card adventure.
And given that this book likely sits on bookshelves next to works from the Financial Times' Summer Reading List, the gravitas of this work is particularly problematic. I'd hypothesize that most readers have come across this from reading Business Insider articles on Peter Thiel and likely think the references to Levi-Strauss are discussing Steve Jobs' legwear of choice.
And I found trying to summarize it for friends particularly difficult; not just because it's so complex, but because I also struggle to hold all the moving parts of his theory straight in my head.
My attempt to summarize is something like, "Every society was formed by a founding murder that resulted from a mimetic conflict. This founding murder brought about unity—as it's a bit of a collective murder—and as a result people began to believe that the violence of the murder brings about peace (the founding lie). Prohibitions were derived to prevent future mimetic conflicts that could break society apart; and religious ritual sacrifice was intended to function as a unifying mechanism at various fractious points in society. Christ exposed the lies of mimetic violence NOT by sacrificing himself for our sins, but by promulgating complete non-violence—the result of which will lead to your death, if you live in a violent society (which he argues we all do). So the Gospels present us with two paths—we could embrace Christ's path and lead non-violent lives which, if everyone does, will lead to a peaceful societal unity; but if everyone doesn't might lead to our own personal destruction. Or, we could continue to seek to counter violence with violence to bring about peace (he cites Mutually Assured Destruction) which will ultimately lead to a manmade Apocalypse."
Yeah . . .good luck explaining that at your next cocktail party when someone asks you what you're reading.
What makes this a 5-start read for me is that it does give me a new lens that can be applied to just about everything. And his exegesis, at times, is pretty brilliant (a very unique reading of the "split the baby" Proverb, for example).
But his insistence on a non-sacrificial reading of the Passion is a tough pill for me to swallow. Nor does he provide the reader with much wiggle-room on the issue. Per Girard, we either believe in the sacrificial reading of the Passion—in which case Christianity is just another myth which ultimately will be effaced; or we accept his non-sacrificial reading.
Those are awfully high stakes and I'm not entirely sure the choice is as binary as Girard makes it out to be. Yet Girard spends a lot of time applying rhetorical sugar-coating, with his underlying message effectively being that the sacrificial reading of the Gospels functions a bit as a Trojan Horse to bring the Gospel message through time to the present, a period when we can fully grasp the non-sacrificial reading that subverts mimetic violence.
I'd be curious to learn how he squares that message with Church teaching and the ritual of the weekly Mass. Perhaps he addresses that in his other works.
But for now, I think I have enough to chew on.
There's a similar mystique I'd argue that surrounds Girard, as we wonder what could have moved a secular anthropologist to leave behind the comforts of mainstream academia to place his heart beside the Manger.
Like the Magi, he's clearly guided by a star, which for Girard, is his theory of mimetic violence. Unfortunately for the reader, this star is not something you can point to quite as readily as the one in Bethlehem. His guiding principle takes about 140 pages to explain, after which, you likely still only vaguely make out the outline.
The forward to the book indicates that customary "concessions to the reader" were left out to "make the texts less heavy." I'm not sure if that was intended to be a little academic humor, but this is a heavy text. Take your average reading speed and divide it by four; then halve it again because you'll likely need to re-read the page. This journey to the manger is not a Hallmark Card adventure.
And given that this book likely sits on bookshelves next to works from the Financial Times' Summer Reading List, the gravitas of this work is particularly problematic. I'd hypothesize that most readers have come across this from reading Business Insider articles on Peter Thiel and likely think the references to Levi-Strauss are discussing Steve Jobs' legwear of choice.
And I found trying to summarize it for friends particularly difficult; not just because it's so complex, but because I also struggle to hold all the moving parts of his theory straight in my head.
My attempt to summarize is something like, "Every society was formed by a founding murder that resulted from a mimetic conflict. This founding murder brought about unity—as it's a bit of a collective murder—and as a result people began to believe that the violence of the murder brings about peace (the founding lie). Prohibitions were derived to prevent future mimetic conflicts that could break society apart; and religious ritual sacrifice was intended to function as a unifying mechanism at various fractious points in society. Christ exposed the lies of mimetic violence NOT by sacrificing himself for our sins, but by promulgating complete non-violence—the result of which will lead to your death, if you live in a violent society (which he argues we all do). So the Gospels present us with two paths—we could embrace Christ's path and lead non-violent lives which, if everyone does, will lead to a peaceful societal unity; but if everyone doesn't might lead to our own personal destruction. Or, we could continue to seek to counter violence with violence to bring about peace (he cites Mutually Assured Destruction) which will ultimately lead to a manmade Apocalypse."
Yeah . . .good luck explaining that at your next cocktail party when someone asks you what you're reading.
What makes this a 5-start read for me is that it does give me a new lens that can be applied to just about everything. And his exegesis, at times, is pretty brilliant (a very unique reading of the "split the baby" Proverb, for example).
But his insistence on a non-sacrificial reading of the Passion is a tough pill for me to swallow. Nor does he provide the reader with much wiggle-room on the issue. Per Girard, we either believe in the sacrificial reading of the Passion—in which case Christianity is just another myth which ultimately will be effaced; or we accept his non-sacrificial reading.
Those are awfully high stakes and I'm not entirely sure the choice is as binary as Girard makes it out to be. Yet Girard spends a lot of time applying rhetorical sugar-coating, with his underlying message effectively being that the sacrificial reading of the Gospels functions a bit as a Trojan Horse to bring the Gospel message through time to the present, a period when we can fully grasp the non-sacrificial reading that subverts mimetic violence.
I'd be curious to learn how he squares that message with Church teaching and the ritual of the weekly Mass. Perhaps he addresses that in his other works.
But for now, I think I have enough to chew on.
September 28, 2020
This book is crazy
I love the conversational style that makes it more fluid and easier to follow, although you're pretty mental if you believe you will completely understand everything after the first go. I knew some of Girard's theory from youtube and some online articles. This helped me out but it was definitely not enough to get me all the way through. I am also pretty sure there is no perfect way to start digesting a theory so dense and profound; you kinda just have to start somewhere. I think this is a good place to start.
The book is titanic in scope and its effects both on culture at large and the church are still lying in the wait. The next century will be about grappling with the ideas of Rene Girard. His readings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the anthropological structuralists is biting and precise; at once giving their ideas respect but in the same sentence correcting their misreading and inconsistencies. This book acts as an acerbic polemic, an insightful philosophical treatise, a visionary theological manifesto, a piquant literary criticism, and a perceptive psychological framework.
That being said, my advice to those interested in Girard is to do some homework before hand - on his theory (youtube, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Freud. I was surprised at the third part of the book, this was the part that had to do with individual psychology and I was completely lost for most of it. Girard's summary of Freud is enlightening and stimulating in its acidity but the implementation of his own definitions in place of Freud's is still obscure to me, this is the part I will have to go back to first, after reading some Freud.
I love the conversational style that makes it more fluid and easier to follow, although you're pretty mental if you believe you will completely understand everything after the first go. I knew some of Girard's theory from youtube and some online articles. This helped me out but it was definitely not enough to get me all the way through. I am also pretty sure there is no perfect way to start digesting a theory so dense and profound; you kinda just have to start somewhere. I think this is a good place to start.
The book is titanic in scope and its effects both on culture at large and the church are still lying in the wait. The next century will be about grappling with the ideas of Rene Girard. His readings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the anthropological structuralists is biting and precise; at once giving their ideas respect but in the same sentence correcting their misreading and inconsistencies. This book acts as an acerbic polemic, an insightful philosophical treatise, a visionary theological manifesto, a piquant literary criticism, and a perceptive psychological framework.
That being said, my advice to those interested in Girard is to do some homework before hand - on his theory (youtube, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Freud. I was surprised at the third part of the book, this was the part that had to do with individual psychology and I was completely lost for most of it. Girard's summary of Freud is enlightening and stimulating in its acidity but the implementation of his own definitions in place of Freud's is still obscure to me, this is the part I will have to go back to first, after reading some Freud.
May 28, 2022
En este libro, René Girard expone su teoría del deseo mimético y desarrolla sus implicaciones para el establecimiento de la cultura, la interpretación de los textos judeo-cristianos y las relaciones interindividuales. El planteamiento es sugerente y el libro contiene muchas ideas interesantes. Sin embargo, las evidencias y los razonamientos aportados son demasiado limitados como para aceptar las pretensiones científicas del texto.
En la primera parte del libro se expone la idea básica del deso mimético y sus implicaciones para el establecimiento de la cultura. El deseo mimético consiste en desear algo porque otro lo desea, no por el objeto en sí. Según Girard, el deseo mimético lleva al conflicto creciente; la única forma de acabar con este conflicto es focalizarlo en torno a una víctima particular (al ser el conflicto mimético en ultima instancia arbitrario, esta transferencia es posible), el chivo expiatorio. Esta víctima emisaria se considera tanto culpable del conflicto como generadora de la armonía final, de modo que se sacraliza. Este es el origen de la religión y de la cultura. En una segunda etapa se crean prohibiciones, que impedirían el conflicto, y ritos, que reproducen el proceso de forma atenuada para lograr la reconciliación final. Para justificar la validez de su teoría Girard apela principalmente a la mitología y los ritos de diversas culturas que, según él, siempre (o casi siempre, el texto no es consistente en este punto) contienen de manera explícita o figurada una expulsión o linchamiento, que evocaría el linchamiento real existente en la base de toda cultura.
La exposición, aunque sugerente, no es satisfactoria ya que no hay si quiera un intento de análisis sistemático de ritos y mitologías de diversas culturas. En lugar de ello, se nos presentan algunos ejemplos concretos que parecen estar en línea con los planteamientos del autor (con más o menos contorsiones interpretativas), pero en ningún caso son suficientes para establecer la universalidad del principio planteado. Una línea de investigación que podría tener cierta utilidad apoyar o refutar la teoría, consistiría en examinar los ritos y mitología de culturas con distinto grado de evolución cultural, y examinar si las mas primitivas presentan más claramente los motivos de linchamiento propuestos (ya que se plantea que en origen los ritos y mitología se refieren claramente al linchamiento originario que creó la cultura, pero con el tiempo se van volviendo más simbólicos y complejos). Por otro lado, se afirma que todo deseo es mimético y (al menos implícitamente) que todo conflicto lo es; ambas afirmaciones parecen excesivas y no se aporta ninguna evidencia sustancial para establecerlas. Otras tesis como que el tratamiento de los muertos, la caza o la prohibición del incesto tengan su origen en la relación con la víctima emisaria parecen altamente especulativas, y es fácil proponer explicaciones más sencillas.
En la segunda parte del libro, se interpreta la Biblia dando una importancia central a la idea del chivo expiatorio. Se plantea que en el Antiguo Testamento se desautorizan progresivamente los sacrificios, y finalmente en el Nuevo Testamento se revela claramente el mecanismo victimario, haciéndolo caer sobre la víctima más inocente, Jesucristo. El Sermón del Reino de Jesucristo se interpreta como la presentación de dos opciones: o bien la humanidad renuncia a la violencia (incluyendo el mecanismo victimario) y se alcanza la armonía mediante el amor, o bien se persiste en la violencia y se llegará a un apocalipsis, entendido como crisis generalizada producida por la rivalidad mimética. Sin embargo, el cristianismo se entiende equivocadamente, dándosele una interpretación sacrificial, y fundándose así una cultura similar a las tradicionales. Este cristianismo sacrificial, sin embargo, prepara a la humanidad para poder entender el verdadero mensaje. Una vez ha llegado a todo el mundo, se puede entender el mensaje real. La situación actual de posible destrucción mundial (derivada de las armas nucleares, por las que había una preocupación particular en los 70, cuando se escribió el libro) se corresponde con el apocalipsis; o bien renunciamos a la violencia o perecemos, lo que muestra la verdad del evangelio y de esta interpretación. Jesucristo se presenta como la única persona que renuncia por completo a la violencia, lo cual es necesario para que sea el ejemplo para la futura vida pacífica de la humanidad y para que su muerte revele claramente la problemática del mecanismo victimario. De este modo, la pasión se considera la única forma de revelar el mecanismo victimario.
Todas estas afirmaciones resultan muy problemáticas. Por un lado, si la situación de posible destrucción nuclear del mundo demuestra la veracidad del evangelio, ¿demuestra entonces también la veracidad de todas las profecías apocalípticas? Se afirma que Jesucristo es la única persona que renuncia completamente a la violencia, lo que se considera central para la interpretación, pero se ignora completamente la expulsión de los mercaderes del templo, donde Jesucristo actúa violentamente (y que aparece en los cuatro evangelios); también parece ignorarse que otras figuras no cristianas también han renunciado a la violencia, como Buda, la tradición Jainista, o más recientemente Ghandi. También resulta difícil aceptar que la Pasión es la única forma de revelar el mecanismo victimario, cuando en la práctica nadie parece ver esa idea en los evangelios, y sin embargo sí es perfectamente comprensible cuando se explica prosaicamente (ante esto, Girard probablemente contestaría que una explicación prosaica del mecanismo victimario es inteligible actualmente únicamente por la influencia de la cultura judeocristiana; pero esto podría ser examinado, ¿no hay culturas o grupos que hayan entendido el mecanismo sin la influencia judeo-cristiana? Este tipo de análisis serían necesarios para empezar a establecer la tesis que Girard propone).
En la tercera parte del libro se argumenta que el deseo mimético explica mucho mejor el masoquismo, las relaciones triangulares y el narcisismo que la teoría Freudiana. Sin embargo, si, tal como se sostiene, todo el deseo es mimético, estas situaciones deberían ser mucho más comunes, y no darse de manera excepcional como sucede en la realidad. Girard analiza, además de textos freuidanos, obras literarias de Proust y Dostoyevsky.
En definitiva, el libro plantea varias ideas que resultan interesantes y potencialmente fecundas, pero en ningún caso alcanza a cumplir el extremadamente ambicioso objetivo que se marca, que no es menos que establecer científicamente una nueva base para la antropología y la psicología y demostrar la verdad del texto evangélico.
En la primera parte del libro se expone la idea básica del deso mimético y sus implicaciones para el establecimiento de la cultura. El deseo mimético consiste en desear algo porque otro lo desea, no por el objeto en sí. Según Girard, el deseo mimético lleva al conflicto creciente; la única forma de acabar con este conflicto es focalizarlo en torno a una víctima particular (al ser el conflicto mimético en ultima instancia arbitrario, esta transferencia es posible), el chivo expiatorio. Esta víctima emisaria se considera tanto culpable del conflicto como generadora de la armonía final, de modo que se sacraliza. Este es el origen de la religión y de la cultura. En una segunda etapa se crean prohibiciones, que impedirían el conflicto, y ritos, que reproducen el proceso de forma atenuada para lograr la reconciliación final. Para justificar la validez de su teoría Girard apela principalmente a la mitología y los ritos de diversas culturas que, según él, siempre (o casi siempre, el texto no es consistente en este punto) contienen de manera explícita o figurada una expulsión o linchamiento, que evocaría el linchamiento real existente en la base de toda cultura.
La exposición, aunque sugerente, no es satisfactoria ya que no hay si quiera un intento de análisis sistemático de ritos y mitologías de diversas culturas. En lugar de ello, se nos presentan algunos ejemplos concretos que parecen estar en línea con los planteamientos del autor (con más o menos contorsiones interpretativas), pero en ningún caso son suficientes para establecer la universalidad del principio planteado. Una línea de investigación que podría tener cierta utilidad apoyar o refutar la teoría, consistiría en examinar los ritos y mitología de culturas con distinto grado de evolución cultural, y examinar si las mas primitivas presentan más claramente los motivos de linchamiento propuestos (ya que se plantea que en origen los ritos y mitología se refieren claramente al linchamiento originario que creó la cultura, pero con el tiempo se van volviendo más simbólicos y complejos). Por otro lado, se afirma que todo deseo es mimético y (al menos implícitamente) que todo conflicto lo es; ambas afirmaciones parecen excesivas y no se aporta ninguna evidencia sustancial para establecerlas. Otras tesis como que el tratamiento de los muertos, la caza o la prohibición del incesto tengan su origen en la relación con la víctima emisaria parecen altamente especulativas, y es fácil proponer explicaciones más sencillas.
En la segunda parte del libro, se interpreta la Biblia dando una importancia central a la idea del chivo expiatorio. Se plantea que en el Antiguo Testamento se desautorizan progresivamente los sacrificios, y finalmente en el Nuevo Testamento se revela claramente el mecanismo victimario, haciéndolo caer sobre la víctima más inocente, Jesucristo. El Sermón del Reino de Jesucristo se interpreta como la presentación de dos opciones: o bien la humanidad renuncia a la violencia (incluyendo el mecanismo victimario) y se alcanza la armonía mediante el amor, o bien se persiste en la violencia y se llegará a un apocalipsis, entendido como crisis generalizada producida por la rivalidad mimética. Sin embargo, el cristianismo se entiende equivocadamente, dándosele una interpretación sacrificial, y fundándose así una cultura similar a las tradicionales. Este cristianismo sacrificial, sin embargo, prepara a la humanidad para poder entender el verdadero mensaje. Una vez ha llegado a todo el mundo, se puede entender el mensaje real. La situación actual de posible destrucción mundial (derivada de las armas nucleares, por las que había una preocupación particular en los 70, cuando se escribió el libro) se corresponde con el apocalipsis; o bien renunciamos a la violencia o perecemos, lo que muestra la verdad del evangelio y de esta interpretación. Jesucristo se presenta como la única persona que renuncia por completo a la violencia, lo cual es necesario para que sea el ejemplo para la futura vida pacífica de la humanidad y para que su muerte revele claramente la problemática del mecanismo victimario. De este modo, la pasión se considera la única forma de revelar el mecanismo victimario.
Todas estas afirmaciones resultan muy problemáticas. Por un lado, si la situación de posible destrucción nuclear del mundo demuestra la veracidad del evangelio, ¿demuestra entonces también la veracidad de todas las profecías apocalípticas? Se afirma que Jesucristo es la única persona que renuncia completamente a la violencia, lo que se considera central para la interpretación, pero se ignora completamente la expulsión de los mercaderes del templo, donde Jesucristo actúa violentamente (y que aparece en los cuatro evangelios); también parece ignorarse que otras figuras no cristianas también han renunciado a la violencia, como Buda, la tradición Jainista, o más recientemente Ghandi. También resulta difícil aceptar que la Pasión es la única forma de revelar el mecanismo victimario, cuando en la práctica nadie parece ver esa idea en los evangelios, y sin embargo sí es perfectamente comprensible cuando se explica prosaicamente (ante esto, Girard probablemente contestaría que una explicación prosaica del mecanismo victimario es inteligible actualmente únicamente por la influencia de la cultura judeocristiana; pero esto podría ser examinado, ¿no hay culturas o grupos que hayan entendido el mecanismo sin la influencia judeo-cristiana? Este tipo de análisis serían necesarios para empezar a establecer la tesis que Girard propone).
En la tercera parte del libro se argumenta que el deseo mimético explica mucho mejor el masoquismo, las relaciones triangulares y el narcisismo que la teoría Freudiana. Sin embargo, si, tal como se sostiene, todo el deseo es mimético, estas situaciones deberían ser mucho más comunes, y no darse de manera excepcional como sucede en la realidad. Girard analiza, además de textos freuidanos, obras literarias de Proust y Dostoyevsky.
En definitiva, el libro plantea varias ideas que resultan interesantes y potencialmente fecundas, pero en ningún caso alcanza a cumplir el extremadamente ambicioso objetivo que se marca, que no es menos que establecer científicamente una nueva base para la antropología y la psicología y demostrar la verdad del texto evangélico.
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