The Girard Reader (2 page)

instances only main entries have been so indicated, although some cases I marked

subcategories I considered important (e.g., "Internal and External Mediation" under

"Model/Mediator").

This book was put together with the continual support and encouragement of Michael Leach

of Crossroad, the fine editorial work of John Eagleson of Crossroad, and the expert,

sometimes amazing clerical assistance of Deborah Pratt. I thank them warmly. And to

Yvonne: once more,

betach bah lev ba'elah
( Proverbs 31:11).

-x-

Acknowledgments

Permission is gratefully acknowledged to reprint the following articles and excerpts:

René Girard, "Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism,"
Berkshire

Review 14
( 1979): 9-19. This periodical is no longer published. It is reprinted here by

approval of Williams College through Michael Bell, former editor.

René Girard,
Violence and the Sacred
, trans. Patrick Gregory ( Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1977), 1-18; 39-44; 169-85; 309-14, reprinted by permission

of Johns Hopkins University Press and the author.

René Girard,
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
, trans. Yvonne Freccero ( Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1-17; 290-314, reprinted by permission of Johns

Hopkins University Press and the author.

René Girard,
The Scapegoat
, trans. Yvonne Freccero ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1986), 1-23, reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University

Press and the author.

René Girard, "Dionysus versus the Crucified,"
Modern Language Notes 99
( 1984): 816-

35, reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press and the author.

"Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: An Interview with René Girard," interview by Rebecca

Adams,
Religion and Literature 25
( 1993): 22-26, reprinted by permission of The

University of Notre Dame Press.

René Girard, "A Venda Myth Analyzed," in
René Girard and Myth: An Introduction
by

Richard J. Golsan ( New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 151-79,

reprinted by permission of Richard J. Golsan.

René Girard,
Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World
, trans. Stephen Bann and

Michael Metteer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), pages 141-79; 180-

82; 205-20), reprinted with the permission of Stanford University Press. English

translation copyright

-xi-

© 1987 The Athlone Press. English edition originally published by The Athlone Press,

London.

René Girard, "How Can Satan Cast Out Satan?" in Georg Braulik, Walter Gross, and

Sean McEvenue, eds.,
Biblische Theologie und gesellschaftlicher Wandel
( Freiburg im

Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1993), 12541, reprinted by permission of Verlag Herder.

René Girard, "Is There Anti-Semitism in the Gospels?"
Biblical Interpretation 1
, no. 3 (

1993): 339-49, 351-52, reprinted by permission of E. J. Brill.

Bibliography of René Girard's writings in French and English provided by Girard-

Dokumentation, University of Innsbruck.

-xii-

René Girard: A Biographical Sketch

René Girard was born in 1923, in Avignon on Christmas day. He received his Baccalaureate

in Philosophy at the Lycée of Avignon in 1941 and attended the Ecole des Chartres in Paris

from 1943 to 1947. He graduated as an archiviste-paléographe, i.e., a specialist in medieval

studies. It was in Paris that he had his only brush with the occupying Germans. His primary

academic interest at that stage of his life was history and cultural patterns. His thesis was
"La
vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle" (Private life in Avignon in the

second half of the fifteenth century)
.

At this point, in 1947, he had an opportunity to spend a year in the United States. It turned out

to be forty-nine years and counting. He matriculated at Indiana University in history, where

he received his Ph.D. in 1950. His dissertation topic was
"American Opinion of France,

19401943."
It may seem quite removed from his later turn to literature and interdisciplinary research, and in some respects that perception is correct. However, it is related to his later

work to the extent that he has always been interested in cultural modes, fashions, and

opinions, all of which express and revolve around mimetic desire, the core of his thought.

Moreover, as a private citizen he continues to take a lively interest in Franco-American relations specifically and international affairs generally.

The young Girard was assigned to teach courses in French at Indiana. When he was asked to

offer courses in literature which he had never read, a fateful period for his career began,

although he could not have been clearly aware of this at the time. His doctoral work was in

history, but he started to become more and more fascinated with the literature that he was

assigned to teach. He would eventually, certainly by the time of his first book, be identified

as a literary critic. However, some of Girard's early published research was historiographical

(e.g., marriage in Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth century; Voltaire and classical

historiography), and one can see in some other early articles that the creative work of writers

in relation to their historical circumstances was one of his main concerns (e.g., articles about

reflections on art in Malraux's novels; history in the work of Saint-John Perse; the situation of

-1-

the American poet; Saint-Simon and literary criticism). His
Dostoevsky
, first published in

1963, was composed as a kind of running commentary on Dostoyevsky's life and the

intellectual and social movements, as seen through Dostoyevsky's eyes, of that period of

Russian history.

But Girard's initial articles did not appear soon enough to win him tenure at Indiana

University. He succeeded in publishing a great burst of articles by 1953 (seven in all), but it

was too late, as the decision had already been made at Indiana not to keep him. He went to

Duke University as an instructor and occupied a position of assistant professor at Bryn Mawr

from 1953 to 1957. From there he accepted a position as associate professor at Johns Hopkins

University, becoming a full professor in 1961. He served as chair of the Department of

Romance Languages from 1965 to 1968.

It was early in this first Johns Hopkins period that he underwent a momentous spiritual

change. In the winter of 1959 he experienced a conversion to Christian faith which had been

preceded by a kind of intellectual conversion while he was working on his first book. These

two conversions are described in the interview at the end of the Reader
. 1.

It was during his tenure as chairman of Romance Languages that he facilitated a symposium

at Johns Hopkins which was to be important for the emergence of critical theory in America.

With Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato he organized an international conference in

October of 1966, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man." Participants

included Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldman, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan,

Georges Poulet, Tsvetan Todorov, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and others. It was at this symposium

that Derrida gave his widely read and cited paper,
"La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le

discours des sciences humaines" (Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human

sciences)
. This paper confirmed for Girard that Derrida was a critic to be reckoned with, and

he found Derrida's subsequent essay
"La pharmacie de Platon"
( Plato's pharmacy) to be particularly significant. Girard would develop the
pharmakos
or scapegoat aspect of Derrida's

analysis of writing/poison, placing it within history and actual social existence rather than

restricting it to language and intertextuality like Derrida.

With his first two books,
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
and
Dostoievski: du double à l'unité
,

2. G
irard had rejected the literary retreat of the 1950s and early 1960s from concern with

history, society, and the psyche. However, his first two books did not scandalize the

intellectual world like his later writings, beginning with
Things Hidden sincethe Foundation

of the World

____________________

1. See also
Quand ces choses commenceront
, 190-95, in the bibliography of Girard's

writings.

2. Scheduled to be published by Crossroad Publishing Co. in 1997 as
Resurrection from the

Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky
, trans. James G. Williams.

-2-

the Foundation of the World. These initial works seemed to stay within a literary context and

they focused on desire, which enjoyed a vogue by the 1960s. He analyzed the work of

Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoyevsky in terms of "triangular" or "mimetic"

desire: our desires are copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our

objects of desire. But the model or mediator we imitate can become our rival if we desire

precisely the object he is imagined to have. Or other imitators of the same model may

compete with us for the same objects. Jealousy and envy are inevitably aroused in this

mimetic situation. The romantic concept of a spontaneous desire is illusory.

As he began to study primitive religions from the standpoint of the mimetic concept, he saw

that mimesis usually led to collective violence against a single victim. He turned to the great

Greek tragedians. Once the
pharmakos
idea took hold in his thinking, he became more and

more convinced of the power and relevance of these dramatists, particularly Sophocles'

Oedipus cycle and Euripides with his stunning exposure of mimetic violence in
The Bacchae
.

He found fascinating Freud's insight in
Totem and Taboo
, although Freud turned violent

origins into a onceand-for-all myth rather than understanding the scapegoat mechanism as a

constant factor in human culture and human relations. The mimetic concept, extended to

include the scapegoat mechanism and refined by the explication of
The Bacchae
and the

critique of Freud: to grasp these developments in his thinking is to grasp the essential

argument of
Violence and the Sacred
.

In 1971 Girard accepted a distinguished professor position at the State University of New

York at Buffalo, where he remained until 1976. During this period he became a close friend

of Cesáreo Bandera, now University Distinguished Professor of Spanish Literature at the

University of North Carolina. Bandera was and has remained an important conversation

partner for Girard. In 1972
La violence et le sacré
was published in France (in English

Violence and the Sacred
, 1977). He had published scarcely anything on Christianity and the

Bible, but that was about to change, and a new stage of his career was imminent as he left

SUNY/ Buffalo in 1976.

In 1976 Girard accepted a second appointment at Johns Hopkins University, with the title of

John M. Beall Professor of the Humanities. The English translation of
La violence et le sacré

came out in 1977, and for the first time he became the subject of reviews, interviews, and

scholarly forums in North America.
Violence and the Sacred
is the one work by Girard that

many American scholars have read, although some literary critics have read only
Deceit,

Desire, and the Novel
.

The most important book Girard has produced appeared in French in 1978,
Des choses

cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World)
. In

the form of a dialogue with two

-3-

psychiatrists, Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, its format is a triptych: (1)

Fundamental Anthropology, (2) The Judeo-Christian Scriptures, (3) Interdividual

Psychology. In this book Girard declared himself, in effect, as a Christian and advocated a

nonsacrificial reading of the Gospels and the divinity of Christ. In France he was a
cause

célèbre
or a
bête noire
, because his argument for a universal anthropological theory,

combined with the position that the deepest insights of Western culture stem from biblical

revelation, shocked and alienated those who held to the assumption of the all-encompassing

nature of language and who tended to ignore Christianity or view it with contempt. However,

for many who were seeking a way to affirm the reality of human experience as a referent

outside of language or for those who were searching for a way of talking about the biblical

God of history, his clear concepts and outspoken positioning of himself against fashionable

intellectual modes came across as the discovery of treasure hidden in a field.

This public discussion of Girard's work happened primarily in France, and to some extent in

other European countries. Due to the impact of
Things Hidden
, there was a new reading

audience for
Violence and the Sacred
. Interest in Girard and the spread of his influence have