This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. It needs additional citations for verification. Tagged since October 2010. It may contain original research. Tagged since October 2010.

Mimesis (Ancient Greek: μίμησις (mīmēsis), from μιμεῖσθαι (mīmeisthai), "to imitate," from μῖμος (mimos), "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self.^[1]

In ancient Greece, mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis, or imitation, with diegesis, or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society, and its use has changed and been re-interpreted many times since then.

One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis, understood as a form of realism in the arts, is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Published in 1946 and written while the author was in exile from Nazi Germany, the book opens with a famous comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible. From these two seminal Western texts, Auerbach builds the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western literature, including the Modernist novels being written at the time Auerbach began his study.

The Frankfurt school critical theorist T.W. Adorno made use of mimesis as a central philosophical term, interpreting it as a way in which works of art embodied a form of reason that was non-repressive and non-violent.^{[citation needed]}

Mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Philip Sidney, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Erich Auerbach, Luce Irigaray, René Girard, Nikolas Kompridis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Michael Taussig, Merlin Donald, and Homi Bhabha.^{[citation needed]}

Classical definitions[link]

Plato[link]

Both Plato and Aristotle saw in mimesis the representation of nature. Plato wrote about mimesis in both Ion and The Republic (Books II, III and X). In Ion, he states that poetry is the art of divine madness, or inspiration. Because the poet is subject to this divine madness, it is not his/her function to convey the truth.^{[citation needed]} As Plato has it, truth is the concern of the philosopher only. As culture in those days did not consist in the solitary reading of books, but in the listening to performances, the recitals of orators (and poets), or the acting out by classical actors of tragedy, Plato maintained in his critique that theatre was not sufficient in conveying the truth.^{[citation needed]} He was concerned that actors or orators were thus able to persuade an audience by rhetoric rather than by telling the truth.^{[citation needed]}

In Book II of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates' dialogue with his pupils. Socrates warns we should not seriously regard poetry as being capable of attaining the truth and that we who listen to poetry should be on our guard against its seductions, since the poet has no place in our idea of God.^[2]

In developing this in Book X, Plato tells of Socrates' metaphor of the three beds: one bed exists as an idea made by God (the Platonic ideal); one is made by the carpenter, in imitation of God's idea; one is made by the artist in imitation of the carpenter's.^[3]

So the artist's bed is twice removed from the truth. The copiers only touch on a small part of things as they really are, where a bed may appear differently from various points of view, looked at obliquely or directly, or differently again in a mirror. So painters or poets, though they may paint or describe a carpenter or any other maker of things, know nothing of the carpenter's (the craftsman's) art,^{[citation needed]} and though the better painters or poets they are, the more faithfully their works of art will resemble the reality of the carpenter making a bed, nonetheless the imitators will still not attain the truth (of God's creation).^{[citation needed]}

The poets, beginning with Homer, far from improving and educating humanity, do not possess the knowledge of craftsmen and are mere imitators who copy again and again images of virtue and rhapsodise about them, but never reach the truth in the way the superior philosophers do.

Aristotle[link]

Part of a series on
Aristotelianism
Aristotelianism Peripatetic school physics ethics term logic view of women view of God (unmoved mover)
Corpus Aristotelicum Physics Organon Nicomachean Ethics Politics Metaphysics On the Soul Rhetoric Poetics
Ideas Correspondence theory of truth hexis virtue ethics (golden mean) four causes telos phronesis eudaimonia arete temporal finitism antiperistasis nature potentiality and actuality universals (substantial form) hylomorphism mimesis substances (ousia) and accidents essence category of being magnanimity sensus communis rational animal genus-differentia definition
Influences and followers Plato Alexander the Great Theophrastus Avicenna Averroes Maimonides St. Thomas Aquinas Alasdair MacIntyre Martha Nussbaum
Related Platonism Commentaries on Aristotle Scholasticism Conimbricenses Pseudo-Aristotle
Philosophy portal
v t e

Similar to Plato's writings about mimesis, Aristotle also defined mimesis as the perfection and imitation of nature. Art is not only imitation but also the use of mathematical ideas and symmetry in the search for the perfect, the timeless, and contrasting being with becoming. Nature is full of change, decay, and cycles, but art can also search for what is everlasting and the first causes of natural phenomena. Aristotle wrote about the idea of four causes in nature. The first formal cause is like a blueprint, or an immortal idea. The second cause is the material, or what a thing is made out of. The third cause is the process and the agent, in which the artist or creator makes the thing. The fourth cause is the good, or the purpose and end of a thing, known as telos.

Aristotle's Poetics is often referred to as the counterpart to this Platonic conception of poetry. Poetics is his treatise on the subject of mimesis. Aristotle was not against literature as such; he stated that human beings are mimetic beings, feeling an urge to create texts (art) that reflect and represent reality.

Aristotle considered it important that there be a certain distance between the work of art on the one hand and life on the other; we draw knowledge and consolation from tragedies only because they do not happen to us. Without this distance, tragedy could not give rise to catharsis. However, it is equally important that the text causes the audience to identify with the characters and the events in the text, and unless this identification occurs, it does not touch us as an audience. Aristotle holds that it is through "simulated representation", mimesis, that we respond to the acting on the stage which is conveying to us what the characters feel, so that we may empathise with them in this way through the mimetic form of dramatic roleplay. It is the task of the dramatist to produce the tragic enactment in order to accomplish this empathy by means of what is taking place on stage.

In short, catharsis can only be achieved if we see something that is both recognisable and distant. Aristotle argued that literature is more interesting as a means of learning than history, because history deals with specific facts that have happened, and which are contingent, whereas literature, although sometimes based on history, deals with events that could have taken place or ought to have taken place.

Aristotle thought of drama as being "an imitation of an action" and of tragedy as "falling from a higher to a lower estate" and so being removed to a less ideal situation in more tragic circumstances than before. He posited the characters in tragedy as being better than the average human being, and those of comedy as being worse.

Michael Davis, a translator and commentator of Aristotle writes:

Contrast to diegesis[link]

It was also Plato and Aristotle who contrasted mimesis with diegesis (Greek διήγησις). Mimesis shows, rather than tells, by means of directly represented action that is enacted. Diegesis, however, is the telling of the story by a narrator; the author narrates action indirectly and describes what is in the characters' minds and emotions. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the invisible narrator or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters.

In Book III of his Republic (c. 373 BCE), Plato examines the style of poetry (the term includes comedy, tragedy, epic and lyric poetry):^[5] All types narrate events, he argues, but by differing means. He distinguishes between narration or report (diegesis) and imitation or representation (mimesis). Tragedy and comedy, he goes on to explain, are wholly imitative types; the dithyramb is wholly narrative; and their combination is found in epic poetry. When reporting or narrating, "the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is any one else"; when imitating, the poet produces an "assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture".^[6] In dramatic texts, the poet never speaks directly; in narrative texts, the poet speaks as himself or herself.^[7]

In his Poetics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle argues that kinds of poetry (the term includes drama, flute music, and lyre music for Aristotle) may be differentiated in three ways: according to their medium, according to their objects, and according to their mode or manner (section I); "For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration—in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us" (section III).

Though they conceive of mimesis in quite different ways, its relation with diegesis is identical in Plato's and Aristotle's formulations; one represents, the other reports; one embodies, the other narrates; one transforms, the other indicates; one knows only a continuous present, the other looks back on a past.

In ludology, mimesis is sometimes used to refer to the self-consistency of a represented world, and the availability of in-game rationalisations for elements of the gameplay. In this context, mimesis has an associated grade: highly self-consistent worlds that provide explanations for their puzzles and game mechanics are said to display a higher degree of mimesis. This usage can be traced back to the essay "Crimes Against Mimesis".^[8]

[edit] Dionysian imitatio

Dionysian imitatio is the influential literary method of imitation as formulated by Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BCE, which conceived it as technique of rhetoric: emulating, adaptating, reworking and enriching a source text by an earlier author.^[9][10]

Dionysius' concept marked a significant depart from the concept of mimesis formulated by Aristotle's in the 4th century BCE, which was only concerned with "imitation of nature" instead of the "imitation of other authors".^[9] Latin orators and rhetoricians adopted the literary method of Dionysius' imitatio and discarded Aristotle's mimesis.^[9]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge[link]

Mimesis, or imitation, as he referred to it, was a crucial concept for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theory of the imagination. Coleridge begins his thoughts on imitation and poetry from Plato, Aristotle and Philip Sidney, adopting their concept of imitation of nature instead of other writers. His significant^{[citation needed]} departure from the earlier thinkers lies in his arguing that art does not reveal a unity of essence through its ability to achieve sameness with nature. Coleridge claims:

[T]he composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the SAME throughout the radically DIFFERENT, or the different throughout a base radically the same.^[11]

Here, Coleridge opposes imitation to copying, the latter referring to William Wordsworth's notion that poetry should duplicate nature by capturing actual speech. Coleridge instead argues that the unity of essence is revealed precisely through different materialities and media. Imitation, therefore, reveals the sameness of processes in nature.

Luce Irigaray[link]

The Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray used the term to describe a form of resistance where women imperfectly imitate stereotypes about themselves so as to show up these stereotypes and undermine them.^[12]

Michael Taussig[link]

In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), the anthropologist Michael Taussig examines the way that people from one culture adopt another's nature and culture (the process of mimesis) at the same time as distancing themselves from it (the process of alterity). He describes how a legendary tribe, the "white Indians", or Cuna, have adopted in various representations figures and images reminiscent of the white people they encountered in the past (without acknowledging doing so).

Taussig, however, criticises anthropology for reducing yet another culture, that of the Cuna, for having been so impressed by their exotic (and superior) technologies of the whites, that they raised them to the status of gods. To Taussig, this reductionism is suspect, and he argues thus from both sides in his Mimesis and Alterity to see values in the anthropologists' perspective, at the same time as defending the independence of a lived culture from anthropological reductionism. (Taussig 1993:47,48)

See also[link]

• Illusionistic tradition
• Life imitating art

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN 0-691-11336-X.
• Coleridge, S.T. 1983. Biographia Literaria. v.1 eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. ISBN 0-691-09874-3.
• Davis, Michael. 1999. The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics. South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine's P. ISBN 1-890318-62-0.
• Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents Ser. London and New York: Methuen. ISBN 0-416-72060-9.
• Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. 1992. Mimesis: Culture—Art—Society. Trans. Don Reneau. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1995. ISBN 0-520-08459-4.
• Kaufmann, Walter. 1992. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN 0-691-02005-1.
• Pfister, Manfred. 1977. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Trans. John Halliday. European Studies in English Literature Ser. Cambridige: Cambridge UP, 1988. ISBN 0-521-42383-X.
• Prang, Christoph. 2010. Semiomimesis: The influence of semiotics on the creation of literary texts. Peter Bichsel's Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch and Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy. In: Semiotica. Vol. 2010, Issue 182, S. 375–96.
• Tatarkiewicz, Władysław. 1980. A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics. Trans. Christopher Kasparek. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ISBN 90-247-2233-0.
• Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90686-5.
• Snow, Kim; Crethar, Hugh; Robey, Patricia & Carlson, John. 2005. "Theories of Family Therapy (Part 1)". As cited in "Family Therapy Review: Preparing for Comprehensive Licensing Examination." 2005. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-4312-4.
• Sen, R. K., Mimesis, Calcutta: Syamaprasad College, 2001
• Sen, R. K., Aesthetic Enjoyment: Its Background in Philosophy and Medicine, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1966

External links[link]

Look up mimesis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Plato's Republic II, transl. Benjamin Jowell
• Plato's Republic III, transl. Benjamin Jowell
• Plato's Republic X, transl. Benjamin Jowell
• INFINITE REGRESS OF FORMS Plato's recounting of the "bedness" theory involved in the bed metaphor
• The University of Chicago, Theories of Media Keywords
• University of Barcelona Mimesi (Research on Poetics & Rhetorics in Catalan Literature)
• Mimesislab, Laboratory of Pedagogy of Expression of the Department of Educational Design of the University "Roma Tre"
• "Mimesis", an article by Władysław Tatarkiewicz for the Dictionary of History of Ideas

René Girard
René Girard in 2007
Born	(1923-12-25) December 25, 1923 (age 88) Avignon, France
Residence	Stanford, California
Institutions	Duke University, Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, State University of New York at Buffalo, Stanford University
Alma mater	Indiana University
Known for	mimetic desire scapegoat mechanism as origin of sacrifice and foundation of human culture

René Girard (born December 25, 1923, Avignon, France) is a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. He is the author of several books (see below), in which he developed the following ideas:

1. mimetic desire: all of our desires are borrowed from other people;
2. mimetic rivalry: all conflict originates in mimetic desire;
3. 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;
4. the Bible reveals the three previous ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

René Girard's writings cover many areas. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature that uses his hypotheses and ideas in the areas of literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Life and career[link]

René Noël Théophile Girard was born in Avignon on December 25, 1923.^[1] Between 1943 and 1947, he studied medieval history at the École des Chartes, Paris. The subject of his thesis was "Private life in Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth century" ("La vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle").^[2]

In 1947, Girard went to Indiana University on a one-year fellowship, but eventually pursued most of his career in the United States. The subject of his PhD at Indiana University was "American Opinion of France, 1940-1943".^[2] Although his research was in history, he was also assigned to teach French literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation as a literary critic by publishing influential essays on such authors as Albert Camus and Marcel Proust. He received his PhD in 1950 and stayed at Indiana University until 1953. He occupied positions at Duke University and Bryn Mawr College from 1953 to 1957, after which he moved to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he became a full professor in 1961. In that year, he also published his first book: Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1966).

For several years, he moved back and forth between the State University of New York at Buffalo and Johns Hopkins University. The two most important books published in this period are La Violence et le sacré (1972; Violence and the Sacred, 1977) and Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978; Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 1987).

In 1981 he became Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1995. During this period, he published Le Bouc émissaire (1982), La route antique des hommes pervers (1985), A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (1991) and Quand ces choses commenceront ... (1994). In 1990, a group of scholars founded the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) with a goal to "explore, criticize, and develop the mimetic model of the relationship between violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture".^[3][4] This organization also organizes a yearly conference devoted to topics related to mimetic theory, scapegoating, violence, and religion. René Girard is Honorary Chair of COV&R. Cofounder and first president of the COV&R was the Roman Catholic theologian Raymund Schwager.

In 1985, he received his first honorary degree at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands; several others followed later. On March 17, 2005, René Girard was elected to the Académie française. He continues publishing articles and books.

His work has inspired interdisciplinary research projects and experimental research such as the Mimetic Theory project sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.^[5]

A more detailed biographical sketch is available in The Girard Reader, edited by James G. Williams.^[6]

Girard's thought[link]

Mimetic desire[link]

After almost a decade of teaching French literature in the United States, Girard began to develop a new way of speaking about literary texts. Beyond the "uniqueness" of individual works, he tried to discover their common structural properties after noticing that characters in great fiction evolved in a system of relationships otherwise common to the wider generality of novels. But there was a distinction to be made:

Only the great writers succeed in painting these mechanisms faithfully, without falsifying them: we have here a system of relationships that paradoxically, or rather not paradoxically at all, has less variability the greater a writer is.^[7]

So there did indeed exist "psychological laws" as Marcel Proust calls them.^[8] These laws and this system are the consequences of a fundamental reality grasped by the novelists, which Girard called the mimetic character of desire. This is the content of his first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961). We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object is always provoked by the desire of another person — the model — for this same object. This means that the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct: there is always a triangular relationship of subject, model, and object. Through the object, one is drawn to the model, whom Girard calls the mediator: it is in fact the model who is sought. René Girard calls desire "metaphysical" in the measure that, as soon as a desire is something more than a simple need or appetite, "all desire is a desire to be",^[9] it is an aspiration, the dream of a fullness attributed to the mediator.

Mediation is external when the mediator of the desire is socially beyond the reach of the subject or, for example, a fictional character, as in the case of Amadis de Gaula and Don Quixote. The hero lives a kind of folly that nonetheless remains optimistic. Mediation is internal when the mediator is at the same level as the subject. The mediator then transforms into a rival and an obstacle to the acquisition of the object, whose value increases as the rivalry grows. This is the universe of the novels of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky, which are particularly studied in this book.

Through their characters, our own behaviour is displayed. Everyone holds firmly to the illusion of the authenticity of one's own desires; the novelists implacably expose all the diversity of lies, dissimulations, maneuvers, and the snobbery of the Proustian heroes; these are all but "tricks of desire", which prevent one from facing the truth: envy and jealousy. These characters, desiring the being of the mediator, project upon him superhuman virtues while at the same time depreciating themselves, making him a god while making themselves slaves, in the measure that the mediator is an obstacle to them. Some, pursuing this logic, come to seek the failures that are the signs of the proximity of the ideal to which they aspire. This is masochism, which can turn into sadism.

This fundamental focus on mimetic desire would be pursued by René Girard throughout the rest of his career. It is interesting to note that the stress on imitation in humans was not a popular subject when Girard developed his theories^{[citation needed]}, but today there is independent support for his claims coming from empirical research in psychology and neuroscience (see below).

Violence and the sacred[link]

Since the mimetic rivalry that develops from the struggle for the possession of the objects is contagious, it leads to the threat of violence. René Girard himself says, "If there is a normal order in societies, it must be the fruit of an anterior crisis." ^[10] Turning his interest towards the anthropological domain, René Girard began to study anthropological literature and proposed his second great hypothesis: the victimization process, which is at the origin of archaic religion and which he sets forth in his second book Violence and the Sacred (1972).

If two individuals desire the same thing, there will soon be a third, then a fourth. This process quickly snowballs. Since from the beginning the desire is aroused by the other (and not by the object) the object is soon forgotten and the mimetic conflict transforms into a general antagonism. At this stage of the crisis the antagonists will no longer imitate each other's desires for an object, but each other's antagonism. They wanted to share the same object, but now they want to destroy the same enemy. So, a paroxysm of violence would tend to focus on an arbitrary victim and a unanimous antipathy would, mimetically, grow against him. The brutal elimination of the victim would reduce the appetite for violence that possessed everyone a moment before, and leaves the group suddenly appeased and calm. The victim lies before the group, appearing simultaneously as the origin of the crisis and as the one responsible for this miracle of renewed peace. He becomes sacred, that is to say the bearer of the prodigious power of defusing the crisis and bringing peace back. René Girard believes this to be the genesis of archaic religion, of ritual sacrifice as the repetition of the original event, of myth as an account of this event, of the taboos that forbid access to all the objects at the origin of the rivalries that degenerated into this absolutely traumatizing crisis. This religious elaboration takes place gradually over the course of the repetition of the mimetic crises whose resolution brings only a temporary peace. The elaboration of the rites and of the taboos constitutes a kind of empirical knowledge about violence.

Although explorers and anthropologists have not been able to witness events similar to these, which go back to the earliest times, indirect evidence for them abounds, such as the universality of ritual sacrifice and the innumerable myths that have been collected from the most varied peoples. If Girard's theory is true, then we will find in myths the culpability of the victim-god, depictions of the selection of the victim, and his power to beget the order that governs the group. And René Girard found these elements in numerous myths, beginning with that of Oedipus, which he analyzed in this and later books. On this question he opposes Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The phrase "scapegoat mechanism" was not coined by Girard himself; it had been used earlier by Kenneth Burke in Permanence and Change (1935) and A Grammar of Motives (1940). However, Girard took this concept from Burke and developed it much more extensively as an interpretation of human culture.

In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), Girard develops the implications of this discovery. The victimary process is the missing link between the animal world and the human world, the principle that explains the humanization of primates. It allows us to understand the need for sacrificial victims, which in turn explains the hunt which is primitively ritual, and the domestication of animals as a fortuitous result of the acclimatization of a reserve of victims, or agriculture. It shows that at the beginning of all culture is archaic religion, which Durkheim had sensed^{[citation needed]}. The elaboration of the rites and taboos by proto-human or human groups would take infinitely varied forms while obeying a rigorous practical sense that we can detect: the prevention of the return of the mimetic crisis. So we can find in archaic religion the origin of all political or cultural institutions.

According to Girard, just as the theory of Natural selection of species is the rational principle that explains the immense diversity of forms of life, the victimization process is the rational principle that explains the origin of the infinite diversity of cultural forms. The analogy with Darwin also extends to the scientific status of the theory, as each of these presents itself as a hypothesis that is not capable of being proven experimentally, given the extreme amounts of time necessary to the production of the phenomena in question, but which imposes itself by its great explanatory power.

Origin of language[link]

According to Girard, the origin of language is also related to scapegoating. After the first victim, after the murder of the first scapegoat, there were the first prohibitions and rituals, but these came into being before representation and language, hence before culture. And that means that "people" (perhaps not human beings) "will not start fighting again".^[11] René Girard says:

If mimetic disruption comes back, our instinct will tell us to do again what the sacred has done to save us, which is to kill the scapegoat. Therefore it would be the force of substitution of immolating another victim instead of the first. But the relationship of this process with representation is not one that can be defined in a clear-cut way. This process would be one that moves towards representation of the sacred, towards definition of the ritual as ritual and prohibition as prohibition. But this process would already begin prior the representation, you see, because it is directly produced by the experience of the misunderstood scapegoat.^[11]

According to Girard, the substitution of an immolated victim for the first, is "the very first symbolic sign created by the hominids".^[12] Girard also says this is the first time that one thing represents another thing, standing in the place of this (absent) one. This substitution is the beginning of representation and language, but also the beginning of sacrifice and ritual. The genesis of language and ritual is very slow and we must imagine that there are also kinds of rituals among the animals: "It is the originary scapegoating which prolongs itself in a process which can be infinitely long in moving from, how should I say, from instinctive ritualization, instinctive prohibition, instinctive separation of the antagonists, which you already find to a certain extent in animals, towards representation."^[11]

Unlike Eric Gans, Girard does not think that there is an original scene during which there is "a sudden shift from non-representation to representation",^[11] or a sudden shift from animality to humanity. According to the French sociologist Camille Tarot, it is hard to understand how the process of representation (symbolicity, language...) actually occurs and he has called this a black box in René Girard's theory.^[13]

René Girard also says:

One great characteristic of man is what they [the authors of the modern theory of evolution] call neoteny, the fact that the human infant is born premature, with an open skull, no hair and a total inability to fend for himself. To keep it alive, therefore, there must be some form of cultural protection, because in the world of mammals, such infants would not survive, they would be destroyed. Therefore there is a reason to believe that in the later stages of human evolution, culture and nature are in constant interaction. The first stages of this interaction must occur prior to language, but they must include forms of sacrifice and prohibition that create a space of non-violence around the mother and the children which make it possible to reach still higher stages of human development. You can postulate as many such stages as are needed. Thus, you can have a transition between ethology and anthropology which removes, I think, all philosophical postulates. The discontinuities would never be of such a nature as to demand some kind of sudden intellectual illumination.^[11]

Judeo-Christian scriptures[link]

Biblical text as a science of man[link]

In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, René Girard discusses for the first time Christianity and the Bible. The Gospels ostensibly present themselves as a typical mythical account, with a victim-god lynched by a unanimous crowd, an event that is then commemorated by Christians through ritual sacrifice — a material re-presentation in this case — in the Eucharist. The parallel is perfect except for one detail: the truth of the innocence of the victim is proclaimed by the text and the writer. The mythical account is usually built on the lie of the guilt of the victim inasmuch as it is an account of the event seen from the viewpoint of the anonymous lynchers. This ignorance is indispensable to the efficacy of the sacrificial violence.

The evangelical "good news" clearly affirms the innocence of the victim, thus becoming, by attacking ignorance, the germ of the destruction of the sacrificial order on which rests the equilibrium of societies. Already the Old Testament shows this turning inside-out of the mythic accounts with regard to the innocence of the victims (Abel, Joseph, Job, ...), and the Hebrews were conscious of the uniqueness of their religious tradition. With the Gospels, it is with full clarity that are unveiled these "things hidden since the foundation of the world" (Matthew 13:35), the foundation of social order on murder, described in all its repulsive ugliness in the account of the Passion.

This revelation is even clearer because the text is a work on desire and violence, from the serpent setting alight the desire of Eve in paradise to the prodigious strength of the mimetism that brings about the denial of Peter during the Passion (Mark 14: 66-72; Luke 22:54-62). Girard reinterprets certain biblical expressions in light of his theories; for instance, he sees "scandal" (skandalon, literally, a "snare", or an "impediment placed in the way and causing one to stumble or fall"^[14]) as signifying mimetic rivalry, for example Peter's denial of Jesus.^[15] No one escapes responsibility, neither the envious nor the envied: "Woe to the man through whom scandal comes" (Matthew 18:7).

Christian society[link]

The evangelical revelation contains the truth on the violence, available for two thousand years, René Girard tells us. Has it put an end to the sacrificial order based on violence in the society that has claimed the gospel text as its own religious text? No, he replies, since in order for a truth to have an impact it must find a receptive listener, and people do not change that quickly. The gospel text has instead acted as a ferment that brings about the decomposition of the sacrificial order. While medieval Europe showed the face of a sacrificial society that still knew very well how to despise and ignore its victims, nonetheless the efficacy of sacrificial violence has never stopped decreasing, in the measure that ignorance receded. Here René Girard sees the principle of the uniqueness and of the transformations of the Western society whose destiny today is one with that of human society as a whole.

Does the retreat of the sacrificial order mean less violence? Not at all; rather, it deprives modern societies of most of the capacity of sacrificial violence to establish temporary order. The "innocence" of the time of the ignorance is no more. On the other hand, Christianity, following the example of Judaism, has desacralized the world, making possible a utilitarian relationship with nature. Increasingly threatened by the resurgence of mimetic crises on a grand scale, the contemporary world is on one hand more quickly caught up by its guilt, and on the other hand has developed such a great technical power of destruction that it is condemned to both more and more responsibility and less and less innocence. So, for example, while empathy for victims manifests progress in the moral conscience of society, it nonetheless also takes the form of a competition among victims that threatens an escalation of violence.

Influence[link]

Psychology and neuroscience[link]

René Girard's work is also attracting increasing interest from empirical researchers investigating human imitation (among them Andrew Meltzoff and Vittorio Gallese). Recently, empirical studies into the mechanism of desire have suggested some intriguing correlations with Girard's theory on the subject. For instance, clinical psychologist Scott R. Garrels wrote:

What makes Girard's insights so remarkable is that he not only discovered and developed the primordial role of psychological mimesis (...) during a time when imitation was quite out of fashion, but he did so through investigation in literature, cultural anthropology, history, and ultimately returning to religious texts for further evidence of mimetic phenomena. The parallels between Girard's insights and the only recent conclusions made by empirical researchers concerning imitation (in both development and the evolution of species) are extraordinary (...).^[16]

Economics and globalization[link]

The mimetic theory has also been applied in the study of economics, most notably in La violence de la monnaie (1982) by Michel Aglietta and André Orléan. Orléan was also a contributor to the volume René Girard in Les cahiers de l'Herne ("Pour une approche girardienne de l'homo oeconomicus").^[17] According to the philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg:

In La violence de la monnaie, Aglietta and Orléan follow Girard in suggesting that the basic relation of exchange can be interpreted as a conflict of 'doubles', each mediating the desire of the Other. Like Lucien Goldmann, they see a connection between Girard's theory of mimetic desire and the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. In their theory, the market takes the place of the sacred in modern life as the chief institutional mechanism stabilizing the otherwise explosive conflicts of desiring subjects.^[18]

In an interview with the Unesco Courier, anthropologist and social theorist Mark Anspach (editor of the René Girard issue of Les Cahiers de l'Herne) explains that Aglietta and Orléan (who were very critical of economic rationality) see the classical theory of economics as a myth. According to Anspach, the vicious circle of violence and vengeance generated by mimetic rivalry gives rise to the gift economy, as a means to overcome it and achieve a peaceful reciprocity: "Instead of waiting for your neighbour to come steal your yams, you offer them to him today, and it is up to him to do the same for you tomorrow. Once you have made a gift, he is obliged to make a return gift. Now you have set in motion a positive circularity."^[19] Since the gift may be so large as to be humiliating, a second stage of development—"economic rationality"—is required: this liberates the seller and the buyer of any other obligations than to give money. Thus reciprocal violence is eliminated by the sacrifice, obligations of vengeance by the gift, and finally the possibly dangerous gift by "economic rationality." This rationality, however, creates new victims, as globalization is increasingly revealing.

Literature[link]

Girard's influence extends beyond philosophy and social science, and includes the literary realm. A prominent example of a fiction writer influenced by Girard is J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. Critics have noted that mimetic desire and scapegoating are recurring themes in Coetzee's novels Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace. In the latter work, the book's protagonist also gives a speech about the history of scapegoating with noticeable similarities to Girard's view of the same subject. Coetzee has also frequently cited Girard in his non-fiction essays, on subjects ranging from advertising to the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.^[20]

Criticism[link]

Originality[link]

Some critics have pointed out that while Girard may be the first to have suggested that all desire is mimetic, he is by no means the first to have noticed that some desire is mimetic. (Gabriel Tarde’s book Les lois de l’imitation (The Laws of Imitation) appeared in 1890.) René Pommier^[21] mentions La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century thinker who already wrote that “Nothing is so infectious as example” and that “There are some who never would have loved if they never had heard it spoken of.”^[22]

Stéphane Vinolo sees Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes as important precursors. Hobbes: "if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies."^[23] Spinoza: "By the very fact that we conceive a thing, which is like ourselves, and which we have not regarded with any emotion, to be affected with any emotion, we are ourselves affected with a like emotion.^[24] Proof... If we conceive anyone similar to ourselves as affected by any emotion, this conception will express a modification of our body similar to that emotion.^[25]

Wolfgang Palaver adds Alexis de Tocqueville to the list. "Two hundred years after Hobbes, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville mentioned the dangers coming along with equality, too. Like Hobbes, he refers to the increase of mimetic desire coming along with equality."^[26] Palaver has in mind passages like this one, from Tocqueville's Democracy in America: "They have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition; the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position."^[27]

At times, Girard acknowledges his indebtedness to such precursors, including Tocqueville.^[28] At other times, however, Girard makes stronger claims to originality, as when he says that mimetic rivalry “is responsible for the frequency and intensity of human conflicts, but strangely, no one ever speaks of it.”^[29]

Use of evidence[link]

René Girard has presented his view as being scientifically grounded: “Our theory should be approached, then, as one approaches any scientific hypothesis.” ^[30] René Pommier has pointed out, however, that Girard’s readings of myths and bible stories—the basis of some of his most important claims—are often tendentious. Girard claims, for example, that the disciples actively turn against Jesus;^[31] since Peter warms himself by a fire, he says, and fires always create community, and communities breed mimetic desire, this means that Peter becomes actively hostile to Jesus, seeking his death.^[32] Or again, Girard claims that the Gospels present the Crucifixion as a purely human affair, with no indication of Christ dying for the sins of mankind. (This is contradicted by Mark 10:45, Matthew 20:28.)^[33]

The same goes for readings of literary texts. For example, Molière’s Don Juan only pursues one love object for mediated reasons,^[34] not all of them, as Girard claims.^[35] Or again, Sancho Panza wants an island not because he is catching the bug of romanticism from Don Quixote, but because he has been promised one.^[36] And Pavel Pavlovitch, in Dostoevsky’s Eternal Husband, has been married for ten years before Veltchaninov becomes his rival, so Veltchaninov is not in fact essential to Pavel’s desire.^[37]

Accordingly, a number of scholars have suggested that Girard’s writings are not in fact science but mere metaphysics. Theorist of history Hayden White did so in an article titled “Ethnological ‘Lie’ and Mystical ‘Truth’”;^[38] Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch made a similar claim in his piece "L'Evangile selon Saint-Girard" ("The Gospel according to Saint Girard").;^[39] and Jean Greisch sees Girard's thought as more or less a kind of Gnosis.^[40]

Non-mimetic desires[link]

René Pommier has pointed out a number of problems with the Girardian claim that all desire is mimetic. First, it is very hard to explain the existence of taboo desires, such as homosexuality in repressive societies, on that basis.^[41] Second, every situation presents large numbers of potential mediators, which means that the individual has to make a choice among them; either authentic choice is back in the picture, then, or else the theory leads to a regress.^[42] Third, Girard leaves no room for innovation: surely somebody has to be the first to desire a new object, even if everyone else follows that trend-setter.^[43] It should be noted that this last objection ignores the influence of an original sin from which all others follow, which Girard clearly affirms. ^[44]

Beneficial imitation[link]

In the early part of Girard’s career, there seemed no place for beneficial imitation. Jean-Michel Oughourlian objected that "imitation can be totally peaceful and beneficial; I don't believe that I am the other, I don't want to take his place [...] This imitation can lead me to become sensitive to social and political problems."^[45] Rebecca Adams argued that because Girard's theories fixated on violence, he was creating a 'scapegoat' himself with his own theory: the scapegoat of positive mimesis. Adams proposed a reassessment of Girard's theory that includes an account of loving mimesis or, as she preferred to call it, creative mimesis.^[46]

More recently, Girard has made room for positive imitation.^[47] But as Adams implies, it is not clear how the revised theory accords with earlier claims about the origin of culture. If beneficial imitation is possible, then it is no longer necessary for cultures to be born by means of scapegoating; they could just as well be born through healthy emulation.

Anthropology[link]

Various anthropologists have contested Girard’s claims. Elizabeth Traube, for example, reminds us that there are other ways of making sense of the data that Girard borrows from Evans-Pritchard and company—ways that are more consistent with the practices of the given culture. By applying a one-size-fits-all approach, Girard “loses... the ability to tell us anything about cultural products themselves, for the simple reason that he has annihilated the cultures which produced them.” ^[48]

Religion[link]

One of the main sources of criticism of Girard's work comes from intellectuals who claim that his comparison of Judeo-Christian texts vis-a-vis other religions leaves something to be desired.^[49] There are also those who find the interpretation of the Christ event—as a purely human event, having nothing to do with redemption from sin—an unconvincing one, given what the Gospels themselves say.^[33]

Honours and awards[link]

• Honorary degrees at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands, 1985), UFSIA in Antwerp (Belgium, 1995), the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy, 2001, honorary degree in "Arts"),^[50] the faculty of theology at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), the Université de Montréal (Canada, 2004),^[51] and the University of St Andrews (UK, 2008).^[52]
• The Prix Médicis essai for Shakespeare, les feux de l'envie (A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, 1991)
• The prix Aujourd'hui for Les origines de la culture (2004)
• Guggenheim Fellow (1959 and 1966)^[53]
• Election to the Académie française (2005).
• Awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen (2006) ^[54]

Bibliography[link]

This section only lists book-length publications that René Girard wrote or edited. For articles and interviews by René Girard, the reader can refer to the database maintained at the University of Innsbruck. Some of the books below reprint articles (To Double Business Bound, 1978; Oedipus Unbound, 2004; Mimesis and Theory,2008) or are based on articles (A Theatre of Envy, 1991).

• 1961. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Grasset. Reprinted 2001: ISBN 2-246-04072-8. (English translation: Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. ISBN 0-8018-1830-3).
• 1962. Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
• 1963. Dostoïevski, du double à l'unité. Paris: Plon. (English translation: Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. Crossroad Publishing Company. 1997)
• 1972. La Violence et le Sacré. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 978-2-246-00051-8. (English translation: Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. ISBN 0-8018-2218-1.) The reprint in the Pluriel series (1996; ISBN 2-01-008984-7) contains a section entitled "Critiques et commentaires", which reproduces several reviews of La Violence et le Sacré.
• 1976. Critique dans un souterrain. Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme. Reprint 1983, Livre de Poche: ISBN 978-2-253-03298-4. This book contains Dostoïevski, du double à l'unité and a number of other essays published between 1963 and 1972.
• 1978. To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-3655-8. This book contains essays from Critique dans un souterrain but not those on Dostoyevski.
• 1978. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 2-246-61841-X. (English translation: Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and G. Lefort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987)
• 1982. Le Bouc émissaire. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 2-246-26781-1. (English translation: The Scapegoat. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)
• 1985. La Route antique des hommes pervers. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 2-246-35111-1. (English translation: Job, the Victim of His People. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987)
• 1988. Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation. Ed. by Robert Hamerton-Kelly. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-1518-1.
• 1991. A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505339-7. The French translation, Shakespeare : les feux de l'envie, was published before the original English text.
• 1994. Quand ces choses commenceront ... Entretiens avec Michel Treguer. Paris: arléa. ISBN 2-86959-300-7.
• 1996. The Girard Reader. Ed. by. James G. Williams. New York: Crossroad. ISBN 0-8245-1634-6.
• 1999. Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 2-246-26791-9. (English translation: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001)
• 2000. Um Longo Argumento do princípio ao Fim: Diálogos com João Cezar de Castro Rocha e Pierpaolo Antonello. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks. ISBN 85-7475-020-4. (French translation: Les origines de la culture. Entretiens avec Pierpaolo Antonello et João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2004. ISBN 978-2-220-05355-4. The French translation was upgraded in consultation with René Girard.^[55] English translation: Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture. London: Continuum, 2008. ISBN 978-0-567-03252-2.)
• 2001. Celui par qui le scandale arrive: Entretiens avec Maria Stella Barberi. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. ISBN 978-2-220-05011-9.
• 2002. La Voix méconnue du réel: Une théorie des mythes archaïques et modernes. Paris: Grasset. ISBN 978-2-246-61101-1.
• 2003. Le sacrifice. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France. ISBN 978-2-7177-2263-5.
• 2004. Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire. Ed. by Mark R. Anspach. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-4780-6.
• 2006. Verità o fede debole. Dialogo su cristianesimo e relativismo. With Gianni Vattimo. (English: Truth or Weak Faith. Dialogue about Christianity and Relativism. With Gianni Vattimo. A cura di P. Antonello, Transeuropa Edizioni, Massa. ISBN 978-88-7580-018-5
• 2006. Wissenschaft und christlicher Glaube Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007 ISBN 978-3-16-149266-2
• 2007. Dieu, une invention? Editions de l'Atelier. With André Gounelle and Alain Houziaux. ISBN 978-2-7082-3922-7.
• 2007. Le Tragique et la Pitié: Discours de réception de René Girard à l'Académie française et réponse de Michel Serres. Editions le Pommier. ISBN 978-2-7465-0320-5.
• 2007. De la violence à la divinité. Paris: Grasset. (Contains Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, La violence et le Sacré, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde and Le bouc émissaire, with a new general introduction). ISBN 978-2-246-72111-6.
• 2007. Achever Clausewitz. (Entretiens avec Benoît Chantre) Ed. by Carnets Nord. Paris. ISBN 978-2-35536-002-2.
• 2008. Anorexie et désir mimétique. Paris: L'Herne. ISBN 978-2-85197-863-9.
• 2008. Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005. Ed. by Robert Doran. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5580-1. This book brings together twenty essays on literature and literary theory.
• 2008. La Conversion de l'art. Paris: Carnets Nord. (Book with DVD Le Sens de l'histoire, a conversation with Benoît Chantre) ISBN 978-2-35536-016-9.

See also[link]

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Notes and references[link]

Further reading[link]

• Aglietta, Michel & Orléan, André: La violence de la monnaie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 1982. ISBN 2-13-037485-9.
• Alison, James (1998). The Joy of Being Wrong. Herder & Herder. ISBN 0-8245-1676-1.
• Anspach, Mark (Ed.; 2008). René Girard. Les Cahiers de l'Herne Nr. 89. Paris: L'Herne. ISBN 978-2-85197-152-4. A collection of articles by René Girard and a number of other authors.
• Bailie, Gil (1995). Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. Introduction by René Girard. New York: Crossroad. ISBN 0-8245-1645-1.
• Bellinger, Charles (2001). The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil. New York: Oxford. ISBN 0-19-513498-2.
• Depoortere, Frederiek (2008). Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, Rene Girard, and Slavoj Zizek. London: Continuum. ISBN 0-567-03332-5.
• Dumouchel, Paul (Ed.; 1988). Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-1338-3.
• Fleming, Chris (2004). René Girard: Violence and Mimesis. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 0-7456-2948-2. This is an introduction to René Girard's work.
• Girard, René, and Sandor Goodhart. For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009.
• Golsan, Richard J. (1993). René Girard and Myth: An Introduction. New York & London: Garland. (Reprinted by Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-93777-9.)
• Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G. (1991). Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross. Fortress Press. ISBN 0-8006-2529-3.
• Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G. & Johnsen, William (Eds.; 2008). Politics & Apocalypse (Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture Series). Michigan State University Press. ISBN 978-0-87013-811-9.
• Heim, Mark (2006). Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. ISBN 0-8028-3215-6 .
• Kirwan, Michael (2004). Discovering Girard. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. ISBN 0-232-52526-9. This is an introduction to René Girard's work.
• Lagarde, François (1994). René Girard ou la christianisation des sciences humaines. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 0-8204-2289-4. This book is both an introduction and a critical discussion of Girard's work, starting with Girard's early articles on Malraux and Saint-John Perse, and ending with A Theatre of Envy.
• Livingston, Paisley (1992). Models of Desire: René Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-4385-5.
• McKenna, Andrew J. (Ed.; 1985). René Girard and Biblical Studies (Semeia 33). Scholars Press. ISBN 99953-876-3-8.
• McKenna, Andrew J. (1992). Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06202-5.
• Mikolajewska, Barbara (1999). Desire Came upon that One in the Beginning... Creation Hymns of the Rig Veda. 2nd edition. New Haven: The Lintons' Video Press. ISBN 0-9659529-1-6.
• Mikolajewska, Barbara & Linton, F. E. J. (2004). Good Violence Versus Bad: A Girardian Analysis of King Janamejaya's Snake Sacrifice and Allied Events. New Haven: The Lintons' Video Press. ISBN 978-1-929865-29-1.
• Oughourlian, Jean-Michel. The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis, translated with an introduction by Eugene Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
• Pommier, René (2010). René Girard, un allumé qui se prend pour un phare. Paris: Éditions Kimé. ISBN 978-2-84174-514-2.
• Swartley, William M. (Ed.; 2000). Violence Renounced: Rene Girard, Biblical Studies and Peacemaking. Telford: Pandora Press. ISBN 0-9665021-5-9.
• Tarot, Camille (2008). Le symbolique et le sacré. Paris: La Découverte. ISBN 978-2-7071-5428-6. This book discusses eight theories of religion, namely those by Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Mircea Eliade, George Dumézil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, René Girard, Pierre Bourdieu and Marcel Gauchet.
• Webb, Eugene. Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1988)
• Webb, Eugene. The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of France (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993).
• Wallace, Mark I. & Smith, Theophus H. (1994). Curing Violence : Essays on Rene Girard. Polebridge Press. ISBN 0-944344-43-7.
• To Honor René Girard. Presented on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday by colleagues, students, friends (1986). Stanford French and Italian Studies 34. Saratoga, California: Anma Libri. ISBN 0-915838-03-6. This volume also contains a bibliography of Girard's writings before 1986.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: René Girard

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: René Girard

Bibliographies[link]

• Girard-Database: searchable database provided by the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Accessed 25 November 2008
• Dietmar Regensburger: Bibliography of René Girard. The most detailed bibliography, ending in 2003. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Dietmar Regensburger: Bibliography of Literature on the Mimetic Theory of René Girard. Updates appear periodically in the Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion. Accessed 25 November 2008
• The René Girard Bibliography. A short list of publications. Accessed 24 November 2008

Online videos of René Girard[link]

• Girard interviewed on "Uncommon Knowledge" at the Hoover Institution
• l'Immortel: A video short

Interviews, articles and lectures by René Girard[link]

In chronological order.

• René Girard: "Are the Gospels Mythical?" in First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, April 1996. See also "August/September Letters" in First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, August/September 1996, for follow-up correspondence. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Girard lecture, on Violence, Victims and Christianity (Oxford 1997) Accessed 24 November 2008
• "What Is Occurring Today Is a Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale" Interview by Henri Tincq, Le Monde, November 6, 2001. Translated by Jim Williams. Original title: "Ce qui se joue aujourd'hui est une rivalité mimétique à l'échelle planétaire".
• "Violence & the Lamb Slain". Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, December 2003. A short, accessible introduction to Girardian thought, plus an interview with Girard. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Ratzinger Is Right in New Perspectives Quarterly (NPQ) Volume 22, Number 3 (Summer 2005). On Pope Benedict XVI and relativism. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Interviews with Girard on mimetic desire (Saturday, September 17, 2005) and on ritual, myth, and religion (Tuesday, October 4, 2005) by Robert P. Harrison on Entitled Opinions. Accessed 24 November 2008
• "The J'Accuse of Rene Girard: The Audacious ideas of a great thinker" Interview with Girard by Giulio Meotti, Il Foglio, March 20, 2007. (Translation by Francis R. Hittinger IV.) Accessed 24 November 2008
• (French) Reception speech of René Girard. This speech does not discuss his own work but is a eulogy of his predecessor. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Robert Doran: Apocalyptic Thinking after 9/11: An Interview with René Girard SubStance 115 (Volume 37, Number 1, 2008. Accessed 24 November 2008
• (French) Centre Pompidou: Traces du sacré: René Girard, le sens de l'histoire. Excerpts from a conversation with Benoît Chantre (see La conversion de l'art). Accessed 24 November 2008
• Cynthia Haven, René Girard: Stanford's provocative immortel is a one-man institution, Stanford Report, 11 June 2008.
• Cynthia Haven, René Girard: Stanford's provocative immortel is a one-man institution, Stanford Report, 11 June 2008.
• Grant Kaplan, An Interview with René Girard, in First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, November 6, 2008.
• Cynthia Haven, "Christianity Will Be Victorious, But Only In Defeat": An Interview with René Girard, in First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, July 16, 2009.
• René Girard, "On War and Apocalypse" in First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Aug/Sept 2v009.
• The Scapegoat: René Girard's Anthropology of Violence and Religion: Interview with Girard on CBC's interview program Ideas [1], Feb 2011

Organizations inspired by mimetic theory[link]

• Colloquium on Violence & Religion
• Association Recherches Mimétiques, founded in 2006.
• Imitatio, founded in 2008. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Imitation, Mimetic Theory, and Religious & Cultural Evolution - A Templeton Advanced Research Project, a two-year project.
• The Raven Foundation. This foundation "seeks to promote healing, hope, reconciliation and peace by offering insight into the dynamics of conflict and violence".
• Theology and Peace, founded in 2008. "An emerging movement seeking the transformation of theological practice through the application of mimetic theory".
• Preaching Peace founded in 2002 as a website exploring the Christian lectionary from a mimetic theoretical perspective, 2007 organized as a non-profit in Pennsylvania committed to "Educating the church in Jesus' vision of peace."

Blogs inspired by mimetic theory[link]

• Mimetic Desire photo blog

Other resources[link]

• Dietmar Regensburger: Link Collection on René Girard & the Mimetic Theory. Accessed 25 November 2008
• Colloquium on Violence and Religion, Annual Conference 2004: Nature, Human Nature, and the Mimetic Theory. Some of the conference papers are available here. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Paul Nuechterlein: Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary: Understanding the Bible Anew Through the Mimetic Theory of René Girard Accessed 24 November 2008
• Philippe Cottet: On René Girard. Available in French and English. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Mark Gordon: Was Christ Just Another ‘Scapegoat’? May 3, 2006. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Thomas A. Michael: How To Scapegoat the Leader. A Refresher Course (for those who do not need it). An introduction to Girard. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Joseph Bottum: "Girard among the Girardians" in First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, March 1996. A review of Violence Unveiled by Gil Bailie, The Sacred Game by Cesareo Bandera, The Gospel and the Sacred by Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, and The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred by James G. Williams. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Paolo Diego Bubbio: "Mimetic Theory and Hermeneutics" in Colloquy 9 (2005). Accessed 24 November 2008
• University of St Andrews, UK: Honorary degrees - June 2008. Accessed 26 November 2008
• Gerald J. Biesecker-Mast: “Reading Walter Wink's and Rene Girard's Religious Critiques of Violence as Communication Ethics.” National Communication Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November 20–23, 1997. A short and clear explanation of the thought of Girard (principally) among other similar thoughts about people, violence and society.
• "Scapegoats and Sacrifices: Rene Girard". Australian Broadcasting Commission - Philosopher's Zone. Accessed 24 November 2008
• Trevor Merrill: "On War: Apocalypse and Conversion: Review Article on René Girard's Achever Clausewitz and Jean-Michel Oughourlian's Genèse du désir" in Lingua Romana: a journal of French, Italian and Romanian culture Volume 6, number 1 / fall 2007. Accessed 24 November 2008
• The website Preaching Peace contains a number of articles related to René Girard, for example:
  • Per Bjørnar Grande: Girard's Christology (no date).
  • Per Bjørnar Grande: Comparing Plato's Understanding of Mimesis to Girard's (no date).
  • Matthew Pattillo: Violence, Anarchy and Scripture: Jacques Ellul and René Girard. Originally published in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture Vol 11, Spring 2004.Accessed 12 February 2009