All Desire is a Desire for Being, page 32
128. Our ideas are less and less lovable and, as a result, they are no longer loved.
129. When the ordinary people and the intellectuals do not agree, it is safer to go with the ordinary people.
130. The idea of renunciation has, no doubt, been overdone by the Puritans and the Jansenists, but the blanket hostility that now prevails against it is even worse. The idea that renunciation in all its forms should be renounced once and for all may well be the most flagrant nonsense any human culture has ever devised.
131. To understand human beings, their constant paradox, their innocence, their guilt, is to understand that we are all responsible for this state of things because, unlike Christ, we’re not ready to die.
132. It is absolute fidelity to the principle defined in his own preaching that condemns Jesus. There is no other cause for his death than the love of one’s neighbor lived to the very end, with an infinitely intelligent grasp of the constraints it imposes.
133. The intensity of conflicts has nothing to do with the reality of differences.
134. The victims are always there, and everyone is always sharpening his weapon for use against his neighbor in a desperate attempt to win himself somewhere – even if only in an indefinite, Utopian future – a plot of innocence that he can inhabit on his own, or in the company of a regenerate human race.
135. Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured – our need is to escape from meaninglessness.
136. I hold that truth is not an empty word … I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth.
137. Unanimity in accusation is in itself a cause for suspicion. It suggests that the accused is innocent.
138. We must place our bets either on the total disappearance of the human race or on our arriving at forms of freedom and awareness that we can hardly imagine.
139. On Foucault: One day, he told me that ‘we shouldn’t invent a philosophy of the victim.’ I replied: ‘No, not a philosophy, I agree – a religion! But it already exists!’
140. In our era many people think that they’re breaking with tradition when in reality they’re repeating it, but without the elegance displayed by their ancestors.
141. Our world is succumbing to the allure of sham complexity. It establishes your reputation as a researcher, gives you a scientific air. ‘A mathematical model for everything – or death!’ That’s our motto!
142. The cult of the obstacle drives human beings from their human condition toward what is most against them, toward what hurts them the most, toward the non-human, toward the inert, toward the mineral, toward death … toward everything that goes against love, against spirit.
143. You can already sense the spirit of May ’68 at its most comical in their behavior: the bourgeois parents who say ‘Don’t forget your scarf!’ to their children as they go out to play revolution … Revolution as an article of consumption.
144. Marxism wants of course to save victims, but it thinks that the process that makes victims is fundamentally economic.
145. Denying the spiritual dimension of Evil is as wrong as denying the spiritual dimension of Good.
146. We still protect crippled people, handicapped people, but in the center of it all we find a sort of cancer growing, which is the return to infanticide.
147. What people call the partisan spirit is nothing but choosing the same scapegoat as everybody else.
148. The fundamentalists often defend ideas that I deplore, but a remnant of spiritual health makes them foresee the horror of the warm and fuzzy concentration camp that our benevolent bureaucracies are preparing for us, and their revolt looks more respectable to me than our somnolence.
149. In an era where everyone boasts of being a marginal dissident even as they display a stupefying mimetic docility, the fundamentalists are authentic dissidents.
150. It’s now no longer possible to persecute except in the name of victims.
151. The aggressor has always already been attacked.
152. The way in which we intellectuals seek to differentiate ourselves from one another by ceaselessly inventing pseudo-differences, revolts that are even more radical than the ones that came before, leads to avant-garde fashions that are ever more sheep-like, ever more repetitive.
153. Tourism, too, is mimetic and a source of undifferentiation.
154. We are ready to deconstruct anything except the idea that we are self-directed and that the persecutors are always the others.
155. The mimetic system, in its eternal return, enslaves humanity.
156. In imitating my rival’s desire I give him the impression that he has good reasons to desire what he desires, to possess what he possesses, and so the intensity of his desire keeps increasing.
157. Unlike the modern gurus who claim to be imitating nobody, but who want to be imitated on that basis, Christ says: ‘Imitate me as I imitate the Father.’
158. The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival.
159. If someone is making excessive demands on you, he’s already involved in mimetic rivalry, he expects you to participate in the escalation. So, to put a stop to it, the only means is to do the opposite of what escalation calls for: meet the excessive demand twice over.
160. If we don’t see that the choice is inevitable between the two supreme models, God and the devil, then we have already chosen the devil and his mimetic violence.
161. The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.
162. We are living through a caricatural ‘ultra-Christianity’ that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by ‘radicalizing’ the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.
163. The imitation of Christ provides the proximity that places us at a distance. It is not the Father whom we should imitate, but his Son, who has withdrawn with his Father. His absence is the very ordeal that we have to go through.
164. On comedy: In order to be successful an artist must come as close as he can to some important social truth without inciting painful self-criticism in the spectators.
165. The refusal of the real is the number one dogma of our time.
166. Our world produces and saves more victims than any other. The two things are true at once. There is more good and more evil than ever before.
167. The unfortunate man is not stoned because he is monstrous; he becomes a monster because of the stoning.
168. There is never anything on one side of a rivalry which, sooner or later, will not be found on the other.
169. Beyond a certain threshold of excitement, almost any human group will focus on almost any victim.
170. Evil is the mystery of a pride which, as it condemns others, unwittingly condemns itself.
171. It is because we have wanted to distance ourselves from religion that it is now returning with such force and in a retrograde, violent form … In this, it will perhaps have been our last mythology. We ‘believed’ in reason, as people used to believe in the gods.
172. The question about our world is not really why so much violence, but why so little? Why are we not always at each other’s throats?
Chronology
1923
On December 25, René Noël Théophile Girard is born in Avignon, the second of five children, to Marie-Thérèse de Loye Fabre and a notable historian of the region, Joseph Frédéric Marie Girard, curator of Avignon’s Musée Calvet and later the city’s Palais des Papes, France’s biggest medieval fortress and the pontifical residence during the Avignon papacy.
1939
On 1 September, Germany invades Poland, leading Britain and France to declare war on Germany in retaliation.
1940 and 1941
Girard receives two baccalauréats, the first the one common for all students, the second in philosophy, with distinction.
In 1941, he travels to Lyon to prepare for the entrance exam for the École Normal Supérieure, the foremost among the grandes écoles, but leaves after a few weeks. Instead, he prepares at home for entry into the École des Chartes, a training ground for archivists and librarians.
On 14 June, the Germans occupy Paris without a struggle. On 22 June, France is partitioned into an occupied zone and an unoccupied zone (Vichy France).
1942–45
In November, 1942, the Germans extend their full occupation to the south of France, with the Italians occupying the small portion of France east of the Rhône.
Girard is appointed to be a student at the École des Chartes in Paris in December 1942, and moves to Paris before his classes began in January 1943. He specializes in medieval history and paleography.
Paris is liberated during a military action that begins on 19 August 1944, and ends when the German garrison surrenders the French capital on 25 August 1944.
On 2 May 1945, the German capital of Berlin surrenders to Soviet forces. On 30 April, Hitler commits suicide, along with other members of his inner circle. On 8 May, an unconditional surrender is officially ratified.
1947
Girard finishes his dissertation on marriage and private life in fifteenth-century Avignon, and graduates as an archiviste-paléographe in 1947.
In the summer, he and a friend, Jacques Charpier, organize an exhibition of paintings at the Palais des Papes from 27 June to 30 September, under the guidance of Paris art impresario Christian Zervos. Girard rubs elbows with Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and other luminaries. French actor and director Jean Vilar founded the theater component of the festival, which became the celebrated annual Avignon Festival.
In September, Girard leaves France for the United States to teach at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. He is first an instructor of French language, and later teaches French literature as well.
1950
He receives his PhD with a dissertation on ‘American Opinion on France, 1940–1943.’
1951
Girard marries Martha McCullough on 18 June. They will have three children: Martin on 8 April 1955; Daniel on 3 January 1957 and Mary on 16 May 1960.
1952–53
Girard becomes instructor of French literature at Duke University for one year.
1953–57
Girard becomes assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College.
1957
Girard assumes the post of associate professor of French at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he is eventually promoted to full professor and chair of the Romance Languages Department. While there, he receives two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1959 and 1966.
1958–59
While finishing his first book, published in English as Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard undergoes two conversion experiences from the autumn of 1958 to Easter, on 29 March 1959. The Girard children were baptized, and René and Martha renew their wedding vows.
1961
Girard publishes Mensonges romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, published in English by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), which introduces his theory of mimetic desire.
He is promoted to Professor of French at Johns Hopkins University.
1962
Girard publishes an edited volume, Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays, with Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ).
1963
Girard’s Dostoïevski, du double à l’unité is published by Éditions Plon (Paris), later in English as Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky (Crossroads, 1997), reissued by Michigan State University Press in 2012.
1966
With Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Girard organizes an international symposium from 18 to 21 October: ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.’ Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and others participate in the standing-room-only event. The conference marks the introduction of structuralism and French theory to America; it marked Derrida’s debut in America.
1968
Girard is appointed Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the Department of English. He begins a lifelong friendship and collaboration with Michel Serres. These years also mark the beginning of what would be a lifelong interest in Shakespeare.
1972
Girard publishes the groundbreaking La violence et le sacré (Grasset) developing the idea of scapegoating and sacrifice in cultures around the globe (published as Violence and the Sacred by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1977).
1976
In September, he returns to teach at Johns Hopkins University as the James M. Beall Professor of French and Humanities, with an appointment to Richard A. Macksey’s Humanities Center.
1978
With the collaboration of French psychiatrists Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, Girard publishes Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Grasset), published as Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World in English (Stanford University Press, 1987), a book-length conversation in which Girard promulgates mimetic theory in its entirety. The book sells briskly in France – 35,000 copies in the first six months, putting it on the non-fiction best-seller list.
Johns Hopkins University Press publishes To Double Business Bound, a collection of ten essays – seven of which Girard had written in English. The book of essays is selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books of the year, along with Violence and the Sacred, newly published in English.
1979
Girard is elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
1981
On 1 January, Girard assumes the post of inaugural Andrew B. Hammond Chair in French Language, Literature and Civilization at Stanford. With Jean-Pierre Dupuy, he organizes the ‘Disorder and Order’ symposium at Stanford, which links disciplinary domains previously thought to be separate. Participants included Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ilya Prigogne and Nobel economist Kenneth Arrow, Ian Watt, Henri Atlan, Isabelle Stengers, Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Deguy, Heinz von Forster, Francisco Varela, and others.
1982–85
Girard publishes Le Bouc émissaire in 1982 with Grasset (published in English as The Scapegoat, 1986) and in 1985 La Route antique des hommes pervers (Job, the Victim of his People, 1987), developing his hermeneutical approach to biblical texts based on premises of mimetic theory.
He receives first honoris causa from Frije University of Amsterdam in 1985.
1988
Girard receives an honorary degree from the faculty of the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
1990–91
Girard publishes Shakespeare: les feux de l’envie (A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare), the only book he conceived and wrote in English. The earlier French edition, Shakespeare: les feux de l’envie, received France’s Prix Médicis in 1990.
1995
Girard receives an honorary degree from the University Faculties Saint Ignatius, Antwerp (Belgium).
1999
Girard publishes Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair (published as I See Satan Fall Like Lightning in 2001).
2001
Girard publishes Celui par qui le scandale arrive (published as The One by Whom Scandal Comes in 2014).
2003
A series of lectures at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France considers the Vedic tradition and eventually becomes a small book of about a hundred pages, published as Le sacrifice, and in 2011 in English as Sacrifice.
Girard receives an honorary degree in arts from the Università degli Studi di Padova in Italy.
2004
Stanford University Press publishes Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, a collection of Girard’s essays.
He is awarded the literary prize ‘Aujourd’hui’ for Les origines de la culture and receives an honorary degree from Canada’s Université de Montréal.
2005
Girard is elected to the Académie Française, an honor previously given to Voltaire, Jean Racine, and Victor Hugo. He takes the 37th chair, vacated by the death of Ambroise-Marie Carré, a Dominican priest, author, and hero of the Résistance.
The Association Recherches Mimétiques is founded in Paris.
2006
The University of Tübingen awards Girard the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize.
2007
With Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, Girard publishes a series of dialogues on Christianity and modernity as Verita o fede debole? Dialogo su cristianesimo e relativismo (published in English in 2010 as Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue).
Éditions Carnets Nord publishes his last book, Achever Clausewitz: Entretiens avec Benoît Chantre (Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre in English, 2010).
2008
Scotland’s University of St Andrews awards Girard an honorary degree.
On 28 December, he receives a lifetime achievement award from the Modern Language Association in San Francisco.
