René Girard

1923-2015 · French · Philosophical Anthropology, Literary Criticism, Religious Studies, Mimetic Theory

Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.

A French literary scholar turned reluctant theologian, René Girard spent the 1950s reading great novelists — Stendhal, Proust, Dostoevsky — not for their style but for what they knew about human nature. His discovery: desire is not spontaneous but borrowed. We learn what to want by watching models, and when model and imitator want the same thing, rivalry ignites. He called this mimetic desire.

Topics René Girard addresses

• mimetic desire
• triangular desire
• the scapegoat mechanism
• the founding murder
• mimetic rivalry
• internal and external mediation
• the mimetic cycle
• sacrificial crisis
• the crisis of undifferentiation
• mimetic doubles
• the skandalon
• the unanimous-minus-one structure
• things hidden since the foundation of the world
• stereotypes of persecution
• the persecution texts
• mythology as distorted memory
• ritual as controlled repetition
• the sacred and violence
• sacrifice and substitution
• the nonsacrificial death of Christ
• biblical revelation as demystification
• the Judeo-Christian rupture
• the apocalyptic reading of history
• Satan and accusation

Converse with René Girard on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in René Girard's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.