Bulletin 56 – May 2018

Haven states that his work in the “social sciences” began during his sojourn at SUNY Buffalo, but in fact Levi-Strauss was already being read alongside of Proust under his tutelage when at Hopkins, such was the generosity of his interests and his discerning attention to non-conscious, structural valences. The variety and vastness of American universities saved Girard from the hothouse polemics and “querelles de chapelle” that consumed the energies of Parisian intellectuals, and his impressive publications soon left him free to range widely among academic “disciplines,” the highly bureaucratized arrangement of knowledge fields that always annoyed and perplexed him.  Enthusiasts of his work are stuck with the shorthand term “mimetic theory” designating it, but he never used that expression. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World begins with chapters on what he labeled “fundamental anthropology,” and later on “biblical anthropology.” Many critics are fairly scandalized by the “grand unifying theory” character of his project, its “theory of everything” air. And understandably so for an author whose biggest book draws its title from the universalist claims of Scripture. There is less narrow disciplinarity in what the French have had the wits to identify as “the human sciences,” including the humanities and social sciences. Girard remains an outlier for having embraced them all in his research. Admittedly “self-taught,” his genius has been to perceive relations of similarity where most others have been harping on differences. 

With the discovery of mirror neurons, the neo-cortical hardware of our mimicry, even the biological sciences are implicated. There can hardly be a more outlandish title for a book than Evolution and Conversion, where Girard interweaves the insights he draws from Darwinian science and biblical revelation while updating the explorations in anthropology and evolutionary theory of earlier works, and successfully eluding the aberrations of creationism. This volume of conversations—a congenial format severally employed by him—is a forthright profession of faith, including faith in Darwinian science:  “I don’t see why God could not be compatible with science. If one believes in God, one also believes in objectivity. A traditional belief in God makes one a believer in the objectivity of the world.” Girard has regularly insisted on the properly scientific ambition of his work, which has borne fruit in a number of volumes published in the splendid MSU series, underwritten by the Imitatio Foundation as Studies in Violence, Mimesis and Culture, in which Haven’s book appears. (See especially, How We Became Human and Mimesis and Science in this series, which update Haven’s coverage in this regard.)

The oft-cited dictum of Archilochus, “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing,” applies to Girard. Roberto Calasso in his important book, The Ruin of Kasch, labels Girard as a hedgehog, and, pace Haven, I think he got it right. Like Darwin in his realm, like Freud and Marx and Einstein in theirs, like Jesus for that matter—God’s love for his creatures has to be our love, if we are to survive at  all—Girard has said that he has one idea, one intuition as he calls  it: mimesis. Like every great thinker, Girard is a monist. Everything he has worked out over several overlapping research fields stems from that easily verifiable fact about the behavior of humans—and animals up to the point where instincts prevent mimetic desire from careening willy-nilly into lethal violence. 

Where humanist literary critics focused on a writer’s difference, as his or her “genius,” Girard left the reservation with his first book, Deceit Desire and the Novel. He detected a pattern of mimetic desire unveiled in the works of our greatest novelists. And where anthropologists, resisting ethnocentrism, were insisting on local knowledge, he uncovered in Violence and the Sacred an unvarying sacrificial dynamic spanning the myths and rituals of traditional cultures worldwide, whose delusions about sacred violence, very nearly apprehended in Greek tragedy, are fully revealed in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures (Things Hidden). So the human self-understanding which our greatest literary works attain is continuous with Revelation. Dostoevsky was not alone in envisioning the properly prophetic ambition of his novels, and history, alas for the worse, has born them out as we cannot fail to observe in this apocalyptic phase of our species.  Accordingly, several scholars have remarked upon the prophetic character of Girard’s work, beginning with his first book, which he rewrote entirely after his own experience of conversion. 

Girard’s stunning breakthrough is adroitly summarized by Haven reporting a conversation with Jean-Pierre Dupuy about resistance to Girard’s thinking: 

Reason #1: “He believes in God, and he says it.”  Dupuy said that laïcité in France means in practice, “a public hatred of religion,” which makes Girard a jolting departure of the norm….  Reason #2: “He believes in the possibility of a science of man.” Post-structuralism, and other “isms,” have denied the possibility of knowing truth, or at least devalued it…. Reason #3: Finally, what he calls the last straw: “#1 and #2 are the same reason.” That is, “if it’s possible to reach the truth, it’s because truth is given by God, and the incarnation of God is Jesus Christ.”  

Haven correctly adds that the same resistance is pervasive among the “bien pensants of our own  country.” We PhDs are much too nice, too benignly pluralist, to hold to believing anything rigorously, except perhaps to our skepticism about absolute truth—an idea, nonetheless, whose time has come, and to our immanent peril. “Truth,” Girard asserts in an early essay on Proust, “is one,” and we must wonder how it could be otherwise—and be true. Girard’s trenchant formulations here and there have their own rationale, ironically modest and soundly Popperian: “Theories are expendable,” he says to Haven, “They should be criticized. When people tell me my work is systematic, I say, ‘I make it as systematic as possible for you to be able to prove it wrong.’” For all that, his thinking does not lead up to a system, psychological, socio-political, religious or philosophical; rather, as Cesáreo Bandera shows in The Sacred Game, the victimary hypothesis is a “system breaker,” the violent closure of the scapegoat mechanism that drives social systems even today being irrevocably punctured by the cross. 

I would cite yet another reason for resistance here: the sheer simplicity, the plainness and accessibility of his thinking, its parsimony, which Eric Gans has so correctly insisted on, namely, its ability to explain much with little. It cannot be that simple, many say; it’s what the Scribes and Pharisees said of the know-it-all Nazarene whose death they pursued so steadily, only to have their plot against him work for all time in favor of his teachings. This is the meaning that Girard has attached to Paul’s eschatological assertion about “the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” In his meditations on Romans Gil Bailie genially observes that resistance to revelation is part of revelation, whereby he clarifies, I think, the epistemic claim of John’s gospel: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot comprehend it”—cannot master it, overcome it; au contraire, the light reveals the darkness as never before. The romantic lie is a world of darkness and light, the latter being the privilege claimed by the modern self; it is the world, very much our own especially these days, of us vs them. Girard everywhere dispels this Manichean dualism. For mimetic realism (to use Bob Hamerton-Kelly’s defining expression), God’s light presides over the opposition, the agon, of light and darkness. Imagine light and dark in opposing squares, and light alone glistening above and all around them. There is no dark side to the God of Israel whom his son illuminates to the very end, despite and because of the violent cries of a lynch mob and the scandalized panic of his very own disciples. Alert to paradoxiphobes: avoid Girard.

This is not an intellectual biography so we only get glimpses of the theoretical environment surrounding Girard’s work, the Nietzscheanism headwinds, the boisterous dithyrambs of untruth he sailed through, now a largely spent force. On the other hand, her book abounds with amusing anecdotes. This is a life story, beginning with Girard’s Avignonais roots.  Among Girard’s papers some gestures toward an autobiography have been found. But Haven rightly avers that we already have such a work in the form of his groundbreaking writings. In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel Girard argues that a literary masterpiece is the spiritual autobiography of its author, who undergoes a humbling conversion from a view of his or her compact righteousness over against what’s wrong with everybody else. To use Trevor Merrill’s resonant formula in his book on Kundera (who has acknowledged his debt to Girard), a great novel is a “satire gone wrong.” We already get an inkling of this autobiographical feature from the apocalyptic and prophetic conclusion of his very first book. We get it in thematic statements he makes to his interlocutor, Benoît Chantre, in his last book, Battling to the End, a fulsome incursion into mimetic history. But it is significant that he makes them here as elsewhere (Evolution and Conversion, When these Things Begin) in conversation. For Girard, it’s relations all the way down and every which way, and it’s not about him, it’s about truth; his originality is, if anything, his disclaimer of it, identifying the Bible as the epistemic source of his insights. While it is certainly true that we all have our own story to tell, Girard’s gift to his readers is that at a certain level, in a certain sense, it is the same story, as told to us by our biblical and literary traditions. We are born into a world of desires that do not start with us but with our models for them, good and bad, with whom we variously collaborate and compete in a common destiny to ruin or resurrection. As Bob Hamerton-Kelly concluded in a talk to historians at UCLA (he was not known for provisional utterances), “Mimesis is truth, live with it.”

Next are a few powerful articles on the central question of sacrifice. Mark Heim’s incisive review of “How Girard Changes the Debate,” in particular, may for many readers help unlock the puzzle concerning atonement. After critiquing the commonly practiced, “excessive focus on the ‘heavenly’ meaning of the cross,” and after cautioning against the narrow interpretations of satisfaction/substitution theories, Heim explains that Girard “dramatically reshapes the picture” by emphasizing the human importance of the Passion and the cross as scapegoating sacrifice. Heim recalls Girard’s own pithy explanation: “God Himself reuses the scapegoat mechanism, at his own expense, in order to subvert it” (181). In a helpful coda, he mentions several other theologians tackling the same question.  

Similarly, Michael Hardin considers how the American Protestant reception of Girard has been challenging, given these denominations’ default paradigm of atonement—penal substitution. Mimetic theory is, Hardin notes, in many ways a “frontal challenge” to Protestant thinking insofar as it critiques economies of exchange. Hardin’s survey of Protestant Girardian engagement from 1986 to 2015 is especially helpful for its short summaries of the work of many thinkers, including Gerhard Forde, Anthony Bartlett, Heim, Charles Bellinger, Willard Swartley, Rebecca Adams, Vern Redekop, Andrew Marr, Jon Pahl, Walter Wink, James Warren, Richard Beck, and Brian McLaren. He also discusses the mimetic theory sites and organizations of Paul Neuchterlein’s Girardian Lectionary, Keith and Suzanne Ross’s Raven Foundation, and the annual Theology and Peace conference. Hardin’s own scholarship, some of it summarized here, can be read in several works, including The Jesus-Driven Life and What the Facebook? 

In another, close and nuanced reading of the concept of sacrifice, James Alison shows how, following Girard’s hypothesis and the lesson of the Judgment of Solomon, we can understand Christ’s death as the One True Sacrifice—in contrast with “the falsity of all other so-called sacrifices.” In Solomon’s story, where one mother was prepared to sacrifice the child’s life and the other mother was prepared to sacrifice her claim to the child to save its life, we see a self-sacrifice that pre-figures Jesus’ self-giving up for others. On this point and Girard’s insistence on objecting to “everything sacrificial,” Alison claims, Girard never backtracked. Another, eye-opening essay here, by John Edwards, delves further into Alison’s “theological appropriation of Girard.” It too is rich in summary and insights, regarding conversion experience, the relationship among witnesses, what “making good use of a theory requires,” and the greater power of mimetic theory lying not in providing a detached understanding of atonement, but in “its capacity to help Christians uncover the experiential insight and meaning contained within the apostolic witnesses’ accounts of their encounters with the crucified and risen Jesus” (237).

Also essential reading are the contributions from Nicholas Wandinger and Petra Steinmair-Pösel. Wandinger traces the life and work of Raymund Schwager, the first theologian to develop the insights of Girard’s anthropological work for theology. We get a concise biography of Schwager, including his encounter with Girard, and the story of his Dramatic Theology and its development into a research program and school of theology primarily based at Innsbruck. For any English-readers unfamiliar with Girard’s friendship and collaboration with Schwager, Wandinger’s may be a perfect introduction. Steinmair-Pösel’s treatment of original sin and positive mimesis, as well, is vital reading. Citing Girard, she explores the idea that “original sin is the bad use of mimesis, and the mimetic mechanism is the actual consequence of this use at the collective level.” It’s a very helpful application of MT to traditional doctrines of sin and grace, one developed at a bit more length in her essay in René Girard and Creative Mimesis.  

Three essays examine the relationship between Girard and other thinkers. Thomas Ryba looks at the Augustine connection, noting first Girard’s claim that three quarters of what he said can be found in Augustine. It’s a fascinating case study of influence, overturning a lot of gross generalization about imitation, and revealing gems on originality and creativity. Ryba suggests there is much yet to be ferreted out, particularly as we come to focus more, not just on historic influences, but on some of the internal mediators in Girard’s own career. Sandor Goodhart also closely examines his subject—Emmanuel Levinas and his influence on mimetic theory—most notably via the Talmudic principle, cited in Things Hidden, that “any accused person whose judges combine unanimity against him ought to be released straightaway” (242, quoting Things Hidden 444). Goodhart also examines the prophetic element common to Levinas and Girard. Ann Astell’s article on Simone Weil and Girard—an important spiritual affinity often cited, seldom truly discussed—is a genuine treat. We get to see in Weil’s own intellectual development and rivalry with her brother some striking examples of mimetic desire, carefully rendered. Here, too, for example, is Weil’s refusal to accept baptism out of the fear of the Church instilling in her a contagious “Church patriotism.” 

Two other pieces are distinctive. In his exploratory essay “Embodiment and Incarnation,” Scott Cowdell pursues an original line of inquiry connecting the body-as-subject-of-sacrifice to a lot of recent materialist critical theory concerned with the body. Cowdell takes in the various speculations concerning artificial intelligence, mirror neurons, and the issues of gender and embodiment, on his way to contemplating Christians presenting their own bodies as a living sacrifice. It suggests a new avenue for “collaboration between Girardian thinkers, embodiment theoriests, and theologians.” One final essay, by Vanessa Avery, surveys mimetic theory’s implications “from the sacred to the holy,” in the world’s five major religions. Given less than a page or so on each, of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Avery does a fine job in surveying so many mimetic parallels, and the fact there might have been more space devoted to these comparisons seems to make this chapter, all the more, required reading. Those looking to explore further can turn to Palaver and Schenk’s recently published Mimetic Theory and World Religions.

Part IV, “Secularization and Modernity,” surveys one of the most multifaceted and fruitful aspects of mimetic theory. Girard’s first book offered a new diagnosis of modernity through the most distinctively modern of literary forms, the novel. His subsequent turn to older and non-Western sources led to a theory even more powerful in its potential for understanding modern secularism as an essentially religious process of desacralization. The modern economy, nation-state, science, literature, and even modern selfhood itself all can be seen as alternatives to the old sacred in ways that have been developed by other scholars, many of the most important of whom are represented in this section.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy leads off with a masterfully condensed account of where Girard, his long-time friend and colleague, fits in the tradition of thinkers, such as Durkheim and Weber, who see the origins of culture in religion and of secularization in Christianity. Dupuy then gives brief, compelling analyses of three secular ways of managing violence in the absence of the sacred: the economy, nuclear deterrence, and terrorism—all of which he has pursued in greater depth elsewhere.

The work of Dupuy and others on economics is admirably synthesized by Bernard Perret in “The Economy as the Opium of the People.” His play on Marx’s famous phrase about religion acknowledges the market’s apparent success at enabling individuals to gratify their desires peacefully and at the same time hints at its dark side. In contrast to dominant discourses that deny the economy’s inherent violence, such as mainstream theories of markets as rational, he outlines an alternative, mimetic analysis with roots as far back as Adam Smith. Perret brings the stakes into focus by concluding with the question of how to respond to the collision between ecological limits and the economic growth on which markets depend for—in a mimetic analysis—managing violence.

Turning to the other large-scale secular institution for managing violence, the nation-state, Paul Dumouchel’s chapter “The Barren Sacrifice” helpfully condenses the sweeping arguments in his book of the same title. Although states are theoretically supposed to direct all of their sanctioned violence against external enemies, they have shown a persistent tendency to make internal victims as well. These “barren sacrifices” are the starting point for Dumouchel’s analysis of how Christian practices of charity and forgiveness have led to the formation of the modern political order as well as its ongoing failure. Dumouchel’s analysis of changes in basic social and political structures is a fundamental and far-reaching extension of mimetic theory beyond Girard’s work.

Mimetic analysis of another hallmark of modernity, the rise of Western science, is the larger agenda behind David Dawson’s chapter on “The Unravelling Logic of the Salem Witch Hunt.” Taking off from Girard’s suggestion, on two pages of The Scapegoat, that the spell of magical causality accompanying the scapegoat mechanism had to be broken before science could investigate natural causes (cited also by Ranieri, as mentioned above), Dawson uses texts written during and shortly after the Salem episode to initiate a case study. The pressures placed on questions of causality by Puritan, Calvinist theology of atonement and divine sovereignty, he argues, led these authors simultaneously in opposite, natural or supernatural, directions. Lack of references here to work on Girard’s thesis about science by others underscores the great need to put it in dialogue with potentially compatible accounts of the rise of science (e.g. by Michel Serres and Bruno Latour), the development of modern theology and philosophy (e.g. Louis Dupré), and links between the two (e.g. Amos Funkenstein, John Milbank, Brad Gregory).

While secular modernity has seen literature as an alternative to religion, William Johnsen is right to observe, at the outset of his chapter, that Girard did not address himself to a general theory of literature after the manner of Northrop Frye or Erich Auerbach, though he saw their work as intersecting with his. Nonetheless, after tracing Girard on the modern novel, ancient myth and tragedy, biblical literature, and Shakespeare, Johnsen suggests that mimetic theory offers more than just a way of identifying a canon of works that embody its insights—that it brings to light literature’s general capacity to bring readers to consciousness, even of its own tendencies to indulge in mythologizing and romanticizing, and to conversion.

The inward experience of modernity gets the spotlight in the next three essays, all by Italian scholars. Paolo Diego Bubbio assembles Girard’s thoughts on “The Development of the Self” from various sources—making especially good use of his early, lesser known book Resurrection from Underground—and sketches directions taken by other MT scholars, from Girard’s important early collaborator Jean-Michel Oughourlian to his own recent work.

Emanuele Antonelli approaches “Modern Pathologies and the Displacement of the Sacred” by distilling the geometrical logic of the three kinds of mediation that configure mimetic desire, which provide a way of mapping its many pathological permutations: narcissism, masochism, etc. Under the topic of “displacements,” he briefly explores the intriguing phenomenological thesis that “intentionality at large is mimetic” (322), so that any shared sense of reality arises mimetically and is thus prone, merely in its sense of stable transcendence, to being a recurrence of the violent sacred.

One particular pathology, ressentiment, has been seen as especially important since Nietzsche diagnosed its expansion as a distinctive feature of modernity, inherited from Judeo-Christianity. Stefano Tomelleri’s “Ressentiment and the Turn to the Victim: Nietzsche, Weber, Scheler” tells the philosophical story of this insight, culminating in Girard’s mimetic analysis of ressentiment as “the interiorization of weakened vengeance” (331), which results from the exposure of sacrificial institutions. Space no doubt precludes discussion of the importance of Dostoevsky’s depiction of what he called the “underground” as an important precursor for both Nietzsche and Girard.

In the final two chapters of part IV, Wolfgang Palaver and Scott Cowdell place mimetic theory in relation to several important thinkers about secularization. Palaver concentrates on Charles Taylor, one of the most prominent philosophers to cite Girard as a major influence on his own thought and a fellow Catholic who shares Girard’s view of modernity as an outgrowth of biblical revelation. The parallels between them, as Palaver details, not only affirm their shared perspectives but also point to Taylor’s work as a bridge linking mimetic theory to other conversations. Cowdell does similar bridge-building in “Secularization Revisited: Tocqueville, Asad, Bonhoeffer, Habermas.” The similarities he traces between Girard and these four, highly diverse thinkers, too intricate for summary, are full of insight and—especially in the case of Habermas’s post-secularism—hope during an apocalyptic time.

(Cue the transition to part V, “Apocalypse, Post-Modernity, and the Return to Religion,” where we will pick up next time.)