Bulletin 86 – November 2025

Our contribution was more theoretical and communicative. We were tasked with drafting a document on democracy. The goal was clear: M-19 sought to transform the country by expanding democracy, in response to the 1970 electoral fraud that gave birth to this group. We studied the classics of political thought. We came to understand that democracy in Colombia was merely formal. The system of alternating power between the traditional parties, created as a solution to their internal conflict in the 1950s, had become a tool of exclusion.

Although a peace process existed between President Betancur’s government and M-19, combat, detentions, and killings continued. The “Leche Massacre” affected us directly: eleven people we worked closely with were murdered by the army. Five hundred uniformed men against eleven militants who were distributing food to the hungry and were defenseless. 

We knew our struggle entailed enormous risks. We believed it was just and that the armed path was the only viable option in the face of the establishment’s violence and intransigence. We agreed with the idea of carrying out a symbolic trial of the President of the Republic for betraying the peace agreements. Our text on democracy would be part of the proclamation to be read during that act.

But this trial never took place. M-19 made a tremendous miscalculation, endangering hundreds of lives. A mistake the surviving leaders have recognized and for which they have asked forgiveness. I share that responsibility, even though I never held a weapon.

We now know that the military forces had been warned and were prepared. What M-19 planned was not a “blood and fire” assault but a symbolic action. A trial. Just like the successful takeover of the Dominican Republic’s Embassy in 1980, when M-19 entered during an Independence Day celebration, held 18 diplomats and other guests, and maintained control for two months without bloodshed. The goal was to denounce human rights violations by the Colombian army and demand the release of political prisoners. But by 1985, the Army felt deeply humiliated by previous M-19 actions—such as the theft of weapons from a military garrison, the theft of Simón Bolívar’s sword, and the Dominican Embassy takeover. Therefore, already aware of the guerrillas’ plan, the army responded with its full destructive force: machine guns, tanks, fire.

Since then, the establishment has insisted—and continues to insist—that the operation was financed by drug trafficking, aimed at halting extradition. But we now know it was the national army itself that set fire to the Palace archives, including files on drug traffickers. However, it appears that copies of those documents existed, so the whole truth about it remains fragmented. 

Another matter buried by the financing narrative is that the military’s extreme reaction—symbolized by the order “If you see them, shoot to kill”—was a response to court rulings against the military for human rights violations.

The claim that drug traffickers funded this M-19 operation relies on testimonies of dubious credibility, as well as reports from media outlets opposed to these guerrillas and to President Petro—himself a former M-19 leader—such as “El Colombiano,” “El Tiempo,” and “Semana,” all of which have declared opposition to the current government and lack impartial, verified information.

Yet the facts present a more complex panorama. A key antecedent undermining the idea of an alliance was the kidnapping of Martha Nieves Ochoa, which triggered the formation of the paramilitary group MAS (Death to Kidnappers), active since 1980. The name MAS continued to be used as a general term to refer to paramilitary actions, but it essentially reflects the enmity between drug traffickers and the M-19 guerrillas.

From the founding of MAS onward, the connection between drug trafficking, paramilitarism, politicians, and sectors of the state—especially the army—became structural. For example, years later, declassified documents linked the Ochoa family to the financing of Álvaro Uribe’s first senate campaign. Uribe is clearly associated with the “Convivir” private security cooperatives, which gave rise to paramilitary groups. The legalization of Convivir marked a turning point: ties between drug traffickers, the military, politicians, and cattle ranchers converged into paramilitary groups aimed primarily at combating leftist guerrillas.

By the late 2000s, this sector could be considered the “winner” of the war against guerrillas. And today’s so-called “guerrilla” groups are deeply infiltrated by drug trafficking. In truth, this war was waged against peasants and the popular sectors, to seize their land and eliminate alternative leadership. More than 8 million hectares were dispossessed, and victims of all kinds multiplied: over 800,000 people killed, more than 200,000 disappeared, over 80,000 kidnapped, over 30,000 minors forcibly recruited, and nearly 9 million people displaced by violence.

Years later, M-19 severed ties with the Guerrilla Coordinating Body and signed peace on March 9, 1990. It was not only a renunciation of armed struggle, but—over time—we have come to understand it as a renunciation of all forms of violence. There were three reasons: an assessment of the conflict concluding that it would not be resolved through arms; a commitment to deeper democracy; and the certainty that, without aligning with drug trafficking, it was impossible to win the war—an alliance we deemed unacceptable. This, historically, confirms Girard’s call to renounce violence.

For this reason, I argue that the prevailing narrative—suggesting an alliance between M-19 and drug traffickers—is false, even if today it is politically convenient for the mainstream media and the opposition. It serves to shift blame and portray as perpetrators those who, in many cases, were most harmed by the narco-paramilitary alliance.

Looking back, we must continue to ask forgiveness for the pain caused. Whether combatants or not, those of us who were part of M-19 bear a share of responsibility. As other actors were also involved in this violent episode, and the truth remains untold, many crimes of state are still unresolved.

Paradoxically, considering the symmetry of rivals: if our goal was to read a proclamation to the nation on the need to expand democracy, what we received in return was “To defend democracy, maestro,” uttered by the military commander who responded with bullets and fire. That response still echoes as a sign that neither path—ours nor the army’s—was the right one.

Today I understand that making peace means building trust and honoring commitments on both sides. But peace should not be confused with the democracy we currently have. Deepening democratic culture, promoting grassroots organizations, and defending rights in all dimensions remain unfinished tasks if we truly want lasting peace.

After that unfinished lunch, what followed was uncertainty. Days later, I walked with the same friend down 7^th Avenue (Carrera 7a) to Plaza de Bolívar, where the events took place, in the very heart of Bogotá. In front of the Palace’s ruins, I felt fear over the violence we unleashed. And reverence: a deep, personal bow to those who died or disappeared. There, I understood that history is not written with rifles or proclamations, but by honoring the stories and hopes of all victims, regardless of who victimized them—victims who still cause us pain.

According to Castro Rocha, the romantic lie is woven through Latin American culture (70). Brazilians have perceived that they can escape the foreigner’s gaze—the source of an identity not of their own choosing—if they “value their own traditions, the indigenous cultures that predated the European invasion” (78). A similar méconnaissance is visible in postcolonial studies when scholars characterize as autonomous agents those whose freedoms they champion. But interdividuality makes each of us beings who are shaped by other beings (81). Given “the unavoidable presence of the other,” the life-giving alternative to a toxic relationality that supports only the colonizer’s subjectivity is not found in refusing relationality but in embracing relationality differently (149). No “truly native thought” exists; rather, mutual influences abound. Indeed, a “permanent oscillation between the own and the foreign” characterizes every relationship. Precarious Latin American identities will not be secured when the other is evaded but when “the constitutive presence of alterity” is embraced (77). 

Faced with asymmetrical power in political, economic, and cultural relationships, Latin Americans should not, Castro Rocha argues, aim for originality or precedence. The desire to return to a time when indigenous peoples generated their own subjectivity, free from outside influences or control, truly is a romantic dream. The forced choice of imitation or originality, submission to a foreign context or native purity, misconstrues reality under the erroneous understanding that it is founded on individuality rather than interdividuality (116). A nonbinary approach is particularly important for Latin America after colonialism. Colonialism was a specific form of coercive control that Castro Rocha describes as “hegemonic.” Understanding that power is deployed in Latin America today in more complex ways, Castro Rocha describes it as “non-hegemonic.” For example, power may not be overtly coercive but may persist as a kind of naturalized acceptance of the status quo among subordinate groups. In non-hegemonic circumstances, such as Brazil, strategies will more effectively engage power dynamics on behalf of emancipating goals when interdividuality is rendered ever more spacious and fluid. 

Fortunately, a model for such strategies exists, and it is as old as Shakespeare (82). Castro Rocha acknowledges his reader’s skepticism. Shakespeare’s works shaped the Western world and feature prominently in its hegemonic canon. But Castro Rocha claims that, if Latin Americans attend to how Shakespeare composed his plays, they will arrive at a model for living, exchanging deadly for life-sustaining alterity (86). 

Shakespeare’s plays did not spring fully formed from his imagination. He relied on existing materials, combining them in unique ways. Of Shakespeare’s thirty-four plays published in the 1623 First Folio, thirty-two feature multiple sources. Only four are original creations (87). In the other thirty-four plays, influences include the comedies of Plautus and Terence, Seneca’s tragedies, medieval chronicles, European legends, and works by Shakespeare’s contemporaries (88). Having identified Shakespeare as a model for “inventive appropriation” by people constrained by asymmetrical relationships (political, economic, and cultural), Castro Rocha can typify as “Shakespearean” cultures that “turn to the gaze of the other to define their own images,” thereby engaging in the “unabashed and systematic pillage of voices” (88). Purloined assets open up non-hegemonic cultures by drawing on a creative assimilation of a canonical repertoire as well as on contemporary modes of expression. Three strategies can amplify these possibilities for freedom: emulation, invention, and anthropophagy.

Emulation: Castro Rocha draws on the visual arts to describe “a poetics of emulation.” Beginning artists master technique—palette, brushstrokes, composition—by imitating the great masters. Emulation is not merely copying, as happens in the cases of mechanical or digital reproduction. Rather, emulation consists in imitating disparate features of others’ works that will later align. Retrospective exhibitions that include examples of an artist’s student work often attest to emulation. The artist can be seen revisiting and recasting early influences in later works. Mastery unleashes new aesthetic expressions and novel compositions we attribute to the mature artist’s style.

Castro Rocha finds it both urgent and of strategic importance for non-hegemonic cultures to claim the power associated with emulation. Rather than rejecting traditions of the dominant culture, the path to one’s own cultural identity runs through them. Emulation enables a culture to imagine new possible relationships to existing structures of power through the simultaneity that is expressed through novel engagements with tradition (e.g., its art, literature, and theatre).

Invention: Described by Castro Rocha as a feature of modernism, invention has enjoyed robust application in Brazilian arts and literature and remains a powerful trope. Indeed, “invention” actually gives rise to Shakespearean cultures. Castro Rocha prefers “invention” to “creation” because the latter implies that what is new emerges in an instant—wholly ex nihilo. Inventors, by contrast, come across things that already exist and recombine these elements in novel arrangements. Above all, invention is grounded in relationships that support emancipatory spaces. In these spaces, traditions are interpreted, incorporated, and upcycled. Inventors do not cling to the prejudice of originality that discounts precedent as a source of creativity; rather they see openings for newness in the complexity of what already exists. 

Anthropophagy: A third strategy to which Castro Rocha appeals is inspired by the 1920s Brazilian Anthropophagia Movement (see Della Torre, 9). Associated with Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago,” this movement challenged imperialism and colonialism without embracing nationalism. On a visit to Paris, Andrade read Montaigne’s account of Brazilian cannibals and discovered himself as Other. He famously concluded, “If there is something I have brought back from my travels in Europe between the wars, it is Brazil itself.” Andrade embraced what European colonizers most associated with Brazil: the act of consuming human beings. Anthropophagy breaks through the colonizer/colonized, subject/object binary by understanding commonality not as a repression of difference but as consumption. Difference is ingested as a source of subjectivity.

Citing Peggy Sanday, Castro Rocha suggests that cannibalism is primarily a medium for nongustatory messages that support the maintenance, regeneration, and foundation of the cultural order (241). He explains that, prior to acts of ritual cannibalism, those who were to be eaten became endogamously related to those who were eating them. That which was being partaken of also became an object of desire: its courage and strength were transferred to those who consumed it (240). Through these actions, anthropophagy confirmed that individuals rely on others’ desires for the constitution of their own identities. Predation did not establish a social bond; it reaffirmed it.

Viewed from the perspective of mimetic theory and the dynamics of desire, Castro Rocha suggests that anthropophagy offers an alternative to the forced choice of the romantic lie: imitation or originality, native purity or submission to a foreign context. Facilitating “a worldview… equipped to incorporate otherness instead of eliminating it,” anthropophagy is a striking instance of interdividuality (244). A competitive play of desire between groups is exchanged for shared being as participants remember an incorporating bond that joined them before they became divided. Understood as “an extreme form of hospitality, cannibalism is a strategy of assimilation of alterity” (246). 

As a reader unfamiliar with the Brazilian Anthropophagia Movement prior to reading about it in Castro Rocha’s book, I have found that Bruna Della Torre’s observations about Andrade’s Manifesto enhance my understanding of Castro Rocha’s discussion of anthropophagy. In an essay, she observes: “Without those so-called barbarous cannibals, Europe wouldn’t have its utopias” (17). Cannibals offer “an imaginary that serves as a resource for Europe’s moral universe and also its economic thought” (17). A Brazil that could not narrate its way out of being an “other” finds in anthropophagy the ultimate challenge to hegemony: “The anthropophagus absorbs what is eaten and, in so doing, calls into question any possibility of radical otherness in relation to European culture” (17). 

Employing a like perspective to Della Torre’s, Castro Rocha suggests that anthropophagy challenges us to reconsider what human actions warrant charges of barbarism. Western colonizers sought to eliminate otherness by denying subject standing to those who were different; societies that practice ritual cannibalism assimilate otherness through physical and symbolic ingestion, transforming the other into their own flesh and blood (248). 

When anthropophagy is understood as “spiritual cannibalism,” it can present as aggression rather than communion. Nevertheless, Castro Rocha reminds us that the paradigmatic model for ingestion is not violence but hospitality: we gather at a common table and “fraternally nourish one another.” When circumstances support a common meal, the other becomes my pathway to nourishment, not because I consume them but because I recognize myself in them (250–51). In light of that possibility, in the context of asymmetrical political, economic, and cultural conditions, anthropophagy joins invention and emulation as an alternative to other emancipatory tactics in non-hegemonic cultures. With originality discounted as unworkable and naive, these three strategies constitute unorthodox and irreverent modes of appropriation that locate openings for freedom in the complexity of what already exists. 

Castro Rocha’s scholarship on non-hegemonic cultures augments Girard’s theory in a way that proves critical to the achievement of the three strategies he has advanced. Nowhere is this more evident than in Castro Rocha’s introduction of the category of the “other other.” He observes that the dynamics of desire, in which we seek models for our emancipatory efforts, create “zones of shadow.” While the “other” in the mimetic triangle is a model for desire, the “other other” is the “target of victimary disdain” (98). 

The “other other” becomes visible for Castro Rocha through an explication of the mimetic crisis that develops because the subject-model-object construct of mimetic desire is unstable. Our desires are predicated on a lack of being that is endemic to the human condition. That lack of being presents as instability when desire is mediated. When the model directs its desire toward the original, imitating subject, the dynamic becomes volatile. In up-close mirroring, reciprocal rivalries devolve into violence when neither the subject nor the model can attain the object of their desire. Moreover, when these rivalries engage groups, and not only individuals, this double mediation threatens social order. Violence is averted when someone is identified by the rivalrous entities as the true source of the crisis. Banishing or killing this person (or group) neutralizes the threat by directing it way from the rivals, and social order returns. Girard calls this scenario “scapegoating.” 

The “other other” is not the scapegoated object. In Latin America, enslaved blacks, indigenous people, and mestizos are the “other other” (225). On my reading of Castro Rocha, his notion can be understood as analogous to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. The abject marks a boundary between the subject and the other, an inassimilable non-unity that is a constitutive element of our subjectivity. The abject precedes language. We first encounter it at the high point of subject instability, in our human not-yetness. Although the abject is associated with infancy, Kristeva claims that humans revisit it whenever in their lives the lack of being that fuels human desires presses most on them. 

When the play of mimetic desire falls short and a scapegoat cannot be found to assuage our fears, the abject or “other other,” as Castro Rocha calls it, makes its appearance. The abject is what humans spit out in disgust when hospitality eludes them and all strategies for communion fail. The abject is, in its essence, unassimilable alterity—the lack of being at the core of human life. As Castro Rocha concludes, citing Conrad, when we encounter the “other other,” we whisper, “The horror, the horror” (221). The challenge of decolonization is to find a means to acknowledge the abject, not to defeat it, but to articulate its strangeness—our human strangeness to ourselves—in order to live with it as an inevitable feature of human life. 

For Castro Rocha, art, literature, and theatre in Latin America can advance a “poetics of emulation” capable of meeting challenges posed by the long legacy of colonization and fraught practices of decolonization. In sharing with his readers his vision for that poetics, Castro Rocha offers a compelling template for further scholarship grounded in mimetic theory that will build on his landmark contribution to postcolonial studies. An essential entry in any primary bibliography of works in mimetic theory. 

Works Cited

Bruna Della Torre, “Anthropophagia and Those Twenties in Brazil: Good Old Days or Bad New Ones?” FORMA 3 (2): 1–35, 2024.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982. 

On his way to this question Perret provides an account of biblical revelation, consisting in a profound interrogation of God’s complicity in violence by means of slowly unveiling an authentic version of God’s actual nonviolence. This is not the usual trajectory (think of the Flood, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Joshua), but it is unimpeachably just as valid, and more so, because it demonstrates an evolutionary pathway that culminates in the nonviolence of Jesus. In other words, there is a strand in Hebraic revelation that leads logically and inevitably to Jesus and his nonretaliatory death. It is a strand just as compelling, and, again, more so, than all the violent images of Exodus, and before them the semi-mythic episodes of early Genesis in which “God” seems to act with the same petty reactiveness as any human being. When Perret’s biblical journey reaches Jesus he repeats the Galilean’s claim, “There is something greater than the Temple here,” a word spoken in direct connection to the saying which is also the title of the book, “I desire mercy not sacrifice.” This already suggests Jesus as a profound alternative to the Temple and, specifically, its sacrificial practice. Then, in respect of the gospel account of Jesus’ final action directly confronting the Temple—something which was the clear precipitant of his death—Perret comments: “Everything suggests that he carried out a premeditated attack against the sacrificial cult itself” (142). It was an action against the archaic foundational violence preserved and institutionalized within the Jerusalem citadel but not according to his Father God’s wishes. What emerges is a Jesus who has little to do with the smoke-dimmed piety of holy places or the highly dubious pathos of traditional sacrificial atonement. Rather he belongs to the long, anguished story of prophets leading, at last, to one from their number who would bring the genuine human breakthrough they always dreamed of—the birth of a humanity without violence, either theological or anthropic. 

But what of all those holy places, their altars and crypts, their candles and incense? As Perret pragmatically puts it: “It is difficult to see . . . how the Christian religion would have been able to take root in ancient societies without using the universal symbolic of sacred power—even more so given the very nature of the message, its intrinsic difficulty, calls for a sacred authority: it is requisite that the Church explain, authenticate and incarnate at the human level the improbable personal involvement of God in human existence” (63). And so at once a problem of the endemic mixture of the sacred and the message of the gospel appears intractable. In historical terms popular piety comes online hand-in-hand with the validating church authority Perret so well describes. I am reminded of a phrase of Augustine, bishop of Hippo, as he gives an argument for the natural transmission of Adam’s soul (and thus sin) to the souls of Adam’s offspring. He says, “The universal church holds to the custom of rushing to the sacrament with living infants” (Literal Meaning of Genesis X.11), referencing, according to commentators, the urgent practice of the local faithful alongside the teaching of a newly established Catholic church. In other words, popular practice confirmed the doctrinal sin of the infant, needing the sacrament to protect from what was surely in fact a cultural sense of the archaic sacred threatening the child. 

Perret provides his own examples of the sacred in critical areas of the church’s practice. “The sacrificial character of the mass confers, in effect, a particular aura on the priest and justifies the obligations of his state, among them consecrated celibacy—a condition which takes on an evident sacrificial dimension, whatever valuable reasons, spiritual or otherwise, for choosing such a way of life” (182). Earlier Perret specifies this sacrificial character: “The grammar of the rite is modelled on that of ancient sacrifices: a material reality is transformed into a supernatural one before the offering—something which Catholic doctrine calls transubstantiation” (85). But, now—adopting the viewpoint of divine nonviolence—how does this interpretation continue to stand once we see the substructure of violence, and if, specifically, the Bible consists of “the self-revelation of the nonviolence of God at the heart of the violent sacred” (61-2)? 

The New Testament letter to the Hebrews is a celebrated instance that seems to run counter to this perspective, re-establishing the sacrificial dynamic in respect of Christ; but Perret pushes back strongly. He points out how the letter does not reflect the brutal violence of Christ’s death, nor the Last Supper accounts of a gift given to human sisters and brothers; indeed, its text makes no reference at all to the drama of that meal. This critique must indeed relativize the value of the letter. At the same time Hebrews does concentrate on the essential role of Christ’s willed choice—something that has no function in the case of an object sacrifice. However, it’s clear that the question of sacrifice reaches back into the New Testament itself. At the end of the day, Perret does accept a kind of limit-use of the word in relation to Christ’s death, but he notes, in something of an understatement, “The risk of confusion is very real” (170).

Nevertheless, there is the possibility of entirely another explanation, an embryonic counterpoint to the sacrificial account, one which could actually turn out to be the most life-filled. Perret references Augustine, who “lays the foundation of a theory of the rite as a transformative sign, a conceptual breakthrough whose consequences are far from being realized” (128). Later he suggests that Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper amount to “an anti-sacrificial mime” (169) and develops this thought briefly with no less of a commentator than Karol Wojtyla: “Christ makes himself present through an ensemble of words and gestures, something which John Paul II also underlined: . . . ‘The Eucharist takes place entirely in the dynamic context of signs which carry in themselves a dense and luminous message’” (175).

Running beneath the entire surface of the book is the fact that Girard himself did not attempt to deal with the sacrificial aspects of the Catholic tradition, notably avoiding any specific commentary on the Eucharist. In fact, as Perret avers, in his later career Girard appeared to take formally conservative positions on the Church’s sacrificial identity (64). In effect, therefore, Perret is deriving perspectives from Girard that Girard himself never admitted. But this does not mean that it is illegitimate to draw these conclusions—the reverse may be the case. The underlying dynamic of Girard’s thought calls for them urgently.  

Perret’s book thus represents a crossroads, and at a profound level. It is not simply a hermeneutical argument between a substantialist-sacrificial viewpoint (the miraculous ontological change of the altar) and a semiotic one (Jesus reconstructing the symbolic universe around his gift of self), but a struggle that belongs at the deepest level of human meaning. Perret turns to represent this element in the last chapter of his book, invoking the language of apocalyptic and the messianic. Taking a cue from Paul’s famous passage in 1 Corinthians where the apostle exhorts the Corinthians to live what they are “as if (they were) not” (7:29-32), he concludes that the actual mode of human existence is already radically changed by the Christ/Messiah. “Messianism is above all a radical presentism illuminated by an event that has already taken place” (196). The future enters into the present, and this can never be by a violent irruption of force, but rather, entirely to the contrary, something communicated through the effect of transformative signs—i.e. a gospel. 

To more fully represent this novelty of a future already inhabiting the now, perhaps the following concluding reflection might be apt. To self-reveal within the violent sacred (not in another separate sphere), but still other than the violent sacred, means to make violence the medium of a truth which is totally other than violence. This is a gripping thought, but how can it be? There has to be a commonality between violence and revelation, a unity of space where a drama of subversion is played out. It means in fact that the most intimate area of human signification and selfhood (by means of the mythologized victim) is challenged and transformed from within. Its very structure is used in order to express a signification completely other and new. From a theological perspective, it suggests that a God of love has somehow turned a violent creation (violent in and through its freedom) into its impossible recreation by suffering human violence utterly without retaliation and inscribing this in the original structure of human meaning. On the formal philosophical level, it tells us that humanity, as a single transcendental structure through violence, has become simultaneously (initially in a pre-reflective condition) the possibility of love. It tells us that, as of the time of the gospel, the transcendental human—the internal synthesis that gives ordered linguistic shape and meaning to experience—is always conditioned by violent origins and yet, at the same time through Christ, the utter overturning of those origins. There is one transcendental structure of the human, but it is challenged from within its deepest intimate structure to become self-giving rather than life-taking. This is the presentism of the future. The result is an actually existing human self which is a constant polarity between the old and the new, between violence and nonviolence, between the cruel destiny of the sacrifice of other humans and the joy of self-giving life. The tension takes place not between two opposed metaphysical principles but within the same unitary structure—so we are not dealing with a dualism of powers which would result only in more rivalry and violence. Rather, little by little, alongside manic attempts to re-establish the sacred, a possibility of complete conversion is effected within the intimate structure of the human—something already realized by saints, poets, and artists, but to which all humanity is called. This is Girard’s amazing structural discovery, which now allows us to bring the Bible’s most radical reading and hope to reflective knowledge and practice.

Because the difference for theology today is that we have begun to know these things clearly. The Catholic synthesis, so well documented by Perret, tells us of itself that it is on the way to becoming something new. This is because the Catholic synthesis is the primary historical site of the post-gospel double valence of the human transcendental and its inevitable creative tensions. The synthesis is the event of incarnation of violence by divine nonviolence—an incarnation that goes beyond any simplistic, Platonic perspective, to the full Pauline sense of Christ engaging via the Cross in our “body of the flesh.” Christ enters the full anthropological complex of founding violence in order to transform it, and he leaves behind the Christian community as the turning-point of historical self-awareness and self-actualization in conformity with this cataclysmic change. I cannot begin to imagine the consequences of this self-awareness and action, but Bernard Perret’s luminous book C’est l’amour qui me plait et non les sacrifices is surely among the first—the instantly recognizable flower of a springtime which will not be held back.

Teaching is a fundamental concern of mimetic theory. Girard himself reported that the initial insights into mimetic desire initially emerged from his own classroom experience. As a graduate student at Indiana University, Girard was assigned to teach French literature, an assignment based more on his language ability than his disciplinary competence. Searching for a way into the novels he was to teach, Girard began looking for recurring patterns and found mimetic desire thematized in the works of Proust, Stendahl, and Flaubert, among others. No surprise that an insight forged in a classroom might occasion insight into the classroom. 

Graham lays out his own insights in a systematic fashion, beginning with a historical overview of the role of mimesis in philosophic thought. This review begins with Plato, continues through Aristotle, and then moves on to Augustine and Aquinas (before turning somewhat unexpectedly to the Spanish Inquisition). Finally, the chapter closes with an examination of Descartes, whose thought ushers in the modernity that rejects the influence of tradition. Yet the book’s main target of critique is not Descartes so much as Rousseau, whose Émile is cited as “a key landmark in which mimesis is radically overshadowed by freedom in pedagogy” (50). Throughout much of the book, Rousseau becomes a representative for the excesses of “romantic” education, which absolutizes and idolizes freedom. No doubt it would be difficult to reconcile mimetic theory with such a view. Nevertheless, it might have been helpful to contextualize Descartes and Rousseau a bit more in order to understand what they were reacting against and why. Without such context, metonymy risks becoming its own kind of scapegoating. This initial chapter might also have benefited from a wider view of Western pedagogical history, particularly rhetorical education, which would have included different perspectives on the role of imitation in the formation of the young. 

The book’s next two chapters then present contemporary pedagogical thinking in the Catholic Church, drawing both upon twentieth-century Church documents on education—especially after the Second Vatican Council—and the work of Giussani. Reading the Church’s view of education, Graham makes his most explicit and compelling case for a “both/and” anthropology that sees mimesis and freedom as mutually needful. At this point in the book, mimetic theory has not yet been taken up in an extended manner. Yet Girard’s influence is evident in Graham’s analysis of the Church’s pedagogical thinking, which proceeds from the assumption that the divisions of modernity (mimesis/freedom, objective/subjective, tradition/liberation) are simply insufficient to account for the complexity of human experience.

The book then turns to Giussani’s Risk of Education. In Giussani’s thought, Graham finds deep resonances with mimetic theory and its emphasis on models. “For Giussani,” Graham writes, “the hypothesis of meaning comes from—and in—the authority of the person making the proposal” (86). But Giussani believes that authority must emanate from the witness and example of the teacher. Giussani thus echoes a principle articulated in Paul VI’s 1975 encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (sec. 41). Only witnesses as teachers can take the risk of education, which entails both proposing the truth and allowing students the freedom to reject it. 

The next several chapters turn to Girard—presenting mimetic theory, summarizing and responding to critiques of mimetic theory, and outlining pedagogical applications of mimetic theory. The book’s central payoff comes with a comparative reading of Giussani and Girard, where Graham makes a convincing case that mimetic anthropology both confirms and explains Giussani’s pedagogical vision. 

Throughout the book Graham consistently focuses his attention on how mimetic theory plays out in the relationship between teacher and student. While he does briefly entertain the possibility of teaching mimetic theory to students, he is more concerned with how mimetic theory operates within students. This focus is very wise in that it treats mimetic desire as a phenomenon more than a theory. But this focus also calls attention to an important question that remains underexplored. What if students do not wish to imitate their teachers? What if they do not take their masters as their models or even recognize their teachers as masters at all? In the devoutly religious milieu Graham imagines, students may arrive more open to their teachers’ personal example. But in many education settings, students may be just as likely to see their teachers as obstacles to the transaction to which their tuition dollars entitle them. 

For Graham, mimetic theory entails teachers asking themselves whether and how they might become worthy models for their students. But even that question leaves unanswered how teachers might stand out against a background of idolatrous models. To be sure, there is evidence that students are looking for guidance and relationship. A recent study of college students reported that 55% desired their teachers to act as mentors, a finding that suggests a desire that Girardians— and Giussanians—might recognize as mimetic. Mimetic theory would assume that all people are looking for models, whether they acknowledge it or not. The key question for educators then becomes whether we are worthy of being modeled.