Bulletin 55 – February 2018

The scope of collaboration involved in the Handbook also makes it an excellent introduction to the major scholars who work on MT and to many of the core members of COV&R, especially its English-speaking segment (plus a strong German-speaking contingent). Indeed, everyone we could think of who would be most qualified to write this review is involved in the project as an author or editor. So we decided to do it ourselves. As literary scholars, perhaps we can also test the Handbook’s value to audiences beyond religious studies and the other disciplines represented.

Given the scale of the book, we have decided to review it in three stages, and Curtis will cover the first two sections in this February edition. For May we plan to review the middle third of the book. In the meantime, we invite you to post comments and feedback. Metrics at the Palgrave website indicate thousands have already downloaded the work (currently sold as an e-book and in hardback).

The Handbook is cunningly organized to use the focus on religion, and MT’s understanding of its centrality in human life, as a way of also treating the theory’s importance for other disciplines. Thus the first part, “Violent Origins,” also deals with anthropology and, to a lesser extent, psychology, while the second, “From Rites to Writing,” continues with anthropology and brings in classical studies and media studies alongside comparative religion and biblical studies.

Each part has a brief introduction that lays out overarching themes, while individual articles relate MT, and usually the work of René Girard himself, to particular areas of thought and to influential thinkers. The authors are to be commended for keeping their contributions—often in areas on which they have written entire books—within a tight span of six to ten pages, including notes and brief bibliographies of the major relevant scholarly works.

One of the great services of the Handbook is to place mimetic theory in relation to other influential approaches to the many topics within its scope. In the first essay of part 1, Paul Dumouchel masterfully summarizes Girard’s account of hominization while comparing it to several other influential approaches. MT is more ambitious, he argues, because it does not focus on a single aspect, such as language, and thus can serve to integrate the others. Pierpaolo Antonello, on MT’s understanding of the importance of ritual for the emergence of consciousness, gives more attention to thinkers working under the influence of Girard. Both Dumouchel and Antonello, like the Handbook as a whole, promote the contributions of MT while suggesting opportunities for dialogue with other schools of thought.

Girard himself was, of course, in dialogue with other thinkers, sometimes explicitly but more often tacitly. Many contributions here help fill in the picture of those conversations. Three essays in part 1 and two in part 2 summarize and extend conversations with individual interlocutors: Kathryn Frost on Freud, Martha Reineke on Julia Kristeva, Wolfgang Palaver on the anthropologist and classicist Walter Burkert, Lucien Scubla on Claude Lévi-Strauss, and James Williams on Nietzsche. Each is helpful in drawing on a wide range of texts, both by Girard and his interlocutors, in order to introduce these authors and their importance for MT, whether as superseded by Girard’s reading of them, as with Lévi-Strauss and Nietzsche, or as continuing partners.

The remarkable range of Girard’s work means that he only touched on some large areas of scholarship, which have of course grown since he wrote. Three major such topics in anthropology conclude part 1. Mark Anspach, in “Vengeance and the Gift,” gives a clear overview of Girard’s understanding of sacrifice, suggests some qualifications that help reconcile it with alternative views, and gives a good introduction to his own important work on the logic of the gift as “negative reciprocity in reverse” (58). Fr. Miguel Rolland, in “Mesoamerican Civilizations and Sacrifice,” surveys how recent work in this field, which has overlooked Girard, nonetheless confirms his use of the story of Teotihuacan myth in The Scapegoat and provides extensive material ripe for further analysis of the relationship between myth and sacrifice. Similarly, Christopher Knüsel and Bonnie Glencross show how well Girard’s analysis of evidence from the study of Neolithic Ҫatalhöyük, in Turkey, fits with current work at that site and in Neolithic studies.

Part 2 puts “Girard’s thesis about how the violent roots of the archaic sacred are exposed by Biblical revelation…into the broader framework of the religious transformation that characterized the axial age” (79). The term “axial age,” coined by the mid-twentieth century German philosopher Karl Jaspers, refers to the innovations of the first millennium BCE that move from primitive myth and ritual toward the major religions, philosophies, and political institutions that still shape the modern world. Stephen Gardner’s dense comparison of Jaspers with two other important thinkers about this period, Robert Bellah and Eric Voegelin, identifies their similarities with Girard’s understanding of this period while arguing that the apocalyptic side of Girard—his diagnosis of the violence in modern civilization—advances the critiques of progress in these axial thinkers.

The biggest story of the axial age is the rise of the major world religions. Palaver’s concise explanation of the scapegoat mechanism and its exposure in the Bible would be an excellent introduction to this central aspect of Girard’s work and also provides an overview of more recent work on how to see Islam as part of this “Abrahamic Revolution” that moves beyond sacred violence. Brian Collins, meanwhile, suggests how mimetic theory might identify a similar “Eastern Revolution” in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, putting Girard’s intuitions along these lines into conversation with current scholarship.

Phil Rose, a scholar of media studies, opens up a promising area of thought beyond Girard’s own work in his brief overview of three major thinkers on the transition from orality to writing: anthropologist Jack Goody, classicist Eric Havelock, and literary and religious thinker Walter Ong, SJ. Such work on how, as Ong puts it, “writing restructures consciousness” stands to enrich the mimetic theory of cultural development through Rose’s suggestion that writing is key to resisting reciprocal violence.

Nidesh Lawtoo, on Greco-Roman culture, does not attempt to summarize generations of scholarship but does a remarkable job of tracing the various threads of Girard’s engagement with it. Whereas Girard’s own style emphasizes his differences from other interpretations, Lawtoo gives equal and suggestive attention to similarities, to the point of arguing for continuity with Plato as well as Aristotle and with the Cambridge ritualists as well as Nietzsche. He also opens dialogue with more recent theorists about sacrifice such as Bataille, Stroumsa, and Agamben. In a much more focused essay, it’s a pleasure to watch Sandor Goodhart recount Girard’s intellectual trajectory through his repeated attention to a single figure from classical culture, Oedipus—including Goodhart’s own work on Sophocles’ play as a Ph.D. student under Girard.

Biblical interpretation also figures into part 2. Robert Daly compares Girard’s use of mimetic anthropology as a “hermeneutic key with which to read the Bible” to the tradition of figural or typological interpretation that goes back to the Alexandrian church father Origen and was relegated to obsolescence by the rise of historical criticism. This is a way of recognizing the weaknesses of Girard’s approach while identifying its enduring value and the need to continue to work out its relationship to wider biblical criticism. Three friends and collaborators of Girard who began this work, Raymund Schwager, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, and James Williams, receive an appropriately appreciative overview from Matthias Moosbrugger, who is particularly helpful in identifying the legacy of each as a rich direction for further development.

We will pick up with part 3 in the next issue.

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius stand at the center not only of every Jesuit’s life, but also of all things Ignatian: the parishes, schools, clinics and universities that bear the imprint of Jesuits’ pastoral efforts. The Spiritual Exercises form a vision of reality—of God, of neighbor, of the Church, of political community. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the genre of “spiritual exercises” is older than Ignatius, that there exist other, at least as worthy, spiritualities and ways of living out the Christian life. As great as the Spiritual Exercises have been and are, they too are a created means and thus must themselves be approached with Ignatian “indifference” or a willingness to let go of them if they no longer produce the sought-after fruit. In his dissertation Schwager approached them with this kind of attitude.

He clarifies the “viewpoint” and the “method” of the Exercises and asks whether this viewpoint and this method still have validity today. He approaches them from the perspective of the Church, the community that the Exercises are meant to serve. The choice of this vantage point was anything but happenstance. The new sense of ecclesiology coming out of the Second Vatican Council (1960-1964) was serving to provoke intense criticism of the Exercises as being too individualistic and too oriented on the hierarchical model of the Church. Schwager was sympathetic to some of these criticisms. In fact, he wrote: “Out of that which we have seen up till now [this is page 175 or page 122 of the original], it is the moment for the original method of the Exercises to go under.” In the next paragraph he clarifies that he does not mean that they should “disappear.” In fact, the ultimate validity of the Exercises will be more visible after the breaking of their outer form. Schwager can still reaffirm that Ignatius’s attempt to bring together truth with religious experiences and from them to forge, in a unified method, the rational, volitional, and affective elements in the service of freedom has not been outdone.

This first major work bears, as noted above, the title St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Dramatic Understanding of the Church. But this was not the title of his dissertation upon which the published book is based. It had the more prosaic title, Ignatius and his Exercises in the Change of the Church. The emendation of the title is not referred to or explained. Further, the concept of the dramatic is not really all that present in the work. It does make an appearance in the last paragraph of the “Introduction,” a paragraph that conceivably could have been added during the process of preparing the dissertation for publication. The next appearance of a cognate of “dramatic” is in a footnote on p. 175 (122 in the original pagination). Schwager is quoting from a book by Roland Barthes in which Barthes credits Ignatius as using forces other than the syllogism or abstraction, thereby establishing his Spiritual Exercises as a model of “dramatized discourse.”

The first time the word occurs in the body of the text is on p. 249 (186 in the original pagination) when Schwager writes that the most fitting word to describe Ignatius’s relation to the Church is “dramatic.” “Dramatic” fittingly expresses that true unity with Church comes into being in the meeting of the human person with the Church, as in a drama.

“Drama” and its cognates are used again, the footnote makes clear, in the spirit of Roland Barthes to express that the language of the Spiritual Exercises integrates in its discourse not merely the rational but also the affective as well as the volitional. What St. Ignatius added to our understanding of belonging to the Church needs to be expressed, can only adequately be expressed, in dramatic language.

This is the seed from which the whole of “Dramatic Theology” will grow. I also think that Schwager tried to write the book in a somewhat dramatic fashion. It contains, as I pointed out above, harsh criticism of St. Ignatius and the Exercises. The reading of Ignatius comes close to what can only be termed tendentious. But it is meant to lead to the moment when Schwager writes: “In this sense all thoughts which were raised in the course of this work against Ignatius, do not lessen anything of his true greatness” (250). The light is to shine more brightly within its own limits.

The second work, Following Jesus, takes as its starting point the multiplicity of religions making ultimate claims. Christian faith can seem to be just one among many and, for a lot of people, being one among many in this particular class is to be “just” another one. Two ultimate claims is already one too many, and since it is precisely these kinds of claims that lead to conflict, isn’t it better to at least withdraw one’s own? Schwager turns away from the justifications of the claim to Jesus’s divine Sonship that were put forward by the First Vatican Council, finding them too “external” to be helpful. According to its decrees, Christian faith is supported not by natural insight but by the authority of the God who reveals. While this may seem to simply assert what it is asked to prove, the Council Fathers took another step in emphasizing the rationality of faith. Even though faith is supported by divine authority and awoken in the individual believer by supernatural power, there are nonetheless arguments that are acceptable to human reason. The belief here is that the surrender of reason to divine authority is rational. The prophecies and miracles of the Scriptures as well as the emergence and growth of the Church are all taken as signs for the credibility of the Christian proclamation.

Schwager notes that the First Vatican Council does not actually develop the arguments that would be acceptable to human reason; it merely asserts that they exist, while pointing, as I mentioned above, to the prophecies as well as the existence and growth of the Church. Schwager shows how problematic these claims are.

He begins to develop a different route to the credibility of the faith by building on the thought of the French theologian Pierre Rousselot (1878-1915). Rousselot developed the idea that faith and reason interpenetrate and that within the unified faith act, faith allows reason to properly grasp the significance of the facts while the understood facts produce a rationality of faith.

While this approach is superior to the Council’s, it does not solve all the problems. In particular one is left puzzled about how to distinguish the true light of faith and reason from a false one. The well-known problem exists and remains: our desires and fears can paint reality a certain color that does not belong to the reality itself. Christian faith, just like Marxist ideology, can so affect the way we view the “facts,” that, in fact, they are no longer facts.

In order to overcome these kinds of objections the revelation itself must show how it differs from supposed revelations in the way it is revealed. This is as important as what is being revealed.

If one accepts this argument, then Schwager’s way of proceeding, his trying to develop the claims about salvation in Jesus based upon what can be gleaned from the so-called historical-Jesus approach, makes a lot of sense. In particular it allows Schwager to emphasize the newness of what Jesus revealed. “Jesus brought about a new beginning” (294). The tradition, the Law, the powerful groups and authorities were all, to some degree or another, against him. What he had was the authority of his Father, and this is shown in the new reality that is his life and in a special way is his death. The Father allowed Jesus to transform the “blind fate of death into an act of offering” (294).

We can glimpse here, already, how central the thought of “offering” [Hingabe] was to Schwager. “Hingabe” means abandon or abandonment, in the sense that “mit Hingabe tanzen” would be translated “to dance with abandon.” Another phrase is “selbstlose Hingabe” which is translated as “selflessness.” Schwager is homing in on Jesus’s self-offering, so I translate “Hingabe” as offering because I think this best brings out its difference from yet relationship with sacrifice. Schwager’s focus was never on the similarity between Jesus’s death and the sacrifices offered in the temple, except insofar as these latter represented the deep desire of a human subject to freely offer his or her being to God—to be taken up by God and used by God so that God’s own will might be accomplished in the world. For Schwager this is the meaning of Jesus’ life and death, and it is the meaning of following him. For all the ways that Schwager’s thinking was enriched by Girard’s, he remained convinced that this idea of Hingabe, self-offering, had to be preserved.

Schwager rightly claims that the Christian message enters in a mediated fashion into humans’ fundamental condition (367). What is missing at this point in Schwager’s own development is a conceptual vocabulary to express that fundamental condition. He speaks of humans knowing their fundamental limitation, but cannot anchor his idea of a self-deception [Selbsttäuschung] (366). He sees that humans can never fully master their life and that they long for recognition and love. He even sees that the problem is related to human desire. For Schwager this is the most fundamental and the most decisive witness for the truth of the Christian message. And yet, to be honest, for me at least, the claim sort of hung in the air. It was not rooted deeply enough anthropologically.

Schwager sees that our preconceptions and preliminary decisions are conditioned by social norms and myths which correspond to our drive for self-preservation and the push for respect and recognition. He also sees that the power and reality of faith have nothing to do with physical or psychic violence, but he does not yet see the connection between these two facts. He does not see the centrality of violence in what happened to Jesus and how that is going to inflect our following him (371). He already understands that there is a radical opposition between the Christian faith and the “collective self-assertion” but has not yet grounded it in his theological anthropology.

The works in this volume continue to have a value in and of themselves, but they also point beyond themselves to the way that Schwager would be changed through his encounter with René Girard.

The new edition provides only a light editorial hand (here it is perhaps a propos to call for a new, annotated edition to Things Hidden), comprising six pages of notes at the end of the text. The edition includes a fine introduction by Moosbrugger and Peter, who show the ongoing relevance of Must There Be Scapegoats? by bringing it into conversation with the controversial claims made by a leading Protestant theologian, Notger Slenczka. A professor of systematic theology in Berlin, Slenczka proposed in a 2013 article that the Old Testament should not have canonical validity for Christians. This claim, associated in modern theology with Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), and in early Christianity with the second-century theologian and arch-heretic Marcion, initiated an outburst of shock and protest. One can certainly understand the outrage, especially in light of the role that Germany’s theologians played in divorcing Judaism from Christianity in the two previous centuries, and the impact this had during the Third Reich.

Rather than fuel the outrage machine, Moosbrugger and Peter elect to focus on a point that too many of Slenczka’s interlocutors glossed over: the failure of theologians to think critically about the relationship between the two Testaments. This very lacuna occupied much of Schwager’s thought and explained his impetus to write Must There Be Scapegoats? As Schwager read Violence and the Sacred, Girard’s theory provided a foundation for unifying the two Testaments around the question of the relationship between God and violence. Schwager composed Must There Be Scapegoats? as an argument for their synthesis, thus siding for Irenaeus, the great Church Father, and against Marcion.

Practical concerns also animated Schwager. As a priest working in Austria, on the border of the Iron Curtain, Schwager considered the threat of nuclear war a real possibility. His activity in anti-nuclear peace movements began before reading Girard and continued long after. It also included a theological response to the problem of nuclear escalation. The editors also recall the difficult circumstances under which Schwager took his position in Innsbruck. The bishop, Paulus Rusch, rescinded the permission to teach theology from Schwager’s predecessor, Franz Schupp, on the basis of Schupp’s affinity for the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. In Austria, as in Germany, all Catholic theologians serve at the pleasure of the bishops, but interventions are rare (the case of Hans Küng’s removal being the most high profile). By no means fast-tracked for an academic career, Schwager felt pressure to alleviate concerns that he would be the bishop’s lackey, and also to prove that he belonged in his position.

For Schwager, the publication of Must There Be Scapegoats? not only launched his engagement with mimetic theory, which would continue for the next quarter century, but it also validated his status as a theologian. He took particular pride in the review process, vetted by such leading theologians and biblical scholars as Norbert Lohfink, Rudolf Pesch, and Walter Kern. After a series of failures to find a German publisher for a translation of Violence and the Sacred, Schwager experienced a warm response from an acquisitions editor, who believed that his book would have a long-term impact on theology and biblical studies. The book not only went through three editions before the current manifestation, but was also translated into English, French, and Korean. Although Schwager’s attempt to bring Girard’s theory to bear on theology did not always go over smoothly—in particular, Schwager expressed frustration to Girard about some negative reviews and a lukewarm reception at a colloquium in Münster—his gambit, from our vantage point four decades later, was wildly successful and is still bearing fruit.

The research of the Innsbruck theologians to preserve Schwager’s legacy has resulted in a noteworthy byproduct: the need to rethink how to narrate the history of mimetic theory and theology. Schwager was not a disciple of Girard; they were not just friends but peers. Their applications of mimetic theory to the Bible took different, if ultimately reconcilable paths. Moosbrugger and Peter recall some of these tensions, which a close reading of Must There Be Scapegoats? (along with the recently published correspondence) easily confirms. This history should destabilize any attempts to presume that theological conclusions—even Girard’s—are simply baked into the origins of the theory. The greatest ode to Schwager’s efforts would be to continue thinking through the consequences of mimetic theory for all of the human sciences.

There is some overstatement here, which reflects Girard’s desire not to be confined to any single disciplinary identity. But it dramatizes all the more the relationship of Girard’s theory and practice to literary criticism—its role, its significance, for him. This is the subject that is explored in the book under review, expertly edited and introduced by Pierpaolo Antonello and Heather Webb, and developed and deepened in eighteen essays by accomplished scholars in French, German, Italian, and other fields of literature and language. There are helpful tips for further reading in the footnotes to the essays, and the book concludes with “Literature and Christianity: A Personal View,” a paper by Girard that he first presented at the MLA Convention in 1998.

It is striking that in this paper, Girard says in counterpoint to his statements elsewhere about the limits of his literary interests, “I started with literature and myth and then moved to the study of the Bible and Christian Scripture. Great literature literally led me to Christianity” (281). Literature, it seems, is the basis and point of departure for the Girardian project of mimetic inquiry. But, he immediately says, “This itinerary is not original. It still happens every day and has been happening since the beginning of Christianity” (281). The place of literature hence is special in Girard’s trajectory, but then again, not so much. What is the connection between the enterprise of literary criticism—the sustained, serious study of literary texts—and the content and shape of Girard’s career, especially his interrogations of sacrifice, ritual, and religious conversion?

In their introduction, Antonello and Webb touch on this question—indeed it is one that they could have engaged more fully. They then preview the contents of the book, noting the key features of the essays and their intersections. There is much solid scholarship and criticism here: readers will benefit from contributors who respond cogently to Girard’s own books; to his relationship (usually by way of contrast) to critics, intellectuals, philosophers, and literary theorists such as Freud, Deleuze, Weil, Barthes, and Auerbach; and to the relevance of mimetic theory for our understanding of authors past and present—including Dickens, Bernanos, and Jonathan Franzen, author of the dazzling novel, published in 2001, The Corrections.

Highlights for me among the essays are Luca Di Blasi’s inquiry into tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes in Girard’s texts; Karen S. Feldman’s probing treatment of realism and scripture in Girard’s Biblical studies; David Quint’s stimulating inquiry into Girardian themes in Dickens’s Little Dorrit; and Yue Zhuo’s incisive survey of Girard’s writings about Dostoyevsky.

The limit to this fine collection is that it says little (see xx-xxi, 28-31) about Girard’s problematic relationship to feminist literary theory and practice, to the discussion of gender roles and sexual identities, and to the consideration of writers and texts that deal with LGBTQ people and communities.

From my reading of this book, two further reflections arise. First, some of the contributors refer to what “the novel” is for Girard or propose that he views “novels” as having this or that revelatory bearing on mimetic theory. But he does not claim that “the novel” or “novels” in general always display to us the operation of his ideas. Some novels do. The vast majority do not. Girard is drawn to novelists who, in his estimation, depict through their characters and stories the dynamic of mimetic desire. Those that do not: from Girard’s perspective, they are (to be blunt) not as insightful as Cervantes, Proust, and the others whom he celebrates, scrutinizes, and keeps returning to.

In our own interpretive work, we might observe the movements of Girard’s theory in novelists and novels he never treated or for that matter may never have read. But this is different from stating or implying that Girard himself believed that his theory is in action in all novels. As he affirms in the essay in this book, he fastens on examples of literary greatness: “Great literature shows the necessary failure of undisciplined desire. The greatest literature shows the impossibility of self-fulfillment through desire” (283). Girard is not interested in being capacious or inclusive in his choices: he focuses on (as he defines them) great and even greater books, and the element of these books that gives them their distinction for him is their presentation of mimetic desire, how it functions and how it could be transcended. The greatest of all, for Girard, is Shakespeare, “an original thinker centuries ahead of his time, more modern than any of our so-called master thinkers” (A Theater of Envy, 6).

Second, there is an inclination among the contributors to stress the negative, destructive, violent implications of Girard’s mimetic theory. On one level, this is inevitable, but we should remember that the point of Girard’s account of bad imitation is for us to embrace the opposite, the right and good one: we make the desire-redefining decision not to bestow our envy on a human rival but to choose to accept Christ, modelling ourselves on Him. Christianity, Girard says, “acknowledges the ultimate goodness of imitation as well as the goodness and reality of the human person. It teaches that instead of surrendering to mimetic desire, by following the newest fashion and worshiping the latest idol, we should imitate only Christ or Christ-like noncompetitive models” (283).

Many value Girard precisely because of the profound implications of his arguments for Christian belief and conduct. But many others who esteem Girard are not Christian or are not Christian in the manner he describes. It is hard, even impossible, for these readers to move from Girard’s diagnosis to the remedy that he urges us (and I think he does urge us) to embrace, becoming, as best we can, rededicated spiritualized souls—by which he means, Christians.

This is the challenge that the reading of Girard poses to us: how far along the path that he points to are we willing to travel? His literary criticism, as much as his labors in other disciplines and fields, has a religious consequence. Girard tells us about the meanings of literary works in order to explain, and reiterate, his own story of conversion, and, furthermore, to beckon to us that we should follow him, imitating him as he has followed Christ.

It is unnerving to realize that the more deeply we read Girard on literature or anything else, he is reading us. Are we Christian or not? Are we Christian but in name only?

Perhaps we are not believers of any kind, but are, simply, literary critics and teachers who enjoy and find profit in the study of literature. For Girard, this is not sufficient, for there are no purely literary questions. Great literature for him is a route toward salvation, and his own provocative work is a continuous argument for soul-searching and, ultimately, for Christianity. In the final sentence of the essay by Girard included in this book, we see this clearly: “The real definition of grace is that Jesus died for us and even though his own people, as a people, did not receive him, he made those who did receive him able to become children of God” (290).

Girard’s work is dangerous to our sense of who we are, perhaps frightening in its implications for our lives if we truly take him seriously. Henry David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century more than once wondered: what would be the consequences for his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, if everyone actually sought to live according to the injunctions in the Bible that were proclaimed each Sunday from the pulpit? Many of us report that we find Girard’s arguments in his literary criticism, and in his studies of other subjects, to be convincing, compelling. If so, what follows? Really reading Girard means confronting the question: Are you ready and willing to change your life?

Bubbio’s major focus in part one, however, is on modern philosophy’s violence toward religion and, even more, on its own, internal conflicts of interpretation. Brief discussions of Descartes, Hegel, and Nietzsche lead to Heidegger’s pivotal exposure, though violent in its own way, of the violence of metaphysics. Yet philosophical violence, conducted in writing—unlike the founding murder—leaves traces that can expose it to view. In sorting the legacy of hermeneutics after Heidegger, Bubbio makes a Girardian distinction between a “profane” (or sacred) hermeneutics and a “religious” (or theological) one. A profane hermeneutics allows infinite interpretations and places them all on the same level, thus allowing those that support persecution to drown out witnesses to violence (as we are all too aware in the era of “fake news”). A religious hermeneutics, on the other hand, “is a search whose objective is to unveil the only valid interpretation, that is, the only one that lays bare the truth of the victim” (52). Jacques Derrida exemplifies postmodern thinkers who manifest the violence in the endless relativism of profane hermeneutics, but without exposing it as a lie. Paul Ricoeur, by contrast, articulates a philosophical hermeneutics that has learned from Judeo-Christian texts to expose the lies of the sacred. Ricoeur points in the direction of a “knowledge in faith” that is interdisciplinary and narrates its own difficulties in searching for truth.

The itinerary of this book performs just such a hermeneutics by showing the stages on the way to Bubbio’s mature articulation of HMT, hermeneutic mimetic theory, in the final essay. Mimetic theory’s hermeneutic roots, and the potential of its partnership with a philosophy like Ricoeur’s, emerge more fully once its fundamental paradox is seen as a version of the hermeneutic circle. If “our entire symbolic and cultural world is generated though mimetic acts” (189), how do we come to see their mimetic nature? And how do we recognize victims if we do not already know what a victim is? The Christian revelation provides, historically, the necessary pre-understanding. But, as Bubbio explains in another essay in part two, mimetic theory shares in a larger, post-Kantian perspectivalism that need not assume Christian truth. He suggests that the “weak thought” of Gianni Vattimo (with whom he studied) could be a resource, like Ricoeur’s work, for seeing not just a simple choice between the versions of mimetic theory, but a productive interplay of self-criticism at the threshold between a theological mimetic theory and a mimetic hermeneutics of the self (sketched also in Bubbio’s chapter of the new Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion).

In turning to the self, mimetic theory is most productive, Bubbio argues, if it resolves an ambiguity in Girard’s own work: Which comes first, desire for the object or for the being of the mediator? The priority of the latter, what Girard called metaphysical desire, is a more Hegelian than Freudian view that can better guide a positive reconstruction of the self after its fracture and shattering, as dramatized in the TV series  Mad Men and Homeland—the topic of the second-to-last essay here. It would be in the spirit of Bubbio’s proposed conversation “at the threshold” to ask how this philosophical version of a mimetic account of the self compares to a theological one, such as Augustine’s heart that is restless for rest in God. Ricoeur’s later works could perhaps be valuable for a mimetic hermeneutics of the self; Bubbio’s welcome references to Ricoeur are limited to his early books The Symbolism of Evil and Freud and Philosophy.

Bubbio gives another angle on HMT through his analysis of Girard’s unacknowledged use of an epistemological version of Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God. Anselm argued that God is something greater than can be thought and thus must exist in reality and not just in the mind; Girard argues that Jesus knows (and the Gospels convey) something greater than can be thought, that is, a God unlimited by the results of mimetic victimage that otherwise imprison all human thinking. This is another way in which mimetic theory answers its own fundamental paradox, open to the same objections (such as Kant’s) and resuscitations (such as Hegel’s) that Anselm’s argument has received. The argument requires the “hermeneutic horizon” of the historical effects of Christianity, but also has, Bubbio suggests, a deep, philosophical significance of recognizing that any philosophical position involves a wager, in Pascal’s sense, that also applies to faith. Here there is perhaps room for dialogue with Raymund Schwager’s use of an Anselmian style of argument in Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, which treats it not as a chain of logical demonstration but rather as a model of hermeneutic process, words and images stretched beyond their human representations in order to think of divine attributes like goodness and justice in such a way that they cannot be thought as greater.

Paolo Diego Bubbio’s story of intellectual violence is also one of providence, particularly in the emergence of philosophical hermeneutics as a complement to mimetic theory. His proposal for HMT opens a space and studies some moves for productive conversation, not only between the theological and philosophical wings of mimetic theory, but potentially between mimetic theory and dominant, competing paradigms across all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. In literary studies, for instance, this approach would help mimetic theory reenter the conversation among literary theories as a partner in the commitment to further interpretability that is the bread and butter of literary criticism, and that has become oriented to the recognition of victims through approaches such as feminism, post-colonial studies, and queer theory. HMT rescues the office of philosophy as metadiscipline in the modern academy from its usual, combative, sacrificial mode as a standard for rationality and offers instead a summons to mutual, interdisciplinary search for meaning through openness to the other and to ongoing interpretation and conversion.

The novel’s tour-de-force comes when Ivan heads home to Budapest for the summer and Selin teaches English in the Hungarian countryside. This time it’s a farce. Selin gets billeted with the oddest hosts for her stay (some Edward Gorey-like characters), and Batuman, closer to her ancestral Turkey now, has a field day writing of the intercultural misunderstandings and ironies of Eastern Europe, making poetry out of the alienating effects of travel. We make it to Istanbul eventually, where the university “atmosphere of late nights and intense relationships, of the oldest books and the newest books” leaves Selin enthused to return to Boston.

Batuman is a brilliant and promising talent, and The Idiot a wonderful portrait of a young writer—as well as the second of Batuman’s books with a Dostoyevskian namesake. Fans of cartoonist Roz Chast—whose wry humor finds an uncanny match in Batuman’s style—especially are bound to enjoy and appreciate Batuman’s work in The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. You can follow her on Twitter @BananaKarenina.