Girard René - Evolution and conversion: dialogues on the origins of culture

Evolution and

Conversion

Evolution and

Conversion

Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

Ren Girard

With

Pierpaolo Antonello and

Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha

Published by Continuum International Publishing

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80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038

www.continuumbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Copyright Ren Girard, Pierpaolo Antonello and Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha, 2007

First published 2008

Reprinted 2010

Ren Girard, Pierpaolo Antonello and Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

Acknowledgements

Our utmost thanks go to Ren Girard for his friendship, good humour and patience. Heartfelt thanks also go to Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who encouraged this project, and to Andrea Borsari who suggested it in the first place; to Giuseppe Fornari who attended some of the sessions of these discussions in the summer of 1999, and who made recommendations and historical and philosophical corrections; to Jaideep Prabhu for his careful reading of the manuscript and for many suggestions; to Laura Franco and Silvia Romani for their tips on Greek mythology; to Amrit Srivastava and James Alison for further corrections to the Introduction, and to Annalia Cancelliere for her precious help with indexing. Also, to the UERJ doctorate programme (Brazil) and St Johns College, Cambridge, which financed most of these conversations.

Foreword

Something very strange and unsettling is happening with regard to Professor Ren Girard, and with the mimetic theory which has been his lifes work. They seem to be attaining respectability. In November 2005 Ren Girard was declared immortal, that is, elected member of the Acadmie franaise: in France there is no higher accolade or more potent recognition of Professor Girards intellectual achievement. And yet reception of Girards ideas in his native land has not always been straightforward.

Although an emeritus since 1995, Girard continues to write, and secondary literature on Girard himself and on applications of the mimetic theory continues to grow, despite the fact that the theory itself is notoriously simple. Girard himself cheerfully agrees that there is an obsessional, hedgehog quality to his investigations: mimetic desire and scapegoats, as the Introduction to Evolution and Conversion makes clear, are the two big things which concern him.

It is beginning to look as if Girards obsessions might be contagious.

What does the hedgehog tell us? Girard draws attention to the imitative or mimetic nature of human desire, by which we are at once attracted to and repelled from one another, as if caught in a gravitational field. Our longing for what the other has and what the other is binds us to that person by a chain of fascinated loathing. We know this from the master voices of the modern age: Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Proust, as well as countless examples from our everyday lives. Whatever the Romantics would have us believe about the innocence of our desire, there is within us an enormous potential for rivalry and outright aggression, simply because we desire in the way that we do.

Girard came to an awareness of this disturbing home-truth when writing his first book in 1961, a study of five key European novelists (Desire, Deceit and the Novel). However it was La Violence et le sacr (Violence and the Sacred) which attracted widespread attention: a famous review from Le Monde declared that the year 1972 should be marked with an asterisk in the annals of the humanities. La Violence et le sacr draws on anthropology, Greek tragedy and mythology to explore further the notion of mimetic desire: whereas the previous work on the European novel had drawn attention to the destabilizing and destructive effects of desire, the latest research enquired into how social groups manage to contain and counteract this destabilization. How do communities hold together and resist the forces which can cause them to disintegrate?

The disturbing answer offered by Girard is that a society achieves equilibrium, if only in the short term, by transferring its aggression upon a figure or group of figures who are part of the society but marginal to it. The victims are either expelled or destroyed, and the community comes now to be at peace with itself. This process of identifying and marginalizing a victim is what Girard calls the scapegoat mechanism. La Violence et le sacr goes even further in relating this process of exclusion to religious beliefs and practices. Put simply, Professor Girard asserts that the function of religion, at least in pre-state societies where a justice system does not exist, is precisely to contain and control the violence which would otherwise engulf and destroy a community. Beneath the practice of sacrifice, which involves the deliberate killing of a human or animal victim, lies the communitys fear of its own violence, and the necessity of doing something to assuage it. The argument of the book can be summed up in one quotation: violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred.

We have, therefore, a general, multidisciplinary theory which seeks to explore the relationships between religion, cultural origins and violence. Over 50 years Girard has been asking three big questions: What draws societies together? What causes them to disintegrate? And he asks, along with so many other contemporary theorists: What is the contribution of religion to all this?

It is hard to think of a body of research which has so wholeheartedly engaged with the principal concerns of our time. La Violence et le sacr was greeted with widespread interest, though Girards achievements were for the most part overshadowed by those of more prominent postmodern theorists. In 1978 he published what remains the most extended exposition of his theory, Des Choses caches depuis la foundation du monde (Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World). Essentially a record of conversations between Girard and two psychologists, the book has a threefold structure: cultural anthropology, biblical reflection and interdividual psychology. One may surmise that the middle third of the book, stressing the superiority of the Christian revelation (the logos of John) over philosophy (the logos of Heraclitus), was a paradox too far for those who had gone along with Girards apparent unmasking of religion in La Violence et le sacr . The increasingly evangelistic tone of much of his subsequent writing reinforced this unease, and Girards ideas receded from the mainstream.

Now, it seems, people are taking another look. One can point to several factors here: most obviously, the widespread contemporary reassessment of religion, above all in its relation to the public sphere, cries out for new thinking. For some time, secularization theories have found themselves in crisis: religion has not withered away, and we now realize the virtual impossibility of policing the