René Girard - When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer

Ren Girard is truly an extraordinary character. He was born in 1923 in Avignon, France, but since 1947 he has lived in the United States, where he met his wife and taught for many years at Stanford University. The title of his first bookMensonge romantique et vrit romanesque (1961), Romantic Lie and Novelistic Truth, or, as the English edition would have it, Deceit, Desire, and the Novelseemed innocent enough, barely hinting at the book's scandalous thesis; the essay could pass itself off as just another work of scholarly erudition, looking to unsuspecting eyes like anything but a monstrous blemish. But soon enough the veil was rent, and apocalyptic trumpets blared in the inner sanctums of our universities. At a time when most intellectuals claimed to descend from Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao, or else from Freud and Saussure, in the days when Sartre, and then Lacan, Lvi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, and Barthes, were still very much in vogue, strange books with incongruous titles, penned by an eccentric of the sort who usually lives in the desert, among the rattlesnakes or atop a column, started to show up on our bookstore shelves: Violence and the Sacred (1972), Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978)books that offer a general, religious explanation for our individual and social behavior; that consider Cervantes, Shakespeare, Marivaux, and Proust as morerealistic than Marx; books that, above all, amidst the structuralist sound and fury on the Left Bank, affirm that the key to heaven has been sitting right there beneath our eyes for two thousand years, in the Gospels, where we have never dared to take hold of it, and that Jesus really is the one God incarnate that the Pope and our ultra-pious grandmothers used to tell us about. Talk about rocking the boat in which our Parisian academic discussions were taking place!

A provocation this brazen, in which new and old ideas were wantonly mixed, couldn't fail to generate reactions of the most violent sort. To be completely frank, I myself wondered whether Ren Girard wasn't a disciple of the terrible inquisitors or the rank-and-file missionaries who civilized so many cultures to death. I got into some lively arguments with him over the airwaves of France Culture. But there was something very strange about even these debatesthe tit-for-tat and the aggressive verbal sparring that would have led any other thinker to sever ties with me once and for all left Ren Girard as serenely benevolent, interested, curious, amicable, and affectionate as ever. Not at all like the others, that one.

Since then, in just a few short years, the world has changed a lot. The USSR is dead. The Communist experiment has gone up in smoke, as if it had never even existed. The only alternative that philosophers were able to come up with to liberal democratic capitalism has been attempted on a truly grand scale, in real life: it didn't work. We're no longer at the same point we were at the beginning of the twentieth century, and we can no longer look forward to the forever and forever of centuries to come. We are blindedor else have had our eyes openedby History's burning paradoxes. Democracy and human rights seem to be catching on everywhere, and with everyone. It's an astonishing reversal. Here we have a system that until now was acknowledged even by its proponents to be inherently weak, incapable of measuring up to the dictatorships that remorselessly exploit their enslaved subjectsand now it appears as the most effective of all, indeed, until proven otherwise, as the only effective one. The last skeptics were reminded by the First Gulf War that the Allies of 1945 hadn't lost any of their warriors' mettle. And we can see now that the defeated parties, Germany and Japan, were able to save themselves only because they adopted the values of their conquerors. Five centuries after Columbus made his first voyage, which heralded both the spread of mercantile capitalism and thedestruction of America's indigenous populations, we are meeting anew with questions that are both fascinating and frightening: the Westernization of the entire planet, the destruction of other cultures and of other systemsare these phenomena inevitable, desirable, predetermined? Is the triumph of democracy a victory for Love and Freedom, or for a mafia of gangsters who are solidifying their well-being at everyone else's expense? Are the wealthiest countries really in command of these changes, or are they themselves the playthings of planetary, physical, biological, metaphysical, and religious processes that transcend them and carry them along in their wake?