GIRARD, RENÉ

Born in Avignon, France, on Christmas Day, René Girard's (b. 1923) work has been a blend of history, literature, and philosophy with implications for science, technology, and ethics that have only begun to be appreciated. He graduated from the Ecole des Chartes in Paris in 1947 (as a specialist in medieval studies) with a thesis on private life in his hometown of Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth century. A year's trip abroad turned into a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University, after which Girard remained in the United States, where he retired as a professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization from Stanford University in 1995.

Girard's early historiographic publications soon shifted to an avalanche of literary criticism. His first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1966), contrasted the romantic lie of individualism with the novelistic truth of what he called imitative or mimetic desire. Among five major novelists Girard discovered a triangular structure to desire where the protagonists struggled with the fact that their deepest aspirations were mere imitations of a model or rival. Adultery remains the archetype for this phenomenon as illustrated in Dostoevsky's novella, The Eternal Husband. The husband is obsessed by his wife's lovers, who inflame, validate, and aggravate his own desire. Girard's students have likened his discovery of imitation in the social sciences to Newton's discovery of gravity in the physical sciences. The vast secondary literature on mimetic desire now extends these early insights into the diverse fields of economics, sociology, psychology, theology, and anthropology.

His second book, an anthropological study of Violence and the Sacred (1977), proposes a rational explanation for sacrificial rituals (as well as religious myths and prohibitions) in what he terms the victimage mechanism. Mimetic desire is inevitably conflictual. "Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it" (Girard 1977, p. 145).

Ancient religion developed as an unconscious method of keeping the peace where the mimetic war of all against all is replaced by the more efficient war of all against one—the community's sacrifice of a scapegoat. Sacrifice acts as a kind of vaccination whose small doses of violence inoculate the community against greater violence.

The publication of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987), a conversation with two French psychiatrists, included discussion of a founding murder among mimetically hysterical primates that initiated the long, slow process of hominization as well as sacrificial mechanisms. Girard sheds new light on the often-discarded speculations on primal murders found in Freud's Totem and Taboo. He also proposes the controversial thesis that the Judeo-Christian revelation of the victimage mechanism provides the anthropological tools necessary to demythologize pagan religious practices, which for Girard includes much of Western Christianity.

According to Girard, Christ's death was not a sacrifice willed by an angry God to atone for an original sin, but simply a revelation of human brutality and violence by a loving God. The remainder of Girard's major works (aside from a delightful work on Shakespeare) focus on biblical criticism, including The Scapegoat (1986), Job: The Victim of His People (1987) and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001).

For Girard modern science and technology are an inevitable consequence of the demythologization of sacrificial violence and magical thought. Magical thought always seeks a social/moral explanation for pain. For example the Black Plague was often attributed to the Jews poisoning the water supply. As Girard quips, "Those who are suffering are not interested in natural causes" (Girard 1986, p. 53). However, with a loosening of magical thought, the search for natural causes slowly becomes a more reasonable path toward the "relief of man's estate" (Francis Bacon). "The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text" (Girard 1986, p. 204).

Yet Girard's attitude toward science contains a certain Freudian ambivalence. Science is necessarily part of the Christian concern for victims and is a consequence of this charitable impulse. At the same time, modern technology has an apocalyptic edge to it. With the loosening of ancient sacred restraints and prohibitions, modern technology, like modern economy, unleashes the phenomenon of mimetic desire in a wave of consumerism, ethnic rivalry, media frenzy, and politically correct victimology. For Girard it is no accident that names for nuclear weapons are "taken from the direst divinities in Greek mythology, like Titan, Poseidon, and Saturn, the god who devoured his own children" (Girard 1987, p. 256).

JIM GROTE

SEE ALSO Christian Perspectives: Historical Traditions;Violence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Girard, René. (1965 [1961]). Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque [Deceit, desire and the novel], trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Girard, René. (1977 [1972]). La Violence et le sacre [Violence and the sacred], trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Girard, René. (1986 [1982]). Le Bouc emissaire [The scapegoat], trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Girard, René. (1987a [1978]). Des choses caches depuis la fondation du monde [Things hidden since the foundation of the world], trans. Michael Metteer (Book I) and Stephen Bann (Books II and III). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Girard, René. (1987b [1985]). La route antique des homes pervers [Job: the victim of his people], trans. Yvonne Freccero. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Girard, René. (2001 [1999]). Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair [I see Satan fall like lightning], trans. James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Williams, James G., ed. (1996). The Girard Reader. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. The best introduction to Girard's thought.