Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy

228 Pages·2020·2.912 MB·English

by  René Girard, Cynthia L. Haven (editor)

CONVERSATIONS WITH
RENÉ GIRARD
René Girard. Photo by Herlinde Koelbl.
Also available from Bloomsbury
Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture,
by René Girard with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha
Mimesis, Movies, and Media, edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris
Fleming, and Joel Hodge
Mimesis and Sacrifice, edited by Marcia Pally
René Girard and Raymund Schwager: Correspondence 1974-1991, edited by
Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge, and Mathias Moosbrugger
CONVERSATIONS WITH
RENÉ GIRARD:
PROPHET OF ENVY
Edited by Cynthia L. Haven
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © Cynthia L. Haven, 2020
Cynthia L. Haven has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 209 constitute an extension
of this copyright page.
Cover design: Louise Dugdale
Cover image © Michael Sugrue
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Socrates in the Digital Age Cynthia L. Haven 1
1 “There Are Real Victims Behind the Text.” 7
2 Opera and Myth Philippe Godefroid 17
3 Technological Power in the Post-Sacrificial World
Scott A. Walter 21
4 The Logic of the Undecidable Thomas F. Bertonneau 33
5 Violence, Difference, Sacrifice Rebecca Adams 51
6 “Revelation Is Dangerous. It’s the Spiritual Equivalent of
Nuclear Power.” Michel Treguer 73
7 “What Is Happening Today Is Mimetic Rivalry on a Global
Scale.” Henri Tincq 85
8 How Should Mimetic Theory Be Applied? Maria Stella Barberi 91
9 Shakespeare: Mimesis and Desire Robert Pogue Harrison 93
10 Why Do We Fight? How Do We Stop? Robert Pogue Harrison 109
11 “War Is Everywhere.” Elisabeth Lévy 125
12 “I Have Always Tried to Think Inside an Evolutionary
Framework.” Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha 129
13 The J’Accuse of René Girard: The Audacious Ideas
of a Great Thinker Giulio Meotti 147
Contents
14 A Passion Born of Rivalry Mark R. Anspach and Laurence Tacou 153
15 Apocalyptic Thinking After 9/11 Robert Doran 167
16 “I Am First and Foremost a Social Scientist.”
Pedro Sette-Câmara, Alvaro Velloso de Carvalho,
and Olavo de Carvalho 181
17 “Christianity Will Be Victorious, But Only in
Defeat.” Cynthia L. Haven 187
Postscript: “René Girard Never Played the Great Man,” Says
Biographer Artur Sebastian Rosman 195
Chronology 203
Acknowledgments 209
Bibliography 210
Contributors 212
Index 216
vi
René Girard grew up in Avignon. In this photograph, taken circa 1930, he sits beside
his sister Marie, brother Henri, and his mother, Thérèse Girard. Photograph is used
courtesy of the Girard family.
Novelist Raymond Federman, René Girard, and Professor Albert Cook at a
gathering at the home of Provost John Sullivan at the State University of New York
at Buffalo, New York, 1974. Photograph by Bruce Jackson is used with permission.
vii
Professor Albert Cook and René Girard enjoy a party at Arts and Sciences provost
John Sullivan’s home in Buffalo, New York, 1974. Photograph by Bruce Jackson is
used with permission.
René Girard holds a seminar on the ideas that would eventually become Violence
and the Sacred at Buffalo in spring 1971. Photograph by Bruce Jackson is used with
permission.
viii
INTRODUCTION
SOCRATES IN THE DIGITAL AGE
It’s been said that there is no such thing as talking and listening, only talking
and waiting. It was not so for René Girard.
The great French thinker, who died in 2015 after an illustrious career
spanning continents and disciplines, enjoyed conversations more than
most. No wonder, then, that so many of his most prominent works are in
the form of an interview.
Girard’s capstone, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, is
in Q&A form. So is Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of
Culture and also his last major work, Battling to the End. Some of his minor
works are dialogic as well—Maria Stella Barberi’s long interview in The
One by Whom Scandal Comes, for example, and his excellent conversation
with Michel Treguer, When These Things Begin (short excerpts from both,
showing the playfulness as well as the intensity of his thought, are included
in this volume). One might even consider that his published letters with the
Innsbruck theologian Raymund Schwager1 were conversational—across
thousands of miles.
Girard’s colleague Sandor Goodhart told me Girard the professor was
“doggedly dialogic.” He added, “He likes working with people on things.
He always spoke in terms of ‘us,’ ‘our’ project. What ‘we’re’ doing. He had a
sense of discovery.”
Literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin described why that might be so: “Truth
is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person,
it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process
of their dialogic interaction.”2 And while that interaction can take place
between the living and the dead, or in poems exchanged between long-
distance lovers, or in cybersphere, it is uniquely effective between people
conversing face to face. Socrates knew this: he brought people into conflict,
and considered himself the “midwife” of the truth that was born that way.
To answer any of the big questions in life, and many of the smaller ones, we
need to collaborate and work together.
Dialogical format liberates thinking and takes it out of the straitjacket,
according to Stanford Professor Robert Pogue Harrison, whose interviews
are also included in this volume. We continually complain about the