Books in the Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture series

In this lively series of conversations with writer Michel Treguer, Rene Girard revisits the major concepts of mimetic theory and explores science, democracy, and the nature of God and freedom. Girard affirms that "e;our unprecedented present is incomprehensible without Christianity."e; Globalization has unified the world, yet civil war and terrorism persist despite free trade and economic growth. Because of mimetic desire and the rivalry it generates, asserts Girard, "e;whether we're talking about marriage, friendship, professional relationships, issues with neighbors or matters of national unity, human relations are always under threat."e; Literary masters including Marivaux, Dostoevsky, and Joyce understood this, as did archaic religion, which warded off violence with blood sacrifice. Christianity brought a new understanding of sacrifice, giving rise not only to modern rationality and science but also to a fragile system that is, in Girard's words, "e;always teetering between a new golden age and a destructive apocalypse."e; Treguer, a skeptic of mimetic theory, wonders: "e;Is what he's telling me true...or is it just a nice story, a way of looking at things?"e; In response, Girard makes a compelling case for his theory.

This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them.

This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them.

Marie Delcourt's brilliant study of the Oedipus legend, an unjustly neglected monument of twentieth-century classical scholarship published in 1944 and issued here for the first time in English translation, bridges the gap between Carl Robert's influential Oidipus (1915) and the work of Lowell Edmunds seventy years later.

Who killed Laius? Most readers assume Oedipus did. At the play's end, he stands convicted of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and triggering a deadly plague. With selections from a stellar assortment of critics, this book reopens the Oedipus case and lets readers judge for themselves.

Drawing on interviews with Girard and his colleagues, Evolution of Desire: A Life of Rene Girard provides an essential introduction to one of the twentieth century's most controversial and original minds.

An account of Paolo Diego Bubbio's twenty-year intellectual journey through the twists and turns of Rene Girard's mimetic theory.

Although women alone have the ability to bring children into the world, modern Western thought tends to discount this female prerogative. In Giving Life, Giving Death, Lucien Scubla argues that structural anthropology sees women as objects of exchange that facilitate alliance-building rather than as vectors of continuity between generations. Examining the work of Levi-Strauss, Freud, and Girard, as well as ethnographic and clinical data, Giving Life, Giving Death seeks to explain why, in constructing their master theories, our greatest thinkers have consistently marginalized the cultural and biological fact of maternity. In the spirit of Freud's Totem and Taboo, Scubla constructs an anthropology that posits a common source for family and religion. His wide-ranging study explores how rituals unite violence and the sacred and intertwine the giving of death and the giving of life.

The discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s led to an explosion of research and debate about the imitative capacities of the human brain. Some herald a paradigm shift on the order of DNA in biology, while others remain skeptical. In this revolutionary volume Jean- Michel Oughourlian shows how the hypotheses of Rene Girard can be combined with the insights of neuroscientists to shed new light on the "e;mimetic brain."e;Offering up clinical studies and a complete reevaluation of classical psychiatry, Oughourlian explores the interaction among reason, emotions, and imitation and reveals that rivalry-the blind spot in contemporary neuroscientific understandings of imitation-is a misunderstood driving force behind mental illness. Oughourlian's analyses shake the very foundations of psychiatry as we know it and open up new avenues for both theoretical research and clinical practice.

In 1755 the city of Lisbon was destroyed by a terrible earthquake. Almost 250 years later, an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean unleashed a tsunami whose devastating effects were felt over a vast area. In each case, a natural catastrophe came to be interpreted as a consequence of human evil. Between these two events, two indisputably moral catastrophes occurred: Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet the nuclear holocaust survivors likened the horror they had suffered to a natural disaster-a tsunami.Jean-Pierre Dupuy asks whether, from Lisbon to Sumatra, mankind has really learned nothing about evil. When moral crimes are unbearably great, he argues, our ability to judge evil is gravely impaired, and the temptation to regard human atrocity as an attack on the natural order of the world becomes irresistible. This impulse also suggests a kind of metaphysical ruse that makes it possible to convert evil into fate, only a fate that human beings may choose to avoid. Postponing an apocalyptic future will depend on embracing this paradox and regarding the future itself in a radically new way.The American edition of Dupuy's classic essay, first published in 2005, also includes a postscript on the 2011 nuclear accident that occurred in Japan, again as the result of a tsunami.

This book offers an alternative explanation for one of the core dilemmas of Brazilian literary criticism: the "e;midlife crisis"e; Machado de Assis underwent from 1878 to 1880, the result of which was the writing of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, as well as the remarkable production of his mature years-with an emphasis on his masterpiece, Dom Casmurro.At the center of this alternative explanation, Castro Rocha situates the fallout from the success enjoyed by Ea de Queirs with the publication of Cousin Baslio and Machado's two long texts condemning the author and his work. Literary and aesthetic rivalries come to the fore, allowing for a new theoretical framework based on a literary appropriation of "e;thick description,"e; the method proposed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. From this method, Castro Rocha derives his key hypothesis: an unforeseen consequence of Machado's reaction to Ea's novel was a return to the classical notion of aemulatio, which led Machado to develop a "e;poetics of emulation."e;

Provides a forum to reassess the theoretical and hermeneutical reach of key issues brought forward by Girard's book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, including literary knowledge, realism and representation, imitation and the anxiety of influence, metaphysical desire, deviated transcendence, literature and religious experience, individualism and modernity, and death and resurrection.

A systematic introduction into the mimetic theory of the French-American literary theorist and philosophical anthropologist Ren Girard, this essential text explains its three main pillars (mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and the Biblical "e;difference"e;) with the help of examples from literature and philosophy. This book also offers an overview of Ren Girard's life and work, showing how much mimetic theory results from existential and spiritual insights into one's own mimetic entanglements. Furthermore it examines the broader implications of Girard's theories, from the mimetic aspect of sovereignty and wars to the relationship between the scapegoat mechanism and the question of capital punishment. Mimetic theory is placed within the context of current cultural and political debates like the relationship between religion and modernity, terrorism, the death penalty, and gender issues. Drawing textual examples from European literature (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Stendhal, Storm, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust) and philosophy (Plato, Camus, Sartre, Lvi-Strauss, Derrida, Vattimo), Palaver uses mimetic theory to explore the themes they present. A highly accessible book, this text is complemented by bibliographical references to Girard's widespread work and secondary literature on mimetic theory and its applications, comprising a valuable bibliographical archive that provides the reader with an overview of the development and discussion of mimetic theory until the present day.

First published in French in 1979, The Ambivalence of Scarcity was a groundbreaking work on mimetic theory. Now expanded upon with new, specially written, and never-before-published conference texts and essays, this revised edition explores Rene Girard's philosophy in three sections: economy and economics, mimetic theory, and violence and politics in modern societies.

In Battling to the End Ren Girard engages Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the Prussian military theoretician who wrote On War. Clausewitz, who has been critiqued by military strategists, political scientists, and philosophers, famously postulated that "e;War is the continuation of politics by other means."e; He also seemed to believe that governments could constrain war. Clausewitz, a firsthand witness to the Napoleonic Wars, understood the nature of modern warfare. Far from controlling violence, politics follows in war's wake: the means of war have become its ends. Ren Girard shows us a Clausewitz who is a fascinated witness of history's acceleration. Haunted by the French-German conflict, Clausewitz clarifies more than anyone else the development that would ravage Europe. Battling to the End pushes aside the taboo that prevents us from seeing that the apocalypse has begun. Human violence is escaping our control; today it threatens the entire planet.