René Girard's Mimetic Theory

Preface

vii Preface The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. —Archilochus A ccording to Roberto Calasso, René Girard is one of the “last surviving hedgehogs.”1 With this thesis, the Italian philosopher makes use of Isaiah Berlin’s interpretation of Archilochus’s dictum in order to describe the founder of the mimetic theory more closely. Berlin differentiates “hedgehogs” such as Plato, Dante, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, or Proust from “foxes” such as Aristotle, Shakespeare, or Goethe. While the former authors attempt to trace all phenomena back to one single insight or principle, the latter take on an array of ideas and inquiries. We must agree with Calasso here: Girard’s work is that of a hedgehog. In his own words, the mimetic theory lives from one “single intuition” (Quand ces choses commenceront, 190).2 Whereas for Calasso the “one big thing” around which Girard’s work revolves is the scapegoat, I believe the crux of Girardian thought is found in the more encompassing concept of the mimetic cycle. In his most recent systematic book, Girard uses this concept to summarize the central core of his thought.3 viii Preface The mimetic cycle is composed of three different components. In the first place, one finds the crisis brought about by mimetic rivalry, which we will examine at length in the third chapter of this book. Our analysis will focus on Girard’s articulation of mimetic desire—the anthropological core of his entire theory. The second component concerns the collective violence of the scapegoat mechanism, which transforms the chaos of the mimetic crisis into a new social order. This is the crux of Girard’s theory of the origin of culture, which we will address in the fourth chapter. The third component is based on the religious veiling of the scapegoat mechanism, which begins with the divinization of the sacrificed victim and forms the origin of archaic religion. In its analysis of this final component, the mimetic theory shows itself as a theory of religion that explicates the origins of archaic myth and discovers in Christianity a form of religion that differs fundamentally from paganism. While mythical religions are based on texts that are told from the perspective of persecutors, the biblical writings show solidarity with the victims of sacrificial persecution. The fifth chapter of this book presents Girard’s interpretation of biblical scripture. In these central chapters, the three main elements of the mimetic theory will be discussed at length. Examples from literature will help to illustrate my presentation of Girard’s thought, and a comparative analysis with other philosophers and cultural thinkers will attempt to provide an intellectual positioning of the mimetic theory. These chapters build the center of a project that can be viewed as a kind of triptych: Two chapters on either side serve to complement this main middle section and can be viewed as the side panels that both refer to the center and must be understood through the concepts discussed therein. The first chapter of the left panel introduces the life and work of René Girard and stresses above all that his exclusive focus on the mimetic cycle is due to a personal conversion that he experienced while working on his first major study of mimetic desire: “It all began for me in 1959. I felt that there was a single whole there that I had penetrated little by little. It was there in its entirety from the beginning, all parts together in one” (Quand ces choses commenceront, 189). The second chapter of the left panel examines Girard’s mimetic theory in the context of the contemporary debate on secularization. In a world in which the topic of religions has once again become a virulent part of political debate, all theses that had proclaimed the “death of God” in the modern world have proved inadequate. The mimetic Preface ix theory, meanwhile, has taken a completely different path with regard to the topic of religion; since it never adopted any naive theory of secularization, it is able to explicate the complex relation of religion and modernity in a convincing fashion. The two chapters of the right panel reflect on additional applications of the mimetic theory. The sixth chapter examines volatile political topics that include the origin of political power and the death penalty, as well as that of friend/enemy relations and war. Just as with the topic of religion, these phenomena are of increasing relevance in our world today; the mimetic...