Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard by Cynthia L. Haven (review)

Biography is only now and again the best avenue into the mind of a thinker. Biography works with Rousseau; his tumultuous life was at one with his philosophy. But a biographical approach to, say, John Rawls would prove largely profitless. The lives of some thinkers are crowded with events; other thinkers neglect events in search of even greater realities.

The life of René Girard (1923–2015) was that of a mild-mannered, prolific, private, and immensely ambitious professor who lived most of his adult life entirely within the privileged confines of two powerfully conservative institutions: the American university system and the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote and taught under their protection. Events that shaped the lives of other academics during his career (the civil rights movement in America, the war in Vietnam, the spring of 1968 in Paris, the campus eruptions in America during the sixties and seventies, the worldwide growth in power of feminism and of the awareness of how complex sexual identity is) were of minimal consequence to him. His horizon was elsewhere. His biographer, Cynthia Haven, calls him "affectless."

Only two events in his life appear to have mattered: the emergence of his notion of "mimetic desire" and his conversion to Roman Catholicism, both in the winter of 1958–59. As he said of that moment: "Everything came to me at once … everything was there at the beginning, all together. That's why I don't have any doubts"—doubts, that is, about either the truth of the religious creed that was to define his life for the next fifty-six years or, founded on that faith, the all-purpose formula that explained whatever needed explanation. In literature, history, psychology, anthropology, theology, psychoanalysis, and the study of war, "mimetic desire" was there to solve all the puzzles.

Haven enumerates specific examples of the formula's triumph. Girard, who thought of himself as a "philosophical anthropologist," saw what Marx and Freud had missed; he dug deeper into ancient history than Schliemann; his understanding of war surpassed that of Clausewitz. Haven's style veers uncertainly between an ardent, even embarrassing affection for its subject ("For René, with all my love") and the careful recording of a life spent entirely on campuses (Indiana, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Bryn Mawr, Buffalo, and Stanford). Her book is the testament of a friendship but also a strained defense of a theory that has never gained great adherence in any of the fields over which it claimed mastery.

That theory, in brief, posits a natural human proclivity to learn by imitation. Among the things we learn to imitate is other people's desires, and, in desiring the same things as others, we take on identities similar to theirs. Mutual desire leads ultimately, in primitive societies, to rivalry and thereafter to violence. When the violence reaches an unbearable level, it is dramatically and abruptly directed outward against a single individual—a "scapegoat." Rivals now combine their energies to visit them upon that target. This collective murder, repeated in ritual sacrifice, forms the foundation of all religious practices and social order everywhere. The scapegoat mechanism, Girard announced, is the very foundation of all cultural life because the reconciliation effected by the scapegoat—on which religious belief is founded—generates, at least for a while, stability and social harmony. Sooner or later, however, the cycle of mimetic desire and violence begins again.

Girard adds to this drama his "finding" that Christianity brought a new reality that would put an end to this ever-recurring round of harmony followed by renewed rivalry and violence. The solution provided by the lesson of Jesus—the scapegoat par excellence—was to turn the other cheek and renounce all violence in love's name. Christianity is unique in world history, Girard says, because the sacrament of the Eucharist sublimates and finishes the archaic sacrificial system. Christianity supplies an answer, indeed the answer, to the problems of the world. As Girard has put...