René Girard: un allumé qui se prend pour un phare by René Pommier (review)

analysis of Michaux’s pseudo-anthropological Voyage au Grand Garabagne as an anti-humanist satire concludes the volume (253–64). It expresses the pessimism felt in Europe during the rise of Hitler. From this point on, Pérez’s discussions become inconclusive and less original than before as he examines Beckett’s minimalism . The same judgment applies to the epilogue, which concludes by capitulating to the pervasive indeterminacy of a nihilistic age. Michigan State University, emeritus Laurence M. Porter POMMIER, RENÉ. René Girard: un allumé qui se prend pour un phare. Paris: Kimé, 2010. ISBN 978-84174-5142. Pp. 133. 17 a. René Pommier has enjoyed a long, distinguished career as a professor of French literature at the Sorbonne and as the author of admirably thorough and sensitive “explications de texte” with various French publishers. A visit to his Web site () affords a very generous sampling of these luminous readings; it also alerts readers to his sideline in the equally French specialty of “éreintage,” his “démarche,” as he describes it, being “celle d’un polémiste et d’un rationaliste, infatigable pourfendeur de fariboles.” Roland Barthes, Freud, Pierre Barbéris, “la nouvelle critique,” as it was styled in the 1960s, have all come in for a zesty drubbing, but so does Pascal, not for his genius but for the belief system to which he devoted it. So does Theresa of Avila, religious belief being chief among the “sornettes” exposed to Pommier’s vigorous— and sometimes strenuous—derision. So we are not surprised to find Pommier taking on René Girard, whose works span literary criticism, religious anthropology, and Biblical exegesis, where he makes huge claims for Judaic and Christian scriptures as the abiding source of Western culture’s self-critical and consequently scientific impulses. All that is arraigned as “infatuation,” “présomption,” “outrecuidance” (10) in Pommier’s broadside, in which he does not refrain from ad hominem explanations for Girard’s work, which we learn is propelled by “un ardent désir de devenir célèbre” in quest of “une gloire universelle et éternelle” (119). He views Girard’s attraction to Christianity as mere self-affirmation: “En fait René Girard a toujours cru: il a toujours cru en René Girard et la foi en Dieu n’a été pour lui que le prolongement , l’approfondissement, l’aboutissement de sa foi en René Girard” (83). Girard’s mimetic theory has aroused skepticism in many quarters for its wide-ranging interpretations, its theory-of-everything proclivities, and Pommier reads Malebranche to good effect against the perils and prejudices attending “inventeurs de nouveaux systèmes” (120). Pommier reads a number of lengthy passages from Girard closely, citing whole pages at a stretch, and he does succeed in showing some factual errors and inaccuracies, while also allowing that these are not essential. It is the sweep of Girard’s claims that fires his animus: “Il soutient que ses théories expliquent tout d’une manière complète et définitive” (90). Any effort such as Girard’s to unify the human sciences will be met by symmetrical doubts about its possibility. His key insight, as informed, according to him, by great literary works, is that desire is mimetic: from early childhood on through the indefinitely prolonged adolescence that our advertising industry encourages among us, desire borrows its objects from others. If that is wrong, then nothing Girard has written has any validity whatsoever. But you have to get his founding 960 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 idea right: mimetic desire is not “le désir d’imiter” (52, 54), as Pommier avers, for then it might be primary or primal, and every bit as “spontané, instinctif, fonci èrement individualiste et égoïste” (55) as he insists. For Girard, and for those literary critics, psychologists, anthropologists, and theologians allied with his project (see ), imitation is the origin of desire, not its object, and it is most often not at all conscious. Mimetic theory argues that our greatest writers dispel the illusion of an autonomous, free-standing subjectivity (this is what is meant by “mensonge romantique” in Girard’s thought) that Pommier, in his relentless appeal to “le bon sens,” is out to defend. Those...