“Conversations with Rene Girard” by Rene Girard (edited by Cynthia L. Haven)

This is a short collection of dialogues between Girard and various interlocutors over the years. The conversations cover much of his career as an anthropologist and historian, particularly his theory of mimetic desire. This project has sought to glean insights into the modern world as it shifts to a post-Christian age. “We live in a world where a great deal more is demanded of the communities and of each individual in terms of self-mastery. But at the same time, very often our world is one which abandons ethics, which abandons any ideal of self-mastery. We surrender to a philosophy of self-gratification that ends up in pure consumerism.” There is a distinct lack of the role of the individual in Girard’s mimetic theory. “Since the individual figures in my scheme only so far as he is involved with other individuals, the epistemology of the isolated consciousness wouldn’t make a great deal of sense for me. I feel that one of the advantages of my theory is its pragmatic effectiveness…. That’s why mimetic theory interests me so much: you can start with it at the animal level and trace it across the threshold of hominization right into human culture. That threshold is when the victim becomes the conscious object of attention by members of the community…. You have cultural specificity, a break between animal and man.” Man is a competitive animal. “The error is always in reasoning from categories of “difference.” The root of all conflicts relies rather on “competition,” in mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, and cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if necessary…. Human relations are essentially relations of imitation and competition…. What is happening today is mimetic rivalry on a global scale…. But if you ask me what mimeticism is, I will tell you: it’s pride, anger; it’s envy, jealousy—these are the cardinal sins. It’s lust as well. Human sexuality is very important, because it’s a permanent impulse, not something episodic or intermittent. There are no tranquil interludes in human life. Rivalry is what sustains desire…. Mimetic desire is when our choice is not determined by the object itself, as we normally believe, but by another person. We imitate the other person, and this is what “mimetic” means…. And of course, envy is mimetic. You cannot help imitating your model…. Envy is a denial of your own being and accepting the fact that you prefer the being of your rival.” As Girard has detailed before, the scapegoat mechanism was the route that archaic societies used to squash mimetic rivalry before violence spread out of hand within their own communities. “Before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their rituals precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That’s the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed.”

“Bartleby & Co.” by Enrique Vila-Matas (translated by Jonathan Dunne)

Vila-Matas knows how to open a novel. “I never had much luck with women. I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to. All my closest relatives are dead. I am a poor recluse working in a ghastly office. Apart from that, I am happy.” The narrator creates a book comprised entirely of footnotes, dedicated to all the Bartlebys of the world, an appellation of Melvillian fame. Vila-Matas’ narrator states, “It is my intention, therefore, to make my way through the labyrinth of the No.” Each footnote details a famous writer who has chosen, for whatever reasons, to stop. Speaking of Pepin Bello’s choice to forgo writing, the narrator opines, “To renounce without lamentation the expression of one’s own gifts can be a spiritually aristocratic virtue and, when one yields to it without recourse to contempt for one’s peers, boredom of life or indifference towards art, then it has something of the divine.” Digressing on Hofmannsthal and the record of Bartleby syndrome, the narrator explains, “Although the syndrome already had a long history, with the “Letter of Lord Chandos” literature lay completely exposed to its insufficiency and impossibility, drawing from this exposure—as is happening in these notes without a text—its fundamental, necessarily tragic question. Denial, refusal, mutism, are gaps in the extreme forms in which the unease of culture presented itself.” Further, he recounts that “Vargas Llosa—always harboured the suspicion, which turned into a conviction, that there is a series of books which formed part of the history of the No, though they may not exist.” Most of Vila-Matas’ novel proceeds in this way, detailing instances, throughout history, when writers have refused to write. “These footnotes cannot have an essence, neither can literature, because the essence of any text consists precisely in evading any essential classification, any assertion that establishes or claims it…. So I have been working on these footnotes, searching and inventing, doing without any rules of the game that exist in literature. I have been working on these footnotes in a slightly careless and anarchic manner.”

“Phenomenology of Spirit” by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (translated by A.V. Miller)

This is one dense tome. Hegel is not an easy read. In fact, this is one of the first books of philosophy which might have made me even more confused after reading it. Hegel speaks in riddles and contradictions. Nonetheless, he does make you think. Through thesis and antithesis you reach synthesis, hopefully. Hegel begins by discussing the senses. “Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge…. Sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge…. But, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing [Sache].” Hegel next relates the idea of truth to that of consciousness. “A perpetual alternation of determining what is true, and then setting aside this determining, constitutes, strictly speaking, the steady everyday life and activity of perceptual consciousness, a consciousness which fancies itself to be moving in the realm of truth.” Consciousness interacts with the world of objects, but is separate from it. “To the extent, then, that consciousness is independent, so too is its object, but only implicitly. Self-consciousness which is simply for itself and directly characterizes its object as a negative element, or is primarily desire, will therefore, on the contrary, learn through experience that the object is independent.” Consciousness is not devoid of reason, but reason transforms the process. “Consciousness observes; i.e. Reason wants to find and to have itself as existent object, as an object that is actually and sensuously present. The consciousness that observes in this way means, and indeed says, that it wants to learn, not about itself but, on the contrary, about the essence of things qua things…. Reason, therefore, in its observational activity, approaches things in the belief that it truly apprehends them as sensuous things opposite to the ‘I’ ; but what it actually does, contradicts this belief, for it apprehends them intellectually, it transforms their sensuous being into Notions…. Hence transforms thought into the form of being, or being into the form of thought; it maintains, in fact, that it is only as Notion that things have truth.”

Hegel circles back to the role of the individual. “Individuality is what its world is, the world that is its own. Individuality is itself the cycle of its action in which it has exhibited itself as an actual world…. The individual exists in and for himself: he is for himself or is a free activity…. In his own self, therefore there emerges the antithesis, this duality of being the movement of consciousness, and the fixed being of an appearing actuality…. This being, the body of the specific individuality, is the latter’s original aspect.” However, the individual is not the unit of reference that Hegel deems most useful. “It is in fact in the life of a people or nation that the Notion of self-conscious Reason’s actualization—of beholding, in the independence of the ‘other’, complete unity with it, or having for my object the free thinghood of an ‘other’ which confronts me and is the negative of myself, as my own being-for-myself—that the Notion has its complete reality…. The labour of the individual for his own needs is just as much a satisfaction of the needs of others as of his own…. The whole becomes, as a whole, his own work, for which he sacrifices himself and precisely in so doing receives back from it his self…. This universal Substance, speaks its universal language in the customs and laws of its nation. But this existent unchangeable essence is the expression of the very individuality which seems opposed to it; the laws proclaim what each individual is and does; the individual knows them not only as his universal objective thinghood, but equally knows himself in them, or knows them as particularized in his own individuality, and in each of his fellow citizens. In the universal Spirit, therefore, each has only the certainty of himself, of finding in the actual world nothing but himself; he is as certain of the others as he is of himself.”

For Hegel, the role of Spirit is paramount. “As substance, Spirit is unshaken righteous self-identity; but as being-for-self it is a fragmented being, self-sacrificing and benevolent, in which each accomplishes his own work, rends asunder the universal being, and takes from it his own share…. Spirit is thus self-supporting, absolute, real being. All previous shapes of consciousness are abstract forms of it. They result from Spirit analysing itself, distinguishing its moments, and dwelling for a while with each…. Spirit, then is consciousness in general which embraces sense-certainty, perception, and the Understanding, in so far as in self-analysis Spirit holds fast to the moment of being an objectively existent actuality to itself, and ignores the fact that this actuality is its own being-for-self…. Spirit is consciousness that has Reason…. Spirit is the ethical life of a nation in so far as it is the immediate truth—the individual that is a world…. The living ethical world is Spirit in its truth.” It is only through his culture that the individual life derives any meaning. “It is therefore through culture that the individual acquires standing and actuality…. This individuality moulds itself by culture into what it intrinsically is, and only by so doing is it an intrinsic being that has an actual existence; the measure of its culture is the measure of its actuality and power…. Culture is the simple soul of the substance by means of which, what is implicit in the substance, acquires an acknowledged, real existence.”

Again, Hegel returns to the role of the individual consciousness. “Just as, in regard to its knowledge, it knows itself then as a consciousness whose knowledge and conviction are imperfect and contingent; similarly, in regard to its willing, it knows itself as a consciousness whose purposes are affected with sensuousness. On account of its unworthiness, therefore, it cannot look on happiness as necessary, but as something contingent, and can expect it only as a gift of Grace…. But though its actuality is imperfect, all the same its pure will and knowledge hold duty to be what is essential…. Consciousness starts from the idea that, for it, morality and reality do not harmonize…. Moral self-consciousness asserts that its purpose is pure, is independent of inclinations and impulses, which implies that it has eliminated within itself sensuous purposes. But this alleged elimination of the element of sense it dissembles again. It acts, brings its purpose into actual existence, and the self-conscious sense-nature which is supposed to be eliminated is precisely this middle term or mediating element between pure consciousness and actual existence…. Moral self-consciousness is not, therefore, in earnest with the elimination of inclinations and impulses, for it is just these that are the self-realizing self-consciousness. But also they ought not to be suppressed, but only to be in conformity with Reason.”

Hegel concludes by returning to the nature of Spirit. “This Spirit is the free nation in which hallowed custom constitutes the substance of all, whose actuality and existence each and everyone knows to be his own will and deed.” Spirit is always above the Self; or, rather, envelops the Self. “Spirit is this movement of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels this difference between objectivity and content…. Whereas in the phenomenology of Spirit each moment is the difference of knowledge and Truth, and is the movement in which that difference is cancelled, Science on the other hand does not contain this difference and the cancelling of it…. Just as Spirit in its existence is not richer than Science, so too it is not poorer either in content…. The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit; to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice is the externalization in which Spirit displays the process of its becoming Spirit in the form of free contingent happening, intuiting its pure Self as Time outside of it, and equally its Being as Space…. But the other side of its Becoming, History, is a conscious, self-mediating process—Spirit emptied out into Time…. The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection the Spirits as they are in themselves as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance [phenomenology].”

“Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

This is a brutal novel centered around the brilliantly confused mind of a murderer. “His whole body was as if broken; his soul was dark and troubled. He leaned his elbows on his knees and rested his head in both hands. “God!” he exclaimed, “but can it be, can it be that I will really take an axe and hit her on the head and smash her skull … slip in the sticky, with blood … with the axe … Lord, can it be?” He was trembling as he said it. “But what’s wrong with me?”” Raskolnikov tries to justify his actions during brief moments of lucidity. “The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she’s not the point! The old woman was merely a sickness … I was in a hurry to step over … it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!” He is obviously not in his right mind. "“You’ve all been saying that I was mad,” Raskolnikov went on, twisting his mouth into a smile, “and just now I imagined that perhaps I really am mad and was only seeing a ghost!… And who knows! Maybe I really am mad, and everything that’s happened during these days, maybe everything is just in my imagination.”” There is more than a little of Nietzsche’s notion of the superman and the will to power in the sick mind of Raskolnikov. ““Then I realized, Sonya,” he went on ecstatically, “that power is given only to the one who dares to reach down and take it. Here there is one thing, one thing only: one has only to dare! And then a thought took shape in me, for the first time in my life, one that nobody had ever thought before me! Nobody! It suddenly came to me as bright as the sun: how is it that no man before now has dared or dares yet, while passing by all this absurdity, quite simply to take the whole thing by the tail and whisk it off to the devil! I … I wanted to dare, and I killed … I just wanted to dare, Sonya, that’s the whole reason!””

“Middlemarch” by George Eliot

Eliot’s novel depicts the small-town travails of the fictional setting, Middlemarch. It is a quintessential provincial English town of the 1830s, with nosy neighbors high on decorum and stuffy morality. The plot is set against the transformative inclinations of the age, with the Reform Bill of 1832 playing a pivotal role. The landed gentry and the ascending manufacturers vie for prestige and power in local affairs, while the poorer folk gossip about their betters and pick their personal rooting interests. “For in that part of the country, before Reform had done its notable part in developing the political consciousness, there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of parties.” 

Eliot’s story digs deep into the mind of her characters, dealing with their interior lives and thoughts. Her novel stresses the themes of unconsummated love, propriety, as well as the restraining binds of religion, morality, chastity, and proper gender roles. At the heart of the plot is young Miss Dorothea Brooke, a woman strict in her religious belief, with genteel deportment and a pure heart. “Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.” Proper marriage is a recurring theme in the novel and the story begins with Dorothea’s to a much older clergyman, Casaubon, stodgy and didactic, but from impeccable stock. “‘I should not wish to have a husband very near my own age,’ said Dorothea with grave decision. ‘I should wish to have a husband who was above me in judgment and all knowledge…. I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I should wish to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me to see which opinions had the best foundations, and would help me to live according to them.’” Her honeymoon in Rome was not even out, however, before the first pangs of regret seep into her mind. “Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal, and had not actively assisted in creating any illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead to nowhither?” Dorothea soon becomes reacquainted with her husband’s younger cousin and ward, studying painting in Rome, Will Ladislaw, who, in turn, becomes enraptured by her charms. “He only wanted her to take more emphatic notice of him; he only wanted to be something more special in her remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be. He was rather impatient under that open ardent goodwill, which he saw was her usual state of feeling. The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reach plays a great part in men’s lives, but in most cases the worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by which his soul’s sovereign may cheer him without descending from her high place.” Will and Dorothea are much too mindful of what each owe to Casaubon to act on any of the impulses of their hearts. “Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.” However, this unconsummated bond of affection would weigh heavily, though always unspoken, on both as they travelled their own paths through life. “All their vision, all their thought of each other, had been as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on tall white lilies, where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered.” Eliot seeks to show, through her novel, that even the plainest of lives, lived in pure honesty, morality, and propriety, though unknown to the world at large, can still greatly touch all those acquainted with them. “The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”