This is a posthumous collection of Girard’s essays, interviews, and speeches chosen by his biographer, Cynthia Haven. True to form, almost all of the selections center around Girard’s themes of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. Girard suggests, “Even the most passionate among us never feel they truly are the persons they want to be. To them, the most wonderful being, the only semi-god, is always someone else whom they emulate and from whom they borrow their desires, thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”
One of Girard’s essays revolves around Nietzsche and his concept of the death of God, while also discussing the eternal return, organized religion, and the scapegoat function. “Nietzsche defines in rigorous fashion the passage of disorder to the sacrificial order through the mediation of the collective murder and the rituals which spring from it. One cannot kill the gods, any gods, without engendering new ones…. Nietzsche designates it as ‘the most elevated philosophy,’ the philosophy of eternal recurrence…. The philosophy of the eternal recurrence is a reflection on the identity of the forces of life and death in antique and primitive religion. Every dissolution is a new creation…. One must lift oneself above current history to see the totality of cycles and to recognize linear time as illusory.”
Girard admired Freud’s conceptual framework, while considering his theories to be incomplete, if not off-base. Here, Girard riffs on the dance of Salome, “Contrary to what Freud believes, to what we all believe, there is no preordained object of desire. Children in particular have to be told what to desire…. Children are taught desire through example or speech, or both. Children imitate the desire of prestigious adults…. The imitation is fiercer than the original…. The child asks the adult, not to fulfill some desire that would be hers, but to provide her with the desire she lacks…. Our sacrosanct cult of desire prevents our recognizing this sameness. Desire is supposed to generate differences…. Far from individualizing its victims, as our modern cult of desire demands, mimetic desire makes them interchangeable…. As desire intensifies, it renders its victims increasingly interchangeable…. Desire has no worse enemy than its own truth. Desire does its best to turn the truth into a scandal…. The child inevitably takes the nearest adult as his model. If he encounters only people already scandalized, too busy with their scandalous desire to respond positively, he takes their behavior as a model and turns him- or herself into a mimetic reproduction of it, a grotesque caricature.”
In a digression from his usual hobbyhorses, Girard discusses constancy in the thought of the intellectual. “We live in an age of middle-class ‘individualism’ in which self-consistency is rated as a major virtue. But a thinker is not bound by the same rules as a statesman or a banker…. Progress in matters of the spirit is often a form of self-destruction; it may entail a violent reaction against the past.”
Haven ends by selecting a few choice maxims coined by Girard. Girard had little time for politics. “Democracy is one vast middle-class court where the courtiers are everywhere and the king is nowhere.” On society being enraptured by violence, he states, “Violence, far from serving the interests of whoever exerts it, reveals the intensity of his desire; thus it is a sign of slavery.” He pontificates on the tendency of all to scapegoat, “The best way not to be crucified, in the final analysis, is to do as everyone else and join in the cruxifixction.” He elaborates, “The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.” Girard suggests, “Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them.” He continues, “The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival.”
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