This biography of Girard reviews his major body of work and gives background to the man behind the philosophy. The book is a good introduction to Girard’s main ideas and is also useful for those who have already read Girard, by delving behind the scenes. Starting with his birth in Avignon and ending with his death in Palo Alto, Haven details moments in Girard’s life and professional career that lend insight to the development of his theories on mimetic rivalry, the scapegoat, and sacrifice.
Haven recounts Girard’s view of Faulkner as a way of describing his general method of reading the texts of novels for greater truths. “Many people believe that Christianity is embodied by the South. I would say that the South is perhaps the least Christian part of the United States in terms of spirit, although it is the most Christian in terms of ritual…. [In the distant future,] if a Faulkner novel survived, telling the truth that is not in the archives, but rather the truth as it is in the Faulkner novel— nobody would believe it. They would all be wrong, obviously. They would lack the essential thing, the social scheme, the psychological scheme, in terms of everyday life, which determined the country at this time.” Girard’s reflection combines both his skill in deep contextual reading of fiction, which digs for truth beneath the text, with his year observing the South while teaching at Duke University in 1952.
Girard also dismantled the “Romantic lie” of an “authentic Self” who is free from the bounds of society at large, which was prevalent in so many novels of the nineteenth century. “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, always is someone else whom they emulate and from whom they borrow their desires, thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those whom they simultaneously hate and admire.” No one can escape mimetic desire for it is in the best, as well as the worst, of human nature to imitate and copy models, who we are bound to aspire to and resent. The object of desire is often incidental and in time actually dissolves away as the model and the subject battle as doubles, escalating their rivalry tit for tat against each other. Girard cites Wagner’s Ring Cycle, “The gold is nothing, clearly, since it’s the ray of sunshine that alights on it and transfigures it. And yet the gold is everything, since it’s what everyone is fighting over; it’s the fact of fighting over it that gives it its value, and its terror.”
Girard also cites Dostoevsky in describing man’s futility in replacing religion with secular humanism on Earth. “Man possesses either a God or an idol…. The false prophets proclaim that in tomorrow’s world men will be gods for each other. This ambiguous message is always carried by the most blind of Dostoevsky’s characters. The wretched creatures rejoice in the thought of great fraternity. They do not perceive the irony of their own formula; they think they are heralding paradise but they are talking about hell, a hell into which they themselves are already sinking.” Girard decries “nihilistic individualism” of all stripes, feeling that “the romantic does not want to be alone, but to be seen alone.” He asks, “why do we, all of us, have to keep judging and being judged?” We are addicted to our obstacles, but hide it, even from ourselves. According to Girard, the novelist has a penchant for lying, even to his own Ego, “which in fact is made up of nothing but a thousand lies that have accumulated over a long period, sometimes built up over an entire lifetime.”
Girard’s conversion back to the tepid Catholicism of his youth was a seminal event in his life and career. For him, “conversion is a form of intelligence, of understanding.” It is not an event or a single moment in time, but a continual process. “Metaphysical desire brings into being a certain relationship to others and to oneself. True conversion engenders a new relationship to others and oneself.” He viewed religion as seminal to his understanding both of world history and the events of his day. “If I am right, we’re only extricating ourselves from a certain kind of religion so as to enter another, one that’s infinitely more demanding because it’s deprived of sacrificial crutches. Our celebrated humanism will turn out to have been nothing but a brief intermission between two forms of religion.” He goes on, “It is because we have wanted to distance ourselves from religion that it is now returning with such force and in a retrograde, violent form…. it will perhaps have been our last mythology. We ‘believed’ in reason, as people used to believe in the gods.”
Girard saw a commonality in human behavior that he traced from archaic rituals through modern religions to our secular age. “Human society begins the moment symbolic institutions are created around the victim, that is to say when the victim becomes sacred.” That act is the founding murder of society and the great lie, when the mob convinces itself of its innocence and the scapegoat is turned into savior, by ending the escalating violence and reinstating unanimity and unity within the community. “Human beings fight not because they’re different, but because they’re the same, and in their accusations and reciprocal violence have made each other enemy twins.” He sees the downside to imitation as well as its glory. “When we describe human relations, we lie. We describe them as normally good, peaceful and so forth, whereas in reality they are competitive, in a war-like fashion.”
Girard sees Christ’s teachings as the only path forward. “It is the absolute fidelity to the principle defined in his own preaching that condemns Jesus. There is no other cause for his death than the love of one’s neighbour lived to the very end, with an infinitely intelligent grasp of the constraints it imposes.” Christ alone has exited the cycle of violence. “It is not the Father whom we should imitate, but his Son, who has withdrawn with his Father. His absence is the very ordeal that we have to go through…. To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated. Imitating Christ thus means thwarting all rivalry, taking distance from the divine by giving it the Father’s face.”
Girard sees the danger in majority rule unbound by tradition. “Intelligent democracies can last only if they are aware of the mob and take great precautions against it, but these precautions are not always effective.” Towards the end of his life, Girard became ever more cognizant that total war, escalating by degrees, could end all of humanity. He warned, “we accept to live under the protection of nuclear weapons. This has probably been the greatest sin of the West. Think of its implications. The confidence is in violence. You put your faith in that violence, that that violence will keep the peace.” When the apocalypse comes, it will be justified as a defensive response.
