René Girard Quotes

The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is re-enacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment. PILATE

I maintain that passion and desire are never authentic in the Heideggerean sense. They do not emerge from the depths of our being; we always borrow them from others. Far from seeing conflict as a sign of mastery, as Heidegger does, we must see it as exactly the opposite, a confirmation of the mimetic nature of our desires.

La dialettica hegeliana si fondava sul coraggio fisico: colui che non ha paura sarà il padrone, colui che ha paura sarà lo schiavo. La dialettica romanzesca si fonda sull'ipocrisia: la violenza, lungi dal servire gli interessi di colui che la esercita, rivela l'intensità del suo desiderio; è dunque un segno di schiavitù.

But an absolute value is not proven by logic or metaphysical arguments; it is accepted, believed (even when not discussed), and hedged about with taboos to protect it.

Instead of reorganizing the demoniac, rearranging it a bit, like a psychoanalyst, you do away with it entirely.

Les mythes débutent presque toujours par un état de désordre extrême.

Kahraman, gururun aldatıcı ilahından vazgeçerek kölelikten kurtulur ve sonunda mutsuzluğun hakikatine erişir. Bu vazgeçiş, yaratıcı vazgeçişten ayırt edilemez. Romantıik bir yazarı gerçek romancı yapan metafizik arzuyu yenmesidir.

Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.

So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world's nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World's fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected.

Some primitive societies avoid striking out at the true guilty party because it might awaken the spirit of vengeance. Channeling violence toward a sacrificial victim as if toward a lightning rod doubtless stops violence, but it's not very pretty.

The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.

Like Hölderlin, I think that Christ alone allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness. The apocalypse does not announce the end of the world; it creates hope.

"3. The Greek pharmakoi, singular pharmakos, refers to victims who were ritually beaten, driven out of cities, and killed, for example, by being forced over the edge of a precipice. The word pharmakos, designating a person who is selected as a ritual victim, is related to pharmakon, which means both "remedy" and "poison," depending on the context. In the story of the horrible miracle of Apollonius, the beggar is a pharmakos, a kind of ritual victim. Apollonius points to him as the demon causing the plague (he is the source of pollution or poison), but his lynching restores the well being of Ephesus (he becomes the remedy for the crisis). — Trans. 4."

Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.

Violence is the divine force that everyone tries to use for his own purposes and that ends by using everyone for its own — the Dionysus of The Bacchae