René Girard Quotes

We are quite ready to accuse others of ‘narcissism' in particular those whom we desire, with the aim of reassuring ourselves and relating their indifference, not to the very minor interest that we hold in their eyes or even perhaps in absolute terms […] but to a kind of weakness that afflicts others. When we do this, we credit them with an excessive and pathological concentration on themselves — with a kind of illness that makes them more sick than we are and consequently incapable of breaking out of their over-protected ego and meeting us half-way as they should.

It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.

That's why he's called Legion — in a way he's the embodiment of the crowd. It's the crowd that comes out of him and goes and throws itself off of the cliff. We're witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence.

Even in the most closed cultures men believe that they are free and open to the universal; their differential character makes the narrowest cultural fields seem inexhaustible from within. Anything that compromises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to persecution.

In myth, violent death is always justified.

"If we listen to Satan, who may sound like a very progressive and likeable educator, we may feel initially that we are "liberated," but this impression does not last because Satan deprives us of everything that protects us from rivalistic imitation. Rather than warning us of the trap that awaits us, Satan makes us fall into it. He applauds the idea that prohibitions are of no use and that transgressing them contains no danger."

The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.

Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.

To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.

The good son imitates the father with such passion that father and son become each other's chief stumbling block - a situation the indifferent son more easily avoids.

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.

Resorting to a psychological explanation is less innocent than it appears. In refusing the mimetic interpretation, in looking for the failure of Peter in purely individual causes, we attempt to demonstrate, unconsciously of course, that in Peter's place we would have responded differently; we would not have denied Jesus. Jesus reproaches the Pharisees for an older version of the same ploy when he sees them build tombs for the prophets that their fathers killed.

The truth of mimetic theory is unacceptable to the majority of human beings, because it involves Christ. The Christian cannot help but think about the world as it is, and see its extreme fragility. I think that religious faith is the only way to live with this fragility. Otherwise all we're left with is Pascalian diversion and the negation of reality. I've gotten interested in Pascal again, by the way. His notion of diversion, or distraction, is so powerful! But it's clear there was something missing in his life: he never had any trouble getting along with people. And even though his youthful brilliance aroused jealousy, he never experienced rivalry, even in science. As a scientist, he understood the importance of diversion, of distraction. But he never knew rivalry in love, as Shakespeare and Cervantes did, for example; he had no way of seeing, as Racine did, the negation of desire in the very functioning of desire. Bizarrely, this is characteristic of the great French authors of the Renaissance.

The goal of religious thinking is exactly the same as that of technological research — namely, practical action. Whenever man is truly concerned with obtaining concrete results, whenever he is hard pressed by reality, he abandons abstract speculation and reverts to a mode of response that becomes increasingly cautious and conservative as the forces he hopes to subdue, or at least to outrun, draw ever nearer.

Les représentations théâtrales, elles aussi, sont enracinées dans la violence collective et ce sont des espèces de rites, mais plus nettoyés encore de leur violence que les sacrifices animaux, et plus riches sur le rapport culturel, puisque ce sont toujours, au moins indirectement, des méditations sur l'origine du religieux et de la culture tout entière, des sources potentielles de savoir.