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 le… - René Girard

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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.

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About René Girard

René Girard (December 25, 1923 – November 4, 2015) was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Rene Girard René Noël Théophile Girard

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Additional quotes by René Girard

Nietzsche is a marvelous antidote to all fundamentally anti-Biblical efforts to turn mythology into a kind of Bible, and that is the project of the Jungians of this world, or to boil the Bible down to myth, and that is the project of more or less everyone else

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The well-adjusted person is thus one who conceals his violent impulses and condones the collective’s concealment of them. The “maladjusted” individual cannot tolerate this concealment. “Mental illness” and rebellion, like the sacrificial crisis they resemble, commit the individual to falsehoods and to forms of violence that are certainly more damaging to him than the disguised violence channeled through sacrificial rites, but that bring him closer to the heart of the enigma. Many psychic catastrophes misunderstood by the psychoanalyst result from an inchoate, obstinate reaction against the violence and falsehood found in any human society.

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