On Girard – Huw Nesbitt in TLS:

‘As an adolescent René Girard was more scallywag than scholar, lucky to avoid jail, let alone make it to university. Born in Avignon on Christmas Day in 1923, the man who coined the notion of mimetic desire – the idea, contra Freud, that our wants and needs are not libidinal but imitative – began his studies emulating delinquent classmates.’

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‘Having already devoured Proust, Flaubert, Cervantes, Stendhal and Dostoevsky while writing his thesis, Girard subsequently immersed himself in structuralist thought during a series of postdoc positions, as attested by his first important work, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961). “All types of structural thinking assume that human reality is intelligible”, he begins. “It can thus be systematized.” At the time language and literature were in fashion in continental philosophy. Girard accordingly sketched his radical thesis on desire using the fictional worlds created by the novelists who had occupied his doctoral years, arguing that even these made-up realities contained elements of real human behaviour. In this landmark text he subsequently claimed that, rather than being spontaneous and driven from “within”, people merely want what others have. Our needs are therefore triangular: a desiring subject “will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is already desired by another person”. This “mediator” consequently becomes a “rival” for the object and conflict ensues.’

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‘Unanimity means that the people suddenly find themselves without enemies”, he later summarized in a 1990 essay on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar compiled in All Desire Is a Desire for Being, a new collection of his essays to mark his centenary edited by Haven, his former student. As a result of the consensual selection of a sacrificial victim chosen between previously warring parties, “the spirit of vengeance is extinguished”. In turn this process conceals the arbitrariness of the scapegoat’s selection, making it seem as if they were somehow responsible for the prior bloodshed. Myths, he claims, participate in this cover-up, contending that, in their depiction in the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides alike, violence continues to worsen until a scapegoat is found, one who is never to blame for what has happened. Conversely, while the Gospels also deal with another sacrificial victim, Girard argues that by foregrounding Jesus’s innocence they represent a unique paradigm in human culture, one that might render its apparent tendency to rivalry and brutality inoperative. “We are for the first time able to understand the deconstructive side of Christianity”, he wrote in the essay “Victims, Violence and Christianity”, also included in All Desire. “Far from being a myth, Christianity […] places us in a world where we no longer have the safeguards of scapegoating.”’

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‘“One cannot kill the gods, any gods, without engendering new ones”, he concludes. The evidence for this is all around.’

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‘In 2014 Thiel launched, with Girard’s blessing a year before his death, Imitatio, an institute dedicated to supporting the “dissemination” of the French author’s work, which duly receives credit in this volume’s acknowledgements. Despite this, Girard’s thought still inspires readers outside the conservative tech sector.’

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‘Regardless of any shortcomings, the writings of a once wayward teen from Avignon still offer a singular vision, one that remains compelling because it is uncategorizable.’

Read the article here.

To me, Girard remains an important thinker.

That desire needs and breeds competition doesn’t contradict Freud.

The need for a scape goat is evident, wherever you look. In Europa, but also in the US, the asylum seeker fulfills this role. Our sins become his sins and that’s the reason why we despise him.

Christianity might have tried to fight against the desire for scapegoats, but its successes were mixed. Also Judaism tried to get rid of the human tendency to look for evil outside oneself.

We desire what other people desire. And we need always somebody who is even worse than we are.