Forum Philosophicum

There is a long-standing dispute among scholars concerning Berkeley’s supposed commitment to an emotivist theory of meaning as the very first (and an early modern) instance of non-cognitivism. According to this position, the domains of religious and moral language do not refer to facts about the world, but rather express the emotional attitudes of religious or moral language users. Some scholars involved in the dispute argue for taking Berkeley to be an emotivist (non-cognitivist), while others hold that we should not do so. This paper puts forward an interpretation that lends support to the non-cognitivist reading of his stance, but in expressivist rather than emotivist terms. It argues that the label “expressivism” does more justice to the textual evidence concerning his understanding of moral language, as what is distinctive where this philosopher is concerned is his interest in explaining the nature of our practice of employing moral language (i.e. how we come to formulate moral statements as expressions of our non-referential attitudes, and the meta-level considerations pertaining to morality associated with this), rather than whether morality is just a matter of our emotions or feelings (i.e. such first-order considerations about morality as whether moral rightness and wrongness correspond merely to our emotional states).

This paper rereads René Girard’s intellectual biography as a process first of apparent dissociation, and then of not so very much apparent, though quite solid, recovery of historical thinking. A trained historian-archivist, the young Girard began to massively rearrange his intellectual outlook by adopting methods and perspectives drawn from both very modern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, and classical thinkers such as Émile Durkheim. In developing his signature theory of the scapegoat mechanism, however, Girard’s intellectual biography eventually came full circle. Reluctantly, and sometimes probably even unconsciously, he began to work intellectually like a good historian. Historical methodology and mimetic theory have, therefore, very much in common. This usually overlooked close relationship would seem to offer a promising new perspective when it comes to further developing mimetic theory methodologically.

René Girard’s work often seems suspect to liberals, because it ap­pears as a totalizing narrative. Such hesitancy with respect to either dismissing or endorsing it follows from the demise of “grand narratives” that brought with them imperialistic and hegemonic tendencies. Yet if a liberal viewpoint does not embrace Girard, it is for different reasons that conservatives are either fully supportive of his thought as promising a return to religious values or hesitant about accepting his theories because they critique a form of violence inherent to any community. Girardian thought, it can be argued, has focused on deconstructing mythological justifications for violent activity at the expense of establishing a fruitful position regarding positive communal formations. The tensions between these juxtaposed liberal and conservative viewpoints, as taken up in this article, illustrate an impasse between deconstructivist-genealogists (representing trends within liberal discourse) and communitarians (representing conservative or orthodox viewpoints)—one that shows up in a variety of contexts today. Highlighting this particular standoff in interpretations of Girard can, nevertheless, yield important insights regarding the ultimate significance of his work.

This paper offers an interpretation of René Girard’s mimetic theory in light of Hannah Arendt’s account of St Augustine’s philosophy of love. Girard’s mimetic theory crosses many disciplines and has been the main inspiration in his oeuvre over decades. However, its later application and how it purports to demystify culture and point to the truth of the Christian revelation, sits uneasily with his early confessional position. This paper is an attempt to make sense of Girard the Christian thinker, who seeks to explain Christianity without a continuous searching quest for God and ethical orientation in the world. I examine his early theory of desire and how it claims to lead to the conversion of the hero and author of the novel, and how Girard compares the hero’s journey in literary space to the Saint’s journey in spiritual space. In explicating Hannah Arendt’s work entitled Love and Saint Augustine I set out some of the key concepts of Augustine’s philosophy of “love as desire” and highlight a number of contexts in Augustine’s thinking that refocus his philosophy in the direction of memory in response to the commandment to love God, neighbour and self. I go on to examine whether Arendt’s analysis of Augustine might also apply to Girard’s journey with mimetic theory. Finally, I attempt to articulate a context for reading Girard in light of Augustine’s own searching quest for God, one that tries to bring his personal and confessional stance back into his account of mimesis and human origins.

This paper will address René Girard’s critique of the “humanization of nothingness” in modern Western philosophy. I will first explain how the “desire for death” is related to a phenomenon that Girard refers to as “obstacle addiction.” Second, I will point out how mankind’s desire for death and illusory will to self-divinization gradually tend to converge within the history of modern Western humanism. In particular, I will show how this convergence between self-destruction and self-divinization gradually takes shape through the evolution of the concept of “the negative” from Hegel to Kojève, Sartre and Camus. Finally, we shall come to see that in Girard’s view “the negative” has tended to become an ever-preoccupying and unacknowledged symptom of mankind’s addiction to “model/obstacles” of desire.

In order to disclose possible affinities between the oeuvres of Emmanuel Levinas and René Girard that run deeper than both the apparently opposite quarters in which they deploy their thought—difference and sameness—and their patently shared view—an ethical concern for victims— their analogue account of the mythical dynamics of undifferentiation should be explored. Due to their very similar endeavor—to pinpoint the circumstances in which mythical violence arises—Levinas’s notion of the il y a as a neutral and saturated field of forces and Girard’s description of the final paroxysm of the mimetic crisis can be equated with very instructive results. Furthermore, because both instances are linked to the primeval situation in which the subject as such emerges, these authors’ descriptions reinforce each other and provide us with a critical account of a realm that should be transcended—the domain of the violent sacred in which force becomes the ultimate criteria—lest we run the risk of a total social involution.

Taking as its point of departure the existing critical literature on the intersections between René Girard’s and Giorgio Agamben’s anthropogenetic theories, this essay aims to add further considerations to the debate by discussing some of Agamben’s intuitions within a Girardian paradigmatic explanatory frame­work. I show how by regressing the archeological analysis to a pre-institutional and pre-legal moment, and by re-examining the antinomic structure of the sacred in its genetic organizing form (so briskly dismissed by Agamben in Homo Sacer), one can account more cogently for certain key issues relevant to Agamben’s theo­retical project, such as the “paradox of sovereignty,” the nature of the “state of exception,” and the dissociation between culpa and individual responsibility in archaic law, as recently discussed in Karman. I also put forward arguments concerning the limitations of Agamben’s immanent ontology to account for the zoe/bios distinction as a key structural element of his particular take on biopolitics, viewing this specifically in the light of Girard’s anti-sacrificial interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.

A major theme in René Girard’s work involves the role of the Bible in exposing the scapegoating practices at the basis of culture. The God of the Bible is understood to be a God who takes the side of victims. The God of the Qur’an is also a defender of victims, an idea that recurs throughout the text in the stories of messengers and prophets. In a number of ways, Jesus is unique among the prophets mentioned in the Qur’an. It is argued here that while the Quranic Jesus is distinctly Islamic, and not a Christian derivative, he functions in the Qur’an in a way analogous to the role Jesus plays in the gospels. In its depiction of Jesus, the Qur’an is acutely aware of mimetic rivalry, scapegoating, and the God who comes to the aid of the persecuted. Despite the significant differences between the Christian understanding of Jesus as savior and the way he is understood in the Qur’an, a Girardian interpretation of the Qur’anic Jesus will suggest ways in which Jesus can be a bridge rather than an obstacle in Christian/Muslim dialogue.

Rene Girard’s anthropology goes beyond Durkheim and Freud in seeking knowledge in literary, mythical, and religious texts. Girard’s primary intuition is that human culture originated in response to the danger of violent mimetic crises among increasingly intelligent hominins, whose imitation of each other’s desires led to conflict. These crises were resolved by the mechanism of emissary murder: the proto-human community came to focus its aggression on a single scapegoat whose unanimous lynching, by “miraculously” bringing peace, led to its ritual repetition in sacrifice. Because this theory fails to found the signs of human language and worship on the deferral of spontaneous action, Girard can only attribute the internal peace necessary to the human community to the exhaustion of violent aggression. Instead, generative anthropology proposes that, beginning from the premise that the need to control internecine violence was the source of the human, an appropriative gesture toward an object of common desire, deferred out of fear of violence, becomes understood as a sign of the object’s sacred/interdicted status, after which it can be peacefully divided among the group. Following this originary event, the sacred/signifying universe of language and religion gradually comes to include the totality of human activity.

Girardian anthropology tells us that the birth of human meaning and its signs are the result of a primitive catastrophe. But if these origins are exposed by the biblical record it is because another, transformative semiosis has opened in human existence. Girard’s seminal remarks on the Greek logos and the logos of John, endorsing Heidegger’s divorce of the two, demonstrate this claim and its source in the nonviolence of the gospel logos. In effect, there is a second catastrophe, one embedded in the bible and reaching its full exposition in the cross, generating a new semiosis in humanity. The transformation may be measured by viewing the original semiosis in a Kantian frame, as a transcendental a priori structured by violence. The second catastrophe generates an equivalent new a priori of nonviolence. The work of Charles Peirce illustrates both the way in which interpretants (of signs) open us progressively to new meanings, and how this process may ultimately be conditioned by love. The catastrophe of the gospel, therefore, works both on the dramatic individual level, with Paul of the New Testament as the great example, but also in slow‑motion over semiotic history, changing the meaning of existence from violence to nonviolence.

Rene Girard never worried about clarifying the epistemological framework of his theories. Yet it is a necessary task, if only to answer the questions of method inevitably posed by the mixture of scientificality and religious conviction that characterizes his approach. Girard’s use of the word “revelation” is paradigmatic from this regard. A philosophy of the event can provide an epistemological framework to unify the theological and anthropological meanings of this notion. On a phenomenological level, Divine Revelation is analogous to certain decisively meaningful happenings in our existence, or in history. The irruption of a radically new sense into a reality that does not contain it in any way is not an exclusive prerogative of religious experience. The schema of the meaningful event makes it possible to disclose the logic of the great Girardian narrative, whose key stages are revelations, in the sense of events bringing a new kind of meaning. The scenario of the emergence of culture described by Girard is event‑driven, and the same logical schema underlies the Girardian interpretation of the Passion as an unveiling of human violence. In the same way Girard analyses conversion, in both a religious and a “novelistic” sense, as a spiritual event. Finally, his apocalyptic conception of history can be interpreted using this epistemological framework.

Questions concerning the relationship between nature and grace, reason and faith are central to Christian anthropology. With philosopher/theologian Bernard Lonergan’s essay “Natural Knowledge of God” as a starting point, these questions will be considered in conversation with the work of Rene Girard and theologian James Alison. Lonergan agrees with Karl Rahner that, with regard to these questions, dogmatic theology needs to be transposed into a theological anthropology. Given that Girard is an anthropologist of religion and culture who is open to theology, his work can be useful in effecting such a transposition. For example, Girard’s thought can help us understand what Lonergan means when he writes: “I do not think that in this life people arrive at natural knowledge of God without God’s grace, but what I do not doubt is that the knowledge they so attain is natural.” Implicit in this statement is an awareness that “natural reason” needs to be freed of its biases before it can operate freely and “naturally.” Girard’s anthropological approach to the Bible helps to explain why this is the case.

The mimetic desire that underlies resentment can enter into different and complex strategies of interaction. In his writings, Girard has indicated at least three such strategies: those of the solipsist, the non‑conformist and the minimalist. His critical insight reveals indifference, transgression and minimalism to be strategies of resentment, where all of these are symptoms of an anthropological condition characterizing contemporary Western society today. At the same time, he sees evangelical revelation as the main source of our modern awareness of the mimetic nature of human beings: an awareness that has produced ongoing transformations in modernity linked to resentment. Moreover, he observes that it is the Judeo‑Christian tradition itself that has disclosed the mimetic nature of human desire and the logic of resentment. Viewed from this perspective, modern humanity now has an extraordinary opportunity to renounce the scapegoating mechanism so as to resolve its resentments, as evangelical revelation makes reconciliation and social reconstruction possible.