Contagion

The Novelistic Incarnation and the Question of Truth

Bill Johnsen — 2024-07-17

N/A

Violence and Accusation

Paul Dumouchel — 2024-07-17

This article enquires into the importance of accusations, especially, but not only, in collective violence. It is common to insist on the role of dehumanization in genocides and other phenomena of mass violence. Dehumanization reduces others to the status of usually despised animals: cockroaches, dogs, pigs, snakes, earthworms or even that of objects, dust. This abusive and degrading language is viewed as a factor that leads to subsequent violence. Accusation, to the opposite, as argues Tricaud (1972), is a form of ethical or moral aggression, a completely different type of speech act. One which, instead of describing the other as less than human, constitutes the victim as in some way responsible for the harm she suffers. Rather than dehumanizing, accusations to some extent humanize the victim and it is there, in the agency of the victim, that accusers find the reason and justification of their violence.

Flight of Desire: The Conversion of Sherman Alexie

Scott Lyons — 2024-07-17

Sherman Alexie's novel Flight (2007) is perhaps his least discussed work of fiction, but it tells a powerful, prescient tale of racial resentment, terrorism, nonviolence and forgiveness. The mimetic theory of René Girard provides a useful set of critical tools for better understanding Alexie's work, motivations, and what Girard describes as conversion. Both Girard and Alexie provide valuable alternatives to a literary critical practice steeped in hostility and violence.

The Girardian Event and the Literary Event

Joakim Wrethed — 2024-07-17

Girardian philosophical and theological thinking is founded on events. Mainly the two generic events of mimetic desire and the purifying sacrifice. However, in addition there is more nuanced cognition of evental structures that becomes highlighted not least when engaging with literary texts through Girardian concepts. I here to probe deeply into Girard’s evental layers through the engagement with Alice Munro’s short story “Runaway”. The analysis more closely examines the literary event as such and what it may mean in Munro’s work, but then also it brings relevant insights back into Girard’s evental framework to ponder some conceptual timbres in his thinking about the scapegoat and revelation. By means of Ilai Rowner’s outline of the literary event, Munro’s short story is shown to appropriate the scapegoat event and to hand it back to the opaque realm of myth that Girard extracted it from. In addition, there will be a more philosophical elaboration of the phenomenon of the event alongside the analysis of the literary event. This part is guided mainly by the philosophical/phenomenological work of François Raffoul.

One to N: Girard's Philosophy of Innovation

Johnathan Bi — 2024-07-17

The dominant view of innovation is that it proceeds from “zero to one” in opposition to imitation. Girard argues for an alternative: innovation actually proceeds from “one to N” via imitation. This paper reconstructs Girard’s critique: the dominant view is theoretically false, practically self-defeating, but nevertheless rose to ascendancy because it is a manifestation of the seductive pride of Satan. Developing this last point, I defend the dominant view by showing its necessary role in an innovative culture which ultimately leads me to re-evaluate our universally lauded value of innovation.

Violent Conflict, the Struggle for Identity, and the Contagion of Mimetic Desire in the Prison Environment

Bill Johnsen — 2024-07-17

N/a

A Patchwork of Non-integrated Others

Michael Elias — 2024-07-17

Since my contribution is a short essay, I don't think an abstract is necessary

Exception or Ekklesia

ANTHONY BARTLETT — 2024-07-17

The Girardian paradox of the revelation of foundational violence accompanied by an apparent lack or passivity of peace-making response continues to shadow mimetic theory as it goes forward in time and academic uptake. The collection of essays, Politics and Apocalypse, resulting from a Stanford conference in 2004, is illustrative of the issues at stake, including the question of an adequate political and theological response. The thought of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss provide an ambiguous, if not mistaken, framework for what may justly claim to be a biblical-transformative outlook. The work of Giorgio Agamben describing the extra-judicial status of the homo sacer and the “state of exception” at the core of sovereignty and the modern state appears an alternative line of reflection. The nomos of modernity as “bare life” confronted by violence opens a radical possibility of thinking ekklesia as the human space where a concrete new human possibility is revealed, one of the structural revelation of nonviolence and the historical practice of peace.

Nietzsche contra Girard: Agonistic Steps for Mimetic Studies

Nidesh Lawtoo — 2024-07-17

N/A

The idiot Patrick Bateman: A new configuration of caricatural “ultra-Christianity”

Fabrizio Arcuri — 2024-07-17

Patrick Bateman is an increasingly central figure in the cultural and media imaginary. Despite the different perspectives adopted to analyze the character in both the fictional and movie versions, this paper aims to interpret its peculiarities by resorting to René Girard’s mimetic theory. In particular, the protagonist of American Psycho will be defined by the concept of caricatural “ultra-Christianity”. With these terms, the French anthropologist points to the degeneration of the salvific message of Jesus Christ concerning the revelation of the innocence of all immolated victims. Specifically, caricatural “ultra-Christianity” is characterized by the spread of expressions marked by performative and strategic victimhood, fomented by resentment toward mimetic rivals. From this perspective, Patrick Bateman’s resentful victimhood presents itself as a peculiar kind of idiocy. This concept will be understood as a paranoid reaction due to the traumatic split, psychiatrically based, between one’s idios kosmos (own-world) and koinos kosmos (common world). Indeed, the idiot Bateman’s worldview is influenced by the intensification of mimetic competition. For him, reality is a desert land dominated by nihilism and absolute evil: a compensatory justification for his uncontrollable violence toward all those he perceives as rivals and persecutors.

René Girard and Giorgio Agamben: Convergent and Divergent Political and Theological Prospects

Bart Leenman — 2024-07-17

René Girard (1923-2015) and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (born in 1942) are an unlikely pairing. Girard is renowned for his socio-anthropological mimetic theory, while Agamben is known for his political philosophy. However, despite these differences, Girard and Agamben share some intriguing similarities. For example, both thinkers employ an archaeological (anthropogenetic) methodology and situate their thoughts against the background of Judeo-Christian concepts such as messianism, revelation and apocalypse. Yet, the most striking similarity is their shared focus on violence and the sacred. Rather than viewing violence as an external element of human society, Girard and Agamben discuss the societal “function” of violence while situating a sacred victim at the heart of their theories. In this article, I delve into Girard’s and Agamben’s perspectives on violence, their sacred victims, and the theological and political implications of their theories. There exists an intriguing divergence in Girard’s and Agamben’s definition of the sacred victim that could help us understand their view on violence, the sacred, and the political and theological implications of their theories.

Dostoevsky, Girard, Levinas:

Justin Jackson — 2024-07-17

The pairing of Rene Girard and Emmanuel Levinas in light of Dostoevsky's works seems a natural fit: both men were influenced by the 19-century Russian author, and both men attest to the centrality of Dostoevsky’s works in their own intellectual formation. This essay will read Dostoevsky's Devils, his most apocalyptic work, alongside the mimetic theory of Girard and Levinas's ethics. Girard's understanding of Dostoevskyan apocalypticism provides the reader with an analysis of the run-away violence in the novel, while Levinas' focus on an ethics that precedes politics, especially with his notion of the Face, provides the reader with an analysis of those ethical moments, a face-to-face encounter, that ruptures the runaway violence Girard highlights.

The neurology of culture, or how we move from rage to ritual in the process of hominization

Gregory Lobo — 2024-07-17

How do we move from rage to ritual? How do we become human? The work of René Girard would seem to offer an answer to this question. In this brief essay I want to simply add some evolutionary and neuroscientific details to Girard’s theory, which flesh out while also corroborating the basic components of it. The concepts and phenomena introduced to add detail to the theory are collective intentionality and prefrontal synthesis.

The Success and malaise of capitalism.

Pablo Morlan — 2024-07-17

This article seeks to contribute to the knowledge that we have on the market as the central institution of capitalism, according to Girard's perspective. Mimetic theory (MT) can explain both the success and malaise caused by the market. Success is measured by the spread of desire; malaise by the mimetic resentment caused by this spread of desire. Both the liberal blindness, that does not understand the hate of the market, and the anti-liberal resentment, make an incorrect diagnosis due to a partial view of the central institution of capitalism. Both liberals and anti-liberals make the mistake of not considering the mimetic nature of human behaviour. This mistake could be corrected by incorporating Girard’s mimetic theory into economics. MT not only explains how capitalism works but also the hate that it inspires.