René Girard

North Carolina · connected1923–2015

French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science

Worked at Duke University

philosopher, historian, anthropologist, university teacher, literary critic, philologist

Quotations with a citation

It was Plato who determined once and for all the cultural meaning of imitation, but this meaning is truncated, torn from the essential dimension of acquisitive behavior, which is also the dimension of conflict. If the behavior of certain higher animals, particularly the apes, seems to foreshadow human behavior, it does so almost exclusively, perhaps, because the role of acquisitive mimesis is so important in their behavior, although it is not as central as it is for the human being. If one ape observes another reach for an object, it is immediately tempted to imitate the gesture. It also happens that the animal visibly resists the temptation, and if the imitative gesture amuses us by reminding us of human beings, the failure to complete it, that is to say the repression of what already can be nearly defined as a desire, amuses us even more. It makes the animal a sort of brother to us by showing it subject to the same fundamental rule as humanity—that of preventing conflict, which the convergence of two or several avid hands toward one and the same object cannot help but provoke.

There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid.

The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence.

There is always an attempt to move away from the Cross, that is, to perpetuate man’s misrecognition of his violence and protect his pride from the revelation. Without the Cross, there is no revelation of the fundamental injustice of the scapegoat mechanism, which is the founder of human culture, with all its repercussions in our relationships with each other.

Few people want to be saints nowadays, but everybody is trying to lose weight.

The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack, that they are never the ones who begin, though in a way they are always the ones. Individualism is a formidable lie. We make others understand that we recognize the signs of aggressiveness which they manifest, and they in turn interpret our posture as aggression.

In the libraries

Open Library Deceit, desire, and the novel · 1961 View library record ↗ Open Library Dostoïevski, du double à l'unité · 1963 View library record ↗ Open Library Le bouc émissaire · 1982 View library record ↗ Open Library Sartre · 1962 View library record ↗ Open Library Things hidden since the foundation of the world · 1978 View library record ↗ Open Library Violence et le sacré · 1972 View library record ↗

Read René Girard

Violence et le sacré 1972 Find a copy Deceit, desire, and the novel 1961 Find a copy Sartre 1962 Find a copy Le bouc émissaire 1982 Find a copy Things hidden since the foundation of the world 1978 Find a copy Dostoïevski, du double à l'unité 1963 Find a copy

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law - and finds no lawgiver.