Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #379111 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

Girard's work is important but not 100% spot on.
This book is Girard's brief discourse on a theme that he's made a career out of. It is based on his assertion that the most important anthropological fact to note when considering religion, politics, people as a whole, is what he calls the "mimetic cycle". This is the process by which people covet each others' possessions or status and thereby come into rivalry with those they are jealous of (read the book for a more detailed description of this). Thereafter, the jealous duelers are caught in a scandal of trying to do each other harm. This continues and is the source of violence in society until a larger focus of mimesis arrives for them to turn to. Finally, the violent society, comprising of many scandalous rivalries, gradually converges on one collective victim, the scapegoat. The mob, reconciled with itself, but united by the chosen victim, lynches their object of hatred collectively. Thereby the community reestablishes peace from the belief that the source of all their anguish is destroyed. Having been relieved of their violence and unpleasantness by the death of the scapegoat, the community deify him in the belief that he brought the remedy to their violent contagion. This, Girard believes, is the mechanism by which ALL violence and gods in mythology are produced. He cites various examples of this such as the miracle of Appolonius of Tyana and Oedipus. He criticises those anthropology experts and mythologians who fail to recognise the violence inherent in society in this way.
Girard then produces his intellectual defence of Christianity. Far from being an extremist, his analysis is rather sound in light of the ground work he's already laid down at this point, with which I personally have some disagreements. Anyhow, the Christian angle on all this is that The Bible, Gospels and the story of Christ in general are stories that refuse to shy away from the violence of victimisation and that highlight the innocence of the scapegoat. In contrast, Girard asserts, mythology that is non-Christian or non-Biblical fails to see that it is deeply associated to this violence. In fact Girard believes that the very process by which the mimetic contagion spreads is by it being unconscious in the minds of the perpetrators, hence Jesus' famous "forgive them Father for they know not what they do". Christianity reveals the process of mimetic contagion by overtly displaying its outcome on the cross at Golgotha. It's revelation brings the whole matter to the fore, defeating the evil of it. Girard proposes to interpret Satan or the Devil as the textual personification of the single victim mechanism. Consequently, he argues, there is an intellectual sense in which the Devil is vanquished by Christ (and therefore God).
Besides all this, Girard takes the opportunity in the book of criticising some thinkers who seem to rub him up the wrong way. Voltaire, Derrida (and deconstructionism generally), and Nietzsche all get an intellectual pummelling. Personally, though it is a slight detour from the book's original brief, I find the remarks Girard makes relatively sound and deserved.
My largest problems with Girard are these: (1) His style is unnecessarily verbose. Some important concepts in the book are skimmed over with the briskest of pace and obscure vocabulary whilst the central theme of the book (one which is easy to grasp throughout) is summarised and resummarised over and over, (2) Girard is mildly a reductionist, believing his worldview to encompass the truth of ALL anthropology, globalisation, mythology, violence and religion. This is naive at the very least. He neglects to adequately criticise previous interpreters of mythology (Jung, Campell, etc). I don't expect him to do it extensively by authors' names, but some mention of the errors Girard thinks they have made would be nice. As I understand it, Girard dismisses alternative interpretations of the origin of myth and religion as inaccurate because they are blind to the violence in engenders from the start. There is no specificity to his critisicm when it comes to individual ideas. For example, one interpretation of a deity in mythology is that of it being the psychological projection of unconscious attitudes of the worshipers. That is a very specific interpretation, usually found in the works of various psychologists more interested in the effect of mythology and its causes, but nonetheless Girard does nothing to dispell these kinds of hypotheses by directly attacking their structure or evidence. Girard only briefly cites blindness as a reason for their invalidity.
Overall, this book is a very interesting one. It is an alternative angle on many important topics and as of yet Girard's claim that few, if any, significant modern authors have recognised the mimetic cycle in literature, religion and mythology (society in general) seems to hold. The book itself is relatively short (some 200 pages) and is certainly thought-provoking. Girard identifies something very important and should be given plenty credit for this as well as the analysis he develops, but we should be wary of his generalisations and reductions. I would recommend it. I intend to read his other books Scapegoat and Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World and see if any of my reservations are addressed in these more intense tomes.