Bøker i Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture-serien

This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them.

How do humans stop fighting? Where do the gods of myth come from? What does it mean to go mad? Mark R. Anspach tackles these and other conundrums as he draws on ethnography, literature, psychotherapy, and the theory of Rene Girard to explore some of the fundamental mechanisms of human interaction. Likening gift exchange to vengeance in reverse, the first part of the book outlines a fresh approach to reciprocity, while the second part traces the emergence of transcendence in collective myths and individual delusions. From the peacemaking rituals of prestate societies to the paradoxical structure of consciousness, Anspach takes the reader on an intellectual journey that begins with the problem of how to deceive violence and ends with the riddle of how one can deceive oneself.

The discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s led to an explosion of research and debate about the imitative capacities of the human brain. Some herald a paradigm shift on the order of DNA in biology, while others remain skeptical. In this revolutionary volume Jean- Michel Oughourlian shows how the hypotheses of Rene Girard can be combined with the insights of neuroscientists to shed new light on the "e;mimetic brain."e;Offering up clinical studies and a complete reevaluation of classical psychiatry, Oughourlian explores the interaction among reason, emotions, and imitation and reveals that rivalry-the blind spot in contemporary neuroscientific understandings of imitation-is a misunderstood driving force behind mental illness. Oughourlian's analyses shake the very foundations of psychiatry as we know it and open up new avenues for both theoretical research and clinical practice.

In 1755 the city of Lisbon was destroyed by a terrible earthquake. Almost 250 years later, an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean unleashed a tsunami whose devastating effects were felt over a vast area. In each case, a natural catastrophe came to be interpreted as a consequence of human evil. Between these two events, two indisputably moral catastrophes occurred: Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet the nuclear holocaust survivors likened the horror they had suffered to a natural disaster-a tsunami.Jean-Pierre Dupuy asks whether, from Lisbon to Sumatra, mankind has really learned nothing about evil. When moral crimes are unbearably great, he argues, our ability to judge evil is gravely impaired, and the temptation to regard human atrocity as an attack on the natural order of the world becomes irresistible. This impulse also suggests a kind of metaphysical ruse that makes it possible to convert evil into fate, only a fate that human beings may choose to avoid. Postponing an apocalyptic future will depend on embracing this paradox and regarding the future itself in a radically new way.The American edition of Dupuy's classic essay, first published in 2005, also includes a postscript on the 2011 nuclear accident that occurred in Japan, again as the result of a tsunami.

This book offers an alternative explanation for one of the core dilemmas of Brazilian literary criticism: the "e;midlife crisis"e; Machado de Assis underwent from 1878 to 1880, the result of which was the writing of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, as well as the remarkable production of his mature years-with an emphasis on his masterpiece, Dom Casmurro.At the center of this alternative explanation, Castro Rocha situates the fallout from the success enjoyed by Ea de Queirs with the publication of Cousin Baslio and Machado's two long texts condemning the author and his work. Literary and aesthetic rivalries come to the fore, allowing for a new theoretical framework based on a literary appropriation of "e;thick description,"e; the method proposed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. From this method, Castro Rocha derives his key hypothesis: an unforeseen consequence of Machado's reaction to Ea's novel was a return to the classical notion of aemulatio, which led Machado to develop a "e;poetics of emulation."e;

Parting ways with the Freudian and Lacanian readings that have dominated recent scholarly understanding of Hitchcock, David Humbert examines the roots of violence in the director's narratives and finds them not in human sexuality but in mimesis. Through an analysis of seven key films, he argues that Girard's model of mimetic desire-desire oriented by imitation of and competition with others-best explains a variety of well-recognized themes, including the MacGuffin, the double, the innocent victim, the wrong man, the transfer of guilt, and the scapegoat. This study will appeal not only to Hitchcock fans and film scholars but also to those interested in Freud and Girard and their competing theories of desire.

In this lively series of conversations with writer Michel Treguer, Rene Girard revisits the major concepts of mimetic theory and explores science, democracy, and the nature of God and freedom. Girard affirms that "e;our unprecedented present is incomprehensible without Christianity."e; Globalization has unified the world, yet civil war and terrorism persist despite free trade and economic growth. Because of mimetic desire and the rivalry it generates, asserts Girard, "e;whether we're talking about marriage, friendship, professional relationships, issues with neighbors or matters of national unity, human relations are always under threat."e; Literary masters including Marivaux, Dostoevsky, and Joyce understood this, as did archaic religion, which warded off violence with blood sacrifice. Christianity brought a new understanding of sacrifice, giving rise not only to modern rationality and science but also to a fragile system that is, in Girard's words, "e;always teetering between a new golden age and a destructive apocalypse."e; Treguer, a skeptic of mimetic theory, wonders: "e;Is what he's telling me true...or is it just a nice story, a way of looking at things?"e; In response, Girard makes a compelling case for his theory.

Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths? Drawing on an anti-Platonic tradition in critical theory, Lawtoo adopts ethical, anthropological, and philosophical lenses to offer new readings of Joseph Conrad's novels and the postcolonial and cinematic works that respond to his oeuvre. He argues that Conrad's fascination with doubles urges readers to reflect on the two sides of mimesis: one side is dark and pathological, and involves the escalation of violence, contagious epidemics, and catastrophic storms; the other side is luminous and therapeutic, and promotes communal survival, postcolonial reconciliation, and plastic adaptations to changing environments. Once joined, the two sides reveal Conrad as an author whose Janus-faced fictions are powerfully relevant to our contemporary world of global violence and environmental crisis.

Although women alone have the ability to bring children into the world, modern Western thought tends to discount this female prerogative. In Giving Life, Giving Death, Lucien Scubla argues that structural anthropology sees women as objects of exchange that facilitate alliance-building rather than as vectors of continuity between generations. Examining the work of Levi-Strauss, Freud, and Girard, as well as ethnographic and clinical data, Giving Life, Giving Death seeks to explain why, in constructing their master theories, our greatest thinkers have consistently marginalized the cultural and biological fact of maternity. In the spirit of Freud's Totem and Taboo, Scubla constructs an anthropology that posits a common source for family and religion. His wide-ranging study explores how rituals unite violence and the sacred and intertwine the giving of death and the giving of life.

Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916 is the first critical study of the religious poet and militarist Joseph M. Plunkett, who was executed with the other leaders of the Dublin insurrection of 1916. Through Plunkett the author gains access to areas of nationalist thought that were more often assumed or repressed than publicly formulated.In this eye-opening book, W. J. Mc Cormack explores and analyzes Plunkett's brief life, work, and influence, beginning with his wealthy but dysfunctional family, irregular Jesuit education, and self-canceling sexuality. Mc Cormack continues through Plunkett's active phase when amateur theatricals and a magazine editorship brought him into the emergent neonationalist discourse of early twentieth-century Ireland. Finally, the author arrives at Holy Week 1916, when Plunkett masterminded the forgery of official documentation in order to provoke and justify the insurrection he planned. Mc Cormack analyzes Plunkett's significant texts and provides context through critical perspectives on his milieu. Enigmas of Sacrifice is unique in its effort to understand a major figure of Irish nationalism in terms that reach beyond political identity.

This volume not only contributes to the study of conflict based on the imitation of the desire of others among international polities, but also proposes in its conceptualization that it is worth looking at studies of agency and structure, normative change, peace, and reconciliation.

In this volume Duane Armitage attempts a critique of continental philosophy and postmodernism through the lens of Rene Girard's mimetic theory. This critique is directed primarily at the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both among the foremost representatives of continental and postmodern thought.

First published in French in 1979, The Ambivalence of Scarcity was a groundbreaking work on mimetic theory. Now expanded upon with new, specially written, and never-before-published conference texts and essays, this revised edition explores Rene Girard's philosophy in three sections: economy and economics, mimetic theory, and violence and politics in modern societies.

This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them.

Marie Delcourt's brilliant study of the Oedipus legend, an unjustly neglected monument of twentieth-century classical scholarship published in 1944 and issued here for the first time in English translation, bridges the gap between Carl Robert's influential Oidipus (1915) and the work of Lowell Edmunds seventy years later.

Who killed Laius? Most readers assume Oedipus did. At the play's end, he stands convicted of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and triggering a deadly plague. With selections from a stellar assortment of critics, this book reopens the Oedipus case and lets readers judge for themselves.

Here, Rene Girard's ideas on violence and the sacred inform an innovative analysis of contemporary Latin America. Castro Rocha proposes a new theoretical framework based upon the "poetics of emulation" and offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding the asymmetries of the modern world.

An account of Paolo Diego Bubbio's twenty-year intellectual journey through the twists and turns of Rene Girard's mimetic theory.

This volume collects engagements with Girard by scholars of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and situates them within contemporary theology, philosophy, and religious studies.

Provides a forum to reassess the theoretical and hermeneutical reach of key issues brought forward by Girard's book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, including literary knowledge, realism and representation, imitation and the anxiety of influence, metaphysical desire, deviated transcendence, literature and religious experience, individualism and modernity, and death and resurrection.

This book asks: How far do cultural mechanisms of controlling violence, which allowed humankind to cross the threshold of hominization - i.e., to survive and develop in its evolutionary emergence - still represent today a default setting that threatens to destroy us? Can we transcend them and escape their field of gravity? Should we look to - or should we look beyond - Darwinian survival?

According to political theory, the primary function of the modern state is to protect its citizens-both from each other and from external enemies. Yet it is the states that essentially commit major forms of violence, such as genocides, ethnic cleansings, and large-scale massacres, against their own citizens. In this book Paul Dumouchel argues that this paradoxical reversal of the state's primary function into violence against its own members is not a mere accident but an ever-present possibility that is inscribed in the structure of the modern state. Modern states need enemies to exist and to persist, not because they are essentially evil but because modern politics constitutes a violent means of protecting us against our own violence. If they cannot-if we cannot-find enemies outside the state, they will find them inside. However, this institution is today coming to an end, not in the sense that states are disappearing, but in the sense that they are increasingly failing to protect us from our own violence. That is why the violent sacrifices that they ask from us, in wars and even in times of peace, have now become barren.

Joining disciplinary worlds, this book explores this ambitious claim, invoking viewpoints as diverse as evolutionary culture theory, cultural anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, ethology, and philosophy.

War, violence, and the disruption of social orders are critical areas of focus in mimetic theory, and a mimetic perspective applied to the study of politics illuminates social processes and phenomena over and beyond typical explanations offered by mainstream political science. Unlike traditional political science ontology, the mimetic perspective highlights neither individuals nor groups, but "e;doubles,"e; or "e;mimetic twins."e; According to this perspective, in order to grasp the fundamental rationales of political processes, we need to concentrate on the distinctive propensity of either individuals or groups to engage in mimetic contests resulting from their unreflective disposition to imitate each other's desire. This disposition has been strikingly described by the French-American anthropologist Rene Girard: "e;Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what."e; Via mimetic theory, Farneti highlights phenomena that political scientists have consistently failed to notice, such as reciprocal imitation as the fundamental cause of human discord, the mechanisms of spontaneous polarization in human conflicts (i.e., the emergence of dyads or "e;doubles"e;), and the strange and ever-growing resemblance of the mimetic rivals, which is precisely what pushes them to annihilate each other.