All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings

Conflict

Human conflict is not primarily a political or systemic problem but a universal feature of desire: people borrow desires from others, inevitably becoming rivals with those they simultaneously admire and hate, and no social system has yet found a cure for this ‘genius for discord.’

• The nuclear deadlock reveals a deeper, universal human capacity for conflict that predates any particular political system; eliminating America and Russia would simply produce new antagonists, because the problem lies in human nature itself.
  • Even the most optimistic scenario after mutual superpower annihilation would produce a resumption of nuclear deadlock with different protagonists.
  • Political scientists focus on capitalism versus Communism, but the broader question is why humans have such a capacity for conflict at all.
• The root of human conflict is a form of alienation deeper than anything Marx or Freud discovered: people never feel they truly are the persons they want to be, so they emulate someone else and borrow that person’s desires, ensuring lives of perpetual rivalry.
  • The most wonderful being, the only semi-god, is always someone else whom we emulate and from whom we borrow our desires.
  • In the old language of religious ethics, the sin of pride was said to be self-defeating: the more self-sufficient man tries to be, the more intricate his foreign entanglements become.
• The questioner cannot stand outside this problem of conflict because his own worst impulses are inextricably mixed with his best, giving the inquiry a philosophical and religious dimension that prevents it from becoming purely scientific.
  • No one can study the formidable human capacity for conflict realistically unless he first recognizes that he is a part of the problem.

Violence and Foundational Myths in Human Societies

Human societies survived their own mimetic violence through the spontaneous scapegoating mechanism, around which archaic religion—its prohibitions, sacrifices, and founding myths—coalesced; the Bible and Gospels are unique in reversing the mythic verdict by declaring the victim innocent.

• Girard’s interest in the genesis of human culture begins with Darwinism: hominization began when mimetic rivalries became so intense that animal dominance patterns collapsed, threatening self-destruction, and religion emerged as the first protection against this violence.
  • The key question is whether we can develop a plausible genesis of what is not animal in our culture—the ‘supplement’ that makes us human.
  • Mankind survived because religious prohibitions emerged early enough to prevent the new species from self-destructing.
• Founding myths always begin with a destructive crisis—plague, monstrous violence, the ‘war of all against all’—that resolves when the community unanimously targets a single scapegoat, whose killing produces a miraculous reconciliation that myths then misrepresent as the victim’s guilt.
  • In the Oedipus myth the crisis is a plague; behind such themes hides what Hobbes calls ’the war of all against all.’
  • The unconscious nature of the lynching is illustrated by Jesus’s words: ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they do.’
  • Many mythical heroes are blind, one-eyed, or defined as ‘men from elsewhere’—foreigners whose slight difference could trigger panic and death in archaic communities.
• Religious prohibitions and sacrificial rites arose from communities’ memory of the cathartic lynching: prohibitions kept potential rivals apart, and when they failed, sacrifice attempted to reproduce the reconciling mechanism by replaying the crisis with a new victim.
  • Over time the fear inspired by prohibitions lessened, and communities sought new protection by replaying the process of crisis and lynching—hence ‘simulated crises’ that anthropologists have rightly identified.
  • Two ancient religions, Greek and Hindu, developed an incomplete but profound understanding of these archaic systems.
• The Gospels perform a radical reversal of myth: whereas myths endorse the crowd’s verdict and treat the victim as guilty, the biblical tradition—climaxing in the Passion—sides with the innocent scapegoat and exposes the founding violence that myths conceal.
  • The Bible therefore effects a radical departure from mythology: in the Old Testament, and even more spectacularly in the Gospels, the supremacy of the crowd, which dates back to the origins of humanity, is finally overthrown.
  • Many Bible stories condemn the crowd and rehabilitate the victim; the Psalms give snapshots of a lynching in which a horrified narrator watches a band of individuals try to surround and kill him.

Is Oedipus Innocent?

Oedipus is not a guilty parricide and incest-perpetrator but a scapegoat arbitrarily selected by a community in crisis, and Freud’s elevation of this myth to universal psychological truth repeats the mythic error of taking the crowd’s accusation at face value; the Bible’s distinction from myth lies precisely in its refusal to accept the crowd’s verdict.

• Mimetic desire is not a feature only of mediocre or inauthentic individuals but is universal: we desire what those around us desire, so models become rivals and rivals become models, generating perpetual conflict that intensifies in proportion to social equality.
  • Unlike our needs, which make themselves felt in our body without any help from third parties, our desires have an irreducible social dimension with a mediator or model who most often goes unrecognized.
  • The more the modern world becomes spiritually if not materially egalitarian, the more the distance shrinks between mimetic models and their imitators, heightening conflict.
• Oedipus is a scapegoat, not a genuine criminal: the charges of parricide and incest are stereotypical witchcraft accusations that belong to a crisis context, and the real cause of his selection is the mimetic snowballing of collective hostility against a convenient target who happens to be present.
  • “There is a crisis, there is a plague in Thebes, they are looking for a culprit—and asking what criminal caused the epidemic can only set off a witch hunt.” —René Girard
  • Tiresias or Creon could assume the role of the guilty party just as easily as Oedipus; the scales long remain equally balanced before they finally tilt against the king.
  • “Even if Oedipus were an incestuous and parricidal son, even if he had killed his predecessor on the throne, he still would not be the cause of the plague—he would still be a scapegoat.” —Mark Anspach
• Freud’s Oedipus complex is built on a misreading that takes the myth’s accusations literally, whereas patricide and incest are in fact the most banal of mythical stereotypes, not unique psychological truths.
  • The Oedipus that Mark Anspach gives us is not the Oedipus of the famous complex but the one the complex conceals—an Oedipus caught in the blinding symmetries of mimetic desire.
  • Freud brings together all the elements of the mimetic triangle but does not want to make a triangle of it; the separate elements do not form a coherent whole.
• The biblical tradition is distinguished from mythology not by the absence of scapegoating but by its reversal: the Bible repeatedly condemns the crowd and rehabilitates the victim, whereas myth always endorses the crowd’s verdict—and this difference, overlooked by anthropologists, is the decisive one.
  • “The case of Sodom illustrates biblical logic: Abraham demands that God spare innocent inhabitants, and when Lot—a stranger in the city—is expelled, the angels save rather than destroy him, reversing the meaning of expulsion.” —Mark Anspach
  • The real hero of victimary knowledge is Job; by persisting in telling the truth that he did nothing to deserve his misfortunes, Job effects a small epistemological revolution that Sophocles approaches but does not complete.
• The Milomaki myth of the Yahuna Indians of Amazonia demonstrates that the Oedipus pattern—a stranger admired then blamed for a fatal illness and killed—is universal across cultures, making Oedipus just one myth among many rather than a privileged psychological archetype.
  • Milomaki arrives as a singing stranger, is admired, then blamed when listeners fall ill after eating fish—and the community kills him; from his ashes grows the first palm tree used to make flutes that replicate his song.
  • The circumstances in which the victim is condemned vary, but not the functioning of the mechanism: unanimous belief in the victim’s guilt, whatever the accusations, allows the group to regain its unity.

The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, universally read as a proclamation of ‘God is dead,’ is in fact a precise account of collective murder, sacrificial crisis, and the ritual genesis of new religion—the very ‘victimage theory’ Girard finds throughout archaic culture—and the modern intelligentsia’s suppression of the murder within the text repeats the very ritual misrecognition the aphorism describes.

• Commentators on aphorism 125 uniformly excise Nietzsche’s explicit language of collective murder—‘We have killed Him – you and I! All of us are His murderers!’—and substitute the neutral formula ‘God is dead,’ thereby committing precisely the ritual misrecognition the Madman accuses the crowd of performing.
  • “Nietzsche insists on the unanimity of the murder with a heavy hand: ‘We have killed Him – you and I! All of us are His murderers!’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Heidegger’s celebrated essay ‘Nietzsche’s Phrase God is Dead’ titles itself after the formula while discussing everything but the aphorism’s actual content.
• The full structure of aphorism 125 maps perfectly onto the victimage theory of religion: a sacrificial crisis (the dissolution of all differences and directions), a collective murder, then ritual commemoration producing new gods—the complete cycle of violence and the sacred.
  • After the murder, Nietzsche asks: ‘What ceremonies of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?’—the precise language of ritual production emerging from collective murder.
  • ‘Must we not become gods ourselves to appear worthy of such a deed?’—the aphorism supplies the exact word ‘gods’ at the moment the victimage theory requires it.
• Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal recurrence is the mythic-ritual context of his thought, representing the identity of destruction and creation in archaic religion, but the aphorism secretly subverts this by revealing the collective murder as its engine—a revelation that, once made, destroys the eternal recurrence’s foundation.
  • The eternal recurrence crushes all claims to absolute singularity and relativizes our world in the midst of an infinity of worlds, contradicting the Judeo-Christian conception of a unique history.
  • By founding the eternal recurrence on the collective murder whose revelation prevents belief in future victims’ guilt, the aphorism is secretly subverted by the Christianity over which it believes it has triumphed.
• Nietzsche himself becomes a scapegoat within the ritual pattern he describes: persecuted and dismissed in his lifetime, then posthumously sanctified in a two-generation cycle that recapitulates the primitive sacred without genuine understanding.
  • The process unfolds over two generations: the first curses the living genius, the second makes sacred the dead—each generation believing it redresses injustices it is simultaneously repeating.
  • This process was defined for the first time in the ‘Curses against the Pharisees’: ‘Ye build the tombs of the prophets … and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’
• Nietzsche comes closer than any modern thinker to seeing the mechanisms by which the Gospels reveal and discredit collective violence, yet he consciously chooses Dionysus over Christ—choosing violence—with tragic consequences culminating in his own madness.
  • “‘Dionysus versus the Crucified: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom – it is a difference in the meaning of it.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Christianity is always accused of justifying suffering, but Nietzsche sees well that it is pagan religion that ‘affirms even the harshest suffering’; his drama is his obstinate preference for Dionysus, pursued with too much intellectual rigor not to culminate in atrocious texts.

Camus’s Stranger Retried

L’étranger contains a structural flaw—Meursault cannot be persecuted by society without committing a crime, yet the murder must be simultaneously voluntary enough to damn him and involuntary enough to preserve his innocence—and La chute is Camus’s own recognition of this flaw as the ‘bad faith’ of the ‘generous lawyer’ who needs to condemn judges more than to defend the innocent.

• Camus presents Meursault as a man persecuted for his authentic individuality, but the novel’s thesis—that someone who does not cry at his mother’s funeral is likely to be sentenced to death—is only true if Meursault also commits a murder, which transforms a supposed social indictment into a logical tautology.
  • If the murder is an accident, the novel proves only that people who don’t cry at their mothers’ funerals will be sentenced to death if they also happen to commit involuntary manslaughter—and that ‘if’ is a very big one.
  • Meursault’s daily life—working, swimming, watching Fernandel movies, drinking café au lait—provides no realistic basis for persecution; only the murder makes him vulnerable.
• La chute is Camus’s self-criticism: the ‘generous lawyer’ Clamence, who defends criminals to prove judges are always wrong, is an allegory of the author of L’étranger, whose real motive was not generosity but the need for self-justification through the condemnation of others.
  • Clamence realizes that mercy, in his hands, was a secret weapon against the unmerciful—a more complex form of self-righteousness whose real desire was not to save clients but to prove moral superiority by discrediting judges.
  • When anti-pharisaism is used as a device to crush the Pharisees, it becomes another and more vicious form of pharisaism.
• Meursault’s murder of the Arab functions as a crimen ex machina—an invented crime that allows the solipsist hero to become a martyr of society without forfeiting the reader’s sympathy—revealing that the novel’s structure requires the contradiction it cannot resolve.
  • All the events leading to the shooting are so devised that they appear to fulfill two incompatible exigencies: Meursault will die an innocent, and yet his death sentence will be more significant than a mere judicial error.
  • L’étranger begins like Monsieur Teste and ends like Chatterton; Camus does not perceive or refuses to assume the consequences of his literary solipsism and resorts to the ‘innocent murder’ to retrieve the structure of the ‘poète maudit.’
• La chute ultimately raises the question that L’étranger evades: not ‘who is innocent, who is guilty?’ but ‘why do we all have to keep judging and being judged?’—a question Girard identifies as Dostoevskian and as approaching Paul’s insight that the one who judges condemns himself.
  • “‘The sentence which you pass against your fellow men,’ says Clamence, ‘is always flung back into your face where it effects quite a bit of damage.’” —Clamence
  • Did Camus realize that all the themes of La chute are in Paul’s Epistles? ‘Thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest; for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself.’

Shakespeare in Comedy and Tragedy

Shakespeare systematically portrays mimetic desire—desire borrowed from a model-rival—as the engine of both comic and tragic conflict, showing how imitative rivalry produces undifferentiation, collective violence, and scapegoating, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream offering a genetic theory of myth and Julius Caesar staging the foundational murder that generates the Roman Empire.

• In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the four lovers’ escalating chaos is not caused by external interference (father figures, fairies) but by mimetic desire: each character desires the erotic absolute only insofar as a rival seems to embody it, so love and hatred between the same persons are generated by the same mechanism.
  • Helena wants to be ’translated’ into Hermia not primarily to have Demetrius but because Hermia embodies the magnetic pole of desires in their little world—desire here is for another’s being.
  • The more I hate, the more he follows me; the more I love, the more he hateth me—Shakespeare presents these as literal truths, not rhetorical flourishes.
• The progressive undifferentiation of the lovers—their loss of individual identity through mimetic escalation—is Shakespeare’s central thesis, not a failure of characterization; the play provides a genetic theory of how mimetic crisis produces mythical monsters through the rapid oscillation of ‘beast’ and ‘angel’ images.
  • When polarities such as beast and angel oscillate so fast they become one, the elements remain too incompatible for harmonious synthesis and will be juxtaposed into a composite monstrous picture—explaining the mythical monster as a product of mimetic crisis.
  • Bottom’s ass-head transformation is not mere fantasy but the logical endpoint of the mimetic process whereby the most extreme metaphysical ambition produces animality.
• Theseus’s famous speech dismissing the midsummer night as mere imagination is itself mythical—a rationalist dissimulation of the violence that produced the social order—while Hippolyta’s five quiet lines of response represent Shakespeare’s own corrective view that the events constitute ‘something of great constancy.’
  • Hippolyta clearly perceives Theseus’s failure to come up with the holistic interpretation that is necessary; he deals with the play as a collection of separate cock-and-bull stories rather than a pattern.
  • Representing blissful ignorance and the decorum of Degree enthroned, Theseus must hold the stage longer, but the real last word belongs to Hippolyta, both literally and figuratively.
• The conflictual undifferentiation of the four lovers is the basic Shakespearean relationship in both his tragedies and his comedies.
• In Julius Caesar, the conspiracy against Caesar is a mimetic association: Cassius instills his desire to kill Caesar into Brutus and then recruits Casca and Ligarius through mimetic contagion, with each recruit showing less rational basis for participation than the last.
  • Brutus loves Caesar dearly and hates him equally; Caesar is Brutus’s rival because he is his model and vice versa—what Girard calls mediated desire, where everything Brutus wants to have and be, he owes to Caesar.
  • Ligarius does not know the name of his future victim and does not even want to know; he follows Brutus blindly—a symptom of how, as the crisis worsens, the relative importance of mimesis versus rationality increases.
• Caesar’s murder miscarries as a sacrificial resolution because it is not unanimous—it divides rather than unites the people—but Brutus’s subsequent suicide and the eulogies of Antony and Octavius transform Caesar into a foundational murder that becomes the sacred origin of the Roman Empire.
  • Calphurnia’s dream—Romans bathing their hands in Caesar’s blood—is first a portent of disaster and then, reinterpreted by Decius, a prophecy of Caesar’s transfiguration: ‘From you great Rome shall suck reviving blood.’
  • Caesar’s murder has become the foundational violence of the Roman Empire: ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all’—the posthumous apotheosis makes Caesar and Brutus partners in a new mythology.
• Shakespeare’s placing of Caesar’s murder at the center rather than the conclusion of the play signals that collective violence itself—not any individual protagonist—is the real subject; the play operates at both a sacrificial surface level and an anti-sacrificial depth that reveals the foundational murder.
  • Julius Caesar is the play in which the violent essence of the theater and of culture itself are revealed; Shakespeare is the first tragic poet and thinker who focuses relentlessly on the foundational murder.
  • The political undecidability of the play—equally plausible readings for and against Caesar, for and against the Republic—is not evasion but the structural consequence of mimetic reciprocity, which erases all meaningful differences between antagonists.

Scandal and the Dance: Salome in the Gospel of Mark

The story of Salome and John the Baptist in Mark’s Gospel is a precise account of the mimetic genesis of desire, from rival brothers through the scandal-structure of obstacles that intensify desire, to the dance’s function as a mimetic accelerant that channels collective desire toward a single victim’s head.

• The story begins with rival brothers—Herod and Philip desiring the same woman, Herodias—as a structural emblem of mimetic desire: people desire something because someone else desires it, and the model’s resistance intensifies rather than extinguishes the imitator’s desire.
  • Herod desires Herodias precisely because possessing her can only be secured at the expense of a dispossessed brother—which is precisely the reason why he desires her, illustrating mimetic desire’s dependence on the obstacle.
  • Once married, Herodias loses all direct influence over Herod; she cannot obtain even the head of an insignificant prophet without resorting to her daughter to reproduce a triangular configuration.
• Salome’s silence when offered anything she wishes reveals that children have no pre-formed desires; they must be told what to desire by prestigious adults, and her instantaneous adoption of her mother’s homicidal desire after a single exchange demonstrates the speed and intensity of mimetic contagion.
  • Contrary to what Freud believes, there is no preordained object of desire; children in particular have to be told what to desire and imitate the desire of prestigious adults.
  • ‘Immediately,’ ‘with haste,’ ‘at once’—three adverbs of impatience in a text with very little descriptive detail signal that the mother’s desire has become the daughter’s own, fiercer than the original.
• The ‘skandalon’—the stumbling block that simultaneously repels and attracts—is the Gospels’ technical term for the structure of mimetic desire, in which the model becomes an obstacle and the obstacle becomes the model, producing obsessive conflict, psychopathological symptoms, and collective violence.
  • To Herodias, John the Baptist is a scandal both as a bone of contention between herself and her husband and as a speaker of an unpalatable truth—the truth of mimetic desire itself: desire has no worse enemy than its own truth.
  • Whoever scandalizes one of these little ones, says Jesus in Mark 9, would be better thrown into the sea with a millstone—indicating that scandal’s contamination of children through adult models is the worst form of violence.
• The dance functions as a mimetic accelerant: it unites all guests in a collective desire directed at Salome, making them willing to grant her anything, while the head on the platter—Salome’s one original contribution—is not an artistic idea but an overly literal interpretation of her mother’s metonymy, yet it becomes the symbol of the entire fin-de-siècle esthetic tradition.
  • The platter turns the head into an object offered to all, one of the dishes circulating among guests at the banquet; extreme mimetic desire focuses less on an object situated behind the obstacle than on the obstacle itself—on scandal as a portable property.
  • What seems most creative in Salome—the addition of the platter—is exclusively mimetic, mechanical, and hypnotic in its submission to the model: she takes her mother’s words so literally that she misunderstands the message.

Peter’s Denial and the Question of Mimesis

Peter’s denial of Jesus is a mimetic phenomenon from beginning to end—from his imitative warming at the fire to his escalating violence against Jesus as an attempted initiation into the hostile community—and the Gospels’ unprecedented clarity about this mimetic process represents a decisive advance beyond Plato’s contradictory theory of mimesis toward a full revelation of the scapegoat mechanism.

• Peter’s presence at the fire is not incidental but mimetic: in a state of ontological deprivation after Jesus’s arrest, he gravitates toward the communal warmth that represents a Being-together he has lost, moving dangerously close to the fire’s center in his hunger for belonging.
  • A fire provides a center of attraction around which people arrange themselves in a circle, no longer a mere crowd but a community—all faces jointly turned toward the fire as in a prayer.
  • Being means Being-together; Peter’s ontological deprivation made the fire even more attractive to him than to the others; his triple denial is a mimetic phenomenon.
• The servant girl’s repeated accusation and the bystanders’ mimetic amplification demonstrate that the community asserts its Being-together precisely by expelling the outsider whose Galilean accent marks him as not-one-of-us; Peter’s escalating denial is his attempted initiation into that hostile community.
  • The second time, the servant girl addresses the crowd rather than Peter—imitating herself in order to be imitated by the crowd; once she succeeds, the bystanders repeat after her.
  • By resorting to curses and oaths against Jesus, Peter is not trying to be believed but trying to establish a bridge: what these people are doing to him, he is doing to Jesus, hoping all will unite against Jesus as a common enemy.
• Auerbach’s praise of Peter’s denial as exemplary mimetic realism is unknowingly an acknowledgment of the text’s mimetic content—the Gospels’ advance beyond Plato’s contradictory theory of mimesis—but his estheticism prevents him from seeing the scapegoat mechanism the text reveals.
  • Plato sees mimesis as both a factor of social order and disorder with no criteria for distinguishing the two; the Gospels resolve this by revealing the third modality—the mimetic mechanism of unanimous victimization that transmutes bad mimesis into functional order.
  • The best estheticians of mimetic realism, like Auerbach, sense this advance but are unable to explicate what they sense; they try to comprehend a view of mimesis enormously superior to Plato’s from the standpoint of an inferior view.
• Jesus’s death is the opposite of Peter’s denial: where Peter sacrifices Jesus to gain admission to a closed community, Jesus accepts death in order to end sacrificial behavior and the exclusionary Being-together that requires victims.
  • Jesus dies to put an end to sacrificial behavior; he dies not to strengthen closed communities through sacrifice but to dissolve them through its elimination.
  • The sacrificial definition of Christ’s death makes it impossible to distinguish Peter’s denial and Peter’s confession of faith; it suppresses all differences between the perspective of the persecutors and the perspective of the victims.

Totalitarian Trials and the Obliteration of Memory

The Book of Job illuminates modern totalitarianism because both require the victim’s enthusiastic consent to their own destruction in order to consolidate the scapegoat mechanism’s unanimous verdict, and both demand the erasure of the victim’s name and memory as a prophylactic against the contamination of doubt.

• For the scapegoat mechanism to function as a positive religion and generate genuine social transcendence, the community’s unanimity against the victim must be absolute—even the victim must enthusiastically endorse their own destruction, which is why Job’s insubordination is so catastrophic for his ‘friends.’
  • If there is just one exception, if even one single voice is raised in disagreement with the unison against the victim, there is no guarantee of a favorable outcome—the drug loses its effect and the group’s unity cracks.
  • The most important assent of all is the victim’s own; Job is expected to explain publicly all the evil that should be attributed to him, as Oedipus does when he repeatedly proclaims himself a horrible impurity and demands his own expulsion.
• The three friends’ mission is not theological debate but a campaign to obtain Job’s public confession of guilt, using alternating threats and promises—exactly the strategy of modern totalitarian show trials, which also require the accused’s spontaneous-seeming endorsement of their own condemnation.
  • This strategy foreshadows modern propaganda: since they are not successful in officiating at an undisturbed sacrifice, the group begins to resemble more and more a circle of police around a suspect.
  • In totalitarian systems, a perfect agreement between the perspective of executioners and that of victims must be secured—it must be shown that truth is so constraining that it wins over even those who suffer the consequences.
• Totalitarian societies arise when institutional transcendence—impartial law that stands above all parties—is destroyed; without it, the only recourse is the scapegoat mechanism, which produces the cult of personality, show trials, and the demand for infallible incarnations of truth.
  • When transcendence no longer exists to secure sovereignty and continuity, either there is no longer any common truth or, to impose one, one must live it to the end and, if necessary, die for it—becoming its incarnation.
  • The conquered must freely recognize their fault; a confession not seen to be extorted by violence is required—the accursed must give their blessing to the malediction that strikes them.
• The erasure of the scapegoat’s name and memory—attested in Job 18 and reproduced in Stalinist de-personification—reflects the belief that even a recollection of the victim could re-contaminate the community, exposing the fragility of scapegoating once biblical revelation has made unanimity harder to maintain.
  • ‘His memory fades from the land, his name is forgotten in his homeland’—Job 18 describes the radical annihilation of the pseudo-guilty that reappears in laicized form in the modern totalitarian manipulation of history.
  • In the days of Stalinism, the disgraced leader became a nonperson and his name disappeared from the encyclopedias and official annals—the same mechanism but stripped of the religious innocence that made primitive communities more naive.

A Method, a Life, a Man

In extended conversation with Michel Treguer, Girard articulates the unity and scope of mimetic theory, its relationship to Christianity and Western history, and his own intellectual and spiritual biography—including the conversion experience of 1958–59 that generated his life’s work.

• Christianity is not merely one perspective among others for Girard but the truth about human culture: the Gospels uniquely reveal the scapegoat mechanism that founds archaic religion by presenting the victim as innocent, a disclosure that progressively undermines the effectiveness of sacrificial violence throughout history.
  • “If religion is the truth, ‘it helps’ more than we can imagine. If Christianity is false, what we’re doing has no value whatsoever.” —René Girard
  • The Gospels are the first texts in which the scapegoating mechanism is fully revealed as a human and purely mimetic phenomenon rather than a transcendental mystery.
• The concern for victims that characterizes the modern West—including the rewriting of history from victims’ perspectives and demands that persecutors acknowledge their debts—is an authentically Christian and unprecedented historical phenomenon, not reducible to political calculation or Western imperialism.
  • After the Roman conquest of Gaul, Vercingetorix was kept alive for Caesar’s triumph and then strangled—never brought to the senate to negotiate aid for underdeveloped Gaul; such dialogue between victim and persecutor is a Christian invention.
  • “We’re the only society that wants history to be written by the victims, and we don’t see the unprecedented nature of the reversal.” —René Girard
• The story of the adulterous woman demonstrates how Jesus dissolves the scapegoating crowd not by philosophical argument but by a single phrase that reinforces the threshold of the first stone—making individual self-examination possible—and the men leave one by one in order of their capacity to detach from the mob’s mimetic logic.
  • “By attracting attention to the first stone, Jesus’s words reinforce the final obstacle to stoning: ‘Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone at her.’” —Jesus
  • The crowd precedes the individual; only he who escapes violent unanimity by detaching himself from the crowd truly becomes an individual—and this detachment cannot spread without itself becoming a social mechanism, a stoning in reverse.
• Girard’s intellectual conversion began in autumn 1958 while writing the conclusion of his first book, when the religious symbolism he was analyzing ‘caught fire spontaneously’ and he found himself undergoing the same experience he was describing; a subsequent cancer scare, lasting precisely the liturgical period of Lent, completed the conversion at Easter 1959.
  • “I ended up understanding that I was going through an experience of the kind that I was describing. The religious symbolism was present in the novelists in embryonic form, but in my case it started to work all by itself.” —René Girard
  • “My worries increased to the point of keeping me awake at night, until the day when they were banished as suddenly as they had begun by a last visit to my medical oracle—exactly on Holy Wednesday, the day in Holy Week that comes before the Passion properly speaking.” —René Girard
• Nietzsche’s opposition of Dionysus versus the Crucified is the greatest theological text of the nineteenth century because it correctly identifies that the difference between Christianity and paganism lies not in the fact of collective murder but in its interpretation—Christianity alone taking the side of the innocent victim.
  • “‘Dionysus versus the Crucified: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom – it is a difference in the meaning of it.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Nietzsche’s only error—a properly Luciferian one—was to have chosen violence against the innocent truth of the victim, a truth that Nietzsche himself was the only one to glimpse.

Violence and Religion: Cause or Effect?

Archaic religion is not the cause of human violence but its first consequence and primary containment mechanism: sacrificial rites emerged as attempts to reproduce the spontaneous scapegoating that ended mimetic crises, and the biblical tradition is unique in demystifying this mechanism rather than perpetuating it.

• Human beings are more violent than animals not because of innate aggression but because of mimetic desire: unlike animal appetites which have instinctual objects, human desire is social and imitates the desires of admired models, generating rivalry over shared objects that can spread mimetically through entire communities.
  • We literally do not know what to desire and, in order to find out, we watch the people we admire—we imitate their desires; both models and imitators inevitably desire the same object and become rivals.
  • Unlike animal rivalries, mimetic rivalries can become so intense and contagious that they spread to entire communities and would have annihilated our species if something had not prevented this outcome.
• Archaic religion originated in the spontaneous scapegoat mechanism: when mimetic rivalries reached crisis intensity, collective hostility converged on a single victim whose killing reconciled the community, and this ‘miracle’ was then ritualized as sacrifice—an attempt to reproduce the mechanism deliberately.
  • Many archaic cultures began important rituals with deliberate disruptions—‘mock crises’—intended to facilitate the triggering of the victimizing mechanism through an abbreviated version of mimetic rivalries.
  • The sacred paradox is that the same victim who appeared responsible for the eruption of violence is perceived as a source of succor; this dual omnipotence, good and evil, is the invention of the archaic sacred.
• Myths are systematically distorted accounts produced by the mob: four categories of clues—the victim’s terrifying portrayal, stereotypical accusations like parricide and incest, physical impairments, and foreign status—reveal that myths are not fiction but lynching reports written from the persecutors’ perspective.
  • The parricide and incest of Oedipus belong to the group of banal accusations still bandied around nowadays by mobs on the rampage—far from being the unique insight imagined by Freud, they are opportunistic accusations routinely resorted to by mobs.
  • Visibly ‘damaged’ individuals attract the attention of mobs in a way similar to how animal predators select visibly abnormal prey—hence the physical impairments of so many mythical heroes.
• The biblical tradition’s uniqueness lies not in lacking collective violence but in consistently reversing the mob’s verdict: the Joseph story, Job, the Psalms, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, and the Gospels all side with the innocent victim against the crowd, a resistance to mimetic contagion that progressively demystifies all collective victimization.
  • The tendency to define all texts as mythical is due to the inability of most modern researchers to go beyond themes and motifs and see that the surrender or resistance to mimetic contagion is the most important factor in the type of text ultimately produced.
  • The only philosopher who realized that preferring mythology was equivalent to siding with the persecutors was Nietzsche—but far from switching sides, this discovery reinforced his bias in favor of unjust violence.
• The modern West’s paradox—simultaneously producing and saving more victims than any previous world—is a consequence of Christianity’s progressive dismantling of sacrificial protection: as sacrificial violence is abolished, the mimetic rivalries it contained are unleashed, generating both unprecedented creativity and unprecedented destructive capacity.
  • The elimination of sacrificial violence is not simply good or bad; it is an ambiguous progress—when one eliminates the violence of sacrifice, one cannot avoid weakening its peaceful effects just as much as its violent aspects.
  • The disappearance of sacrificial limitations facilitates the unleashing of mimetic rivalries at their most creative, in scientific competition, but also at their most destructive, in the suicidal forms of terrorism that turn modern technology into indiscriminately murderous weapons.

Belonging

Relationships of belonging contain both an integrating function and a self-destructive seed: they integrate communities by establishing shared models and rituals rooted in archaic scapegoating, but they also generate mimetic rivalries among those they bring together, and the modern weakening of these relationships paradoxically intensifies rather than reduces conflict.

• All relationships of belonging—familial, professional, national, religious—originate in ritual and sacrifice: archaic rites of initiation reproduced the original mimetic crisis and its sacrificial resolution, making membership dependent on demonstrated ability to survive and participate in collective violence.
  • Primitive societies are characterized by the multiplicity and rigidity of ritual and religious relationships of belonging; this multiplicity is intended to prevent desires from converging on the same objects, as a safeguard against mimetic rivalry.
  • Relationships of belonging always re-emerge from the crises that threaten to destroy them, through scapegoats against whom and then around whom communities beget or renovate their religious and ritualistic systems.
• Relationships of belonging contain an internal violence—mimetic rivalry between those they bring together—that is as fundamental as their external violence of exclusion; the closer people are brought by shared membership, the more their common desires generate conflict.
  • In Voltaire’s Candide, Pangloss teaches Candide his philosophical system; Candide, imitating his model’s desires, ends up desiring Cunégonde—whom he discovers Pangloss was also pursuing. This is the mimetic dynamic inside every relationship of belonging.
  • In Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, the reasons why Yvain and Gauvain are the best friends in the world are the very same reasons that incite them to terrible combat—the world of knights is doomed to self-destruct through its own excellence.
• The weakening of relationships of belonging in the modern egalitarian world does not reduce conflict but intensifies it: as protective barriers dissolve, mimetic rivalries multiply at all levels, and the resulting conflicts justify themselves through appeals to traditional ethnic, religious, or national belonging that is in fact already decayed.
  • The decline of feudalism exacerbated feudal conflicts; after the Reformation, when religious fervor waned, religious wars increased; the First World War, that paroxysm of national conflicts, announced the decline of nationalism.
  • In most cases of seemingly virulent ethnic or religious conflict, the belonging invoked is rarely anything more than an excuse—its weakening, not its strength, is what makes conflict possible.
• Proust’s portrayal of the transition from Combray’s organic community to the salon Verdurin’s totalitarian social formation illustrates the structural difference between authentic patriotism—sincere worship of models too distant to become rivals—and chauvinism, which is rivalry in disguise, dependent on resenting a hated model.
  • The salon Verdurin is an obsessive dictatorship that tries to pass itself off as a democracy; its boss is a totalitarian head of state who governs by dispensing demagoguery and ferocity in expelling her scapegoats.
  • Chauvinism is the fruit of mimetic rivalry—a negative feeling rooted in resentment, in the secret worship of an Other that is simultaneously venerated and detested—whereas patriotism is a collective egoism still authentic, a sincere worship of heroes too distant to become rivals.

On Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ

Gibson’s film is a legitimate attempt to apply cinematic realism to the Passion in the tradition of great Christian art from Caravaggio to Mantegna, and the hysterical media response—including reversed positions on violence between habitual advocates and critics—is itself an illustration of the crowd dynamics the film portrays.

• The media panic over anti-Semitism in Gibson’s film was not justified by the film itself, which consistently attributes Christ’s death to all humanity and amplifies the sympathy of Jewish bystanders for Jesus—Simon of Cyrene, Veronica—rather than demonizing Jews.
  • For Mel Gibson, the death of Christ is a burden born by all humanity, starting with Mel Gibson himself; when his film strays from the Gospel text it is to emphasize the pity that Jesus inspires in some Jews, not to demonize them.
  • Instead of the 2,600 screens originally planned, The Passion of the Christ opened on more than 4,000 screens on Ash Wednesday—the media controversy guaranteed its commercial success.
• Gibson’s film belongs to a tradition of Western realism extending from Caravaggio and Mantegna through cinema; the argument that the Gospels’ concise style justifies cinematic restraint ignores that realism was not available to first-century writers, who were already moving toward it as a religious imperative.
  • The writers of the Gospels did not deliberately reject realism—they sought to create it, but the means were lacking; the narratives of the Passion contain more concrete details than all the learned works of the time.
  • The first impulse in the development of Western realism came from the Passion; far from disdaining science and technology, great Renaissance artists used all new inventions—perspective, trompe l’oeil—in the service of their will to realism.
• The Passion has an anthropological dimension that is neither specifically Jewish nor Roman: it is a crowd phenomenon following universal laws visible in all foundational myths, and the Gospels’ uniqueness is in showing both the crowd’s perspective (which myths endorse) and the victim’s innocence (which myths suppress).
  • The crowd that receives Jesus triumphantly on Palm Sunday is the same crowd that shouts for his death five days later—the same crowd dynamics visible in all archaic religion’s shift from persecuting to divinizing a victim.
  • Whereas myths incessantly repeat the murderous delusions of crowds of persecution, the greatest biblical texts reveal the essentially deceptive and criminal character of crowd phenomena—this is what Gibson shows.

The Mystic of Neuilly

Father Ambroise-Marie Carré’s religious life was shaped by a single mystical experience at age fourteen in Neuilly—characterized by an overwhelming certainty of being loved by God—whose subsequent frustration through his own activist ambition for holiness was resolved only in old age by the recognition that the memory of a past grace can itself be a new grace.

• Father Carré’s foundational mystical experience at age fourteen—falling to his knees suffocated by happiness, feeling with incredible force that he was loved by God—remained the single unambiguous religious certainty of his entire life, which he defined as ’the only event that ever gave me certainty about my faith.’
  • “‘An absolute beginning (or that which is closest to being one): that is how, more than fifty years after the fact, I would characterize the only event that ever gave me certainty about my faith, the event, too, that brought me a joy that no other joy was subsequently able to surpass.’” —Father Carré
  • The Neuilly experience is described both as a privileged memory and as its opposite, an absolute beginning—suggesting that its intensity makes the boundary between memory and new experience dissolve.
• Carré’s long years of spiritual dryness after the Neuilly experience resulted not from God’s absence but from his own excessive Western activism—his ambition to replicate and surpass the experience through personal effort—which is the characteristically modern error in the mystical life.
  • We Westerners are never content with what Heaven sends us; we all dream of unprecedented conquests—the very thing that gives the modern world an immense advantage in the practical domain constitutes a disadvantage in the mystical life.
  • Far from having disappeared forever, the former presence was resuscitated in old age, sweeter and more thrilling than ever—once Carré stopped demanding more and began to cultivate what he had been given.
• Carré’s encounter with soixante-huitard students who mocked his fidelity to a teenage mystical experience illustrates how Western conformism disguises itself as revolt: these bourgeois students from Neuilly were themselves the most mimetically docile members of their culture, while Carré’s constancy constituted the authentic dissidence.
  • Far from bestriding the social comedy of their day, the soixante-huitards were its most benighted protagonists; many of them now sit on the boards of France’s biggest capitalist companies and are preparing comfortable retirements.
  • Carré’s experience protected him from all the intellectual phantasms that gripped so many privileged young people around him—Nietzscheanism, Althusserism—without his having to exert any particular effort.

Victims, Violence and Christianity

Violence is fundamentally a relationship—not an isolated act—and the question of why there is so much violence is less pressing than the question of why there is so little, given mimetic rivalry’s tendency to spread; Christianity’s distinctive contribution is not to cause violence but to demystify the sacrificial mechanism that previously contained it, exposing both a new standard for victims’ rights and a new vulnerability to uncontained mimetic conflict.

• Violence is not an isolated act but a relationship: it arises from mimetic competition, in which we desire what admired others desire, turning models into rivals and rivals into models in an escalating reciprocal spiral that neither party perceives as its own initiative.
  • The shift from violent to non-violent behavior is not clear-cut because the reciprocity is always there; you can describe what happens when a relationship becomes bad—each party believes it is reacting to the other’s provocation, so nobody feels responsible for the deterioration.
  • In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus prophesies: ‘you shall find the band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their enmity’—that which is the strength of amity shall prove the immediate author of variance.
• Archaic religion resolved mimetic crises through the scapegoat mechanism: when rivalries spread mimetically until they threatened the whole community, collective hostility converged on a single victim whose killing reconciled everyone, and this spontaneous process was then institutionalized as ritual sacrifice.
  • The question about our world is not really why so much violence, but why so little—the built-in braking mechanism in the mimetic crisis was the scapegoat mechanism, through which archaic communities survived their own violence.
  • Since they had not forgotten the great catharsis, primitive communities asked whether killing more victims might repeat the miracle—resulting in the invention of ritual sacrifice, the most important religious institution of humankind.
• The Gospels are a ‘failed myth’ because a power behind them resists the crowd’s unanimity: unlike all mythological texts that record mob violence from the mob’s perspective, the Gospels show the victim as innocent and the crowd as guilty, exposing the deception on which archaic sacred order rests.
  • Peter’s triple denial is a mimetic phenomenon—as soon as he is surrounded by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility; Pilate too surrenders to mimetic pressure; even the two thieves crucified with Jesus insult him in imitation of the crowd.
  • Jesus says ‘I do not bring the peace of the scapegoat, but the sword’; every intervention of Jesus in John’s Gospel is followed by ’they were divided by his words’—far from reconciling the community, Jesus destroys the myth that unifies it.

Literature and Christianity: A Personal View

Great literature—from Cervantes and Stendhal to Dostoevsky and Proust—is structured around a conversion experience in which the author shifts from the deceptive perspective of mimetic desire to a liberating omega perspective that enables genuine creation; this literary conversion is structurally analogous to Christian conversion, which is how literature led Girard to Christianity.

• The culture’s inability to generate new labels—producing only ‘post-’ prefixes and recycled ‘isms’—is symptomatic of the exhaustion of mimetic desire itself: postmodernism cannot define itself except as the aftermath of what it claims to have superseded.
  • In the expression ‘post-Christian,’ the more evocative word is the second one—Christian; our time seems unable to define itself independently of what it regards as hopelessly outmoded.
  • So-called postmodernism is even more sterile than modernism, and, as its name suggests, also totally dependent on it.
• The five novelists of Girard’s first book—Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust—each structured their central work around a conversion experience: a shift from the deceptive pre-conversion perspective of mimetic desire to a post-conversion omega perspective that enables genuine novelistic creation.
  • In Proust’s Time Recaptured, the hero’s complete discouragement is followed by trivial incidents—like stepping on uneven pavement—that trigger esthetic and spiritual illumination, transforming him into a novelist; Proust enters great literature as one might enter the religious life.
  • The same dual structure appears in the death-bed repentance of Don Quixote, Julien Sorel facing the guillotine, Emma Bovary eating arsenic, and Raskolnikov in Siberian exile—all central works, all built on a conversion from self-deception to truth.
• The Latin word conversio means a circular return to the starting point—the pagan conception of time as eternal recurrence—whereas Christian conversion is irreversible and open-ended: a new creation that cannot return to its origin, which is why great novelistic conversions resemble Christian conversion rather than any pagan metamorphosis.
  • The problem with ‘conversio’ is that it refers to reversible actions: translation, mythical metamorphoses; when Christians adopt the word they change its connotation from circular to linear—now meaning a change once and for all, with no conceivable return.
  • The Donatists were wrong in practice but right in instinct: they took conversion so seriously that they regarded its recurrence as blasphemous, refusing to reintegrate those who had recanted under persecution.
• The Gospels themselves employ the dual perspective of pre- and post-conversion: the disciples in the synoptic Gospels misunderstand everything while listening to Jesus, and only after the Resurrection—experienced as a conversion and identified with the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost—are they able to understand what they first heard.
  • The apostles believe in the triumphant Davidic Messiah rather than the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah; only after death and resurrection do they understand—the real definition of grace is that Jesus died for us and made those who received him able to become children of God.
  • Augustine’s Confessions is the first great literary autobiography rooted in a conversion experience, and like Proust’s novel it employs the dual perspective: the misguided pre-conversion narrator and the illuminated post-conversion author who interprets him.

Maxims of René Girard

One hundred and seventy-two aphorisms distill Girard’s core insights across mimetic desire, scapegoating, Christianity, violence, and culture into standalone propositions, functioning as a compressed index to the theory’s key claims.

• The founding propositions of mimetic theory appear as maxims: desire is fundamentally imitative and aims at being rather than objects; models become rivals; violence escalates mimetically; scapegoating is effective only when unconscious.
  • “All desire is a desire for being.” —René Girard
  • “To have a scapegoat is to not realize you have a scapegoat. Scapegoating is effective only if it is nonconscious. Then you do not call it scapegoating; you call it justice.” —René Girard
  • “In imitating my rival’s desire I give him the impression that he has good reasons to desire what he desires, and so the intensity of his desire keeps increasing.” —René Girard
• Christianity’s historical and anthropological claims are crystallized: the Gospels are the only texts that reveal the founding violence concealed by all myth; Christianity’s concern for victims is unprecedented in human history; and the modern world’s victim-consciousness is a secularized form of Christian revelation.
  • “The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.” —René Girard
  • “In general, history is written by the victors. We’re the only society that wants history to be written by the victims, and we don’t see the unprecedented nature of the reversal.” —René Girard
  • “Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse.” —René Girard
• Girard’s most sardonic maxims target academic and intellectual culture as itself a mimetic system: a vast herd of sheep-like individualists, generating pseudo-differences and fashionable revolts that are ever more repetitive, driven by envy it dare not name.
  • “Academia, that vast herd of sheep-like individualists.” —René Girard
  • “The reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy.” —René Girard
  • “Intellectual life is nothing more than a series of frantic infatuations.” —René Girard