René Girard

René Girard (Avignon, 1923 – Stanford, 2015) was a French thinker trained in medieval history who spent most of his career teaching literature at American universities. He is best known for mimetic theory, an idea that began as a way of reading novels and grew into an account of how violence, culture and religion arise. It matters because it offered a view of human desire that differed from the psychology of his day, and because it has engaged theology, anthropology, literary criticism and the social sciences.

Girard studied philosophy in Avignon and then medieval history at the École des Chartes in Paris. He took his doctorate in history at Indiana University in 1950 and taught French literature at Duke, Bryn Mawr and Johns Hopkins, as well as at Buffalo and, from 1981 until his retirement in 1995, at Stanford. His first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), examined great European novels and argued that we do not desire spontaneously but borrow our wants from others who serve as models. This produces a triangle of subject, model and object, and when several people want the same thing, rivalry can intensify into violence.

In Violence and the Sacred (1972) he applied the same logic to early human societies. Communities in crisis, he argued, found relief by expelling a victim blamed for the disorder, a scapegoat. That victim could later be revered as a source of order, and the founding violence was concealed beneath rituals, myths and taboos. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978) he read the Bible as a text that exposes the innocence of the victim and undermines the mechanism. The Scapegoat (1982) and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999) developed these biblical readings further.

His influence reaches theology, anthropology, literary studies and the analysis of contemporary violence. The Colloquium on Violence and Religion, founded in 1990, continues to discuss his work, and he was elected to the Académie française in 2005.