René Girard is a Frenchphilosopher, historian and philologist. He is the author of several books (see below), developing the idea that human culture is based on a sacrifice as the way out of a mimetic crisis.
Life and career:
René Girard was born in the southern French city of Avignon on December 25, 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied medieval history in Paris at the École des Chartres. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year's fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Moving back and forth between Buffalo and Johns Hopkins, he finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Bibliography:
Deceit, Desire and the Novel : Self and Other in Literary Structure, (Johns Hopkins Univ Pr, 1965)
Resurrection from the Underground : Feodor Dostoïevski (Crossroad Pub Co)
Violence and the Sacred, (Johns Hopkins Univ Pr, 1977)
Things hidden since the foundation of the world, (Stanford Univ Pr, 1987)
In ReneGirard's theory, the beginnings of human society are based on the religious transformation of mimetic violence into the collective sacrifice of a scapegoat.
Girard's research has found the story of the scapegoat repeated again and again throughout numerous human cultures and societies which he takes as a symptom of the universality of such persecution.
However, Girard believes that in the Christian Bible the story of the scapegoat is retold in a way that decisively unmasks and undermines the religious basis for persecution and scapegoating.
In addition, Girard neglects to employ the methodologies of biblical criticism to analyse the historical validity and authorial intention of the texts he uses.
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