Original subtitles

We are all aware in our world, and I think it's true of all human societies,

that when men have some difficulty, when men disagree with each other with each other,

When they have problems coming from one direction or another,

there is a tendency in all of us to place the blame on someone else,

to resort to what we call popularly a scapegoat.

I always remember the first words I heard him speak in the class.

We said human beings fight not because they are different,

but because they are the same.

He's seeing right to the bottom of something, and he's seeing something that nobody else has seen.

Why do we fight? Why do we hate each other? Why do brothers and sisters quarrel?

There is a tendency in human beings to desire what their neighbors desire.

If I reach toward an object, your tendency would be to imitate me and to reach for the same option.

It was this one e-day fix.

You just had one big idea.

It couldn't possibly be true.

For those of us who were Girardians,

that was in some ways this powerful, refreshing counterpoints.

You know, there's one thread you can follow

to try to make sense of our world.

That's thing about Girard, he was helpful not just theoretically,

but existentially.

I saw ways that he helped me understand the way I'm operating.

The paradox is fighting over an object

divides people, but everybody fighting against the same antagonist can reunite them.

If you can do an anatomy of the madness of reciprocal violence,

then perhaps you can wake people up to the fact that they are trapped within these infernal cycles.

Because the moment will come where rivalry, mimetic rivalry between your brother and you,

will put you in a situation where either he kills you or you kill him.

You see, what the Bible tells you and no other religion tells you is that sacrifice is so inborn in human being, so important in human society, that you can refuse sacrifice only if you accept to die.

Okay, this is Steve Berry speaking with René Girard at Renee and Martha's home in Stanford, Stanford University.

And the date is April 19th, 2005. First, I'd like to say that it's a pleasure being here with you, Renee.

It is a pressure for me too.

And now I'd like to have you give us a little bit of a background on your history.

on your personal journey, on your spiritual journey,

on things that have been important in your life.

And we'll go back to the early days.

So that's back in France, isn't it?

I was born in Avignon in southern France

on Christmas Day, 1923.

My father was the curator of the Pope's Castle,

which is the most famous monument.

in Avignon there, which is almost as big as half of the town.

Renee, he spoke about his childhood is rather idyllic,

and perhaps it was.

His mother was rather devout.

His father was anti-clerical.

That's a normal sort of tension running through all of French life.

I remember many details of my early education.

I taught myself to read, and I still remember,

And I still have the book with me, you know, which was a children's version of the medieval novel about the fox, you know,

Rhinart the Fox. I remember that.

Like many people that go on to be great men geniuses, he did well when he applied himself,

when he didn't always wish to apply himself.

He was something of a troublemaker.

He liked practical jokes.

The schools he attended didn't always appreciate them.

I always hated school, all schools, all my life.

And I spent my life in school since I became a university teacher.

And at the beginning of the last year, I was actually expelled from school.

And this was during the beginning of the Second World War.

You know, the French defeat in 1940, followed by the occupation of France.

You know, in France, all students tend to learn.

All students tend to go to Paris.

So there were many students from the South, and I found it just abominable.

It was the worst year in my life, really.

People who were not nearly born in that time and won't remember what occupied France meant

and what it was like to go to school every day with Gestapo on the corner.

He tried to keep his head low, stayed in school, and a lot of his efforts seemed to have been

getting back to Avignon, which was not always easy.

was at various travel restrictions.

I always say, mockingly, in a way that it's thanks to the Germans that I finished at school in Paris,

because I couldn't go back home, which I would have done if it had been immediately possible.

He described the biggest

He described the biggest decision of his life as the decision to move to America,

which is interesting, but it's this thing that made everything else possible for him.

He came to the United States on a ship called the DeGrasse.

It was its second trip after the war.

Landed in New York, had a possibility of a job at the UN library,

but that was too stodgy So he got in a train and woke up in the cornfields the next day I remember waking up after a night on the train on the single track that ran straight to

Indianapolis. Huge cornfields stretched into the distance without so much as a hill on the horizon.

I had a feeling of utter and complete culture shock.

But you have to imagine a man coming from the present.

of post-war France to this university with lavish grounds and stonework and students

who were dressing well and eating well. On one level it was heaven and another level he talks

about his resentment. Finding myself teaching in a university that was at the time very

provincial. And in the Department of French Studies, where just being a Frenchman from France

gave me from the outset, status that owed nothing to my personal talent, aroused in me a feeling

of cultural superiority. That feeling of superiority expressed itself all the more arrogantly

as it concealed anguished doubts and traumatisms from the defeat, the occupation, and above all the

American victory, a liberating victory in all other respects, but one that was psychologically

crushing for those who were liberated.

I was not interested in research of any kind at all at the time. I was primarily interested in

buying a car, in traveling in the United States. You know, the first summer with two other

boys, one French, the other American, we actually did a trip which took us to San Francisco.

Francisco, Los Angeles, and then back on the famous route at the time.

36.

He wasn't tremendously serious.

Mostly, he admits that he was working on girls and cars, American cars.

Because I was a student, I was also doing a PhD in history.

And I had the good idea of writing the French embassy.

And they sent me a huge box, which was full of newspaper clippings.

of a period so my research was done you know i only had to write something about that so i did

that thesis very fast and i was really very lucky because i just wrote not knowing anything about

you but i read even more than i had in france in the previous years and years of my child

and of course one of the best bits of good luck that he had was having a student in one of his

early classes and he went through the roll call and he got to the name Martha McCullough.

My name was McCullough and when he saw that combination of letters he said I'll never be able to

pronounce that word. He invited me to go to a picnic with some other graduate students.

So we went to a lake in Brown County which is the scenic part of Indiana. I actually have a picture of it.

I think I was curious and he liked to teach and I was eager to learn.

I think we both had the same vision of life.

He really wanted a serene domestic life and so did I.

So we were married on my graduation day, stayed together from 1948 on.

Brinmar College began in 1885.

It has flourished to become one of the nation's proudest schools for women.

One of the reasons for its growth might well be the forward thinking of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The Pensie, years ago, saw Brinmar as an ideal summer resort to build beautiful homes and to commute the year around.

In the group of new figures among the faculty this year may be found a young couple, a dark-haired man and a blonde woman who are often to be seen in the library or en route from the library to the college inn.

Monsieur René Girard is one of the two new professors in French, and Madame Gerard is an assistant at the library.

American universities like to have native speakers in their language department, so they have this live French.

and they ask him to teach literature.

And I had no training in literary criticism.

So I was asking myself, what should you teach these kids?

I feel bored teaching these novels, and the students must feel bored.

And what can I do for them to be less bored or even interested, you know?

Criticism at that time was always about the individual author's genius, you see.

What makes this author and this work special?

Books have to be different from each other.

to be like lonely mountains, you know, separated by wide valleys and no communication between the two.

My own trend was very different.

My tendency was to look for what was the same in all these novels, what made them similar.

And he saw a pattern across a range of authors, most of whom had never even read one another, but the pattern stuck.

Was it during that teaching time that you discovered it when you looked into the books?

It was in part my teaching, in part my own recollections of my own reading, you know, a book of my childhood.

I've never left the books of my childhood because my childhood is very precious to me,

and I keep rereading the books of my childhood all the time.

And for a long time, I was wondering about the role of the book in Dodgerodkerod.

You know, Don Quixote is a reader of novels.

He reads the novels of chivalry, and his head becomes so full of them that he wants to become

a knight-errant.

I want you to know, Sancho, that the famous Amidus of Gaul was one of the most perfect knight-errants.

Amidus was the poor, the star, the sun for brave and amorous knights.

And we others who fight under the banner of love and chivalry should imitate him.

So what Servantes want to show us there is a...

is a character who is carried away by his dreams.

But his dream is not really his own his dream is borrowed from the book this way

The second book was Flaubert, you know, the French writer Flaubert and Madame Bovari.

She's a provincial woman who feels terribly unhappy because she doesn't live in Paris.

And she reads cheap novels. Therefore she's full of romantic dreams.

She copies the aristocrats in Paris.

Then after that was Stendhal's, you know, the red and the black,

which is a novel about an ambitious young man in the 19th century.

All these books were really primarily about the desire of the characters.

Their project in life, what they wanted to do.

The girls or women they were in love with, you know.

And I could see that their desires were not in the same.

were not independent, rooted in themselves, as they claimed, like we all claim.

But were dependent on someone else.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, yes, that's right, Elvis Presley.

As a great philosopher once said,

You're in Nagelah!

Aristotle famously said in the poetica that man is the most imitative of animals.

We imitate one another's in behavior and especially in our desires.

We don't know what to desire. We need models.

And so we imitate good models and bad models.

But between the subject and the object of desire,

there's a third party, a third entity, and that's the other.

Parents, peers, society, media, the social other, if you will.

other, if you will.

The gentleman in the elevator now is a candid star.

These folks who are entering, the man with a white shirt, the lady with a trench coat,

one other member of our staff, will face the rear.

And you'll see how this man in the trench coat tries to maintain his individuality,

but little by little.

Romantic literature, popular views have taught.

us that our desires should be independent from other people, should be rooted in ourselves.

But even that idea is not really ours.

It's the idea of the whole society and it is still repeated ad nauseam in the world today

and believed by most people.

But in great novels, we'll show you that it's true, that there is either a book behind

the desire or a live individual.

And in a way, it can be pretty much the same thing.

My effort to find something to see about these novels led me automatically to the idea of memetic designer, which is, in a way, the basic idea which has never left me.

This is Baltimore, America's sixth largest city, 12th largest metropolitan area, a city of homes growing so fast that today's cornfield is tomorrow's new neighborhood of young energetic families.

In 1955, we had our first child, our son Martin.

And then two years later, we had Daniel.

Just after the birth of Daniel, I think, we moved to Johns Hopkins.

And the teaching became quite interesting to me.

When I came to Hopkins, I'd never heard of Girard.

I was still a relatively young man.

He was still an associate professor.

But it didn't take it.

But it didn't take long for me to see that he was the most interesting professor in the department.

But more than that, not just a showman, but somebody whose ideas were compelling

and who had a great deal of faith in them.

He would come into class with the novel he was teaching, by Stendhal, by Flaubert, by Proust.

And he would just open it.

One day he came in, he says, I'm going to comment on a book that I haven't read.

How dare you?

And some of the students were in sense.

And he opened it up and started reading for the first few pages

showing how this author has seen that this character desires that object

or that woman or anything, that career because of some model.

And it blew my mind.

I mean, I realized, my goodness, he's decoded desire.

He's decoded human relations.

Subject, model, object.

Or subject, model, who becomes a rival and an obstacle to the object.

And so from that day on, I wanted to make more sense of this.

I started not only there to talk about genetic desire,

but to say there are different types of emetic design.

If your model does not exist, or if he is far enough from you,

you preserve a certain independence.

Don't care what he is a happy man because he has no rival,

because the Knights errant, he imitates.

He's never going to be.

going to encounter in the field pursuing the same goal.

He's pursuing himself.

Now, if you look at many characters in the 19th century,

they have real models, live models.

You know, they see a gentleman who has more money, more prestige,

he's a little bit older than himself, and they imitate it.

And they are going to fall in love with the same person.

If your model is your school friend,

you know, your neighbor.

You get into a world of dreadful competition, rivalry, envy, jealousy,

and so forth, which you can see these bad sentiments,

which are the same finally on both sides,

because as the model is imitated,

he starts imitating his own imitator.

Therefore, you have a vicious circle of imitation

that gets worse and worse between model and rival.

which is in a way typical of the world of politics.

Even the world of scholarship, I would say,

because all scholars are in a sense rivals of each other,

miters and so forth.

I mean, competition is the essence of our world

and competition is essentially memetic.

One one one no One No I going to be When people begin making about

and things like that.

And they begin talking about medic rivalry and medic struggle.

But I think one of the most important things that Renee said is all desire is a desire for being.

This feeling that we have, this persistent feeling that somebody else has the metaphysical goods,

that if we could only be as beautiful, as clever, as charming, or whatever as this other person,

then we would have it made.

Then everything would be okay in our lives.

The desire for this being of another that we don't have.

And that's the illusion, that's the chief illusion.

The more mimetic desire you have,

the more it gets into real life,

and the more it destroys your life,

and the more I'm happy the characters become.

So I think, in a sense, in my first book,

much of my theory of human relations is already there.

What is hinted behind it is a history

of the Western world as more and more competition.

You know, as less and less distance between models and their imitators.

And we feel we're constantly moving toward more happiness as we become our equal.

But in fact, we're always moving towards more rival.

And this history at the same time is the history of the earth.

But what happens to the Christian world, which becomes less and less Christian with time.

which is a history of modern individualism, which is a rebellion against religion.

And another course change came in the middle of that.

When he was on the railroad going back and forth to Grimmar where he was still teaching,

He had a conversion experience that changed the nature of the way he saw what was going on in these books.

In the autumn of 1958, I was working on my book about the novel, on the 12th and last chapter that is entitled Conclusion.

I was thinking about the analogies between the religious experience and the experience of a novelist, who discovers he has been consistently lying.

lying for the benefit of his ego.

And he finds the memetic behavior in the characters of any number of novels,

but in addition to just seeing the behavior,

there's also the authors.

The authors were fully cognizant of the memetic nature of human desire,

and were able to probe from the inside,

you know, the very psychology of memetic desire.

And that's why for him, literature was an incomparable archive

of undeniable human truth.

But I think as he read the literature,

it was the literature itself that spoke to him.

He said, it's strange that every one of those five writers

has a deathbed experience of some kind.

And they all talk about at the end

freeing themselves from the prison house of momentic desire.

At this time, my judgment is free and clear

and no longer covered with a thick blanket of ignorance

woven by my sad and constant reading of the testable,

books of chivalry. I am the enemy of Amides, de Gaul, and all of the infinite battalions of his kind.

Today, through God's mercy, having been made wise at my own expense, I loathe them.

The religious symbolism was present in the novelists in embryonic form, but in my case, it started to work all by itself and caught fire.

spontaneously. He described it as something that happened on the Pennsylvania

Railroad and that something happened, some sort of illumination happened to him

on the train. Again, illumination is a word that pulls in all sorts of associations.

We don't know exactly what that meant, but he had what you might call and again

it's another term that brings in associations a mystical experience. I usually just

looked out at the scrap iron.

and vacant lots of that old industrial region.

But now my mental state transfigured everything.

The slightest ray from the setting sun

set off veritable ecstasies in me.

You know, the idea is that you read these novels

and you understand that you yourself

of the victim of memetic desire

and that you have to try to overcome that.

So he sees the novel as a kind of a spiritual movement.

But I think the most fascinating thing as he described it is everything came to him at once.

Those are his words.

It all came to him at once.

So whatever happened, he saw the beginnings and the development of all his theories

wrapped into this one tight ball of perception that needed the rest of his life to unravel.

I was thrown for a loop because I was proud of being a skeptic.

It was hard for me to imagine myself going to church, praying, and so on.

I was all puffed up, full of what the old catechism used to call human respect.

But he describes it elsewhere as two experiences.

The first was a more emotional experience for him.

And the second had more urgency.

It was on that train one morning that I discovered right in the middle of my forehead a little

pimple that refused to heal.

It literally showed me, pointed to it.

And there was hardly anything.

It was a little mark there, but it was not much there and more than like, you know,

normal skin stuff.

And he said, I went to a doctor and the doctor said, it's cancer.

And I said, oh, my God, I'm going to die.

And the doctor who told him that really did not take the trouble to tell him that this was

completely curable and not a dangerous thing.

So he really believed.

He thought it was a very serious thing.

So that probably accentuated his emotion at the time.

My dark night of the soul lasted exactly as long as the period prescribed by the church for the penance of sinners.

With three days, the most important of all, mercifully subtracted,

no doubt so that I could calmly and quietly reconcile myself with the church before the Easter holiday.

I've never known a holiday to compare to that day of delivering.

I thought I was dead, and all at once I was resurrected.

And what was most amazing for me about the whole thing

was that my intellectual and spiritual conviction,

my true conversion, had occurred before my Great Lenton scare.

If it had occurred afterwards, I would never have truly believed.

My natural skepticism would have convinced me that my faith was a result of the scare I had received.

God had called me to order with a jot of humor, but deep down was just what my mediocre case deserved.

I am convinced that God sends human beings a lot of signs that have no objective existence whatsoever for the wise and learn it.

The ones those signs don't concern regard them as imaginary, but those for whom they are intended, they can't be mistaken,

because they're living the experience from within.

I think perhaps the best evidence that we have of the whole experience actually lies within his first book because he went back and rewrote the ending into my eye other parts of that in the light of this experience that he'd had.

So the deathbed conversions that he describes in these novels, in a sense, were his own.

The title of hero of a novel must be reserved for the character who triumphs over metaphysical,

desire in a tragic conclusion and thus becomes capable of writing the novel.

Therefore, every conclusion is always a memory.

It is the eruption of a memory which is more true than the perception itself.

Every novelistic conclusion is a beginning.

But it didn't lead him to lead a spiritual life, let him to lead a literary life,

a life of probably the best reader that we have.

You know, because he wrote that book that led him to then read tragedy in a new way,

which led him to read anthropology in a new way,

which led him to read Christian scripture in a new way.

It's all about, to me, it's all about reading.

It's all about how he changed his reading by virtue of identifying in his own life

with the text that he was reading.

Monson Romantic and Veritourmanesque, which was to be translated as deceit, desire, and a novel,

was very well received, but by a very small community, which is a community very important,

especially in France, the community of literary theorists, because it was a great book,

and Renee probably wrote it in order to be acknowledged

and recognized as a member of the group.

But it was, of course, much more than that

because the essential theory was in a sense already there

in that book.

I read that book, and for me it was an illumination.

All of a sudden, I discovered things that I knew inside myself,

which had never really theorized.

So it's a discovery of this,

part of us, which is so fundamental. I mean, let's call that human passions and his particular envy and

jealousy and resentment.

very difficult time in academia.

You see, he went to Buffalo in 68.

I followed him there in 69.

They were revolutionary times.

You know, it was a tempestuous time.

Vietnam War was going on.

It was unrest.

It had happened a little bit earlier in France,

but it happened here, and it happened at Buffalo.

that idea of public violence and the idea of what moves society was always in the forefront of his mind.

He was never just a simple literary thing with him.

He wanted to enlist the anthropologists and the sociologists.

He wanted to say, you know, I can explain to you where we're going wrong.

You could say Renee came to it through novels or looking at doubles, but basically he was always trying to go

what is it that propels violence and what's the relationship of violence to the sacred?

The scapegoat phenomenon. Yeah. You were working on this for years before you wrote the book.

My first book was published in 1961, Deceit Desire in the novel, you know, the one we've been

talking about. And violence and the secret was published in 1972, so 11 years later. For a while,

Well, after my book on the novel, I hesitated, you know.

And I became interested, not merely in Mimetic Desire, but in religion.

I used to go once a week to visit with him at his beautiful home, 15, 20 miles south of Buffalo.

These lunch meetings were a kind of relaxing moment for him.

There was something bigger and much deeper.

that at the beginning he did not talk about,

I didn't know what it was, and I felt I didn't want

to pry into something that obviously was very personal.

Eventually, in this meeting he started telling me about the big thing.

You know he was shifting from literary criticism to anthropology His friends around in the department were saying you know Renee the kind of work you doing you should read these anthropologists like Livy Strosse

And you sooner or later had to take careful look at Freud.

He always resisted being told that he should read something or look into something, but finally he did.

And became, you know, very interested. And then it fed into his

the evolution of his theories.

Ancient philosophers, Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle,

have seen that imitation is absolutely essential in human life.

But no one has seen that imitation and violence are like this.

My purpose is to correct this mistake.

of the philosophers, you know, and say imitation is the best thing in man, but is also the worst.

Because it is that endless conflict that makes human society in a way impossible.

The time has come. Just tell me what the heck is going on.

What are you working on?

And then, you know, very, very serious.

He said, you know something.

something. I am convinced, really convinced, that I can demonstrate clearly the transition from animal to

man. I looked at him and said, you know, René, you shouldn't say those things in a loud voice.

People will think you're crazy. I was skeptical from the beginning. I said, René, who's going to

believe that, I mean, everybody knows, every other who is being

some who's familiar with you, knows that you had a profound religious

conversion. You are a devout Catholic, a man of faith. How are you

going to talk about, you know, the transition from animal to man? Yes, I

can do it, I can do it. Let's make the big leap backward. You begin by

modern literature or contemporary literature, and then you descended through the ages to ancient

men.

And there you found a certain failure of men to live together.

In animals you already have this type of rivalry.

You know at certain seasons, certain animals will always fight for the females.

But there is a difference between animals and men.

All the phylogists will tell you that this fight

will end up in one of the two animals yielding to the other.

They are never fights to the finish.

They never lead to death.

And the animal who yields becomes the dominated animal

and the other one becomes the dominant animal.

This is the rule in animal societies.

Now we know that in men, there is no such thing.

People, when they become really exciting, really angry in a rivalry,

kill each other.

And this is probably, this is my view, decisive in the definition of man,

because this greater power of imitation is both our intelligence, our ability to learn from others,

and also our violence, our rivalries.

The fact that we kill each other in rivalries.

And rivalries in human beings don't end with the dominant-downented pattern,

but they end with vengeance.

What is vengeance?

I kill you, but after I've killed you, your brother may decide to kill me.

And after your brother kills me, my brother will decide to kill my killer.

And it goes on endlessly.

And societies cannot stand that because if everything becomes vengeance, you know, everybody dies.

You must see that dilemma in order to realize that human beings cannot have the same type of

societies as animals. They need laws. They need rules. Outside themselves, which force a

certain type of behavior upon them, which say, for instance, murder will be punished by murder.

But not by you individuals, so it's endless vengeance, but by a separate power. We call the state,

we call the judicial system, against which, if things work right, you cannot avenge yourself.

Who is beyond vengeance, above vengeance, like transcendence itself, like God.

Okay, if you want to talk scientifically, you have a problem.

How does this state of generalized war, how do you get out of it?

How do you stop it?

The dominance patterns which are established at each generation in animals will fail in men

because they will fight to the finish and tend to kill each other.

That would mean that no human destruction.

that no human society is possible, unless there is another mechanism.

What can cure a crisis of mimetic violence?

It has to be something which belongs to the mimetic process itself.

See, because we don't have anything that would be beyond the animal at that stage.

When you have these great battles, which I postulate, which I've never seen, of course,

the mimetic power ultimately will tend to gather

on one victim.

When one victim becomes memetically more attractive

because several people are focused against it,

suddenly everybody will go the same way

for purely memetic reason, just as in the stock market.

A greater violence anywhere in the group attracts more vile.

It's a snowball.

And eventually, eventually it's going to grow, grow, grow, grow,

and we got involved all...

minus one, the victim.

And I would say what I call the scapegoat mechanism

is the moment when all antagonists choose the same one.

Automatically, this one has no chance, of course.

They kill them.

And then, at least for a brief moment,

no one will have an antagonist in the group.

The group will be automatically reconciled By this last antagonist he killed Because it will be the antagonist of everybody But they don know how that thing happened

As far as they act on this thing which is on the verge of becoming human, it is a hominid.

All they know is that they killed this and violent scalp.

That victim seems to be in the eyes of the other ones is responsible for the whole thing.

power, but he's also responsible through his death for the reconciliation.

I mean, we are all totally at his mercy.

How did he attract all of us toward him?

Therefore, that victim seems all powerful for good and evil.

And that victim is first God.

That victim seems to be the master of that crisis.

He created violence and he has read ourselves from us.

He has an immense invisible power.

Bang, that's the sacred.

The origin of human culture is the question that was considered to be not interesting because there was no possible answer.

And Rene Girard was able to show how from the theory of mimetic design you can generate

a theory of the origin of the sacred.

Human culture is fundamentally sacrificial.

So there we have a situation which is suddenly one of peace and the community rejoices, you know.

The community is free from that crisis.

But that freedom is not going to last and very quickly the metabolic rivalry will come back.

So then these people will remember that a victim saved them.

Therefore, they are going to try to do it again.

Period.

They are going to deliberately choose other victims and kill them collectively in the hope that it will reconcile them another time.

And it does.

And this is the invention of ritual sacrifice.

Robertson Smith, he says, you know, tells us about sacrifice, but he doesn't tell us anything about sacrifice.

Why are people doing it? What is it about?

And his analysis of it, which is that we need to do some kind of violence in order to control our own violence

so that we get a scapegoat and we project our violences and that heals us.

The society is responsible for it.

The group is responsible for it.

It was disrupted first and reconciled by the victim,

but it's going to project the whole trajectory of events on that victim.

That victim tells us to do again what reconciled us.

If you look at primitive rituals, what do they consist of?

They consist of a community voluntarily going into a crisis,

a form of disorder, in order to reach sacrifice.

That's how the ceremony looks.

That's how the same thing.

So I would say this type of ceremony, which is the typical primitive ritual, is a reenactment of the scapegoat phenomenon, understood as a sacred dispensation coming from the divinity.

For him, the sacred and violence are one and the same. The sacred is simply violence that's been effectively contained and sequestered, and violence is simply the sacred that's run amok.

and this scapegoating is a regulatory mechanism it's it's a management system for borrowed

desire that's the whole thing in a nutshell but the old anthropology just they the fear the sacrifice

did not explain anything and they always regarded it as an institution without a purpose which is

ridiculous it's the institution with the greatest purpose it makes a society possible it makes people

so that they can have a society.

So the same is true for Africans, for Asians, for Europeans, for...

Of course, in an extremely diverse variety of ways, you know.

If you have the sacrificial matrix, you could call it, you know.

The sacrificial genesis, you can see that kingship, religion, priesthood, all that comes from it.

And it's culture.

Therefore, culture comes from that collective killing which reestablishes a peace, period.

this period.

So what is new in Rene's theory, it's, well, it owes something to Freud to be sure,

but nevertheless it's radically new because for Freud this was just the theory of the

murder or the father was just a tale in a sense.

Rene Gerard told us, I mean, showed that it was actually a real event, a real event.

It was about a real event, the collective murder of a victim.

So initially, God is a collective victim, the victim of a mob, etc.

Well, this is radically new in the history of the human sciences.

This is an incredible breakthrough.

And this story was unfolding for you while you were in the midst of going from place to place in terms of teaching.

Is that correct?

Yes.

But it was not unfolding necessarily in the right order, you know.

It's difficult to talk about both simultaneously.

But my thinking of Christianity and about the difference of Christianity, you know, was going on too.

So he finished him, and he must have finished the manuscript of Love Your Angel Sacre.

I don't think it was published yet.

And all of a sudden, he becomes very nervous.

Violence and the Secret, I really wanted to write things hidden since the foundation of the world.

In other words, have a archaic part and a Christian part.

And I just was not ready I didn have the right formulations for the Christian He said that he had these moments of regulation and depression indicating to me that he had doubt that he could be misunderstood

I knew that the relationship between Christianity and archaic religion is a very close one in some ways with a great difference.

the same time, but I couldn't define it. I couldn't define it.

You know, I remember he was on the phone with the Glasse, the French publisher, and

they said, you know, because he wanted to put Christianity in there at the very end, the last

chapters. And they said, no, no, no, don't do that because he said, well, I've already put it

into the preface. And they said, no, no, no, you need to write a whole other book.

So I wrote a book exclusively on Archaic Religion. So it's a book which is very dark,

you know, which is about the archaic type of religion,

which is about sacrifice, and nothing else.

So the last chapter kind of ends oddly.

He says, you know, is Christianity simply another form of Dyneseac thinking,

or is it something new and different?

And, of course, it will be something new and different for him.

The year 1972 must be marked with the White Cross in the annals of the human sciences.

René Girard's Violence and the Sacred is not only a great book.

It is a unique and fundamentally contemporary book.

It finally gives us the first theory of religion and the sacred, which is really atheistic.

His work caught fire in Europe, and one of the people,

people who read violence in the sacred was Jean-Michel Ungolion, who was Chief

Psychiatry of the American Hospital in Paris.

And indeed, I read it, I read it once, I read it twice, I read it three times, I read it four

times and I said to Helen, I think I have to go and see this guy, he is professor at the

University of New York.

And so he flew to the US just to talk to Renee, he could do that.

At the time, I must remind you, there was no computers, there was no computers, there was no

phones, iPhones, there was nothing. And in my brain, Professor Gerard was an old, crippled,

professor, I never realized that he was such a young athlete, you know. Since that time,

during about five years, he came to Paris, we talked, I registered. I came to the States,

we talked, he registered. Wherever we went, there always had to be a desk at one side,

where Renee would spend at least the whole morning working.

He worked very hard.

He liked routine.

He loved to get up in the morning and have his coffee and go to his desk.

His method, as many people did,

that involved having scotch tape and scissors.

But somehow in those days,

it didn't seem that you could have a number of pairs of scissors in the house

or several of scotch tape.

So they remember him coming roaring through the house,

saying, where is my scotch tape?

We took my tape.

Both Renee and I realized that this way of doing it, we would never be able to really build

something solid.

I requested permission from the American Hospital, Chief of Staff.

So they gave me four months leave.

So he came to Baltimore, Jean-Michel, and another psychiatrist friend and kind of just burst

this manuscript.

June 8, 1977.

My dear Eric, this summer in principle, and I hope in reality, I should finish between the 1st of July and the 15th of August, a book that I am writing with two Parisian psychiatrists, with whom I hope you'll become acquainted.

At present, I have a feeling that I am arriving at some decisive formulations about Freud's Oedipus complex, which reveal the inanity of Freud.

He certainly taught me many things, especially he taught me how to read.

How to read with an open mind, not to read with reverence, not to read with obedience, to read freely, even the greatest authors.

You can be interested in what the text says, and also what the text does not say, and also what the text wants to hide.

July 2nd, 1977.

Here, everything is rather calm.

I'm doing quite a bit of work,

but I can no longer stay at it for as many hours in a row as I could 20 years ago.

For the time being, it hasn't been too hot.

And he said, okay, then we have finished the anthropology book.

And I said, okay, but we have to add something.

He said, yes, I have a text.

I have a text about the Bible and the passion of Christ,

but I'm reluctant to put it inside that book.

I said, why?

He said, you know, because they're going to say, in French, I'm a calottein.

You know, there was a sort of a, I'm too Christian.

And I said, well, they can say whatever they want.

I think, why don't you let me read that piece?

He said, okay, read it and tell me what you think about it.

So I read that piece, which was to become the book number two of things hidden since the beginning of the world, since the foundation of the world.

And I said to him, well, this is brilliant. This is brilliant because you parallel the scapegoat mechanism and the passion of Christ.

Where violence in the sacred had seemed to reveal you as a theorist who is inherently hostile

to religion, things hidden significantly complicate this picture because what happens is that

you begin to unfold or you begin to work on the Christian aspect of what's going on.

Is that, is that?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Sure.

Well, the Christian aspect is just the relationship with Christianity is difficult to be difficult

to understand in a way because it's too simple.

In many myths all over the world,

there is a big crisis.

For instance, at the beginning of the Oedipus myth, there is a plague which is destroying the community.

Another myth, it will be a drought or a flood, or it may be even a social disruption.

And then, after that crisis, there always comes a collective form of violence against a single individual.

What modern anthropology has understood is that

But the Gospels have the same structure as a myth.

You have a crisis, which is a crisis of the Jewish state, which is slowly strangled to death by the Romans.

And this crisis, this time, we know it's real.

It's a historical crisis.

We have all types of documents because we are in the days of the Roman Empire, there is civilization around it.

And then what do you have is capable of phenomenon.

Jesus is not killed by the Romans alone, by the Jewish priests alone, by the crowd open by everybody.

It's a collective murder if there is one.

Therefore, the anthropologists were perfectly right to see myth and the Gospels, same story, same business.

and conclude it's the same thing.

How could you see any difference?

So where is the difference?

It's obvious.

It's so obvious that no one sees it.

The scapegoating is effective only if it is unconscious.

If you cannot call it scapegoating, but call it justice.

And that's what The Oedipus myth tells you,

that the people of Thieves are right to get rid of Oedipus because he's responsible for the plague.

What a joke.

No one is responsible single-handedly for a plague.

In the Gospels, you don't have that type of nonsense.

You have the opposite.

You have his escapegoat, all right, they turn him into a scapegoat.

And we can use the word scapegoat or the word lamb of God.

The word lamb of God means nothing but scapegoat.

in a nice way.

But the land of God is innocent, you see.

Civilization, society, eventually, Greece and Rome, and the coming of Christ.

And what does the coming of Christ mean?

Oh, Christ is going to reveal two men, to human beings.

what this whole history is about.

It will reveal the structure of the scapego mechanism.

How will he do that?

He will become a victim.

And by becoming the victim,

it will show how it works.

And it will also show that the victim is innocent.

That it is not true that he was the

cause of the violence. Where is the cause of the violence? You, human beings, and only you are the

cause of the violence. The result of the work of this summer is a book that should be

about 600 pages. My whole project of synthesis has gone into it and I'm very happy to be

liberated of that task. I biento, Chene.

He came one day, victoriously, and he gave me the manuscript, 900 pages.

René drives us to the airport and he says, he kisses me, and you know, and he says,

now we're going to make it, so and so forth.

We've done something.

We were very excited, both of us.

So I go to the process Bernice.

He was in her little office with a cigarette in the mouth.

And she looked at me in a sort of a furious way.

And she said, what is this you're bringing a conversation?

900 pages of conversation?

Are you crazy?

This will never sell two copies.

I said, listen, why don't you read it?

And then you will pronounce your judgment.

And indeed about week, 10 days later, she calls me.

And she says, you know something?

You're both crazy, Renee and you.

But this is genius.

Apostolv was this very, very famous show, you know,

like opera Winfrey in the United States.

And everybody was watching it and everybody was waiting for it.

And it would make or destroy an author.

At the co-the-goat-you-Raegris, who has taught us in the United

I've first 20 years.

You're professor of literature at the University Hopkins

at Baltimore.

You're the author of two

...

I first met René Girard through his books

because he really appeared

on the French literary scene

at a time when the media

took a great importance in the intellectual field.

In French intellectual culture,

you know, pretty much since the French Revolution

has been antagonistic

to seeing religion in any kind of saving or

saving or modulating violence mode.

The French say that they are very, very keen on being laic.

I don't know how you can translate laic.

It's much more than the separation of the church and the state.

The state considers that religion is irrational.

No room for religion in a public space,

and in particular in the intellectual world.

And it's still popular. Everybody thinks, well, religion is the cause of all our woes.

That's why people are making themselves suicide bombers or that's where they're being extreme.

And Gerard's understanding was so much subtler, so much smarter, so much more central, I think, to the nature of it.

So you analyze the Judeo-Christianism, but you're saying that, well, it's not...

It's at a both the same thing and it's all other thing.

Then we heard these voice from the United States who told us something other than what we were still taught a certain Nietzschean Marxist structuralist psychoanalytic vulgate

but a voice that dared to say that the Gospels were the true human science.

But the Judeo-Christian, he wants to go to the end of the violence

and reveling the nature of the sacrificial, the nature of the human,

the origin of the man.

It's part of his whole, really, his whole life's work,

which is to show the relevance of these Christian values

to anthropology.

In other words, it's not just, well, you can choose

between religion A and religion B,

it's that these are essential insights into the human.

And whether you want to believe in divine powers or not,

you are nevertheless obliged to recognize

that this is a certain truth about humanity.

And he said the myth of the foundation of Rome.

Romulus has a frere Remymus.

He'd he'd to and in tue in Remymus,

he accomplish the gesture military by excellence,

he defends the city,

he accomplished the gesture legislator,

because he defines the frontiers,

and he's sacrificator, he'd kill his friend.

And Rene Girard in Things Eden

showed that he had not

you could say that that's false marks,

That's false modesty, but he had not invented the theory of immeic design and of the original secret.

It was already complete in the Bible.

Now, take Caen and Abel.

In Cain and Abel, it's exactly the same history.

You have two brothers.

You have one who kill the other.

But, at the difference of the myth of Rome, the Bible us do,

the son of your friend, cry vengeance to me.

It's always stories that reverse myth, contradict myth.

And of course the gospel is just the arched story of this story.

So deep down, when we read the myth right, we slip the passion underneath, the innocent victim.

That was too much for the French intellectual milieu.

And some of the great people in France, great intellectuals who had light or even loved or

even adored, the first two books started to take that distance in relation to Girard.

I mean, the collapse of Gerard's reputation was brutal.

You would see in the paper attacks against Girard, but then you would see also celebrations of books of his

that would be coming out and would be wonderful and celebrated.

because it's a

book where we're

an end

in a certain

manner and

on sort

transformed.

It was a real

shock to

an entire

generation, to

my own

generation,

we were no longer

ashamed to

call ourselves

Judeo-Christian

My dear Eric,

my dear Eric,

my stay in Paris

was very busy.

Kassé did things well.

I had all sorts of interviews, two on television, a multitude on the radio, and seminars for people in high places.

All of it seasoned, of course, with a great number of lunches and dinners.

When De Chos Chasse came out, I could see there was some recognition, some traditional terms of success.

The memory of my father that I didn't talk about yet, but that's very strong, is he,

worked all the time.

Everywhere we went, even on vacation, he would bring his

portable typewriter.

And when we arrive someplace, the first priority

would be, where am I going to work?

Or am I going to set up my stuff and my papers and my

typewriter?

And sometimes as kids, it was kind of frustrating,

because it'd be, you know, he's locked up again,

and you can't interrupt him, and you better not make any

noise, and you better not touch his typewriter,

and you better not touch his scotch tape, or his

manuscripts, or.

And it's kind of like, what, you know, let's do something else or let's do something and he's off somewhere.

So it was good to see that leading to something that looked rewarding to him.

And the book started selling.

It started selling and it sold 100,000 copies.

So far, I don't think I've made anyone mad.

But after three weeks of this regiment, it was hard for me to believe I was really the author.

of anything at all. And I repeated the same things mechanically to everyone. I'm quite afraid

this success, still relatively modest, really, will do nothing but irritate the hordes of dear

colleagues and dear students. All of this, after all, is nothing but a useless distraction.

And I'm impatient to return to the calm, tranquil life of Baltimore. Like you, I can hardly make

do without family. I don't know what success in politics or in business is like, but I can say that

the success of a book like mine is just about nothing. One must work towards success, but without

illusions, adding to the pure pleasure of working just enough of an external goal to make the work

more ardent.

I met him as an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 80s.

I had a known one of his classes as a senior and then got to know him very well in the 20 years after that.

I had sort of grown up in a fairly conservative Christian context,

and I was thinking a lot about why is Christianity true.

And Gerard offered a sort of new apologetic for Christianity.

There was history and anthropology, you know, all these theological and biblical questions.

But also, you know, it was sort of a very keen observer of the geopolitical scene,

thinking a lot about the sort of apocalyptic dimension of late modernity,

the arms race with the Soviet Union.

How could that ever come to an end?

Things hidden was well it was electrifying because it was almost because you sort of had a sense of ghanostic insight that you You know you understood the meaning of history the key to history

God's plan for history there was a set of insights that nobody else on this planet had that gave a lot of the Girardian group a lot of energy in the 80s and 90s

There was a very rich period for my mother and father that lasted for decades I think he had to a certain

extent done his work and he was he was helping others with it and at a certain

point people decided that we need an association and a certain group of

biblical scholars created something called the Colloquium on Violence of Religion

and we met three times in Austria we met in Graz too and a second time at

Ennsborg we met in Germany at Wiesbaden

They traveled a lot together.

He did a lot of conferences.

We heard them talk about it, or when we got together, we heard about stories of their trips.

As I understand it, it is the major insight into Christianity for the last several hundred years.

I think that it's really something that enables us to recover so much of ancient understandings and modern understandings together.

I would say the insights of René Girard, particularly on the scapegoat mechanism, were the single greatest unveiling, pulling back of a screen of ignorance on the whole biblical tradition that I'd ever read.

You know, I said, oh my goodness, this explains this, this, this, this, this, this.

Christianity and Judaism before all interpret the story from the point of view of view.

of the victim. The victim is innocent and not guilty. It's not just friendship for Jesus or friendship

for Joseph or friendship for Job, that you give a voice to the victim in the Bible. It's to tell

the truth. It's of such extraordinary importance that I've compared him to the fathers of the

church. And what I mean by that is he explains things with such depth and range and breath that he's

like Chrysostom or Augustine or Jerome, those figures. I do think Girard will be read in 500 years.

This has been hidden since the foundation of the world. But once it's announced to you, you cannot

not see it. It's everywhere.

Yeah, well, look, the Gerardian circle, they're all good people. I know them. They're Gerardian circle. They're all good people. I know them.

friends and I'm not saying anything against them when I say that for me it's a pity

that Gerard is known for the most part really as a you know a Christian apologist

and not for a fundamental insight into the mimetic nature of human desire that

can stand completely on its own independently of the Christian doctrine now

and what could say, but that would be too simplistic,

maybe that there are two kinds of your audience today,

those who think that the theory doesn't need the part devoted to the Christian revelation

and others who believe that it would be an amputation

that would deprive the theory of any importance.

So for me, Christianity is a source of questioning.

It's not a set of answers.

I think he was pleased by the fact that I was returning to Judaism through his work.

And it was true.

I mean, it was a trigger for me to do that.

It was somehow the seriousness with which he approached his relationship to Christianity

made me feel in a way that I could go back and rediscover what was before Christianity.

Because, I mean, why was Christianity so important for him?

Because of Judaism.

The attraction of René's ideas for many of us is that it allows us to be,

a thoroughgoing thinker and remain Christian, that there's no conflict between science and faith.

The attraction of René's ideas for others is that regardless of the fact that he,

as self-described as an ordinary Christian and a practicing Catholic, that this theory has

its own legs and you can run with it without any adhesion, adherence, or profession of faith

of any kind.

From your most recent book, Achieve Klousfitz, to be published in this country under the title,

Battling to the End.

You argue that the modern world finds itself in a peculiar predicament.

Man has become capable of destroying his own world.

For good.

Rene Girard wanted to finish his own work

by striking a big blow, he told me.

Girard became a member of the French Academy in 2005

and proposed to me to write with him his last book.

For he just discovered Klaus Witz

this Prussian strategist

whom Girard was convinced had had a dazzling apocalyptic intuition

with his concept of the escalation to the extremes.

You know, I've talked a lot about literature,

but recently I read a book which is very informative for me,

which was Klausovits on war.

You know, he calls war a chameleon.

And he says it's a rise to the extremes.

And he says, in order to win, you have to imitate.

your enemy constantly.

If you have a big gun, I must have a bigger gun,

and you have.

So in other words, he shows us the move towards total war

and total memetic conflict.

This was an enormous surprise.

No one expected this author on this field This author was thought to be much more powerful to be much more concerned by the origins of humanity than with the end of Western history

But Jirah wanted to prove that his thought could shed light on the present times.

You know, Yates' most famous poem, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The crisis develops when the scapegoating mechanism no longer works.

That gathering mechanism has been broken by the revelation of the cross.

Even if we have countless little scapegoatings here and there,

we are not going to create a new scapegoat God in a sense of Greek religion or so forth,

impossible.

We are too Christian for that.

We may be atheists, but we may not be, you know, believe in some.

or Jupiter or that sort of thing.

We are deprived of all medicine against our own violence.

Therefore, we are moving towards destruction.

Look at the apocalyptic text in the last world.

You know, there will be the sea and the roaring of the waves and so forth,

and men will fight man and city against city and so forth.

It's always symmetrical, you know, like what I call the doubles, the...

called the doubles, the basic conflictual situation, when you realize that these two things are one.

The fundamentalist interpretation, the apocalypse is just God destroying the world. Of course,

the atheists also think of God as fundamentally violent. And Gerard would have said that, you know,

the atheists and the fundamentalists make the same mistake of projecting human violence onto God.

And so the apocalypse is just nuclear weapons. It is just runaway technology with humans to have

nothing but their death instincts to guide them.

If there are people on Mars who are watching us,

they must be wondering why, even though we have scriptures

that talk about the destruction of man by himself,

we pay absolutely no attention to it now.

We stopped paying attention to it when it became literally possible every day.

This to me is evidence that the Bible is not a religion like the other ones,

that it knows about the origin and the end of man.

things that are incomparable and that cannot be compared with any other religion.

We're watching now the globalization of desire.

What happens, the conflict among people when it escalates memetically and contagiously,

no longer just infects a village, it has a capacity to infect the whole world.

The whole world can want the same thing.

The whole world can want an iPhone or a gadget or a movie star or whatever else.

it's universally broadcast.

And as Renee said, when the world becomes globalized

with memetic desire, one match can set the whole thing on fire.

Do you believe, I've got a question here from a viewer,

Todd Jones.

Does Renee Gerard believe that there is any way to turn the tide?

Yes.

behaving like Christians.

Sacrifices don't work anymore.

Therefore, what can you do?

You can behave according to the rules of the kingdom of God,

which is to refuse the escalation.

people provoke you. Instead of being violent, answering violence to violence, we have to

answer with non-violence. Therefore, if someone strikes you on the left cheek, offer your

right cheek. If someone wants to walk a mile with you, walk two miles. It's not a political

program as the 19th century believe. It's not a social program. It's if the military

escalation begins. This is a moment you must drop everything. Either we are going to love each other or we're going to die.

In his last book, Girard is very pessimistic and he almost in a sense he considers as a fact that Christianity has failed and that humanity is about to choose the wrong path to

into a Nissan war, nuclear war, of course, and its own extinction.

Now, people don't understand what I'm talking about because they don't understand the most fundamental thing about scapegoing.

When people come and tell me, oh, I understand fully your story.

your business, you know. You cannot believe how scapegoated I am. I said, go away. This is

everybody's story. I want to hear the story which is nobody's story. And it's a story of

Peter when he realizes he's betrayed Jesus. He realizes that the scapegoater is he and that

Jesus is a scapegoat.

Look at Peter.

When Jesus is arrested instead of fleeing with everybody else, he follows.

Therefore, his heart is in the right place.

He enters the courtyard with everybody else.

But when he finds himself in the crowd, he verifies, you know, the weakness of man.

The fact that man alone, among other men, will just join the crowd.

We all join the crowd.

join the crowd. Men cannot resist the memetic contagion. There is one of the gospels that tells us that

the servant is young. So she has some appeal. Peter has to show her that he's not part of that

gang which is being judged and so forth, you know. Or the sense of part of the friends of Jesus.

Yeah. That is a friend of Jesus. He must surrender. And she says another thing, which in my view,

it's extremely important.

She says, anyway, I recognize you

because you have that Galilean accent.

which is impopular in Jerusalem.

In other words, you're a kind of foreigner.

You're not even one of us, you know.

You're a stranger.

So what does Peter do?

He wants to show he's one of them.

And the only way you show you're part of a crowd

is to join in scapegoating.

If I have the same enemy you have,

I am one of yours.

So you really have, you know,

in a very subtle way, indications of what the incentives are for Peter,

which are universally human.

That's why we must not say, oh, Peter is a special case.

He betrays Jesus there because he's a weak individual really.

I don't think he's just the representative of all the apostles since he's the head.

You see, so I think it's a scene which is absolutely priceless.

There is no sociology, you know, and revelation of what living together does to human beings.

You see, how come we all have the ideas of our time?

You know, not so many centuries ago, everybody automatically believed in God.

It didn't mean much.

Today, automatically no one believes in God.

But it's purely a mob phenomenon.

It's not because there are powerful scientific arguments, you know.

It's Peter's denial.

That's all it is.

The Peter's denial is infinitely more powerful to tell you about what society is.

not than any other text. Then at the same time, the idea that Peter doesn't know what he's doing

is extremely important. In other words, he's denying not unconsciously, but he's unconscious of

what he's really doing. That's why maybe the most beautiful thing is the ending. Because in order

to show unconscious, we say words like unconscious, they don't mean much. But the Gospels know very well

how to represent very directly, very understandably that's unconscious.

All they tell you, all they have to tell you, and then the cock was heard.

And it reminds Peter of what he had conveniently forgotten,

which was that Jesus had predicted the very thing that has been happening.

And here you can see that the prediction of Jesus is not some kind of, you know, of,

what should I say of divine inspiration

you see because there again you must

people say well Jesus

it's his father who teaches him that Peter is going to deny

yes it is his father but it's also his human knowledge

the fact that he's infinitely that because he listens to his father

he understands human communities infinitely better than all these guys and he knows that Peter is going to find himself in a situation of collective pressure

of mob pressure in which he would deny.

So all we have to do is to see the cock, clod, and Peter's starting to cry.

That was beautiful.

I think that we can conclude anything else,

any of the comments you'd like to make,

then we'll just close this session.

And, well, I enjoyed this very much.

Did you?

Mm-hmm.

It's great, great honor.

And you think of those influential people in history,

that you will be an R among those persons.

Maybe yes, maybe not.

You know, thinks I'm weird.

Well, for me, you are.

I remember, actually, I remember specifically a quote of his that my brother and I sort of made fun of at the time where I think he was telling us something about working harder at school or reading something.

and we said, well, that's not really cool.

And I remember him saying, well, maybe there's a different kind of cool.

I think he taught us that, not thinking, hey, I'm going to apply my theory on my kids,

but because he saw those things himself and the risks around imitation and desire and jealousy

and wanting things other people want and not finding things other people want and not finding

happiness in the right places and the frustrations of are the endless chase of kind of

bullshit.

There's a sort of sagis, they say in French, you know, there's kind of a wisdom that I think

he succeeded in imparting us with.

You know, I hope so.

I think Gerard's message is still as important or more important than it ever was in his lifetime.

And it still is a question who's ready to listen to it.

It's hard to make these kinds of historical analogies, but I sort of think like, you know,

Nietzsche lived in the 19th century and was very important for the 20th.

And I sort of wonder if Gerard was this 20th century thinker who will be very important in

the 21st and it will just, it will take some time.

Ren insight is so profound that it has a kind of air of simplicity innocence It the baby in the cradle It just beautifully tender simple pure

and in some way, the moment you hear it, undeniable.

He's right.

It's not just another iteration of the monomyth.

It's not just a nice universalist spirituality.

It's something of decisive apocalyptic significance.

In other words, either the gospel or we descend again into violence.

Either the gospel or our own destruction.

Renee's ideas are like a bomb, but it's a bomb that doesn't explode outward.

It explodes inward in us.

It's to shine a light on us.

Why do I desire?

Why do I fight at the office?

Why do I argue?

Or why am I envious?

You don't have to go to ancient Mesopotamia to verify René's ideas.

You don't have to understand archaic Greece.

You have to look at the movements of your own heart.

And Renée always did.

In order to be truly a genius, all these geniuses are humble, are humble.

This is why Shakespeare can ironize.

about himself and this is why René Girard is equally great because he's

capable of doing what any of these greats are doing you know that is the

message that I would like to convey and I hope that is the way that he will

be remembered for the rest I would probably be

fighting about endlessly.

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