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Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Studiekring René Girard > Online teksten
REVIEW Rene Girard, Les Origines de la Culture, Entretiens avec Pierpaolo Antonello et João de Castro Rocha, Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 2004, 280 pp, ISBN 2-220-05355-5
by Simon Simonse
(from: Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion 26, April 2005)
Before Les Origines de la Culture appeared in French in March 2004,
it was published in Portuguese (Um
longo argumento do princípio ao fim, Dialogos com João Cezar
de Castro Rocha & Pìerpaolo Antonello (Rio de Janeiro: TopBooks , 2003,
230 pp, ISBN 85.7475.020) and in Italian (Origine
della cultura e fine della storia, Dialoghi con Pierpaolo
Antonello e João de Castro Rocha, xxi
+ 221 pp, Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2003, pp180, ISBN 88.7078.827X.). Both
in the Italian and French texts the work of translators is acknowledged. The
French translation and text has been upgraded in consultation with René Girard.
The French book ends with Rene Girards reply to the criticism of his work
made by Régis Debray in Le feu sacré (Fayard, 2003), a text not
included in the Italian and Portuguese versions.
In its structure Les Origines de la Culture
reminds us of Choses cachées. It is built up as a series of dialogues with two
gentlemen: Pierpaolo Antonello, professor of Italian at the University of
Cambridge and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, professor of Comparative
Literature at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Compared to Choses cachées.
the interviewers keep a lower profile offering René Girard maximum
opportunity to give clarifications on the theory. The text does not indicate who
of the two is asking a particular question. Both interviewers are well prepared
for their task. They are at home in most fields to which mimetic theory has been
applied by Girard and by others. Whether their questions relate to the
anthropological issues, to the Bible, or philosophy, they are well argued and to
the point .
Practitioners of thesocial sciences should be particularly grateful with
this book. Never before did Girard position his research so clearly in the heart
of anthropology as a developing discipline. For the anthropologist La
Violence et le sacré and Choses cachées were inspiring texts
suggesting a whole range of new questions and new possibilities of integrating
the different human sciences. However, Girards relationship with ongoing
research and with the established schools of thought remained largely predatory
and polemical. He took from existing knowledge what suited his argument while
exposing the patches of blindness. Despite formal protests of the contrary,
social scientists were never given the illusion they were dealing with a fellow
traveller. The fact that Rene Girard remained at the doorstep of academic debate,
at least in the social sciences, cannot be wholly attributed to the blindness of
academic interlocutors.
In this book Girard presents his contribution to the study of culture in
continuity with other endeavours to explain the emergence and variation of human
culture. He places himself in the evolutionist tradition. There is no protest,
or expression of reservations, when his interlocutors compare his way of working
and his ambition to that of Darwin. The book emphasises the affinity between the
two scholars in many ways. Almost all chapters open with quotations from
Darwins autobiography or from the notebooks. The Brazilian title quotes
Darwin who, towards the end of his life characterised his work as a long
argument from beginning to the end (um longo argumento do
principio ao fim). The
French title must have been Darwinised at the last moment. Internet booksellers
still advertise the book with the predictable Girardian title La culture dévoilée
(Cultured Unveiled). The definitive title stops short of mimicking
Darwins The Origin of Species . Girard has attributed the singular to
culture and the plural to origin, a gesture to those who criticise
him for a single-factor explanations?
Anthropological evolutionists have been on the whole been materialists,
giving pre-eminence to technological and economic changes as motors of evolution.
For Girard the discovery of the effectiveness of sacrifice and the subsequent
revelation of the violent sacrificial mechanism as the precondition of peaceful
human coexistence, are the benchmarks of human evolution. In the fourth chapter Lhomme:
un animal symbolique Girard argues how a mimetic understanding
of the role of sacrifice can contribute to tackling unresolved issues in human
evolution. He sees an intimate connection between Darwins concept of
natural selection and sacrifice both being processes resulting in
death.[1]
He enters in debate with leading scholars in the study of human evolution
with Edward Osborne Wilson (who admits an adaptive role of religion in human
evolution, animal hierarchy as protection against violence), with Richard
Dawkins, (memes), Konrad Lorenz (observations on human laughter,
redirection of mutual aggression to an external object among animals), Merlin
Donald (the three stages of mental evolution: from mimetic via myth to theory,
the anteriority of myth to articulated language), Terence Duncan (from
indexation to symbolicity ), Irenaeus Eibl-Eiberfeldt (dehumanisation in enemy
scenario), Carl Vogt (cannibalism as an advanced, at times civilised form
of sacrifice) . Girard offers further comments on his old thesis of the
religious origin of the domestication of animals which is here extended to
agriculture. The chapter with Frazer and Lévi-Strauss in the title provides
precision on sources of inspiration other than these two gentlemen: Emile
Durkheim (who, we discover here with some surprise, was marginal to Girards
intellectual itinerary, Walter Burkert, Gabriel Tarde.
The last chapter deals with the problem of verification, the proof of the
validity of mimetic theory. As during the first years of the development of
evolutionist theory, direct proof if there is any, cannot convince. The first
skull found exhibiting properties intermediate between primates and humans did
not convince. It needed the context of the comparative method that led to a
systematic search of the missing link that eventually turned direct evidence
into proof. While the validity of Girards theory lacks the degree of solidity
that Darwinist model has acquired, there is a multitude of indications that have
not been contradicted. A comparative method is required that can turn this
scattered indications in scientific proof. Todays anthropologist has
to proceed on the basis of circumstantial evidence very much as a police
investigation. The work of the anthropologist Arthur M. Hocart and the historian
Carlo Ginzburg are discussed as exemplary of this detective approach.
The first chapters Origines de la culture are devoted to Rene
Girards intellectual and spiritual biography including memories of his youth
and adolescence in wartime France. We follow Girards career in different
American universities: meet Girard as one of the organisers of the historic
conference at Johns Hopkins University that introduced structuralism and
de-constructivism to the United States and in which many
members of the French intellectual avant-garde of the time participated (Jacques
Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and others). At the same university a
first circle of disciples was formed (Eric Gans, Andrew McKenna, Cesareo
Bandera, Eugenio Donato). There is more on the relationship with Michel Serres (guest
professor in Buffalo, Lucien Goldmann (Girards promoter in Europe in the
60s), the anthropologist Victor Turner. Successive interests -the novel ,
ethnographic monographs, Greek tragedies, Shakespeare- are given a university
context: Johns Hopkins University in (Baltimore), New York State University (Buffalo)
and Stanford University (Palo Alto). It also becomes clear that Girards
successive interests were hardly influenced by the intellectual climate in his
immediate environment. In fact, he decided to leave Johns Hopkins when the
French ideas started booming there.
In other parts of the book ideas that have been the subject of earlier publications are passed in review and further articulated. For those who are new to Girards work these can serve as a summary of his ideas. Those familiar with his work will find known arguments applied to new cases , old cases put in a new light (for example: the two meanings of sacrifice immolation and renouncing on ones self-interest in the story of the Judgment of Salomon). Nietzsche and Freud demand their usual space but there is also attention for thinkers that remained marginal in earlier books (Auerbach, Hocart), for recent responses to Girards work (Robert Calasso), for the work of anthropologists applying the mimetic theory (Lucien Scubla). The chapter on Christianity makes interesting observations on the fundamental difference of monotheism and polytheism discussing the case of the non-violence of Jainism.
In the last part of the book Rene Girard defends himself against the
criticism made of his work by Regis Debray in his last book Le feu sacré (Paris:
2003 Fayard). Debray is a French intellectual well known for the controversial
positions he has taken on political development in South America during the
1970s. In this book he deals with religious violence in the context of the
9.11.2001. Since I do not have Debrays text at my disposal I will refrain
from mingling in the debate.
Langano (Ethiopia), 14.2.2005
E-mail adres auteur simonse@paxchristi.co.ke
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