Born in Avignon in 1923, René Girard trained in Paris during the German occupation of France as a specialist curator of medieval documents; beginning in 1949 he taught in the USA as a professor-generalist in history. He would eventually arrive at a fundamental insight regarding human nature that puts him on the level with the most profound anthropological thinkers in the Western or any other tradition. The road to this insight reached across a decade and yielded a direct prospect only in the last stage. Girard first made his name, after switching his scholarly focus and obtaining a doctorate in French Literature at Indiana University in 1958, as a literary critic, with his study of vanity and resentment in prose narrative called, in French, Mensonge Romantique et Verité Romanesque (1962). Deceit Desire & the Novel studies the authorial obsession with the genesis of misery in the tendency of the human subject to acquire his desires from what he takes to be the desire, or object-of-desire, of another person. Novelistic protagonists indeed imagine that absolute being, seemingly denied to them, resides embodied in the other person so that the subject wants and attempts to become that other person. Girard had discovered in the novelists the unoriginality of desire. He had also discovered—or rather, the novelists had discovered—a complex psychology and a related oblique rhetoric, the Mensonge Romantique or “Romantic Lie” of the French original, that systematically deny this unoriginality of desire and claim complete, yet miserable, sufficiency of the ego. Even more simply, Girard had discovered the centrality of mimesis or “imitation” in psychology and culture.

The second chapter of Mensonge Romantique provided the springboard for Girard’s next book, Violence and the Sacred (1966), which undoubtedly ranks as his touchstone achievement. Fairly well known forty years after its publication, Violence and the Sacred nevertheless remains misunderstood by many of its readers. The generative chapter of Mensonge Romantique takes its title from Dostoyevsky, “Men become Gods in the Eyes of Each Other”; in it Girard notes how Stendhal’s or Dostoyevsky’s or Proust’s main characters think of themselves tacitly as victims of a “broken promise” or a swindle that has deprived them of their proper being, which they locate in someone made enthralling through the apparent possession of all that the sufferer lacks. Modernity, with its spiritual bleakness and assimilation of everything to the politics of democracy, has exacerbated this perennial and universal phenomenon. “Men who cannot look freedom in the face are exposed to anguish . . . There is no longer God, king, or lord to link them to the universal.” The despiritualized and isolated ego in its misery inclines, writes Girard, to “choose substitute gods” so that it might “escape the feeling of particularity”; it does so typically, Girard argues, by “imitat[ing] another’s desires.” In this way, what Girard calls mediated desire—the endless cycle of vain jealousies and imitations—links up with the anthropological question about the origin of the gods—of divinization.

In Violence and the Sacred, Girard turned to myth and Classical literature to tease out evidence to support his growing suspicion that certain recurrent features of primordial narrative enshrined the effects of an event—and here Girard emerged in his full audacity as a thinker—in which the human community, emerging abruptly from its pre-cultural state, founded itself by a specifiable, generative, paroxysmatic crisis-and-resolution from which leaped the fundamental institutions of society, most especially ritual sacrifice, with its system of totems and taboos.

The major theses of Girard’s theory are: (1) That, as Aristotle affirmed in his Poetics, human beings are the most mimetic or imitative of animals; (2) that the human propensity of one individual to imitate another, not only in gestures, but in appetitive interest and desire, conduces to the belligerent convergence of two or more parties on solitary objects of mediated and amplified allure; (3) that, as proto-humanity’s instinctual aversion against intra-specific aggression broke down, such mimetic convergence became an existential problem for the most advanced hominid groups, leading in one such group to a unique sacrificial crisis, in which excitation over an object became a war of all against all; (4) that the afflicted not-quite-community resolves its mayhem through concentrating the chaos of blows on an arbitrarily selected individual who therefore seems not only the cause of the riot but also the agent of its resolution. The victim is thus (5) transfigured in the new type of awareness that he creates as both miscreant and intercessor-god; he becomes sacred, and the sacred, rooted in the dissimulation of “the scapegoat mechanism,” is, as Girard asserts, the oldest of institutions.