Comments on: There seems something unusually elastic about Girard's thought

There seems something unusually elastic about Girard's thought

chavenet — Sun, 18 May 2025 02:22:52 -0800

He was never a household name, although his work is widely cited in numerous disciplines. But in recent years, he has had a surprising resurgence for a Venn diagram of Catholics, entrepreneurs and those populating Donald Trump's White House, who repurpose Girard's thought in ways that are vehemently contested by some academics. from How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right [Financial Times; ungated]

By: unearthed

unearthed — Sun, 18 May 2025 03:09:24 -0800

Athens (reason), Jerusalem (faith traditions), and Silicon Valley (innovators in business..) One of these is not like the others. My G*d Thiel has to be the most hubristic prick in the US Pantheon. Fantastic wide-ranging article and a lot to read. Thanks chavenet. Ah! so Thiel's been an anti-DEI 'thought' leader since at least 1995. Those undergraduates who, like Shore, went on to do PhDs, might have learnt to combine Girard's insights with those of other thinkers. But those, like Thiel and JD Vance, who left the academy might never exit from the Girardian system. Yep, cherry picking a complex nuanced philosophy for a nice simple view of the world they want to make in their own image - I've seen this quite a bit, esp. with Christian IT/phys. engineering people. No troubling lessons on evolution or life sciences and less fovus on ethics.

By: mumimor

mumimor — Sun, 18 May 2025 05:28:44 -0800

The idea is set out in Girard's first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (published in French in 1961), which describes how Don Quixote, Madame Bovary and characters from Stendhal, Proust and Dostoyevsky come to desire things because others already want them. This makes me curious, maybe even curious enough to read the book. Because both Don Quixote and Madame Bovary are obviously satirical novels, and there are strong elements of satire both in Stendahl, Proust and Dostoyevsky, enough that you should be very careful if attempting to draw some truth about humanity out of them. Were does Girard stand on this? And are the fascists making their own metaphysics out of what was meant as ridicule or at the very least a critique of an aspect of modern culture? (Modern in the sense that Don Quixote is seen as the first modern novel, no as in contemporary). It seems to me that Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendahl, Proust and Dostoyevsky all describe Girard's core concepts of memetic desire, scapegoating and violence as attributes of the immature and unwise, rather than as societal foundations. Has anyone here read Girard and can they explain this?

By: pseudocode

pseudocode — Sun, 18 May 2025 06:26:47 -0800

I must've read his name a few times in passing when it came to the "characters" he influenced, but got my first thorough journey into the concepts and their history on the Know our Enemy Podcast, where they had John Ganz as a guest who wrote a Substack 4-parter about it. Might be interesting for others if they want to go beyond the FT article. I ended up with the opinion that both IT dudebros and literary critics might not be the best people for coming up with general life philosophy.

By: gimonca

gimonca — Sun, 18 May 2025 06:35:53 -0800

This paragraph jumps out at me: Girard had been struck by the public punishment of collaborators in France after the second world war, treated as scapegoats for the Nazi invasion. His remarks on American politics, however, were more cautious. Readers have often wondered whether his interest in the scapegoat was influenced by living in the American South, where lynchings still took place. Girard rarely used contemporary case studies, preferring to find his evidence in ancient literature, scripture and anthropology, but his view on lynchings ancient and modern was unambiguous: they were unconscionable. Oof. A couple of follow-ups from that: if Girard was capable of equating anger at Nazi collaborators with the worst of racist violence in the U.S., well, Girard himself would be a potential source of a lot of problems. You could trace a path from that dysfunctional error right down to Afrikaners being resettled in the U.S. this month. Also possible that the problem is with a perception or misunderstanding of Girard's meaning, an error that Thiel and Vance continue to base their actions on. An error that continues to be driven by their own "mimetic desire" and groupthink that they think they've transcended--but they haven't.

By: nangua

nangua — Sun, 18 May 2025 09:00:11 -0800

I've not read Girard, but there are plenty of people in my academic context who have and draw on his work in ways that aren't facist. My suspicion is that like Thiel's obsession with Tolkien, the meanings he's drawing out of Girard are based on an extremely selective reading that actually rows against the dominant normative impulse of the sources he's using. I can't imagine, for example, Girard being thrilled that the largest impact of his work on mimetic desire might be Thiel's recognising it as a money-making opportunity via Facebook, any more than Tolkien would be thrilled that Thiel has named his surveillance company after an object that Sauron used to corrupt both Saruman and Denethor.

By: clew

clew — Sun, 18 May 2025 09:06:38 -0800

are the fascists making their own metaphysics out of what was meant as ridicule Torment Nexus! (drink)

By: Smedly, Butlerian jihadi

Smedly, Butlerian jihadi — Sun, 18 May 2025 09:09:42 -0800

I'm so effing tired of the existence of Peter Theil. What a choad.

By: y2karl

y2karl — Sun, 18 May 2025 09:09:53 -0800

I encountered Violence and the Sacred decades ago by pulling it at random in the old downtown Seattle library. I was at a table reading the Washington Post on those old wooden spindles they used back in the day, turned around and spotted the title. I pulled it out and took it home. Not that I understood it when I read it thereafter or understand it now. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, oh, I was so much smarter then, I'm dumber than that now. But all the same; it had a profound affect on me. Shit, I even commented about it way back when long gone Tarn posted You want something because someone else does. Shit, now I come to find I even posted about it in 2003. I will repeat what I have said over and over here already. Onsite Search here is useless -- even worse than useless. It took me forever to find all of the above via Google Search site:metafilter. Why is that, powers that be, and will it ever be fixed? Now, on topic: God I hate Peter Thiel. That man is evil incarnate. Also, what chavenet, muminor, unearthed, pseudocode and gimonca et al said. I woke so depressed as it is already and now this... Oh, ain't we got fun.

By: blue shadows

blue shadows — Sun, 18 May 2025 10:33:26 -0800

That last sentence says so much: "More likely, the anti-political thinker had been abandoned altogether, sacrificed at the very moment he'd been deified."

By: mumimor

mumimor — Sun, 18 May 2025 10:37:11 -0800

pseudocode, thanks for the link to John Ganz, there is a lot to read on that substack!

By: Brian B.

Brian B. — Sun, 18 May 2025 10:41:27 -0800

These are ironic developments. The first is that post-modernism is a reaction to attempts at "scientific" social ordering (especially Marxism) beginning with Heidegger, the most philosophically devout Catholic there ever was. Post-modernism assigned western traditions to espouse cultural relativism and other forms of group subjectivity, elevating the importance of impulses such as desire. And desire is problematic because we aren't really that different from each other. A lot of critics have folded world-renouncing Buddhism into their thoughts over the years, but not mentioning it as an influence raises more questions. The scapegoating stuff is where it becomes too savior-centered, which people identity with after suffering shame from not being mimetic enough. Cancel culture as an example of scapegoating is made difficult because it likewise has a self-righteous urge to prove one's moral worth. One of the first cancellations in the US of a non-criminal was when someone famously ripped up a photo of the pope on TV. This is another feature of the inconsistency of a closed system of criticism where something is more important because of the theology involved, not as relevant to anyone outside. Now we have Vance spouting French criticism which nobody will ever read to make himself academically grounded, when he is a blatant follower, which is what mimetic behavior really is (when it is not common or genetic). Asserting the victim as a religious archetype has other problems as well, because it lets feigned victimhood pose as a religious act, which explains why fascists whine the most about imaginary insults and conspiracies against them to justify their abuses. I agree with gimonca above that framing retaliation against French collaborators as scapegoating is rather absurd considering their complicity in murdering or torturing family and friends. See the TV series, A French Village, for reference. Girard maybe tipped his hand to his political conservatism.

By: mumimor

mumimor — Sun, 18 May 2025 11:40:30 -0800

John Ganz has this quote from Girard:

All through the twentieth century, the most powerful mimetic force was never Nazism and related ideologies, all those that openly opposed the concern for victims and that readily acknowledged its Judeo-Christian origin. The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be "revolutionary" now, and they reproach Christianity for nor defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. Satan imitates Christ better and better and pretends to surpass him.

I'd say, case closed, no need to study this guy or his minions, they are all fascists.

By: downtohisturtles

downtohisturtles — Sun, 18 May 2025 13:25:37 -0800

Damn. I'm trying to give away all my books soon and there's a Girard book in the mix. Never read it but if I want to I can get an ebook. Hope the final recipients don't think I'm a fascist.

By: unearthed

unearthed — Sun, 18 May 2025 17:56:52 -0800

mumimor! thanks for mentioning Ganz, I hadn't heard of him - very much laying it on the line that MAGA-ism is a false religion (and in reality is strikingly like the false religion that my generation of evangelicals were warned to watch out for - they have become their supposed enemy, in a monstrous bait-and-switch). More from Ganz here from a Freedom from religion foundation conference.

By: mumimor

mumimor — Sun, 18 May 2025 23:32:47 -0800

Thank pseudocode :)

By: chavenet

chavenet — Tue, 20 May 2025 03:14:42 -0800

A really good essay on this: From Philosophy to Power: The Misuse of René Girard by Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and the American Right

By: Brian B.

Brian B. — Tue, 20 May 2025 08:59:51 -0800

After reading the linked essay directly above (and all the dead-end dichotomizing of simple ideas that underpin a belief system, which go away by not believing it) I almost forgot that Thiel is carrying a torch for the family tradition, same as Trump and Musk, who all had fathers active in extreme right wing causes and politics. Why doesn't Peter Thiel Denounce Nazism?