Without Lifting A Finger

René Noël Théophile Girard ( / ʒ i ˈ r ɑr d / ; French:  [ʒiʁaʁ] ; born December 25, 1923) is a Franco-American historian , literary critic , and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy . Girard is the author of nearly thirty books (see below ), with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism , critical theory , anthropology , theology , psychology , mythology , sociology , economics , cultural studies , and philosophy . Girard's fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrif...

Dragging through Wolf's Medea (loved her City of Angels , the last book I read by her, but this one is so-so), but I thought I'd see what she had to say before I dipped into Euripides' version. Anyway, each chapter is a "voice," and each chapter/voice has an epigraph. This is where I first ran into the name of Rene Girard (both quotes are from his text: Violence and the Sacred ). From Chapter Seven: Leukon: People want to convince themselves that their misfortunes come from one single responsible person who can easily be got rid of. From Chapter Eight: Medea: The festival has lost all of its ritual characteristics, and it ends badly insofar as it finds its way back to its violent beginnings. It is no longer a hindrance to the forces of evil, but their ally.