Status
Available
Call number
Publication
The Johns Hopkins University Press (1979), Paperback, 352 pages
Description
Violence and the Sacred is René Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.
User reviews
LibraryThing member PinkPandaParade
In a highly innovative book that studies the mechanisms and structures behind violence, Girard's Violence and the Sacred presents his unique insights into violence in literature and society. From the bible to Oedipus Rex to various indigenous tribes throughout the world, Girard attempts to cover
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all bases in his arguments. He finds interesting psychological sources for the various sacrifices of humankind, talks of the victim and the scapegoat, and analyzes the way humans fight, block, and stop violence. His ideas, while they may be quite offensive or at the least controversial to some, definitely present new perspectives on why humans give in to primal instincts.Girard discusses, in complicated and yet fairly understandable terms, common literary elements of sacrifice, plagues, dealing with crisis, and generative and reciprocal violence. Another interesting topic Girard analyzes in his novel is that of desire. In presenting the idea that human desire is mimetic and external, he eventually comes to the conclusion that desire invariably becomes violent.The tried and tried again theory behind the title character of Oedipus Rex gets a revamping in Girard's second chapter with the suggestion that Oedipus, rather than being led into fate, himself took the deliberate steps to end up where he was. Every aspect of Oedipus, as well as many other stories and novels, can be analyzed under Girard's theory with the result of a highly different perspective.Other literary analyses are of great interest, including the idea of the "monstrous double" in literature, the literary elements of mirroring and repetition, and the historical significance of twins in society. Girard's novel gives a new and large perspective not only on literature, but on society. Show Less
LibraryThing member gmicksmith
Girard's thesis is that violence is at the heart of the sacred, that violence belongs to all, and no one. Sacrifice restores order to society as the end of religious practice. This is an important and major study of the topic.
The companion volume to this study is Violent Origins, a discussion by
The companion volume to this study is Violent Origins, a discussion by
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Walter Burket, Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith. Show Less
LibraryThing member PhilipJHunt
Hard to read. Impossible to forget. Reality changing. A whole new way to understand humanity. Everyone should read it and the world may change for the better.
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
"Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is
In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary meanings - that of imitation (more specifically, the imitation of nature as object, phenomena, or process) and that of artistic representation. Mimesis is an extremely broad and theoretically elusive term that encompasses a range of possibilities for how the self-sufficient and symbolically generated world created by people can relate to any given "real", fundamental, exemplary, or significant world.
In Girard's book, which I read for a study group, he goes beyond the aesthetic usage of mimesis as presented in his literary criticism. In this book uses the concept of mimesis as the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change. He presents a series of hypotheses about the generation and stabilization of cultural order in primitive societies and human communities in general. He argues that mimetic desire often leads inexorably to rivalry and conflict, and that the origins of cultural order and stability reside in repeated acts of collective violence against a lone victim or group of victims, the scapegoat. Girard postulates a hypothetical morphogenetic mechanism accounting for the generation of cultural and social order: the surrogate victim mechanism.
He also discusses religion as a way of regulating social violence and creating social cohesion, arguing that through sacrifice, the violence that threatens the community is ritually cast out, turned outwards rather than inwards on to the members of the community. Girard, who sees society as an affair of men and says this explicitly, relates sacrifice to religion: he sees the function of religion as keeping violence out of the community by means of the mechanism of the scapegoat, or the ritual which substitutes for it.
Girard's thought is dense at times, but the hypotheses and cultural examples make this a thought-provoking tome that is worth reading.
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none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role." --- Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty" 1933In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary meanings - that of imitation (more specifically, the imitation of nature as object, phenomena, or process) and that of artistic representation. Mimesis is an extremely broad and theoretically elusive term that encompasses a range of possibilities for how the self-sufficient and symbolically generated world created by people can relate to any given "real", fundamental, exemplary, or significant world.
In Girard's book, which I read for a study group, he goes beyond the aesthetic usage of mimesis as presented in his literary criticism. In this book uses the concept of mimesis as the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change. He presents a series of hypotheses about the generation and stabilization of cultural order in primitive societies and human communities in general. He argues that mimetic desire often leads inexorably to rivalry and conflict, and that the origins of cultural order and stability reside in repeated acts of collective violence against a lone victim or group of victims, the scapegoat. Girard postulates a hypothetical morphogenetic mechanism accounting for the generation of cultural and social order: the surrogate victim mechanism.
He also discusses religion as a way of regulating social violence and creating social cohesion, arguing that through sacrifice, the violence that threatens the community is ritually cast out, turned outwards rather than inwards on to the members of the community. Girard, who sees society as an affair of men and says this explicitly, relates sacrifice to religion: he sees the function of religion as keeping violence out of the community by means of the mechanism of the scapegoat, or the ritual which substitutes for it.
Girard's thought is dense at times, but the hypotheses and cultural examples make this a thought-provoking tome that is worth reading.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Rockhead515
Mentioned in 'Strangers At The Feast' by Jennifer Vanderbes.
Subjects
Awards
Prix Broquette-Gonin (1973)
Language
Original publication date
1972
Physical description
352 p.; 8.9 inches
ISBN
0801822181 / 9780801822186