René Girard and the Right (w/ John Ganz)
Added 2024-02-26 15:30:13 +0000 UTCThe late René Girard, former Stanford professor of literature and mentor to Peter Thiel, is having something of a moment on the right these days—as Sam Kriss recently put it in a Harper's essay, Girard's name is being "dropped on podcasts and shoved into reading lists," and "Girardianism has become a secret doctrine of a strange new frontier in reactionary thought." Why might that be the case? To unpack this question, Matt and Sam welcomed back John Ganz, whose four-part series on Girard is one of the best primers available. What does Girard have to say about who we are as human beings, why we want what we want, the origins of both violence and social order (and what they have to do with each others), the uniqueness of Christianity, and the nature of secular modernity? What use is all this to the right? And to what uses do they put it?
Also: please pre-order John's book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s — it's sure to be excellent.
Sources:
John Ganz's Unpopular Front series on Girard: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (1976)
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987)
The Scapegoat (1989)
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999)
Sam Kriss, "Overwhelming and Collective Murder: The Grand, Gruesome Theories of René Girard," Harper's, Nov 2023
Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis (2013)
Comments
One of the best podcast eps of the year. I had read Girard’s literary work as an undergraduate but never took this stuff seriously.
Sean
2024-04-09 20:08:28 +0000 UTCGreat episode. To me, a giant weakness in Girard thought is this interpretation of art and literature. First, the origins of true creativity... If everything is just mimetic desire, how does anything new ever get made? Second, reading Proust and focusing on the vapid members of french high society as the main point of the books is, well, idiotic. Its clear Proust is making fun of those pretentious fops, in addition to the narrator being obsessed with them. And the book makes it clear its all related to not connecting with his mom as a child. The only way to read it as Girard does is to completely disregard all the internal dialogue of the first parts of Swanns Way, and then miss ALL the humor in the later portions of the book and series. WTF Girard is a lit guy, I can only assume he willfully disregards all that to make his point
RS
2024-03-23 17:53:43 +0000 UTCShout out to John Ganz for the Big Lebowski reference when he says: “We have a tendency to treat objects like women, man.”
Paddy R.
2024-03-20 04:18:30 +0000 UTCOsiris is innocent when Set kills him and he is reborn as his son the son of God Heru.
Wesley Chambers
2024-03-13 01:41:46 +0000 UTCBlack liberation Christian prospective: quick point on soteriology. Osiris is innocent as well as is the deceased performer of the Osirian drama in The Book of the Coming Forth By Day. Like Ausar, the Messiah comes and will come again. I object to that degree to what Matt says about Christianity being the first documentation of the innocence of the suffering savior. That being said, much of Girard’s treatment of the Biblical narrative arch resonates with me intuitively. There is this unfolding that makes the Hebrew Messianic tradition develop into the best story ever told and one that can root a culture in the good.
Wesley Chambers
2024-03-13 01:36:19 +0000 UTCCain killing Abel and that being a foundational sin for civilization and for the city specifically has an obvious example in Remus and Romulus and the founding story of Rome. Fratricide is Rome's original sin. Curious about Matt's thoughts on this given that he is now *in* the eternal city
Matthew Bennett
2024-03-09 00:10:56 +0000 UTCMy understanding is that Girard claims all desire, not just some, is mimetic and then builds his anthropological theories on that basis. That seems like a bold claim given the complexity of human life and culture. Species classification, in contrast, just addresses one aspect of biology. And, in recent years, Linnaeus’ classification system has undergone significant change, moving away from physical characteristics to genetics. Even then, there is wide debate about how living things should be classified because creating a system that accounts for biological diversity is difficult. Similarly, the idea of supply and demand as the means for setting prices is just one among many theories to explain economic relationships, not an attempt at a grand theory of economic life. And, even with respect to determining prices, supply and demand is a gross simplification of how prices are actually set in the market. So, even as to the narrow areas that classification and supply and demand address, they fall short. They are useful but imperfect and incomplete explanations of how the world works. In the same way, Giriard’s theory may be useful, but I am skeptical, as apparently are some of his critics, that it explains all human desire.
Paul Smolinsky
2024-03-08 18:12:13 +0000 UTCHonestly, I think your frustration is literally just because you aren’t familiar with philosophy and how ideas like this are applied. Telling yourself there’s no way one theory can cover everything isn’t actually saying anything. Its just an unanalyzed statement. Like could you say this of species classification in biological science or the economic of supply and demand? No, because they are familiar even though they aren’t actually sensible in every single fact of existence. But they are in their way just theories organizing life.
Montez
2024-03-08 16:30:43 +0000 UTCGreat comment, thanks! I think you'll be interested in the new bonus episode on Girard (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-03-06 21:24:24 +0000 UTCI loved this one so much. But I was surprised that the discussion of scapegoating didn’t touch on the absolute obsession the modern Right has with scapegoating all of societies woes onto a perpetually revolving list of marginalized minority communities, whom they view as antagonistic outgroups. Whether it’s poor migrants or the LGBTQ community or the black community or women, etc. There is a constant palpable drive / hunger to deliberately inflict harm on whichever marginalized outgroup community has their attention. In an apparent attempt at taking action to resolve their (perhaps mimetic) frustrations. When the only tool they trust is punishment. Your characterization of the psychology of this cathartic violence was spot on and incisive. But what I felt was missing was sticking the landing by how starkly Girard’s central thesis (of Christianity’s defining innovation in unmasking the senseless cruelty of scapegoating the innocent) stands in contrast with the modern Christian Right, and who gets a presumption of innocence from their view. Talk about the French love of paradox. Among followers of Girard, it’s such a glaring oversight as to make a farce of attempts to use him as a foundational theoretical structure to unify and legitimize Conservative Theological frameworks. Hence his arguments devolving from genuine insight into Reactionary nonsense in his efforts to thread the needle.
Evan
2024-03-06 04:46:31 +0000 UTCI know it was only a mention, but maybe it’s time for a Walker Percy episode…?
Luke LeBar
2024-03-06 04:12:55 +0000 UTCAlso worth noting that the mutilation and exile of Oedipus hardly resolves matters!
Charlie
2024-03-05 16:28:48 +0000 UTCOne problem I had with Gerard's anthropology as laid out is that the whole idea that Christianity introduced the idea that the sacrificial victim/scapegoat was innocent is just flatly incorrect. From Greek myth, which he referenced, you have the story of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon who was sacrificed to Artemis to make up for her father's killing of a sacred deer--so here you have the innocent taking on the sins of the guilty, who might this remind you of? This might be dismissed as pedantic nitpicking, but the story is hardly an obscure one (there is a Euripides play!) and it gets to a classicist's frustration with the way generalist "intellectuals" like to strip mine classical narratives for anecdotes to give a veneer of intellectual sophistication and worldliness without actually engaging with classical culture. Particularly on the right but hardly unique to them. To be fair I'm not familiar withy Gerard so maybe he deals with this, but it seems like an obvious issue.
Charlie
2024-03-05 16:25:40 +0000 UTCShe actually even references Girard!
Caroline J
2024-03-04 17:07:56 +0000 UTCGreat prep for contrapoints three hour video on twilight (not joking)
Amy
2024-03-04 14:16:47 +0000 UTCI very much doubt your chops are to blame! Reading Peirce directly is a real challenge, in the first place because the publication status of his work is a mess, but that in turn is mainly because he never produced a single finished major work, just some articles and lectures and then an endless amount of nachlass. And that's where all the best stuff is: an immensely ambitious philosophical project, on par in scope to Kant's or Hegel's, forever developing and evolving but never receiving a definitive statement. So there's no book you can just start reading to find a cogent presentation of his considered view on anything. He still awaits an editor who can do him justice. But for my own part my best encounters with Peirce have come from following up citations in work influenced by him that I admire, which has mostly been in semiotic anthropology. This sounds like a niche subfield, but it has inherited from Peirce a huge scope of theoretical ambition that I think might be of some interest to a reader of Walker Percy (I'm thinking of _The Message in the Bottle_), which I think it would be fair to call, as Percy does, a theory of man as the speaking animal. I'd be happy to recommend some reading material should you ever want it!
R. Daniel Smith
2024-03-02 09:40:01 +0000 UTC“When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” - Eric Hoffer
Mark K
2024-03-01 00:05:03 +0000 UTCGreat episode. I had never encountered Girard before, but was surprised at how closely his thinking mirrors a paper I wrote in college about desire in literary accounts of character and subject formation. I'm more partial to the Marcusian and Lacanian accounts for a lot of the ground y'all covered but definitely want to explore his perspective more. Extra points for the fruitful Freudian slip analysis by Sam.
Dan L
2024-02-29 22:52:37 +0000 UTCI enjoyed the conversation but also found myself frustrated by it. I am not trained as a philosopher and have not read Girard. But I am skeptical of that the complexity of human existence can be reduced to, and explained by, some grand theory like mimetic desire and scapegoating. And Girard is not alone in this attempt to explain everything with a digestible theory that explains everything. Recently I read a review of a book by Costica Bradatan who argues that we live our lives fleeing from, or trying to make more bearable, the fact that we live next-to-nothingness, the nothing from which we come at the start of life and to which we go at the end of life. That idea may have some truth, but like Girard's theory, does it really explain everything or even all that much? I am a lawyer, and one thing you learn practicing law, is that any statute, regulation, or rule will fail eventually when applied because it can never cover all the circumstances in which might apply. You cannot write a statute, regulation, or rule that contains all possibilities that will arise without writing something incomprehensible and utterly useless in practice. An even better analogy might be attempts at all encompassing theories of statutory and constitutional interpretation like "originalism" and "textualism". Neither theory succeeds as a means to usefully interpret every text. So, as much as I enjoyed learning about Girard's theory and its appeal to conservatives, I wonder how much does Girard really tell us about our lives? There is comfort in thinking that life is reducible to a neat theory, and playing with that theory may be intellectually satisfying and even somewhat useful but ultimately, no theory can hold the complexity of human life.
Paul Smolinsky
2024-02-29 21:29:38 +0000 UTCOh boy, I *tried* to read and understand Peirce back in the day because he was a huge influence on Walker Percy. But I didn't have the chops tbh! (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-02-29 15:06:34 +0000 UTCAlso, Oedipus doesn’t simply die, he faces blindness and exile (the latter in some versions).
Michael
2024-02-29 00:02:27 +0000 UTCAha! Thank you for this, Nik. I wasn't thinking consciously of that passage, but I guess my frustration with incurious anti-moderns is never far from mind. I do think, to be fair, that it's worth asking what it is about modern life that prevents us from being curious, or that induces us to imagine the other (especially, perhaps, the political other) as a gormless dupe or rube. But as I said, I think the Freudians are better suited to answering that sort of question than is Girard. (-SAB)
Know Your Enemy
2024-02-28 22:18:10 +0000 UTCSam: I had to think of this part of your recent piece on George Scialabba: "If anti-modern anxieties are an irreducible feature of modernity, then perhaps we should say that “the modern” man or woman is not necessarily a conformist, a face in the crowd, incapable of independent thought, or disinterested in the higher pursuits of being…rather, he or she is someone who detects these frailties in everyone else. These moderns are defined by their doubts about the individuality of others, whom they dismiss as so many blinking cattle satisfied with meaningless little pleasures." (and echoing the end of this episode, you contrast this with the democratic virtue of curiosity about others). I don't think the left is immune from these tendencies (or that they're always negative) but am always struck by how often they emerge on the contemporary right. However hypocritically, Trump can sound like a real populist, but the intellectual wing of his movement can't seem to stop coming up with ways to write the majority of people off as brainwashed, NPCs, infected with the woke mind virus, or in this case acting out of mimetic desire. Maybe not a coincidence that it was Thiel's acolyte Blake Masters who managed to run a campaign so repellent that Mark Kelly of all people could get away with calling him a know-it-all on the debate stage. It's definitely one of those things that makes me return to Corey Robin's insistence on a weak right. Many more thoughts— a great episode.
Nik
2024-02-28 21:27:13 +0000 UTCMy sense is it’s a compelling puzzle for Girardians. Plato always insists on Socrates’ innocence against the judgment of the City, but Socrates appears more guilty elsewhere in the Greek canon, e.g. in Aristophanes (The Clouds). Girard has said, paradoxically, that the death of Socrates can’t reveal the scapegoat mechanism (at least not via Plato) precisely because the philosophers are never tempted by the mob, as even Jesus’s disciples are in the Gospels (e.g. Peter’s denial). But other Girardians see Socrates' death as the primal sacrifice for the founding Plato’s political philosophy, which is to replace deficient Athenian democracy. In conclusion: good question! (-SAB)
Know Your Enemy
2024-02-28 19:59:01 +0000 UTCThanks, Alec! We of course love the theory episodes too (perhaps too much!). Glad you enjoyed this one! (-SAB)
Know Your Enemy
2024-02-28 19:39:46 +0000 UTCThanks for the recommendation! I've been reading Alasdair MacIntyre who is ofc influenced by Thomas and Aristotle, but he draws concepts from them pretty intelligently (plus has a Marxist/Trotskyist undercurrent!) without being overly wedded to them.
DC
2024-02-28 17:53:36 +0000 UTCAwesome stuff. Also, am I the only one that thinks of all the luminary-modern genius relationships out there, the Girard-Thiel relationship seems to be among the most wantonly searching and self-serving? Probably because of growing up in a world where the Christian obligation to the meek has a lot of purchase, Thiel no doubt carries that inheritance too (and I think I've read that he considers himself Catholic?). This way out for him allows his ilk to assert a worldview with their wants at the center while leaning into and reconciling that which about Christianity seems contradictory to tech-genius oligarchy. Maybe Girard isn't the only route, but someone like Nietzsche doesn't always port well with a world steeped in Christian idiom, maybe requires embracing some things about the self that outright contradict it and/or sound really, really bad to fess up to, and maybe suggests including too many non-genius liberal whackos in the process. Intellectual justifications aside, it really seems Girard provides a reverse engineered justification for Thiel to be who he is -- profoundly mimetic, that.
Ryan Erickson
2024-02-28 14:28:37 +0000 UTCAccording to Xenophon, yes!
Unclear and Present Danger
2024-02-28 13:30:55 +0000 UTCThis is outstanding, you three. One of the best episodes in a while (though I am someone who comes to KYE with a strong interest in political theory, so this is right up my alley). It exemplifies the sympathetic yet critical way you treat so many of the authors and historical figures whose work you discuss. Reminds me why I am thankful to have found this show and why I am proud to be a Patreon supporter of it.
Alec Arellano
2024-02-28 06:11:10 +0000 UTCRandom historical note, perhaps inaccurately remembered from a Roman history class almost 20 years ago: "pontiff" comes from the old Roman title pontifex maximus for a high priest whose earliest title holders may have sacrificed people from a bridge over the Tiber, but over time, the real person was replaced by a straw man (a sort of scape goat) which would be ritually sacrificed instead. Now the pontiff doesn't even sacrifice a straw man, but instead worships, I suppose in Girardian terms, the scape goat.
DC
2024-02-28 05:32:43 +0000 UTCA small contribution: IMO the best candidate for America's greatest philosopher is not Dewey but Peirce!
R. Daniel Smith
2024-02-28 02:55:06 +0000 UTCWow loved this
Maurice Marion
2024-02-27 16:48:45 +0000 UTCI was unsatisfied with it too! We might do a bonus addressing some more Girard stuff at the start, probably adding some clarifications. (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2024-02-27 08:52:18 +0000 UTCThanks for this podcast: not only am I very interested in Girard (though equally leery of his totalizing tendencies) and the potential of Girardian theology for progressive Christianity, but I was also so glad to hear Matt dismiss Thomism, a particular bugbear of mine. I was unaware of its importance and potential to the right, however, so I feel I learned a lot here. A note on those totalizing tendencies, though: in the final chapters of THEATER OF ENVY, Girard interprets the later Shakespeare as coming to recognize that mimetic rivalry is neither inevitable nor all-encompassing, and that the assumption that it will be is itself one of the harmful permutations that comes from understanding mimesis too well. In this interpretation, Girard concedes that he has made the same error; I can't recall if Girard quite admits that not all desire is mimetic, but it did feel to me like Girard at least implies it.
Christian Hendriks
2024-02-27 05:00:06 +0000 UTCMimetic desire! Kittens have it. You tie your shoes and suddenly your shoelaces are something to chase. Grad students have it. You tell them what's important and they work on it.
David Gillman
2024-02-27 03:54:14 +0000 UTCIncredible episode! I would listen to the full unedited 2.5 hours of this.
Justin Kehoe
2024-02-27 02:51:05 +0000 UTCDamn, this was fantastic. Thanks, guys.
RZMZ
2024-02-27 02:24:05 +0000 UTCWouldn't Socrates have been an innocent scapegoat, via Plato, which is pre-Christian?
Rick Perlstein
2024-02-26 22:00:33 +0000 UTCAh I see. Probably would be a wise move for all of us, if I’m being honest. Cheers
Jon
2024-02-26 21:51:20 +0000 UTCHi Jon, I deactivated my Twitter for Lent! So it’s not permanent and I’ll be back before too long
mjs
2024-02-26 21:21:34 +0000 UTCAs someone who is not a Christian, I find Thomism vastly more interesting and compelling than anything by Rene Girard. Aristoteanism is still a perfectly valid lens by which to view the world, as is natural law. If you want an idea of what an updated Aristotelanism would look like, post-Darwin, I'd recommend Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature.
Casey
2024-02-26 19:47:24 +0000 UTCNot sure where else to ask this but did Matt delete is Twitter account? Can’t blame him give how the site has deteriorated but was looking for an old post and noticed today it looks like he’s not there anymore.
Jon
2024-02-26 19:46:22 +0000 UTCAs always, this episode was fantastic and insightful. For Matt though, I feel a bit unsatisfied by your response to the question about Soteriology and Girard’s take on Christ’s death. Do you think it works theologically on a more substantial level, or do you just find it an interesting detail or framing?
Zachary Roussie
2024-02-26 19:33:26 +0000 UTCNothing! Simply a mistake I intended to correct. Will correct. - SAB
Know Your Enemy
2024-02-26 18:01:44 +0000 UTCI wonder what reading Sam would make of his confusing Aristophanes with Sophocles at 0:39?
Tristan K. Husby
2024-02-26 17:59:17 +0000 UTC
