The Girard Reader Read Free

of assistant professor at Bryn Mawr
    from 1953 to 1957. From there he accepted a position as associate professor at Johns Hopkins
    University, becoming a full professor in 1961. He served as chair of the Department of
    Romance Languages from 1965 to 1968.
    It was early in this first Johns Hopkins period that he underwent a momentous spiritual
    change. In the winter of 1959 he experienced a conversion to Christian faith which had been
    preceded by a kind of intellectual conversion while he was working on his first book. These
    two conversions are described in the interview at the end of the Reader . 1.
    It was during his tenure as chairman of Romance Languages that he facilitated a symposium
    at Johns Hopkins which was to be important for the emergence of critical theory in America.
    With Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato he organized an international conference in
    October of 1966, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man." Participants
    included Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldman, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Lacan,
    Georges Poulet, Tsvetan Todorov, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and others. It was at this symposium
    that Derrida gave his widely read and cited paper, "La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le
    discours des sciences humaines" (Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human
    sciences) . This paper confirmed for Girard that Derrida was a critic to be reckoned with, and
    he found Derrida's subsequent essay "La pharmacie de Platon" ( Plato's pharmacy) to be particularly significant. Girard would develop the pharmakos or scapegoat aspect of Derrida's
    analysis of writing/poison, placing it within history and actual social existence rather than
    restricting it to language and intertextuality like Derrida.
    With his first two books, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Dostoievski: du double à l'unité ,
    2. G irard had rejected the literary retreat of the 1950s and early 1960s from concern with
    history, society, and the psyche. However, his first two books did not scandalize the
    intellectual world like his later writings, beginning with Things Hidden sincethe Foundation
    of the World
    ____________________
    1. See also Quand ces choses commenceront , 190-95, in the bibliography of Girard's
    writings.
    2. Scheduled to be published by Crossroad Publishing Co. in 1997 as Resurrection from the
    Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky , trans. James G. Williams.
    -2-
    the Foundation of the World. These initial works seemed to stay within a literary context and
    they focused on desire, which enjoyed a vogue by the 1960s. He analyzed the work of
    Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoyevsky in terms of "triangular" or "mimetic"
    desire: our desires are copied from models or mediators whose objects of desire become our
    objects of desire. But the model or mediator we imitate can become our rival if we desire
    precisely the object he is imagined to have. Or other imitators of the same model may
    compete with us for the same objects. Jealousy and envy are inevitably aroused in this
    mimetic situation. The romantic concept of a spontaneous desire is illusory.
    As he began to study primitive religions from the standpoint of the mimetic concept, he saw
    that mimesis usually led to collective violence against a single victim. He turned to the great
    Greek tragedians. Once the pharmakos idea took hold in his thinking, he became more and
    more convinced of the power and relevance of these dramatists, particularly Sophocles'
    Oedipus cycle and Euripides with his stunning exposure of mimetic violence in The Bacchae .
    He found fascinating Freud's insight in Totem and Taboo , although Freud turned violent
    origins into a onceand-for-all myth rather than understanding the scapegoat mechanism as a
    constant factor in human culture and human relations. The mimetic concept, extended to
    include the scapegoat mechanism and refined by the explication of The Bacchae and the
    critique of Freud: to grasp these developments