Holy shit is there anyone more tedious than Girard? >just throw out everything except the Gospels and DostoevskyGive this man a new religion to study and within five minutes he is already suspicious that all its adherents are murderers. Does everything really have to be about 'mimetic rivalry'? Does this really explain anything? >its all just mimetic escalation and bloody scapegoatsWell, I guess that's all there is to it, there's no mystery, our ancestors just killed a bunch of animals for no good reason. All you need to do is read about the Karamazov brothers and follow Christ and you're covered. The Upanishads? They were killing animals because they envied one another, obviously. Behold, the explanatory power of the Girardian gospel!Seriously what the fuck was his problem?
>>25319968>All you need to do is read about the Karamazov brothers and follow Christ and you're coveredOh, and Sophocles, but pretty much, yeah.
>>25319968In France, you get to have a whole academic career if you can invent one concept
>>25319968 Girard is tedious to read. I grant you that. But dismissing him because he found one mechanism that explains an enormous amount of human behavior is like dismissing Darwin because everything becomes natural selection. The scapegoat mechanism is real. Read the Bacchae. Read Oedipus. Read the Passion. The same pattern: collective violence against a singled-out victim restores social order. The difference is that the Gospels tell the story from the victim's perspective and reveal the innocence of the scapegoat. Every other founding myth hides the murder. Christianity exposes it. That is Girard's argument. Girard was a Catholic convert, by the way. He came to faith through Dostoevsky and the Gospels, not through apologetics. His anthropology of the cross is the most original Catholic contribution to the study of religion in the last century. Read Violence and the Sacred. Read I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. He is tedious but he is right.
