René Girard

René Noël Théophile Girard (1923–2015)

French-American literary critic, anthropologist and philosopher of religion; professor at Stanford from 1981 and a member of the Académie française from 2005. He is known for mimetic theory: desire is borrowed from a model rather than being autonomous, the rivalry it produces drives collective violence, and archaic societies discharged that violence through a scapegoat mechanism which he read the Gospels as exposing. Michel Serres, replying to his reception speech in 2005, called him 'the new Darwin of the human sciences' — a superlative recorded here as Serres's, spoken in a ceremony of praise.[3] [4] [5] [9] [11] [12] [13] [18] [7]

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Life and works

YearEvent
25 December 1923Born in Avignon as René Noël Théophile Girard, son of Joseph Girard (1881–1962), archiviste-paléographe of the École nationale des chartes, curator of the Musée Calvet from 1906 to 1949 and thereafter of the Palais des Papes, and of Marie-Thérèse de Loye Fabre (1893–1967). The birth date is one of the few points on which every source consulted agrees: the Académie française, Britannica, the IEP, COV&R and Stanford's own memorial resolution all give it.[5] [3] [4] [9] [11]
1947–1953Graduates from the École nationale des chartes in 1947 as archiviste-paléographe, with a thesis on private life in Avignon in the second half of the fifteenth century; emigrates to the United States the same year and teaches at Indiana University Bloomington until 1953, taking a doctorate in history there in 1950 with a dissertation on American opinion of France, 1940–1943. The year he entered the École des chartes is given by no source consulted here and is left unstated rather than guessed; the school's published Positions des thèses for 1947 would settle it.[11] [12] [3]
1951Marries Martha McCullough; three children follow, Martin, Daniel and Mary. The year is disputed and is recorded rather than resolved: Britannica gives 1951, and Stanford Magazine's 'sixty-four years of marriage' counted back from his death agrees with it, while Wikipedia gives 1952. 1951 is the date used here.[4] [12] [8]
1953–1957 ≈Teaches at Duke University and then at Bryn Mawr College. The sources do not divide the window consistently between the two, so it is given as one approximate span rather than split into two dated appointments.[3] [11]
1957–1968First period at Johns Hopkins, where he is made full professor in 1961. He held two Guggenheim Fellowships: COV&R and the Académie française both describe him as a two-time fellow, but neither names the years. The years 1959 and 1966 circulate from Wikipedia and are confirmed by neither, so they are carried here as unverified rather than stated.[13] [11] [9] [5]
Autumn 1958 – Lent 1959 ≈The conversion, narrated here as his own account rather than as an established chronology. Girard told interviewers that an 'intellectual conversion' came in the autumn of 1958, while he was writing the twelfth chapter of his first book, accompanied by quasi-mystical experiences on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and that he rewrote the book's conclusion afterwards; a religious conversion followed during Lent 1959 and was sealed when a melanoma scare was cleared on Holy Wednesday, which in 1959 fell on 25 March. The reference works decline to date any of it: Britannica and the IEP say only that he converted while reading Dostoevsky, without a year, and Wikipedia offers 'c. 1959–1961'. The dates here come from his own interviews and from Cynthia Haven's biography, which itself rests on his retelling.[19] [20] [18] [4] [3]
1961Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Grasset), the book that introduced mimetic desire through readings of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky. The English translation by Yvonne Freccero, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, appeared from the Johns Hopkins Press in 1965 — the date in the publisher's own catalogue and in library records. Stanford Magazine and Wikipedia give 1966; 1965 is used here.[16] [3] [12]
18–21 October 1966'The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man', the Johns Hopkins symposium Girard convened with Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato to introduce French structuralism to American universities. Girard issued the invitations, among them to Jacques Lacan and to Jacques Derrida, whose paper 'La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines' was delivered on 21 October 1966 and is conventionally dated as the arrival of post-structuralism in America — at a conference convened to promote structuralism. The proceedings appeared in 1970 as The Structuralist Controversy, and the symposium audio was digitised by the Sheridan Libraries in 2023.[14] [15]
1968–1976 ≈At the State University of New York at Buffalo. The span is not agreed: the widely copied account has him holding a distinguished professorship from 1971, and other accounts close the period in 1975. It is recorded as an approximate span with the disagreement left standing.[3] [13] [11]
1972La Violence et le sacré (Grasset), which took a prize of the Académie française; the English Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory, followed from Johns Hopkins University Press in 1977. It is the book that carried the scapegoat mechanism out of literary criticism and into anthropology and the study of religion, and the one on which the disciplinary objections to his method concentrate.[5] [3] [4]
1976–1981Returns to Johns Hopkins as John M. Beall Professor of the Humanities. In 1978 he publishes Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Grasset), a book-length dialogue with the psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort in which the reading of the Gospels as the disclosure of the victim mechanism is set out; the English Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World appeared from Stanford University Press in 1987.[13] [11] [3]
1981–1995At Stanford as the inaugural Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, until his retirement as emeritus in 1995. Stanford's memorial resolution dates the appointment to 1981 and rene-girard.fr to 1980; the university's own record is followed here. The books of these years are Le Bouc émissaire (1982; English The Scapegoat, Johns Hopkins, 1986, trans. Freccero) and La Route antique des hommes pervers (1985; English Job, the Victim of His People, 1987).[11] [13] [3] [12]
1990Two foundings in one year. In March the Colloquium on Violence & Religion is established at Stanford by James Williams, Charles Mabee and Robert Hamerton-Kelly; it is formally constituted in 1991 with Girard as honorary chair, Raymund Schwager as president and Wolfgang Palaver editing its bulletin, and it publishes the journal Contagion — the association's own account of its beginnings is the only detailed one, and is written from inside. The same year Shakespeare : les feux de l'envie (Grasset), written in English but published in French first, takes the Prix Médicis essai. The publisher's record dates the prize 1990 and Wikipedia 1991; 1990 is used here. The English A Theater of Envy followed from Oxford University Press in 1991.[10] [17] [9]
1999–2004Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair (1999; English I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Orbis, 2001), the most directly theological of the books, and Les Origines de la culture (2004), a set of interviews which took the Prix Aujourd'hui.[3] [5]
17–18 November 2000The Rio de Janeiro visit — the point at which this chronology's two subjects meet, and attested only through the Olavo de Carvalho network. A lecture and round table at the auditorium of the Faculdade da Cidade / UniverCidade on 17 November, and an interview at the Hotel Glória the next day, conducted by Pedro Sette Câmara and Alvaro Velloso de Carvalho with Olavo de Carvalho taking part, published on 19 November 2000. No independent Brazilian press record of the visit was found in Folha, Estadão, O Globo or the Jornal do Brasil; olavodecarvalho.org now serves a parked retail template and oindividuo.com returns 503, and the Internet Archive's availability API answered 429 to every request from this session, so no snapshot of either page could be checked in either direction. The only reachable text is an unattributed blog reproduction. Olavo refers to the meeting in the COF transcriptions — aula 18, 18 August 2009, a reviewed file: 'Quando o René Girard esteve no Rio de Janeiro, eu lhe perguntei isso' — which corroborates that a meeting took place but is itself part of the same network. Recorded as attributed, not as established.[24] [25] [26] [1]
2005Elected to the Académie française on 17 March 2005 to fauteuil 37, succeeding the Dominican Ambroise-Marie Carré, on the sponsorship of Jacqueline de Romilly and Marc Fumaroli; received under the Coupole on 15 December 2005, with the reply delivered by Michel Serres. Serres's speech is the origin of the tag 'the new Darwin of the human sciences' — his phrase, in a ceremony whose genre is praise, and not a judgement this page makes. The reception is sometimes dated 2006; the Académie's own notice puts it on 15 December 2005.[5] [6] [7]
2006–2008Honours, a last book and an institution. The Dr Leopold Lucas Prize (Tübingen) in 2006 and the Modern Language Association's Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement in 2008, alongside honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1985), UFSIA Antwerp (1995), Padua (2001), Montréal (2004) and St Andrews (2008), and the Légion d'honneur as chevalier. In October 2007 Achever Clausewitz, his book-length conversation with Benoît Chantre, appeared from Carnets Nord; the English Battling to the End is dated 2009 in Stanford's obituary and 2010 by Stanford Magazine, and that discrepancy is left open here. 2007 is also the year Imitatio was founded to fund and propagate mimetic theory — a project of Peter Thiel's Thiel Foundation, set up with Robert Hamerton-Kelly, recorded here from a third-party account rather than from Imitatio's own.[5] [21] [23] [22] [12]
4 November 2015Dies at his home on the Stanford campus, aged 91; the Académie française posted its death notice the next day. He was survived by Martha and their three children, and Stanford held a memorial on 19 January 2016. The standard obituaries — the Stanford Report of 4 November 2015, Quentin Hardy in the New York Times of 11 November 2015 and Jean Birnbaum in Le Monde of 5 November 2015 — exist but were unreachable from this session (Cloudflare, 403 and a paywall respectively), and are therefore not cited.[8] [5] [11] [12]

Reception in the COF

Present in 12 of the 589 transcription files of the Curso Online de Filosofia; 2 lectures engage him substantially (5 or more mentions). The most engaged lectures:

This section documents what Olavo said and when — never what the philosopher "really" meant. Characterizations are Olavo’s, tied to a lecture by number and date.

Lecture (aula)DateMentions
142009-07-118
182009-08-186
362009-12-124
942011-02-122
332009-11-211
352009-12-051
372009-12-191
1632012-07-141
2422014-03-151
2432014-03-221
507—1
532—1

A dash in the date column means the transcription file carries no verified date — an undated file, not an undated lecture. Counts are accent-insensitive, word-boundary matches over the public community transcription corpus.[1] [2]

References

  1. COF — community transcriptions of the Curso Online de Filosofia (585 lectures) — Community transcription repository (upstream declares CC0 for the transcription work; the lectures remain the estate's)
  2. COF em Áudio — lecture audio collection — Internet Archive (community upload)
  3. René Girard (1923—2015) — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  4. René Girard — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  5. René Girard — les immortels, fauteuil 37 — Académie française
  6. Réception de M. René Girard (15 décembre 2005) — Académie française
  7. Discours de réception de M. René Girard et réponse de M. Michel Serres — Académie française
  8. Décès de M. René Girard (5 novembre 2015) — Académie française
  9. René Girard — Colloquium on Violence & Religion (COV&R)
  10. The History of COV&R — Colloquium on Violence & Religion (COV&R)
  11. Memorial Resolution for René Girard (Stanford University Faculty Senate) — Stanford University Faculty Senate, reproduced on Cosmos the in Lost (Patheos)
  12. Eminent Theorist (René Girard) — Stanford Magazine (Stanford Alumni Association)
  13. Biographie de René Girard — Association Recherches Mimétiques (French association devoted to his work — sympathetic perspective)
  14. The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man symposium, 18–21 October 1966 — repository item record — JScholarship, Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries
  15. Johns Hopkins humanities conference that changed the field turns 50 (22 March 2016) — The Hub, Johns Hopkins University
  16. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure — catalogue record — Johns Hopkins University Press / Hopkins Fulfillment Services
  17. Shakespeare : les feux de l'envie — fiche éditeur — Éditions Grasset
  18. Cynthia L. Haven, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (Michigan State University Press, 2018) — Michigan State University Press
  19. René Girard, Quand ces choses commenceront… Entretiens avec Michel Treguer (Arléa, 1994) — Éditions Arléa
  20. The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (Crossroad, 1996), including the interview 'The Anthropology of the Cross' — Crossroad Publishing / WorldCat record
  21. Compte rendu : René Girard, Achever Clausewitz (Carnets Nord, 2007) — Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses (Persée)
  22. Imitatio — mimetic theory programme — Imitatio, a project of the Thiel Foundation
  23. The Thiel Foundation — InfluenceWatch, Capital Research Center (right-of-center watchdog — labeled as such)
  24. Olavo de Carvalho, 'René Girard e a coletividade homicida' — olavodecarvalho.org (the subject's own site)
  25. Entrevista com René Girard, Hotel Glória, Rio de Janeiro, 18 de novembro de 2000 (publicada em 19/11/2000) — O Indivíduo (Olavo de Carvalho's circle — interviewers Pedro Sette Câmara and Alvaro Velloso de Carvalho, with Olavo de Carvalho taking part)
  26. Reprodução da entrevista de René Girard no Rio de Janeiro (26 de janeiro de 2007) — elienaijr.wordpress.com (personal blog — unattributed reproduction)