The Marxian Thesis about the role of violence in History, as it is enunciated in The Capital, is investigated through an analysis of the Hegelian character of its syntax, and the way Engels develops it; a non-teleological interpretation of the thesis is then defended, one that understands that violence presents a plurality of forms, a pervasive character and a heavy materiality.Trata-se de investigar a tese marxiana acerca do papel da violência na história, tal como enunciada em O Capital, analisando sua (...) sintaxe de matriz hegeliana e o modo como Engels articula tal tese, para então defender uma interpretação não-teleológica da violência, segundo a qual esta apresenta uma pluralidade de formas, um caráter totalmente difuso e uma pesada materialidade. (shrink)

"Girard fuses literary, psychological, and anthropological texts in order to view the activity of mimesis. This includes the phenomena of scapegoating, victimage, and sacrifice. They, in turn, serve as starting points for a breathtakingly daring and encompassing theory of the origins of human culture. In an era of interdisciplinary studies, this volume stands alone."--"Choice.".

This is the single fullest summation of the ideas of one of the most eminent and controversial cultural theorists of our time.

In his Violence and the Sacred, literary critic René Girard presented a bold thesis that revealed his increasing preoccupation with philosophical anthropology. There he claims that all societies are founded in violence that arises from unconscious imitation and subsequent rivalry. Sacred ritual is a means of avoiding, attenuating, or postponing this discord resulting from what he calls "mimetic appropriation." If his contentions in the earlier book seemed striking and original, their correlatives in the present volume are even more radical. In (...) it he adopts the dialogue form with interlocutors Oughourlian and Lefort; the text consists partly of edited transcriptions of their discussions and partly of inserted passages from Girard's writings. (shrink)

The reception of René Girard’s work in France deserves book-length treatment to fully describe the heated debates, conflicting expectations, and controversy that it inspired before its lasting importance was eventually recognized. We must keep in mind that, although he lived in the US and became a citizen in 1956, he always kept his sights on his native land. He watched the transformations of French thought from the other side of the ocean; he forged his own writing strategies in response to (...) French thought; and it was within the context of French debates that he chose to formulate, through the conjoined hypotheses concerning mimetic desire, the scapegoat, and Judeo-Christian writing, the founding event of his... (shrink)