From the Archives: Part 101 of The Self and its Sources

From a 1993 book on Joseph Goebbels by Ralf Reuth
An example of the collapse of transcendence.

From the Archives: Part 100 of The Self and its Sources

The opposition of the conceptions of the success and perfection of the self and the escatological vision of history. An example from late 20th century China, Mao worship.

From the Archives: Part 99 of The Self and its Sources

The search for meaning in history by viewing history as a long procession of magnificent human beings. A preoccupation with personality. (article by Helmut Koester in the Harvard Divinity Review - October 1985 Volume 78 Issue 3-4)
An alternative to an eschatological view, that history is moving in a direction.

From the Archives: Part 98 of the Self and its Sources

The search for a centering principle, ordering the identities of the characters of the novel.

From the Archives: Part 97 of The Self and its Sources

Imitation: positive or negative. The relation to the mediator

From the Archives: Part 96 of The Self and its Sources

The madness of self-creation vis a vis the ‘other’. Girard: “It is the effort to leave the beaten path which forces everyone inevitably into the same ditch.”

From the Archives: Part 95 of The Self and its Sources

The story telling that takes place without a meta-narrative is designed to obliterate the one true story. Bernard, “I, who am always distracted, always make up a story and so obliterate the angles of the crucifix.”

From the Archives: Part 94 of The Self and its Sources

Over the course of Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, the internal monologues of the characters become shorter, and it becomes harder to distinguish who is speaking. In the end, only Bernard’s character remains speaking. He tries to sum up the story of the novel: “There are so many stories, stories of childhood, love, marriage and death; and none of them are true.

The agenda of literary or philosophical deconstruction: to rid ourselves of metanarratives – a story that operates as an interpretive key to all other stories. To rid ourselves of the idea that there could be one true story to which all the other stories relate and derive their meaning.

A René Girard Christmas Card...

Courtesy of National Review Online - Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson...


Every Christmas since the 2009 Peter Robinson interview with René Girard was first aired we have featured this excerpt. Like most of Girard's works, it only becomes more meaningful and moving with the passing of time. It is especially touching to see one of the preeminent scholars of our age comment on the nativity narratives in Luke with such gentle humility. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to René, not only for his extraordinarily insightful scholarly work, but perhaps even more for his friendship over many years and for the kindness and encouragement that he and his wife Martha have extended to us. René will celebrate his 90th birthday on Christmas Day, and we wish him our heartfelt best wishes. 

From the Archives: Part 93 of The Self and its Sources

Resentment: the disease of the modern age, continued.

From the Archives: Part 92 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf portrays a more advanced stage of the ‘disease’ that Dostoyevsky depicts in the character of the “underground man”. Nietzsche incorrectly saw Christianity as the source of the modern world’s resentments – when in fact the resentments are the source of mimetic entanglements. Christianity censured the taking of revenge. It is this prohibition that Nietzsche rejects. To the extent that people refuse the Christian call to conversion and repentance that can change the human heart and yet still renounce revenge, there will be resentments.

From the Archives: Part 91 of The Self and its Sources

Nietzsche’s “madman” & Dostoyevsky’s “underground man” – are reflected in the metaphorical prelude to the last section of the novel.

From the Archives: Part 90 of The Self and its Sources

The stigmata of mimetic entanglements; its bodily effects. The search for a non-sacrificial way to experience transcendence.

From the Archives: Part 89 of The Self and its Sources

Faith of any kind has mimetic consequences. St. John of the Cross: Love creates a likeness between that which loves and that which is loved.

From the Archives: Part 88 of The Self and its Sources

The vanishing of transcendence is like the depletion of the Ozone layer: the ozone layer is thinned, nobody notices it and yet people begin to develop skin cancer. The lack of transcendence will not keep us from being religious; it will only make us idol worshipers.

From the Archives: Part 87 of The Self and its Sources

The novel “The Waves” as a prayer book on transcendence: vertical and deviated transcendence. However, the prayers of these characters are all addressed to each other.

From the Archives: Part 86 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard, speaking of a possible religious ‘way out’ of the crisis:

“I, who am always distracted, at once make up a story and so obliterate the angles of the crucifix. I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all the phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story.”

From the Archives: Part 85 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf’s voice in the novel: Bernard -

“He joined the sensibility of a woman and the logical sobriety of a man…” “When I am alone I fall into lethargy; when Lewis is alone he sees with astonishing intensity and will write some words that will outlast us all.”

The solution to the mimetic crisis can only be religious; can only be found in true transcendence.

From the Archives: Part 84 of The Self and its Sources

TS Eliot haunts the novel as the focus of a negative imitation.

From the Archives: Part 83 of The Self and its Sources

Detachment, repose, composure

From the Archives: Part 82 of The Self and its Sources

The 'satellites' of Percival: attracted to his ‘monolithic gigantic repose’
Dandyism: striking the pose of being the one who doesn’t care about what others think. You must not look into the lens…

From the Archives: Part 81 of The Self and its Sources

Echoes of the poetry of TS Eliot in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”...and Robert Hughes comments on Andy Warhol.
In Warhol’s world the hunger for approval and forgiveness was satisfied by publicity.

From the Archives: Part 80 of The Self and its Sources

Using sexuality as a semblance of transcendence will inevitably tend toward violence.
The image of the nightingale – in mythology it is the transformed victim of rape.

From the Archives: Part 79 of The Self and its Sources

Paul Tillich: “Personality is impossible without faith.”
Denis De Rougemont: there are two religions vying for ascendancy in the west, Christianity and passionate romance.
Sexuality simulating transcendence

From the Archives: Part 78 of The Self and its Sources

The hysteria of trying to define oneself vis a vis others.
Our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.

From the Archives: Part 77 of The Self and its Sources

Percival – the center of everyone’s attention. The others are like soldiers in the presence of their captain..
Order and disorder: Like the rays around a star in the middle of a smashed window pane
The need for order is also the need for transcendence, whether true transcendence oriented toward God – or false (deviated) transcendence oriented toward someone human, idolatry

From the Archives: Part 76 of The Self and its Sources

St Paul: “I live now, but no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”
Everybody is somebody’s fool. Whose fool are you?

From the Archives: Part 75 of The Self and its Sources

Read the Bible until it takes root in you. The only alternative to prayer is madness

From the Archives: Part 74 of The Self and its Sources

The myth of the spontaneous origin of desire.

From the Archives: Part 73 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard’s and Neville’s attempts to stabilize their selves.
Influence from Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’

From the Archives: Part 72 of The Self and its Sources

Rhoda says, “I have no end in view”, “I have nobody to follow”, “I have no face”. She yearns for ‘lodgment’.

St. Augustine’s phrase, “...we are restless until we rest in God”

From the Archives: Part 71 of The Self and its Sources

The image of the open door - the possibility of an escape from the current crisis.

From the Archives: Part 70 of The Self and its Sources

The image of the ‘drop’ as a picture of the instability of the self. It begins to swell until its weight causes it to fall. The characters transition from one crisis to another.

From the Archives: Part 69 of The Self and its Sources

From this point on all the characters in the novel are trying to deal with their instability.

The sacrament of marriage

From the Archives: Part 68 of The Self and its Sources

The characters in Virginia Woolf's novel "The Waves" are now older – “the sun risen bared its face and looked over the waves…they fell with a regular thud.”

The disintegration of the self.

From the Archives: Part 67 of The Self and its Sources

Girard’s sources & precursors: Homer, Shakespeare, novels, the Bible

György Lukács' essay: ‘Ideology of Modernism’

Bronislaw Malinovski: Desire and counter desire

From the Archives: Part 66 of The Self and its Sources

Mirrors...I have no face

From the Archives: Part 65 of The Self and its Sources

The Sun rose...the fixation on Percival.

From the Archives: Part 64 of The Self and its Sources

The brute menaces my liberty when he prays…

From the Archives: Part 63 of The Self and its Sources

Deconstruction: To extricate ourselves from the past is a bourgeois idea of liberty that is still very much at work in modern theory. Simone Weil had a hunger for determination

From the Archives: Part 62 of The Self and its Source

The scene of the boys entering the school chapel: Lewis (the T S Eliot character) in procession, rejoices.

From the Archives: Part 61 of The Self and its Sources

Negative imitation: a way of showing that we are not imitators.

From the Archives: Part 60 of The Self and its Sources

Composure (continued)…

The ‘Möbius strip’ of mimetic contagion

From the Archives: Part 59 of The Self and its Sources

The wave as a gesture of departure - leaving the past (childhood) behind and moving into the future diaspora.

Composure: How to be in the presence of others without being drawn into mimetic entanglements.

From the Archives: Part 58 of The Self and its Sources

The Biblical image of ‘pairs’ or doubles: e.g. Adam & Eve, Cain & Able

From the Archives: Part 57 of The Self and its Sources

The consequences of this mimetic drama begin spreading like ripples on water...like waves.

"Abortion has been called 'atheism in action;' contraception, the doorway to abortion, should be called 'the denial of Divine Providence in action." - Anne Barbeau Gardiner, Professor Emerita, John Jay College of the City University of New York.

From the Archives: Part 56 of The Self and its Sources

The children are in the garden. The plot begins with one spontaneous expression of desire, Jinny comes dashing by and kisses Lewis…, which sets the whole mimetic dynamic in motion. This event is surreptitiously viewed by Susan. The Fall...

From the Archives: Part 55 of the Self and its Sources

The mimetic chirping of the birds…

From the Archives: Part 54 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf introduces each section of the novel with an italizied phrase referring to the position of the sun in the sky. Section one: "The sun had not quite risen; the sea and sky were indistinguishable." Mythological imagery. The sun comes up…its light striking the leaves in the garden making them transparent.

From the Archives: Part 53 of The Self and its Sources

The dramatis personae of the Waves. The story is comprised of a series of internal monologs of a strange kind. The more you know about a character’s internal life it seems the more undifferentiated they appear to every other character.

From the Archives: Part 52 of The Self and its Sources

"The Moths" or "The Waves" – alternative titles to novel.

The moth drawn to the flame; drawn to the light but not so close as to be destroyed. The Waves – crashing on the shore, one following the other in endless repetition.

From the Archives: Part 51 of The Self and its Sources

Raising the coefficient of illusion to the next power.

From the Archives: Part 50 of The Self and its Sources

A short overview of Virginia Woolf’s life and the Bloomsbury group. Her novel, the Waves, provides an insight into the social and psychological drama of the modern world. It is based on the experience largely that she had while at the center of this literary circle called the Bloomsbury group.

From the Archives: Part 49 of The Self and its Sources

Among the symptoms of the demise of systems of sacred transcendence: failure to comprehend the modern crisis, failure to appreciate the Biblical role in the cause and cure for this crisis.
René Girard discovered this process by reading novels.

From the Archives: Part 48 of The Self and its Sources

Simone Weil:

“Wherever the virtue of supernatural light is absent everything is obedient to mechanical laws as blind and exact as the laws of gravitation.”

From the Archives: Part 47 of The Self and its Sources

Max Picard notices about the modern world, that the first person pronoun is overused.

From the Archives: Part 46 of The Self and its Sources

Gabriel Marcel: “The subordination of the self to a superior reality, a reality at my deepest level more truly me than I am myself”.

In an introduction to Max Picard’s The Flight from God (now out of print), Gabriel Marcel says Picard is "among the few who appear capable of redirecting the thinking elite toward an awakening of reason, without which it is impossible not to despair of mankind.

From the Archives: Part 45 of The Self and its Sources

There is a mystery about identity that goes to the heart of personality itself.

Personality is not possible without faith

– Paul Tillich

The only true self is the converted self

– Renè Girard

From the Archives: Part 44 of The Self and its Sources

Continuation of a contemporary example of the novel as autopsy: Avant-garde and madness

“When I came to know her better, I thought of her as a new disease…”

From the Archives: Part 43 of The Self and its Sources

A contemporary example of the novel as autopsy: Avant-garde and madness

From the Archives: Part 42 of The Self and its Sources

The imperative of the novel is autopsy....it is documenting a slow death.

From the Archives: Part 41 of The Self and its Sources

The novel has run out of subjects…it has lost its subjectivity.

From the Archives: Part 40 of The Self and its Sources

The novel is a chronicle of the collapse of transcendence in the modern world and the rise of internal mediation.
Ortega y Gasset:

“When we are fascinated by a novel it is not because we a curious to know what happened to Mr. So-and –So. The subject of any novel can be told in a few words and in this form holds no interest. We want the novelist to linger and to grant us good long looks at his personages, their being and their environment until we have had our fill. The interest in the outer mechanisms of the plot is today reduced to a minimum. All the better. The novel must now revolve around the superior interest emanating from the inner mechanism of the personages.”

From the Archives: Part 39 of The Self and its Sources

Caiaphas: “It is better that one should die than the whole nation be destroyed” - the economy of violence in the old sacred system. Primitive religion was indeed the opiate of the people…

From the Archives: Part 38 of The Self and its Sources

The social leveling which is the inevitable product of the Biblical revelation can only take place without catastrophe in a world that has discovered another way of experiencing transcendence. This is why the "Greatest Commandment" - to love the Lord your God with all you heart, soul, and mind - is so essential. A graphic example from the French Revolution.

From the Archives: Part 37 of The Self and its Sources

The crisis of distinction or the crisis of degree: From Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida Act 1, Scene 3...the speech of Ulysses: “Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows!”

Pascal: Whom shall we choose as ruler of the state…?

From the Archives: Part 36 of The Self and its Sources

Is this about the ‘novel’ or anthropology? The imitator and the model: Girard's concept of 'internal' vs 'external' mediation. This is exemplified in Shakespeare & Cevantes who were late 16th century contemporaries. Every Shakespeare play deals with, in some way, what Kierkegaard described concerning resentment. Cf. speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida

From the Archives: Part 35 of The Self and its Sources

Sacrality is on the wane…and with it transcendence itself. Fascination is now only with the human order. But as the Hebrew prophets knew so well…we will either worship God or we will create idols. We will have an object of ultimate concern – the only question is, ‘who will it be?’ Kierkegaard announces the beginning of this process in the mid-nineteenth century: Resentment is the constituent principle of the modern age. “Resentment happens when the world moves from the happy love of admiration to the unhappy love of envy”.

From the Archives: Part 34 of The Self and its Sources

Kingship participated in the distinction between the sacred and the profane. The old sacred system is compromised by the effects of the Gospel. The novel as an early symptom of modernity reflects these effects.

From the Archives: Part 33 of The Self and its Sources

Anthropological field studies of kingship…continued: Affection for the king?

From the Archives: Part 32 of The Self and its Sources

Anthropological field studies of kingship…continued. Kingship is an extended sacrificial ritual…the king is the victim with an extended sentence.

From the Archives: Part 31 of The Self and its Sources

The sacred system comes into being when the crowd gathers around the corpse of the victim.
All cultural structures are generated from that event. And one can read the traces of that event in cultural aftereffects. An anthropological case study from equatorial Africa.

From the Archives: Part 30 of The Self and its Sources

Rudolf Otto: experience of the primitive sacred – ‘awe’ and ‘awful’ – religious dread, the primary emotion that attended the discovery of religion.
Our ancestors were religious not because they were pious but because they were terrified. An example from the Aztec story of Tezcatlipoca

From the Archives: Part 29 of The Self and its Sources

The Ancient City (Fustel de Coulanges): the origin of religion – looking at the ‘dead’ - the first mystery
The Idea of the Holy (Rudolf Otto)

From the Archives: Part 28 of The Self and its Sources

Is there nothing sacred? A transformation from the primitive sacred to the sacramental.

From the Archives: Part 27 of The Self and its Sources

Is there another way of experiencing transcendence, as an 'ultimate concern' outside the social order?

From the Archives: Part 26 of The Self and its Sources

Sacrificial structures prior to the cross of Christ provided a way for human culture to regenerate itself.

Paul Tillich’s – 'ultimate concern'.

From the Archives: Part 25 of The Self and its Sources

The centrality of the cross as seen anthropologically.

From the Archives: Part 24 of The Self and its Sources

The greatest commandment: love the Lord your God with all your heart…

From the Archives: Part 23 of The Self and its Sources

Self and Soul

From the Archives: Part 22 of The Self and its Sources

Martin Buber: prayer and sacrifice.

From the Archives: Part 21 of The Self and its Sources

The modern self exists because it inhabits a world lacking transcendence.

From the Archives: Part 20 of The Self and its Sources

The world that shaped the novel is dying and the novel is dying with it.

Pascal:

“We are not satisfied with the life we have in our selves and in our being; we want to live an imaginary life in the eyes of others. “ So, we try to make an ‘impression’.

From the Archives: Part 19 of the Self and its Sources

The ontological disease - continued: Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground Man’

Levi’s ad:

“I’m not trying to be noticed…but I won’t be ignored”

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 18

The ontological disease as exemplified by the character Hap Loman in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman".

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 17

Mimetic Desire: 'internal' versus 'external' mediation

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 16

Sacrifical violence transcendentalizes desire.
The revelation of the truth about the sacrificial structures of human culture is found in the story of the crucifixion of Jesus

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 15

A biblical echo of sacred transcendence in Numbers 25 - the righteous sacrificial act of Phinehas

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 14

How does this sacred transcendence come about?
An example from Aztec myth.
Is there another way to create transcendence?

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 13

Examples of images of fanciful prestige that keep humans from slaughtering each other.

Lord of the Flies: British officer as representative of the sacrificial system - a form of transcendence.

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 12

Democracy as the myth of the death of kings (Charles I and Louis XVI).
Plato: let no one disturb the small stone that separates friendship and enmity.
Prestige: those illusions that kept us from slaughtering one another.
The Caiaphas principle: it is better that one should die than the whole nation be destroyed.

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 11

The main story of human culture – culture’s ‘plot’

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 10

More definitions of "plot": the main story.
Myth (an operative fiction with its fictionality suppressed).
Western skepticism and the scientific spirit have a moral core.
Plot: a secret plan or scheme.

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 9

Sacrifice at the heart of the central monument of western culture. The ancient Greeks as “equal opportunity victimizers”?
The plot is where the sacrificial victim is buried.
The cosmos and the corpse come into being at the same instant.

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 8

A new interpretation of the Parthenon frieze.

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 7

Plot – the ground plan of a building - Mircea Eliade: a New Guinea ritual

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 6

Ancient historic background of the word ‘plot’ as a measured piece of land - the sacrality of the terminus.

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 5

Ancient Roman practice of demarcating a plot of land.

From the Archives: The Self and its Sources Part 4

The source of primitive people’s attention. The tended plot of ground, a garden and a grave - the site of sacrality.