"A synthetic theorist with a singular idée fixe, a grand pattern that he could not help but see inscribed and repeated everywhere in human culture." — a summary of Girard
"There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid."
In the late 1950s, a French historian teaching at Indiana was assigned, somewhat against his preparation, a course on the European novel. He read Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust, and saw something no critic had seen: they were all, fundamentally, writing about the same thing. Desire, in all of them, was never spontaneous; it was borrowed from someone else, "mimetic." From this, René Girard (1923-2015) spent the next sixty years unfolding a theory of everything: desire is imitation, imitation breeds rivalry, rivalry breeds contagious violence, and culture itself was founded, at the beginning of the world, on the mechanism that discharges that violence — the collective murder of an innocent scapegoat, concealed ever after by the myths the murderers wrote. Anthropology, ritual, kingship, tragedy, psychoanalysis, the Gospels, and finally the trajectory of modern history were annexed, decade by decade, into a whole global stucture. He was more of a "Ni-Ti" type, however the humanitarian IEI component was the strongest in him, albeit with strengthening of additional analytical and static Ti (maybe if you add a touch of SHS school approach without being a full adherent of it (aka "Gooler") you can interpret it as an accent on LSI.)
I have to confess, that while the thesis is intriguing and perfectly legible, reading it is a bit mind-numbing, because the theory cannot really be tested. In this, it's more like a poetry or a mystical vision of its own, rather than a scientific hypothesis. Myths, Girard holds, are persecution documents written by the persecutors, which conceal the founding murder; therefore a myth exhibiting no scapegoat is not a counterexample but a better concealment (some conspiratoid thinking patterns here). This system was, aafter initial insight, never revised in its core across six decades, and was held with something approaching the seer's serene certainty. It is the register of the intuition of time, not of structural logic. The LII general-systematic accent simply supplied the scaffolding to a humanitarian vision of the scapegoat victim being blamed for the society's conflict.
Girard's data were novels ("the great modern novelists," he insisted, "have understood human psychology better than the modern field of Psychology does"). Its deepest concepts are the human feelings of envy and persecution. Even his quarrel with the age was humanitarian in form: at the famous 1966 Hopkins symposium he himself co-organized, he was already diverging from the whole of French Theory, rejecting its formalism for a theory of real desiring persons in real rivalrous relation.
The hinge of Girard's entire cosmology is the victim — and here the IEI type shows itself the most plainly: the innocent one on whom the crowd converges, whose murder founds the city, whose concealment is culture, and whose revelation is, for Girard, the axis on which world history turns. Girard's fundamental scene is innocence suffering at the hands of the unanimous many, and it was perceived with such intensity that he rebuilt the whole human story around it. It's the Beta-NF sensibility which puts the victim, not the inventor, the compassionate self-sacrificer — the victim's participation in his narrative is forced, not freely chosen — or the conqueror, as other types would do, at the foundation of the world and human psychology.
The theory's content is quite dark: culture as concealed homicide. Girard, however, was explicitly hopeful: Christianity, on his reading, is not one myth among many but the unmasking of all myth — the first telling of the founding scene from the victim's side, which forever discredits the scapegoat solution and opens the one exit: the renunciation of rivalry, the imitation of a model who cannot become a rival. "The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence." And yes, here the compassionate self-sacrificer finally enters the scene. The late books speak frankly in the eschatological register. Such combination of "victimity" and ultimate positive vision is a good example of Ni-style "positivism" — and, weak as this dichotomy is for the type, IEI is a positivist.
The LII accent supplied the systematic "grammar of sacred violence" that lets the insight be taught, and the aspiration to scientific standing that led admirers to call him the Darwin of the human sciences. Even in manner he was a patient professor, elaborating the doctrine in calm prose while the movements raged elsewhere. Still, his formal structures served his dream.
After his death, his theory gained an unexpected revival not only because many social media trends seem to show exactly the kind of "mimetic rivalry" he described, but due to prominent right-wing sponsors (Peter Thiel, who was a student of Girard at Stanford) and politicians (JD Vance) claiming to be influenced by him. How right-wing Gerard was is debatable. He didn't like post-modernists and social-constructivists, but his theory lacks an obvious political instruction, and, as the libertarian activist Pozharsky points out, there're "left-girardians", too. This article claims that Vance misuses Gerard: Vance accepts that the most important thing in the modern (post-Christian) world is caring for victims, and he also accepts that the crowd truly gets fired up when it finds scapegoats. And then he starts lashing out at immigrants, who supposedly eat dogs and cats — that is, he creates a scapegoat to highlight the "true" victim: the American people. So the jury on use-vs-misuse is still out.
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