Cynthia L. Haven, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018)
Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University
“How is a philosophy embodied in the man who espouses it? … How does a man’s being—the sum of his knowledge, experience, and will—‘prove’ his knowledge? Can we ever devise a philosophy, even a theory, wholly apart from who we are, and what we must justify?” (144). These are the questions that drive Cynthia L. Haven’s engaging biography of René Girard (1923-2015), the French scholar whose influential studies of mimetic behaviour, violence, and scapegoating proposed a complete reinterpretation of religion and a comprehensive theory of human nature and society. The nexus between thought and life promises to be a particularly fruitful vantage point for assessing Girard’s thought: unlike so many of his generation, particularly in his home discipline of literary studies, Girard’s interest was not in how texts “functioned,” but in what they described. “I’ve always been a realist,” he once asserted. “I have always believed in the outside world and in the possibility of knowledge of it” (127). Drawing, perhaps, on this claim, Haven reconsiders Girard’s thought from the standpoint of its interaction with the “outside world” that shaped it.
Haven’s book is not a conventional biography, objectively recounting its subject’s life history. It is, rather, a whimsical exploration of Girardian thought, a play in which René Girard is the leading but by no means solitary actor, and in which the biographical narrative is interwoven with more chronologically disparate episodes. Haven, moreover, incorporates herself into the story, using her relationship with Girard, as well as his family and friends, to explore his character and trace the multiple ramifications of his thought. Though undoubtedly biographical, the precise subject of her book is difficult to pin down. It is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual biography, rigorously focused on the conception and development of Girard’s most distinctive ideas. At moments, it becomes a study of academic self-fashioning, examining Girard’s successive appointments, academic politics, and professional jockeying before his ultimate consecration as a superstar. Frequently, Haven’s style can only be described as hagiographic—not simply because it is laudatory, but because she presents Girard as a visionary whose wisdom and insight are instrumental to grasping humanity’s current condition. Though Girard’s life is the book’s core, it bristles with digressions—an excursus on the medieval papacy (when discussing Girard’s native Avignon), a slapstick account of Jacques Lacan’s disastrous trip to Baltimore (at a conference organized by Girard), and meditations on 9/11 as a world-historical confirmation of Girard’s intuitions about violence and sacrifice.
Beneath these intriguing quirks lurks a comprehensive and quite definitive narrative of Girard’s life and career. He was born in 1923 in Avignon, France, where his father worked as a curator at the Palais des Papes, the edifice that attests to the city’s brief stature as a seat of medieval Christendom. During the German Occupation, Girard moved to Paris, where, following in his father’s footsteps, he studied at the École des Chartes, the national school for archivists. After the war, he played a role in launching the Festival d’Avignon, which has since become of one France’s most cherished annual cultural events. The turning point in Girard’s youth was his decision to seize an opportunity to teach at Indiana University in 1947. While enjoying the United States’ postwar prosperity—a far cry from his depleted and dilapidated homeland—Girard taught French and trudged his way through a history dissertation (devoted to American attitudes towards France during World War II). Not until he was fired for failing to publish were the rigours of the American academic system impressed upon him. Girard learned his lesson: after a brief stint at Duke, he was hired by Johns Hopkins, where he published a suite of literary papers, before completing, in 1959, his landmark study of mimetic behavior in literature, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. This essay not only secured his academic reputation, it also coincided with a spiritual watershed in the young professor’s life: as he was completing the manuscript, Girard underwent a conversion experience, leading him to become—for the first time—a practicing Roman Catholic, while also leaving him brimming with thoughts that he would flesh out in his theoretical writings.
In 1966, Girard leveraged his growing reputation to host a symposium at Hopkins, entitled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which provided an American showcase for cutting-edge French thinkers associated with structuralism—though in retrospect, the event is often seen as the first flowering of post-structuralism or post-modernism. Girard, who viewed these currents as a “plague” (124), was, as Haven aptly notes, “both a child of this new era and an orphan within it” (122). Not long after his subsequent move to the State University of New York at Buffalo, Girard published his definitive statement, Violence and the Sacred (1972).In this work, he argued that scapegoating was the mechanism through which humans successfully purge themselves of their tendency towards destructive violence (rooted in mimetic rivalry), and that sacrifice was the institution through which the initial scapegoating was both revived and managed. The book’s success led to ever-more prestigious academic recognition (Hopkins redux, Stanford, the Académie Française), a series of books teasing out the (notably theological) implications of Girard’s core thesis, and the establishment of Girardian studies as a self-standing subfield (of which the series in which Haven’s book was published—“Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture”—is one example). In 2015, at the age of 91, Girard died at his home near Stanford.
Haven offers a panoramic view of Girard’s impressive career and his bold and influential ideas. But, knowing more about his life, are we expected to understand these ideas any differently? Haven implicitly acknowledges the appropriateness of this question, as can be seen in her quest to find a biographical basis for Girard’s signature concepts, particularly scapegoating and victimization. Was Girard’s thinking provoked by the tondues de ‘44—the French women accused of “horizontal collaboration” with German men, whose heads were shaved by Resistance forces before they were paraded and publicly derided by throngs celebrating France’s liberation? Was he influenced, rather, by his encounter with racism during his brief stint in North Carolina? In this vein, Haven briefly entertains the claim, advanced by a close friend of Girard’s, that Girard may have witnessed a lynching—even if, ultimately, she rejects it. Or was Girard’s theory ultimately purely intellectual, a merger of his intuitions about mimetic rivalry in literature with his extensive readings in the field of anthropology? Haven dangles each of these options before her reader as possible explanations, without ever committing to a particular experiential matrix as the primary font of his thought—or even committing unreservedly to the claim that such a matrix exists.
This reluctance to clinch the relevant contexts of Girard’s theory accounts, in part, for Haven’s unwillingness to take a stand on what the ultimate significance of Girard’s oeuvre really is. She convinces us that he matters. But Girard’s thought is so consequential, she implies, that it is not necessary to pinpoint its import. For example, all the modern instantiations she cites of Girard’s theory—the Jim Crow South, South Africa under Apartheid, and 9/11, to name a few—are presented in ways that effectively depoliticize them. For Girard’s readers, this is hardly surprising. His theory emphasized the fundamental commonality between the many forms of “sacrificial crises” (that is, the eruptions of violence that can only be ended by scapegoating). Though fundamental, victimization and sacrifice attest, for Girard, to the eternal return of the same in human affairs.
“I am convinced that history has meaning,” Girard once remarked, “and that its meaning is terrifying” (128). Yet while Girard was no doubt interested in history, he was far less concerned with historical change—that is, with the ways in which social structures, political systems, and ideologies might alter and transform unchanging anthropological truths (the one exception being Christianity, which he saw as an escape hatch from the implacable dynamic of human violence). The primitive horde, the Dionysian sparagmos, the sans-culottes crowd, and the Southern lynch mob were so many variations on a common transhistorical theme. This view was reinforced by Girard’s insistence that the choice of a scapegoat could only be arbitrary: it is because every human is to blame for the species’ penchant for violence that no one human can be deemed more guilty than the rest. Yet few interpretations of the French Revolution, American race relations, or 9/11 claim that the victims of these events were randomly chosen. This reductive tendency in Girard’s thought is carried over into his biographer’s analysis: in reflecting on his theory’s relationship with the world, there is little that could not be construed as instances of scapegoating or related phenomena.
More attention to the distinctiveness of Girard’s thought, rather than its capaciousness, would be welcome in Haven’s account—especially since, in her expansive research, she has found material that more narrowly delimits Girard’s uniqueness as a thinker. In an interview, the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy gives her three reasons why Girard’s work is often ostracized by certain intellectual circles: 1) Girard believed in God; 2) he believed in the human sciences; and 3) 1) and 2) are the same (179). Perhaps this is where Girard’s true significance lies—in his attempt to wrest a world-historical justification for Christianity from the violent fate to which human nature (as he sees it) seems condemned, as much in primitive times as at present.
While Haven’s efforts to explain Girard’s thought may be more suggestive than satisfying, the portrait she paints of Girard is nonetheless a convincing one. She offers a rich and evocative account of his life, situates his work in historical context, delineates his intellectual persona through extensive conversations with friends and colleagues and, along the way, suggests that Girard represents, if not an exemplary life, at least an exemplary mind—one that, by so breezily sweeping aside so many modern assumptions, sheds a paradoxical light on the modern world.