Abstract
One of the primary figures of the so-called religious turn of continental philosophy of religion at the turn of the twenty-first century, René Girard was one of the most important and influential Christian writers at the time of his death. His legacy is at this time questionable, as his writing is often employed as a philosophical justification for Christian supersessionism and the prioritization of Christian hermeneutics of the Hebrew Bible, all while providing helpful interpretive insight into scripture, human anthropology, and psychology. This chapter proposes Girard as a radical thinker whose ideas have been domesticated, and introduces his work in an accessible way.
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Notes
- 1.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 257–258.
- 2.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann, Kindle ed. (New York: Random, 1974), §125.
- 3.
Pierpallo Antonello, and João Rocha, “Introduction,” in Evolution and Conversion by R. Girard, Kindle ed. (London: Continuum, 2007).
- 4.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. Holingdale (New York: Random, 1968), 542–543.
- 5.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Naked Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 642.
- 6.
René Girard and David Cayley, “The Scapegoat,” from Ideas (Toronto: CBC Radio One, 2008), available online.
- 7.
Wolfgang Palaver and Gabriel Borrud, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2013).
- 8.
Michael Kirwan, Discovering Girard (Luton: Andrews, 2010).
Works Cited
Girard, René. 1966. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 1978. Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 1984. Dionysus Versus the Crucified. MLN 99 (4): 816–835.
———. 1986. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2007. Evolution and Conversion. Kindle ed. London: Continuum.
———. 2011. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. New York: Orbis.
———. 2014. When These Things Begin. Trans. T. Merrill. Kindle ed. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
———. 2015. The Girard Reader. Ed. J. Williams. New York: Crossroads.
Girard, René, and Rebecca Adams. 1993. Violence, Difference, Sacrifice. Religion & Literature 25 (2): 9–33.
Kirwan, Michael. 2010. Discovering Girard. Luton: Andrews.
Palaver, Wolfgang, and Gabriel Borrud. 2013. René Girard’s Mimetic Theory. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
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Dawson, D. (2018). René Girard. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_14
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