If the bushy eyebrow looked down at you, the eye had a hint of sadness. That of not succeeding in convincing you of a crucial fact: human societies are built on a murder – that of the scapegoat – which alone protects us from the greater violence to which humanity is doomed. Because in the beginning is the desire to imitate others, the source of all conflicts. The academic René Girard (1923-2015) believed he found this truth in the stories of ethnologists and the great texts of our culture, from Sophocles to the Gospels, making extrapolation a style.
As the vast biography dedicated to him by Benoît Chantre, his publisher and friend, reminds us, Girard’s self-confidence irritated him very early on, from his first attempt Romantic lie and romantic truth (1961). Flexibility rarely comes with age, Girard saw confirmation of his theory in everything he read (except perhaps in Ginette Mathiot’s cookbooks), assuming in the evening of his life apocalyptic theses with neoconservative overtones. and fundamentalists : Christ or chaos. Like all anti-moderns, he preferred the sins of the past to our current mismanagement: certainly, the scapegoat had no luck (let it fall on him), but at least he limited the damage – unlike our woke civilization which excites desire.
“Why do Girardians exist?”
At the end of this 1,000-page odyssey, it is not so much Girard’s work that fascinates as the improbable trajectory of its author: a Chartist by training, without any local claim to fame (neither aggregator, nor normalien, nor state doctor), the Avignon resident found room and board in prestigious American universities: Johns Hopkins, Buffalo, Stanford. Girard is a meteorite in our intellectual sky, a case for the sociology of science. His name could be associated with those of troublemakers who, like him, benefited from the American ticket: Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres or Bruno Latour – while they were struggling in France. Their distance created their legend which fueled good-natured self-criticism – as if we had sold Exxelia. “More famous there than at home”: this myth had a hard life, while the said defectors had fairly banal, even confidential careers with Uncle Sam across the country. Girard is no exception: even if mimetic theory floats above Silicon Valley like a zeitgeist, his work remains little read in Palo Alto. A few years ago, his junior at Stanford, the lively professor Joshua Landy, wrote a cruel article: “Why do Girardians exist?” The reasons for success according to him: “A theory of everything, for cheap.”
The contradictions and contingencies of the Girard phenomenon would have made a great subject for a book. Benoît Chantre wisely prefers to tell us about the man in detail: childhood, apprenticeship, glory – the excess of details sometimes masking the thinness of the events. It is an understatement to say that this life was not hectic: no sit-ins, no taking to the streets with bullhorns, no moral turpitudes. The man slept easily, especially in public. Telling it amounts to telling the story of his books and their reception, which above all reveals the making of success under the name Grasset and Bernard Pivot. Returning to favor in Paris, Girard was able to access the highly prized status of misunderstood prophet: Frédéric Taddeï and the French Academy were destined for him. They were waiting for Bergotte, it was the Marquis de Norpois who showed up.
By its honesty and meticulousness, Chantre’s biography impresses, but without convincing, failing to succeed in making a true Girard inventory. The man had panache, disrupting academic disciplines and habits. But too sure of himself, he was sent back by his peers to his essential solitude. His 1978 bestseller, modestly titled Things hidden since the creation of the world, was presented at the time as a dialogue with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort – second knives. The only things hidden were in fact the writing process, which Chantre reveals: the dialogue form was fictitious. Girard did the questions and answers. As he did all his life.
René Girard. Biography, by Benoît Chantre. Grasset, 1,184 p., €35.