René Girard

René Girard (born December 25, 1923, Avignon, France—died November 4, 2015, Stanford, California, U.S.) was a literary critic, scholar, and philosopher whose contributions—numerous and sometimes controversial—spanned the fields of literary theory, philosophy, religious studies, psychology, history, and anthropology. His theory of mimetic desire, which seeks to understand human desire and the conflicts it begets, has been widely influential in academic and artistic work in the 20th and 21st centuries. His work on sacrifice and his theory of the scapegoat have also been influential in academic circles. His ideas have also been cited by political figures such as entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel and U.S. Vice Pres. J.D. Vance.

Early life, education, and academic career

Girard was born in Avignon, France, in 1923. His father, Joseph Frédéric Marie Girard (1881–1962), was an archivist trained at École Nationale des Chartes in Paris and was something of a socialist and a Dreyfusard. His mother, Marie-Thérèse de Loye Fabre (1893–1967), was among the first women in the region she grew up in to earn a baccalaureate degree; she was also a committed Roman Catholic.

After studying medieval history at the École Nationale des Chartes (where his father had trained), René Girard pursued a teaching position in the French department as well as graduate work in modern history at Indiana University at Bloomington, where he wrote about American perceptions of France during World War II and earned a Ph.D. in 1950. It was through his teaching at Indiana that he first met his future wife, Martha McCullough; their relationship began the year after she was in his class, and they married in 1951. At Indiana University, in addition to teaching French, he was asked to also teach European literature. Girard described his study of the great 19th-century novelists (undertaken to prepare for teaching) as both intellectually and personally transformative. In particular, he attributed to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels his conversion from agnosticism to Catholicism.

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This flexibility and eclecticism across academic fields came to characterize the rest of Girard’s career. He eventually wrote on topics as far-ranging as the Hebrew Bible, William Shakespeare, psychoanalysis, Christianity, and eating disorders and established a reputation for himself outside traditional U.S. academic disciplines. Nevertheless, he spent nearly his whole career teaching in the United States, including at Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Bryn Mawr College, and finally Stanford University. Awarded numerous academic honors throughout his career, he was elected to the prestigious Académie Française in 2005.

Mimetic desire

The central idea motivating Girard’s varied explorations is what he termed mimetic desire, which he initially developed in his first book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961; Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure). Mimetic (i.e., imitative) desire postulates that humans’ objects of desire are determined not by individual psychological factors but instead by interpersonal dynamics. According to Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, humans desire the things others possess or desire for the precise reason that others possess or desire them. Desire, on this reading, is not a relationship between a subject (an individual human) and an object (something desired) but rather a relationship between two or more subjects mediated by an object. Girard attributed his development of the concept of mimetic desire to his analysis of the relationships between characters in Romantic novels, including not only Dostoevsky’s but also those of Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust. The character of Don Quixote, in the novel of the same name by Miguel de Cervantes, was also an inspiration for this idea.

Although Girard was critical of what he took to be the overly individualistic notions of the self, desire, and the unconscious that characterize modern psychology, his theory of mimetic desire provided occasion for him to engage with psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud. Girard used his notion of mimetic desire to reinterpret Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex, suggesting that the father-son rivalry is fundamentally driven by the son’s self-modeling on the father. Their relationship is transformed into one of violent rivalry when the son imitates the father’s desire for the mother.

Sacrifice and the scapegoat

Girard significantly expands the idea of mimetic desire in his book La Violence et le sacré (1972; Violence and the Sacred), which offers an analysis of sacrifice in ancient religions. If desire is intrinsically mimetic, he argues, human experience is suffused with envy, which frequently leads to violence. He imagines the peril such violence might have posed to early societies—in particular, the way that the human impulse toward retribution could lead to a cycle of murders between different families or tribes. This potential for unending violence, he suggests, presented a problem for people living together in society. Violence can even be externalized as one of the main forces affecting human experience, thereby becoming intertwined with religious thought; as Girard writes, “Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred.”

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In order to avoid internal violence and maintain stability, Girard contends, human societies developed a mechanism to dissipate the tensions caused by mimetic desire: the sacrifice of a scapegoat. In sacrificial rituals involving a scapegoat, the inevitable violent impulses humans experience as a result of the structure of desire are redirected to someone or something outside the structure of society—someone who will not be avenged and who is thus deemed sacrificeable. For Girard, the development of such a mechanism is integral to the stability of a given society. This presents something of a contrast to the earlier philosophical conceptualizations of social contract theory, which were based around fully transparent and consensual mutual agreement. According to Girard, it is central to the functioning of the scapegoating mechanism that those participating in it do not recognize it as a sacrifice of the innocent. That is, those performing the killing or eradication of the outsider believe that they are justly punishing someone who deserves punishment, when in fact the victim unjustly bears the blame for the community’s social dysfunction.

Deeply influenced by the sociological work of Émile Durkheim and his students, Girard’s reading of Hebrew and Greek sacrifice, in particular, is significantly indebted to Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’s “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice” (1898; Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function). That landmark work proposes provocatively that sacrifice is not performed because there are gods but that instead gods are created to explain the performance of sacrifices. That is to say, it is not religion that creates the ritual but rather the ritual that generates the religion. Yet, on Girard’s reading, Hubert and Mauss fail to fully understand the origins and functions of sacrificial ritual. According to Girard’s theory, the killing of the scapegoat shifts the focus from the community’s internal disagreements to something external. Through this sacrifice, social stability is restored: The sacrifice of the scapegoat is experienced as a catharsis and purification that provides a peaceful respite. It is thus ascribed religious significance. But the pacifying effects of the sacrifice do not last indefinitely, and thus the sacrifice must be repeated regularly.

Girard’s analysis of sacrifice and the scapegoat draws on much literary, religious, and anthropological material. The term scapegoat comes from Leviticus 16, in the Hebrew Bible, in which God directs the sin-corrupted Israelites to undertake a sacrificial ritual involving two goats—one sacrificed and the other turned loose—in order to restore themselves to sanctity. Girard also cites other narratives from the Hebrew Bible, such as stories of Job and Joseph, to illustrate the notion of victimhood. He draws on Greek mythology too, giving significant attention to the story of Oedipus. Girard also presents evidence from historical events, such as the witch trials from early modern Europe and ethnographic and cultural-anthropological studies from around the globe.

Underlying Girard’s analysis is a narrative about the development of society reminiscent of narratives about an original state of nature. Such narratives are characteristic of social theory in the past few centuries. Girard proceeds as follows: Initially, society is dominated by the violence that is entailed by mimetic desire. Then society develops the scapegoat mechanism to redirect violence in ways that are less harmful to itself, which in turn inspires the invention of religion to justify sacrifice. Ultimately, with the rise of the state as a political formation, the function of sacrifice is largely absorbed by the judicial system’s capacity to discipline and punish members of a populace. Girard further pays homage to this tradition of grand historical narratives of human development when he cites Sigmund Freud’s idea in Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo) of a primordial sacrificial murder that lies at the foundation of society. Significantly, however, Girard takes Freud’s notion in a different direction by insisting that the foundational murder was not fundamentally Oedipal (and thus sexual) but a sacrifice of a scapegoat that channels and releases the pent-up tension in the community.

Christianity among religions

Girard defended the uniqueness of Christianity, whose great achievement he considers to lie in its offering of the sacrifice to end all sacrifices in the form of the Incarnation of God, who serves as an innocent scapegoat for all humanity. The notion that the death of Jesus Christ is a sacrifice that puts an end to Jewish sacrificial rituals in the Temple of Jerusalem can be found most prominently in chapter 10 of the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament. In his writings Girard frequently returns to the motifs of vengeance and mercy in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, making the case that through Christ’s sacrifice Christianity ultimately overthrows the scapegoat mechanism and severs the tie between violence and the sacred. While (as Girard admits) the New Testament is not univocal in its condemnation of violence, on his reading it lays to rest once and for all the scapegoating mechanism by pulling back the veil over it. The text insists on pointing out that the Crucifixion was not justice served but rather the terrible result of the moral frailty of Jesus’ persecutors. The result, according to Girard, is to open up the possibility of eliminating violence, although he concedes that the ample violence of the 20th and early 21st centuries illustrates the precise opposite tendencies at play in the geopolitical arena.

“By accepting to be crucified, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world’—the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the Cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.” —René Girard, “On War and Apocalypse,” First Things, August 1, 2009

Reception

Influences

Girard’s writings and ideas have influenced a wide array of thinkers, writers, artists, economists, and political figures. Some theologians have embraced Girard’s interpretation of the Bible and pursued interpretive questions relevant to scapegoat theory. Political scientists have applied the idea of the scapegoat to such issues as capital punishment and immigration. Economists and social scientists have tried to use mimetic desire to cast light on the rapidly shifting modern economy amid ever-changing technological advances, particularly in regard to social media. Applying Girard’s ideas to social media, observers note that the human desire to have what others have and do what others do is what makes social media engaging to consumers and invaluable for marketing.

In the arts, the Nobel laureate writer J.M. Coetzee has both evoked the theme of the scapegoat in his fiction (see, for instance, the novel Disgrace [1999]) and cited Girard in his essays, as has the Czech-born French novelist Milan Kundera. The salvific or cleansing power of sacrificing the innocent has also surfaced as a theme in films, such as director Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), and James DeMonaco’s The Purge (2013).

Perhaps Girard’s most unlikely influence was on the ideology of a particular strand of the far-right in U.S. politics and Silicon Valley, although Girard did not himself espouse these political views. Entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political commentator Peter Thiel studied with Girard at Stanford University. Thiel finds the theory of mimetic violence extraordinarily compelling and sees Girardian theory as psychologically undergirding social media; indeed, he credits Girard with his lucrative decision to become an early investor in Facebook. Through Thiel, others in the Silicon Valley’s conservative community have adopted and adapted Girard’s thought, such as monarchist blogger Curtis Yarvin, cofounder of the so-called Dark Enlightenment (an anti-democracy reactionary movement opposed to the ideals of the Enlightenment). Thiel’s protégé J.D. Vance, who became the U.S. vice president in 2025, has also made reference to Girard’s thought in expounding his own views of the world. He recognized mimetic desire as animating the competitive meritocracy he experienced at Yale Law School, and he also regards the scapegoat as a foundational idea for Christianity. Drawing explicitly on Girard in an article for the Catholic journal The Lamp in 2020, Vance wrote, “Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.” Girard’s work suggests that every society must consider exactly whom it has chosen as scapegoats.