René Girard, Mimesis, and Conflict (with Cynthia Haven)

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🗓️ 24 June 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

If you're always imitating others or aspiring to be something else, what's left of the "authentic" you? According to the French philosopher René Girard, not much: Nothing can be truly authentic, he argued--everything comes from somewhere else. This is just one of the many original and counterintuitive claims put forth in Girard's sweeping approach to human history. He argues it is sameness, not our difference that leads to conflict, and he sees religion as a way to contain the chaos as opposed to its first cause. Listen as Stanford University scholar Cynthia Haven speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about Girard's theories of desire and violence. The conversation also includes a discussion of the power of forgiveness to put a stop to conflict's rinse-and-repeat.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.8	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is May 28th, 2024, and my guest is author Cynthia Haven of Stanford University.
0:44.0	She is a national endowment for the Humanities Public
0:46.3	Scholar.
0:47.0	Among other books, she is the author of Evolution of Desire,
0:50.7	a life of Renee Gerard, which was the first biography of the French theorist published in 2018, and she is the editor of Renee Girard's All Desire is a desire for being essential writings, which was published in 2023.
1:04.8	Cynthia, welcome to Econ Talk.
1:06.8	Pleasure to be here.
1:08.8	Our topic for today is Renee Gerard and his ideas.
1:13.4	We have a previous episode on Gerard with Jonathan B
1:16.2	that we'll link to.
1:17.6	But I want to start with a bit about Gerard's life.
1:21.5	He was born in 1923. He died in 2015. What was his career? Where was he? What was he writing about?
1:31.2	He was a he's not a normal scholar with a narrow discipline and he had a very
1:36.3	unusual academic life. Yes he began at the began in Avignon, where he was born, went to the Aco de Chart.
1:48.0	He followed in his father's footsteps.
1:49.8	His father had been the curator of the Palais de Pop.
1:55.8	After the war, he was mostly in the A-Cole during the war.
2:01.0	He went to Paris, came back to Avignon, helped launch the first Avignon festival,
2:09.6	which is now a major event in Europe, and then he went to America. It was a great time for young men to be
2:18.2	they were Europe. America was looking for more European young men to supplement their colleges and their
	...

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