2003 Tanner-McMurrin Lecture

Rene Girard
Professor emeritus of French language, literature, and civilization at Stanford University

"The Uniqueness of the Biblical Religions"
Lecture Resources

Lecture was given: Thursday, May 8, 2003 7:00p.m. Gore Auditorium

Rene Girard was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas Day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the Ecole des Chartres, and institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947, he went to Indiana University on a year's fellowship and has spent almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a Ph. D. in History at Indiana University in 1950 and also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971, he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.

Beginning with Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1965), Girard discovered that human desire is essentially mimetic (imitative) in nature and that in this understanding of desire lies the key to understanding the origin of human violence. Thus, mimetic desire creates mimetic violence, or the competition between people for the same object of desire, which results in a crisis that threatens the very existence of the community. Girard consequently discovered the origin of the scapegoating process as a way for the community to resolve the crisis of escalating mimetic violence. Thus when a scapegoat is found his or her communally experienced death purges the community of violence and restores order. Girard continued to elaborate his discoveries in the well-known Violence and the Sacred (1977), followed by, among other important works, The Scapegoat (1985), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987), A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (1991), and most recently, I see Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001).

Girard continues to lecture, write, and offer a seminar at Stanford, where he and his wife Martha make their home. In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard's work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.

Biographical sketch excerpted from COV&R

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