Abstract

In his Violence and the Sacred, literary critic René Girard presented a bold thesis that revealed his increasing preoccupation with philosophical anthropology. There he claims that all societies are founded in violence that arises from unconscious imitation and subsequent rivalry. Sacred ritual is a means of avoiding, attenuating, or postponing this discord resulting from what he calls "mimetic appropriation." If his contentions in the earlier book seemed striking and original, their correlatives in the present volume are even more radical. In it he adopts the dialogue form with interlocutors Oughourlian and Lefort; the text consists partly of edited transcriptions of their discussions and partly of inserted passages from Girard's writings.