Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture

INTRODUCTION

In the year 2002, I came across a manuscript by Jean-Pierre Dupuy that linked the work of Ivan Illich with that of René Girard. I immediately set about translating the text, which was published in Spanish as part of the essay collection The Other Titan: Ivan Illich.¹ The original “Detour and Sacrifice” can be found in two books that pay tribute to the authors. The first was compiled by Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham, Illich’s disciples;² the second is a book edited by Sandor Goodhart, Jorgen Jorgensen, Tom Ryba, and James G. Williams that celebrates Girard’s work.³

The genesis of Dupuy’s text actually goes back to 1996 and was inspired by Ivan Illich’s seventieth birthday, which was celebrated with a series of lectures in Oakland, California. Asked to contribute, I produced two texts, one published in the magazine Ixtus—“The Place of Gender”⁴—and the other “The Convivial Philospher.”⁵ Later, in 2006, I published an essay on René Girard.⁶

The first two paragraphs of Dupuy’s text elicit reflection on the link between the two authors: [End Page 155]

Illich and Girard barely know each other’s work. Neither of them has been influenced by the other. It is through readers like myself, who think there are discernible truths in the writings of both authors, that their works are finally more complementary than contradictory, that their ideas have been able to enter into a synergy. I won’t recount in this context my own intellectual journey. I will limit myself to summarizing what I have drawn from both of them in a way that brings to light the challenge each constitutes for the other.⁷

Despite this promising beginning, the essay then loses force; in fact, instead of analyzing one author’s work in light of the other’s, it considers them separately and avoids the confrontation of their ideas. Instead, Illich is compared to Jon Elster and Girard to Friedrich von Hayek and Adam Smith. My intention in writing the present article, then, is to evaluate each author’s body of work as it relates to the other’s, delving deeper than Dupuy and emphasizing reciprocal criticism.

It is noteworthy that while, as Dupuy pointed out, Illich and Girard did not inspire each other, they were clearly well versed in the other’s approach. The two met at the beginning of this century in Palo Alto; while there is no written account of what transpired, José María Sbert spoke to Illich shortly thereafter and reported that “Ivan was amazed at how well Girard knew his work. Apparently, he had read all of it.”

There is also some evidence of mutuality, as Illich quoted Girard on more than one occasion. We can thank Dupuy for establishing this connection. As Illich himself wrote in Shadow Work:

we have become blind to the paradox that scarcity increases in a society with the rise of the GNP. The kind of scarcity which we take for granted was—and largely still is—unknown outside of commodity-intensive societies. The history of this sense of scarcity, however, still remains to be written.

A major step toward such a history was made in 1979 by Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy in the two separate essays they published under the joint title L’enfer des choses. Both authors start with an insight which they reached with the help of René Girard.⁸

Illich had the highest praise for Girard when in the sixth note to Gender, titled “Envious Individualism,” he stated:

Girard finds in the nineteenth-century novel a source of evidence for a historic transformation of desire: the evolution of needs based on invidious comparison [End Page 156] with others’ aspirations. Rather than analyzing Dostoevsky’s figures through Freudian categories, he demystifies Freud by looking at him through the eyes of the brothers Karamazov. In this perspective, what is considered economic progress appears as the institutional spread of triangular, or mimetic, desire. The history of economic individualism coincides with the modernization of envy.⁹

Furthermore, in...