René Girard citations

René Girard, né en Avignon le 25 décembre 1923 et mort le 4 novembre 2015 à Stanford en Californie,, est un anthropologue et philosophe français, élu à l'Académie française en 2005.

Ancien élève de l'École des chartes et professeur émérite de littérature comparée à l'université Stanford et à l'université Duke aux États-Unis, il est l’inventeur de la « théorie mimétique » qui, à partir de la découverte du caractère mimétique du désir, cherche à fonder une nouvelle anthropologie de la violence et du religieux.

✵ 25. décembre 1923 – 4. novembre 2015
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Œuvres

René Girard: 35   citations 1   J'aime

René Girard citations célèbres

“Les mythes débutent presque toujours par un état de désordre extrême.”

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

René Girard Citations

“…l’envie est de tous les péchés le plus difficile à avouer, et le plus répandu.”

Shakespeare. Les feux de l’envie, 1990

“L'amour, comme la violence, abolit les différences.”

Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde, 1978

René Girard: Citations en anglais

“An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles.”

René Girard livre Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 11-12.

“The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence.”

"The Scandal of Christianity" in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (2007), p. 219

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