Description Is Democracy overrated? Does energy corrupt? Or do corrupt humans search power? Do company puppet masters pull politicians’ strings? Why does Frank check with the camera?
Can politics convey at the promise of justice? House of playing cards depicts our worst fears approximately politics at the present time. Love him or detest him, Frank Underwood has charted an inimitable path via Washington politics. He and his cohorts depict the darkest dealings in the glowing halls of our so much respected political institutions. These 24 unique essays study key philosophical matters in the back of the critically-acclaimed series—questions of fact, justice, equality, chance, and privilege.
The amoral machinations of Underwood, the last word anti-hero, function an incredible backdrop for a dialogue of the political theories of philosophers as different as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Marx. From political and company ethics, race kin, and ruthless paragmatism to mass media collusion and sexual politics, those essays take on quite a number matters vital not just to the sequence yet to our realizing of society today. Table of Contents Introduction: considering a home of playing cards 1 Part I Socrates, Plato, and Frank 3 1 Of Sheep, Shepherds, and a Wolf in Sheep’s garments: The Cynical View of Politics in condominium of playing cards and Plato’s Republic 5 James Ketchen and Michael Yeo 2 Being as opposed to Seeming: Socrates and the teachings of Francis Underwood’s Asides 16 John Scott Gray Part II Imagining percentages: American beliefs in apartment of playing cards 29 3 Frank Underwood supplies the correct Society a fact cost 31 Brian Kogelmann 4 “What can we go away in the back of? ” Claire Underwood’s American Dream 42 Sarah J. Palm and Kenneth W. Stikkers Part III Characterizing Frank: U¨ bermensch or the Prince 53 5 Underwood as U¨ bermensch: A Postmodern Play of energy 55 Leslie A.
Aarons 6 Why Underwood Is Frankly now not an Overman 68 Matt Meyer 7 American Machiavelli 81 Greg Littmann 8 Machiavelli wouldn't Be inspired 92 Don Fallis 9 Is Frank the guy for the task? Apartment of playing cards and the matter of soiled fingers 102 Tomer J.
Perry Part IV Classical Liberalism and Democracy 113 10 Frank the Foole, Upon a home of playing cards 115 Shane D. Courtland 11 Hobbes and Frank on Why Democracy Is puffed up 128 Steven Michels 12 “Democracy Is So Overrated”: The Shortcomings of renowned Rule 141 Brendan Shea 13 “Money provides energy. If our own system seems more rational, it is because it con forms more strictly to the principle of v engeance.
Its insistence on the pun ishment of the guilty party underlines this fact. Instead of following the example of religion and attempting to forestall acts of revenge, to mitigate or sabotage its effects or to redirect them to secondary ob jects, our judicial system rationalizes revenge and succeeds in limiting and isolating its effects in accordance with social demands. The system treats the disease without fear o f contagion and provides a highly effective technique for the cure and, as a secondary effect, the preven tion of violence. In other words, the question is thrown to the vinds. Henceforth there are as many legitimate forms of violence as there are men to implement them; legitimacy as a principle no longer exists.
Only the introduction o f some transcendental quality that will persuade men of the fundamental difference between sacrifice and re venge, between a judicial system and vengeance, can succeed in by passing violence. All this explains why our penetration and demystification of the system necessaril y coincides with the disintegration of that system. Clearly, medical considerations are not excluded from the primitive concept of contagion, and the prevention of epidemics plays a definite role in impurity rites. But these factors 30 Violence and the Sacred play only a minor role in primitive culture. They arouse our interest precisely because they offer the sole instance in which the modern scientific notion of contagion, which is exclusively pathological, coin cides with the primitive concept, which is far broader in scope. The aspects of religion in which contagion seems to have some reality for us are hard to distinguish from those in which it ceases to have any reality.
Author by: Agamemnon Maverick Language: en Publisher by: Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 13 Total Download: 847 File Size: 47,8 Mb Description: Violence and the Sacred (La violence et le sacr ) is a 1972 book by French anthropologist Ren Girard. Turning his interest towards the anthropological domain, Girard began to study anthropological literature and proposed his second great hypothesis: the victimization process, which is at the origin of archaic religion. Since the mimetic rivalry that develops from the struggle for the possession of the objects is contagious, it leads to the threat of violence. Girard himself says, 'If there is a normal order in societies, it must be the fruit of an anterior crisis.' Author by: R.
Scott Appleby Language: en Publisher by: Rowman & Littlefield Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 52 Total Download: 409 File Size: 47,7 Mb Description: Terrorists and peacemakers may grow up in the same community and adhere to the same religious tradition. The killing carried out by one and the reconciliation fostered by the other indicate the range of dramatic and contradictory responses to human suffering by religious actors. This book explains what religious terrorists and religious peacemakers share in common, what causes them to take different paths in fighting injustice, and how a deeper understanding of religious extremism can and must be integrated more effectively into our thinking about tribal, regional, and international conflict. Author by: Federico Finchelstein Language: en Publisher by: Duke University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 61 Total Download: 334 File Size: 40,5 Mb Description: In Transatlantic Fascism, Federico Finchelstein traces the intellectual and cultural connections between Argentine and Italian fascisms, showing how fascism circulates transnationally.
From the early 1920s well into the Second World War, Mussolini tried to export Italian fascism to Argentina, the “most Italian” country outside of Italy. (Nearly half the country’s population was of Italian descent.) Drawing on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Finchelstein examines Italy’s efforts to promote fascism in Argentina by distributing bribes, sending emissaries, and disseminating propaganda through film, radio, and print. He investigates how Argentina’s political culture was in turn transformed as Italian fascism was appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted by the state and the mainstream press, as well as by the Left, the Right, and the radical Right.
As Finchelstein explains, nacionalismo, the right-wing ideology that developed in Argentina, was not the wholesale imitation of Italian fascism that Mussolini wished it to be. Argentine nacionalistas conflated Catholicism and fascism, making the bold claim that their movement had a central place in God’s designs for their country. Finchelstein explores the fraught efforts of nationalistas to develop a “sacred” ideological doctrine and political program, and he scrutinizes their debates about Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, imperialism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism. Transatlantic Fascism shows how right-wing groups constructed a distinctive Argentine fascism by appropriating some elements of the Italian model and rejecting others. It reveals the specifically local ways that a global ideology such as fascism crossed national borders. Author by: Susan Juster Language: en Publisher by: University of Pennsylvania Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 64 Total Download: 521 File Size: 53,7 Mb Description: Sacred Violence in Early America offers a sweeping reinterpretation of the violence endemic to seventeenth-century English colonization by reexamining some of the key moments of cultural and religious encounter in North America. Susan Juster explores different forms of sacred violence—blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction, and iconoclasm—to uncover how European traditions of ritual violence developed during the wars of the Reformation were introduced and ultimately transformed in the New World.
Juster's central argument concerns the rethinking of the relationship between the material and the spiritual worlds that began with the Reformation and reached perhaps its fullest expression on the margins of empire. The Reformation transformed the Christian landscape from an environment rich in sounds, smells, images, and tactile encounters, both divine and human, to an austere space of scriptural contemplation and prayer. When English colonists encountered the gods and rituals of the New World, they were forced to confront the unresolved tensions between the material and spiritual within their own religious practice. Accounts of native cannibalism, for instance, prompted uneasy comparisons with the ongoing debate among Reformers about whether Christ was bodily present in the communion wafer.
Sacred Violence in Early America reveals the Old World antecedents of the burning of native bodies and texts during the seventeenth-century wars of extermination, the prosecution of heretics and blasphemers in colonial courts, and the destruction of chapels and mission towns up and down the North American seaboard. At the heart of the book is an analysis of 'theologies of violence' that gave conceptual and emotional shape to English colonists' efforts to construct a New World sanctuary in the face of enemies both familiar and strange: blood sacrifice, sacramentalism, legal and philosophical notions of just and holy war, malediction, the contest between 'living' and 'dead' images in Christian idology, and iconoclasm.
Author by: Chris Fleming Language: en Publisher by: Polity Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 61 Total Download: 853 File Size: 47,7 Mb Description: In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the work of Rene Girard, thought by many to be one of the most important, if controversial, cultural theorists of the twentieth century. Girard's work is extraordinarily innovative and wide-ranging, cutting across central concerns in philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, anthropology, theology, and sociology.
In this much-needed introduction, Chris Fleming traces the development of Girard's thought over forty years, describing the context in which he worked and his influence on a number of disciplines. He unpacks the hypotheses at the centre of Girard's thought - mimetic desire, surrogate victimage and scapegoating, myth, ritual, and the sacred - and provides an assessment of Girard's place in the contemporary academy. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book constitutes an excellent overview of Girard's work and is essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, theology, literary studies, French studies, and cultural studies.
In the 1972 work, Violence and the Sacred, the French literary critic Rene Girard undertakes a “scientific” exploration of the dual aspect of sacrifice, attempting to resolve the contradiction articulated in the work of Henri Hubert and Marcel Maus: “Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him- but the victim is only sacred because he is to be killed.” The results of this inquiry yield, according to the author, the origins of all religion and culture. At the core of Girard’s theory In the 1972 work, Violence and the Sacred, the French literary critic Rene Girard undertakes a “scientific” exploration of the dual aspect of sacrifice, attempting to resolve the contradiction articulated in the work of Henri Hubert and Marcel Maus: “Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him- but the victim is only sacred because he is to be killed.” The results of this inquiry yield, according to the author, the origins of all religion and culture. At the core of Girard’s theory is the concept of mimetic, or imitative, desire.
Human beings, like animals, are essentially mimetic; that is they learn primarily through imitation. An individual understands what is valuable by imitating another person, who then becomes a model. Initially, the rivalry between the model and the imitator has an object. However, the value of this object is not intrinsic; its sole worth lies in the fact that it is desired by the other. The two figures, struggling to obtain the same object and insisting that the other imitate him in order to validate his own worth, become almost interchangeable.
This contradictory imperative, simultaneously being told to imitate and not imitate the rival, is termed the double bind. The two figures are so similar that they don’t realize that they are rivals. Each time the imitator/disciple comes close to the desired object, he comes into conflict with his rival/model and thus he associates violence with desire. The experience of this contradictory imperative sometimes transforms the rival into what Girard calls “the monstrous double.” The image of the rival is distorted, hallucinations occur, and these hallucinations are represented by the various monsters that exist in myths. Mimetic desire is, according to Girard, the primary impulse of living creatures.
Accordingly, the violence that such desire inevitably engenders is an almost inescapable facet of human society. Left unchecked, the mimetic impulse leads to violence and murder.
Murder ultimately leads to another murder and thus to the beginning of an unstoppable chain of reciprocal violence and vengeance which threatens to destroy the entire community. This period of chaotic violence is termed the sacrificial crisis. When society is on the verge of collapse due to ongoing reciprocal violence it channels all of its violence onto a scapegoat and the scapegoat mechanism fosters social cohesion and creates a new society from the ruins of the old. The entire community participates in the murder which serves the dual function of creating social cohesion among all the participants and channelling all the violence onto one person. This is termed by Girard as being “generative” or “unanimous” violence.
Because the purpose of the original sacrifice is to maintain the social fabric, the scapegoat cannot be from the heart of the community but is usually an “exterior or marginal individual” who is not fully integrated into society. Myths arise concealing the actual nature of the violence and sacrificial rites are initiated in which a surrogate victim is used in place of the original victim.
Because he has managed to still the violence that threatened to consume the community, the scapegoat eventually evolves from being a reviled figure to being a revered as divine. The rites of sacrifice are performed as a “preventative measure” attempting to contain the community’s latent violence and evoking the almost forgotten memory of the original sacrifice. The obscured function of the sacrifice is essential in order for the process to be effective: “the celebrants do not and must not comprehend the true role of the sacrificial act.” However, when the memory of the original sacrifice becomes too distant, the rites begin to lose their efficacy and it is possible that another sacrificial crisis can arise and the whole process may begin again. Society begins to collapse, but the mechanism of the scapegoat allows the society to regenerate and the cycle begins again.
Girard outlines his theory in the first chapter of the book and fleshes out the details in the subsequent chapters. He suggests that tragedy, by virtue of the fact that it differs in details from other forms of the myth, is particularly importance in giving us glimpses into the actual nature of the sacrificial crisis. Further, the dialogue in tragedy is such that the characters seem to be interchangeable and this reveals the nature of mimetic rivalry. Though he makes brief references to several tragedies, the bulk of his discussion is focussed on The Bacchae and Oedipus the King, which leads the reader to suspect that the two plays are the only ones which fit easily into the Girardian paradigm. Girard also suggests that all rites dare linked to the sacrifice; exorcism is mock sacrifice, with the evil spirit acting as a sacrificial victim; rites of passage attempt to recreate the desperation of the sacrificial crisis for young members of the community who lack all memory of it. This seems to be a difficult claim to substantiate as there are many rituals, the marriage ceremony for instance, which are important in many cultural systems but which seem to have no links to violence or sacrifice.
Nero full crack. Chapters seven and eight are taken up with a discussion of Freud, who as one critic suggests, seems to be Girard’s own model. Girard first takes apart the Oedipus complex.
Whereas in Freudian thought desire for the object (the mother) leads to rivalry, in Girard’s conception desire is the product of the rivalry. Girard is particularly interested in a one Freudian work, Totem and Taboo, which has been dismissed by most Freudians. The work hints at a theory of collective murder but, because Freud was so intellectually attached to his notion of the Oedipus complex, “the mechanism of the surrogate victim eluded him.” Because he insists that his theory is all-encompassing, Girard uses a comparative approach that examines everything from anthropological studies of primitive cultures to Shakespeare to Greek tragedy. His methodology is composite, having been described by one commentator as a “mixture of anthropology, literary theory, and cultural philosophy.” Girard’s ability to examine a broad variety of sources in admirable, yet one wonders if the specialists in the various areas he plucks from would not find his work lacking in nuances. Nonetheless, the sheer ingenuity of Girard’s thought and his ability to bring together such different source materials cannot be denied. The main criticism that can be levied against Girard is the same one that every mono-theorist is accused of, namely that he is unabashedly reductionist: “There can be nothing in the whole range of human culture that is not rooted in violent unanimity- nothing that does not find its source in the surrogate victim.” Girard is seems insistent on the notion that one theory can reveal all the nuances of human culture and rejects the notion that such reductionism is invalid.
The failure of such theorists as Freud, James Frazer and W. Robertson Smith does not mean that attempting to “get. To the bottom of things” is a fruitless enterprise. There is a certain amount of arrogance to Girard’s belief that he will boldly achieve what no previous mythographer has achieved before and to his insistence that he has uncovered the unity underlying “the whole of human culture.” Ultimately, this is where Girard fails. The criticism that Girard levies against Freudian thought, “psychoanalysis is a closed system that can never be refuted,” can be applied to Girard himself. He notes that traces of the surrogate victim and generative violence can be so transformed within a myth as to become “unrecognizable.” Thus any holes found in his theory can be dismissed; if a particular myth does not conform to the Girardian designated patterns, then it simply has been transformed beyond all recognition in an attempt to cover up the generative violence. Thus Girard has removed himself from all criticism.
Girard's is a hugely ambitious project: a sort of grand-theory-of-everything, a prodigal son to psychoanalysis, bent on criticising mercilessly the Freudian project, while pursuing an essentially similar goal with, according to the author, a much more rigorous analysis. Despite such scope, the book stands out by its clarity and its careful (and elegant) avoidance of unnecessary jargon – the paperback in fact became my companion in the public transport, a place generally reserved to works of fict Girard's is a hugely ambitious project: a sort of grand-theory-of-everything, a prodigal son to psychoanalysis, bent on criticising mercilessly the Freudian project, while pursuing an essentially similar goal with, according to the author, a much more rigorous analysis.
Despite such scope, the book stands out by its clarity and its careful (and elegant) avoidance of unnecessary jargon – the paperback in fact became my companion in the public transport, a place generally reserved to works of fiction. Girard develops his theory slowly, illustrating it profusely with many examples drawn from his extensive knowledge of anthropology, of Greek tragedies, and to a much lesser extent, of history and political theory. He is at times a little bumptious in his attacks on the grand dinosaurs of Xxth century culture, but it is easy to forgive him in light of the simple, even humble style of his prose.
Girard's most famous concept is that of mimetic desire: the reason why we desire an object is not in the object itself, but because another appear to us as desiring the said object. Desire, then, is always mediated by the presence of someone else, thus escaping for example psychoanalysis' tendency to ascribe an essential value in the object of desire. What this mimetic desire means is that it is not the differences between the various members of a community that brings about violence, but rather the erosion of those differences: what he calls the 'sacrificial crisis' is the theoretical and historical event in which the cultural order, warrant of social differentiation, looses its authority. The result is the spread of violence, as one crime calls for a vengeance, and the vengeance in turn calls for another crime, and so on, in what he terms a deadly reciprocity.
Spontaneously a seemingly inbuilt mechanism can however thwart this apocalyptic prospect: the highly emotional and irrational nature of violence means that its object can be displaced, and in extreme situations the group members tend naturally to displace their violence on a single individual, the scapegoat, in actual fact no more no less guilty than the others, but identified as the source and the reason of violence itself. A highly ambiguous figure, Girard identifies him with the Greek sparagmos and pharmakos, Bushong and other African sacrificed kings, with Oedipus, and with many other examples taken from myths and rites across the world. The scapegoat somehow 'absorbs' the crimes and the violence itself, and is either cast-out of the community or sacrificed. His pivotal position between the chaotic crisis and the re-established order is the source of his fundamental ambiguity, which makes him both a criminal and a founding father.
The event is then commemorated ritually throughout the existence of the culture it created. At the light of this theory, Girard then explore a lot particular cases, showing how his model can explain the seemingly more intractable debates in theory. He eventually turns it against psychoanalysis and use it to move beyond structuralist anthropology. He eventually opens it up to make all sorts of bold claims, starting with the continued relevance of his model to our contemporary societies, and going all the way to claiming that all sacred and all divinities are merely transcendent violence. So is it any good? Well it is a very enjoyable read, not least because Girard is found of those ever entertaining anthropological limit-cases, which to the western eyes seems so intriguing and mysterious. It is, as I mentioned, easy to read, and remarkably clear.
Certainly the theory resonates, with its emphasis on the Machiavellian 'criminal virtue' (although Girard does not mention it by name) and its inbuilt irrationality, with the puzzles of Xxth century radical politics, those of Sorel or those Carl Schmitt for example. However, maybe because Girard himself fails to connect it too explicitly (save for small passage on Kantorowicz) to politics, we are left to do the guess-work. Another, more important issue is Girard's rather nebulous hyspostasis of violence, which is a bit of everything, the omnitool of his post-structuralist project: it is the 'other', that which lives outside the boundaries of the recognised order, it is the archaic and haunting memory of primordial violence, but it is also the constant (unconscious) threat which maintain social cohesion when the law's more concrete hazard is absent or weak. It is the irrational ground from which the binaries of language emerge, as well as the meeting point of opposites and the sacred itself. We can agree with Girard that violence is universal and an intrinsic component of any social form – but in order to assimilate violence to the sacred or the divine, violence need to be absolutely transcendent: there are two modes for experiencing violence, as perpetrator or as victim. For a victim the locus of transcendence would probably not be a nebulous and abstract notion of violence, but rather the oppressor himself. For the perpetrator, violence become synonymous with an acute form of agency, with, precisely, the ability to shape or distort the order of things – in which case violence is no longer perceived as 'other'.
Girard would probably argue, as he does about many other things in the book, that the separation between the two 'faces' of violence (perpetrator and victim) is a modern distortion. Yet the social dynamics of the great apes or a wolf pack seem to me to prove just the opposite. I completely understand Girard's (and Bataille's) fascination with the inbuilt ambivalence of the sacred, both positive and negative until the rise of Christianity, but he does use it way too often as a 'get out jail free' card. Oh, how I love reading anthropology!
Just when I get caught up in the endless facebook stream of arguments and memes-religion, politics, TV, and corporate-controlled and produced mass culture-I step back into a culturally removed, dispassionate space and compare my culture to ancient Greece, or the Bushmen, or some tribe in Borneo and understand how silly and deadly serious are our bizarre choices manifest as cultural institutions. Perspective is everything. So refreshing. Girard's arguments he Oh, how I love reading anthropology! Just when I get caught up in the endless facebook stream of arguments and memes-religion, politics, TV, and corporate-controlled and produced mass culture-I step back into a culturally removed, dispassionate space and compare my culture to ancient Greece, or the Bushmen, or some tribe in Borneo and understand how silly and deadly serious are our bizarre choices manifest as cultural institutions. Perspective is everything.
So refreshing. Girard's arguments here are amply summed-up and synopsized elsewhere (even on this page by one Jennifer who does a fine, exhaustive job) so I'll leave it to you to explore this book and its detailed contents on your own. It posits that human culture begins with groups of people attempting to deal with the problem of human-on-human violence through the institution of sacrifice and the argument is largely convincing.
The argument is also soiled/weakened somewhat by being both too strenuously (and repetitively) argued and, as in most blanket, all-encompassing theories of anything (particularly ALL world cultures) there has to be a reductionist element and a 'latency' clause so that anything that doesn't fit into the system actually fits into the system by not fitting into the system. 99% of the non-fiction books published are useless self help, celebrity gossip, and silly politicians arguing battles that philosophers solved centuries ago but the common idiot can still not grasp with their nationalistic education and superstitious adherence to religion. So five fucking stars to a real thinker and the finger to all major publishing houses, the MacDonalds-s of contemporary culture!
We need more scapegoats after all. As Girard points out, poets are anti-social because we pity the scapegoat. I'd like to see society sacrificed so that one outsider might finally realize him/herself as both the sacred and the profane.
Chemoffice 2004 free download. A true deity? Who wants all that order anyway? We're still the flowers in the dustbin. Maybe the best book of Rene Girard. It should be read as a book of philosophy, its vast ambitions taken into account. I feel that a comment on the pertinent (but in my opinion symptomatic) review made by Fatima has its place here (read that review first). The idea that Girard, or anybody, may be above all criticism, that one can put oneself above that, is not true, and too seductive by its own right.
(The Fatima's text ends with some criticism - as it should - isn’t’ it?) This kind of crit Maybe the best book of Rene Girard. It should be read as a book of philosophy, its vast ambitions taken into account. I feel that a comment on the pertinent (but in my opinion symptomatic) review made by Fatima has its place here (read that review first). The idea that Girard, or anybody, may be above all criticism, that one can put oneself above that, is not true, and too seductive by its own right.
(The Fatima's text ends with some criticism - as it should - isn’t’ it?) This kind of criticism against a theory like that of Girard’s seems necessary in order to have a “scientific” approach. But is it true? What is the truth of the matter? What are the facts? Or maybe there are no facts? Girard states that there are. Is there no contradiction in saying that Girard enters too many different domains of research and also that he does not discuss more than two Greek tragedies?
This is implying that he should have limited himself to studying Greek tragedy, and that exhaustively, following the methodology of that domain. These contradictions are not errors of argumentation but contradictions of fact. One cannot have the cake and eat it. I understand exactly what 'remove himself from all criticism' means.
But this kind of argument is too self-explanatory. What does it really say? Where can we apply it and where can't we? It seems to me that the sheer vastness of an author’s ambition tends to bring this accusation. And that only pettiness of design can avoid it.
Specialization is the rule of the day but that some might just think and manifest beside the rule of their day is not a surprise; it is the rule of those who will be read after centuries. The risk of ridicule is high, but does that matter?
Free thinking is not a healthy sport that we all can train for and enjoy together, but rather a difficult and problematic result of seeing certain things that we would rather forget; saying that Girard is in this sense Freudian is praising him. We are too easily too clever for people like Girard or Freud.
Great thinkers are not made for peer-review. And this is, without irony, sad, and true, as usually are things that we would rather forget. I had just been attacked by demons, my life was spinning around, so I decided to go back to temple. I had spent years challenging the buddhist beliefs I was raised in, but it seemed the right choice.
At the same time I was reading this book I began to hear from the lama of our temple words that I had previously only heard in Christian/Catholic doctrine and churches and twelve step programs. The combination of renewed disillussionment with the buddhist temple and the revelation of this book trans I had just been attacked by demons, my life was spinning around, so I decided to go back to temple. I had spent years challenging the buddhist beliefs I was raised in, but it seemed the right choice. At the same time I was reading this book I began to hear from the lama of our temple words that I had previously only heard in Christian/Catholic doctrine and churches and twelve step programs. The combination of renewed disillussionment with the buddhist temple and the revelation of this book transformed my perspective on life.
This book is a remarkable achievement by Girard. He has managed to provide a context and framework by which to understand sacrifice, so closely related linguistically to 'sacred', and the violence that accompanies it-and their role in society. Anyone terrorized as a child by the 1969 Encyclopedia Britannica film 'The Lottery', based on a short story by Shirley Jackson, will understand the undercurrent of Girard's book.
He holds that violence has been ritualized by society, and that it can serve This book is a remarkable achievement by Girard. He has managed to provide a context and framework by which to understand sacrifice, so closely related linguistically to 'sacred', and the violence that accompanies it-and their role in society. Anyone terrorized as a child by the 1969 Encyclopedia Britannica film 'The Lottery', based on a short story by Shirley Jackson, will understand the undercurrent of Girard's book.
He holds that violence has been ritualized by society, and that it can serve as a kind of relief valve - but much more - that keeps the social fabric of society knit together. Girard mines Greek mythology, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and finally Shakespreare to explore his theory.
What seemed to be a glaring weakness was resolved in the final pages - the seeming omission of Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition from his conversation. He says briefly mid-book that Christ was one of the few of his era that understood the power of violence and sacrifice. In the final chapter, he engages the Jonah story and the casting of lots to see who would be thrown from the boat-bringing to mind again the film 'The Lottery'. More satisfyingly, he notes that a whole separate book will be needed to explore the Judeo-Christian story. Apply Girard's theory to current events and one's mind begins to reel. Ponder the terrorism perpetuated by ISIS and the Taliban.
The multiple mass shootings in the last few years balanced against the power and activity of the gun lobby. The death penalty. Our treatment of those different than ourselves, from ethnic and religious minorities to immigrants and gays. The Greek economic crisis and the European Union.
Girard would hold that there is some much, much deeper stuff going on, and I'm inclined to agree. Girard has left me with a great deal to think about.
I'm convinced now to add to my list his books 'The Scapegoat' and 'Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World', which will delve more deeply into my own faith traditions. I am grateful for this work by Girard; it has not so much shifted my thinking as as prodded it, giving me very useful tools by which to further understand and contemplate the role of the sacred - and violence - in our world. In a highly innovative book that studies the mechanisms and structures behind violence, Girard's Violence and the Sacred presents his unique insights into violence in literature and society. From the bible to Oedipus Rex to various indigenous tribes throughout the world, Girard attempts to cover all bases in his arguments. He finds interesting psychological sources for the various sacrifices of humankind, talks of the victim and the scapegoat, and analyzes the way humans fight, block, and stop v In a highly innovative book that studies the mechanisms and structures behind violence, Girard's Violence and the Sacred presents his unique insights into violence in literature and society.
From the bible to Oedipus Rex to various indigenous tribes throughout the world, Girard attempts to cover all bases in his arguments. He finds interesting psychological sources for the various sacrifices of humankind, talks of the victim and the scapegoat, and analyzes the way humans fight, block, and stop violence.
His ideas, while they may be quite offensive or at the least controversial to some, definitely present new perspectives on why humans give in to primal instincts. Girard discusses, in complicated and yet fairly understandable terms, common literary elements of sacrifice, plagues, dealing with crisis, and generative and reciprocal violence. Another interesting topic Girard analyzes in his novel is that of desire. In presenting the idea that human desire is mimetic and external, he eventually comes to the conclusion that desire invariably becomes violent. The tried and tried again theory behind the title character of Oedipus Rex gets a revamping in Girard's second chapter with the suggestion that Oedipus, rather than being led into fate, himself took the deliberate steps to end up where he was. Every aspect of Oedipus, as well as many other stories and novels, can be analyzed under Girard's theory with the result of a highly different perspective.
Other literary analyses are of great interest, including the idea of the 'monstrous double' in literature, the literary elements of mirroring and repetition, and the historical significance of twins in society. Girard's novel gives a new and large perspective not only on literature, but on society. Original Review: I read two of the sections from this book for a class. I would like to read the rst of i someday, because Girard has some very interesting ideas about the role of violence in the genesis of myth. Updated Review: Well, I feel like three chapters really have the main meat of this argument for me, while the others develop and explore the ideas laid out most clearly and directly in 'The Sacrificial Crisis,' 'Oedipus and the Surrogate Victim,' and 'From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Original Review: I read two of the sections from this book for a class.
Religion
I would like to read the rst of i someday, because Girard has some very interesting ideas about the role of violence in the genesis of myth. Updated Review: Well, I feel like three chapters really have the main meat of this argument for me, while the others develop and explore the ideas laid out most clearly and directly in 'The Sacrificial Crisis,' 'Oedipus and the Surrogate Victim,' and 'From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double.' The main concern that I feel Girard doesn't fully define is the object of his investigations. I mean, obviously his central question is about the interconnectedness of violence and the sacred, but he works across anthropology, literature/drama, myth, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, etc. Musica karaoke en espanol.
So it isn't entirely clear at what level Girard sees these interconnections functioning. At times, for instance, he draws a distinct line between myth and tragedy, or between religion and anthropology. But he doesn't exactly clarify at what level he sees the structures of sacrificial crisis, surrogate victim, mimetic desire, and the monstrous double functioning. It seems like he would say they function at virtually all levels of human culture (which makes it interesting that he tends to revert to 'primitive' societies or 5th century BCE Greece rather than utilizing contemporary examples).
That criticism aside, for my purposes in talking about Attic tragedy and its adaptations, the ideas of the sacrificial crisis, surrogate victim, mimetic desire, and the monstrous double are really useful. 'Nature creates similarities.
One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s.
His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.' - Walter Benjamin, 'On the Mimetic Faculty' 1933 In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary meaning 'Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s.
His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.'
- Walter Benjamin, 'On the Mimetic Faculty' 1933 In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary meanings - that of imitation (more specifically, the imitation of nature as object, phenomena, or process) and that of artistic representation. Mimesis is an extremely broad and theoretically elusive term that encompasses a range of possibilities for how the self-sufficient and symbolically generated world created by people can relate to any given 'real', fundamental, exemplary, or significant world. In Girard's book, which I read for a study group, he goes beyond the aesthetic usage of mimesis as presented in his literary criticism. In this book uses the concept of mimesis as the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change. He presents a series of hypotheses about the generation and stabilization of cultural order in primitive societies and human communities in general. He argues that mimetic desire often leads inexorably to rivalry and conflict, and that the origins of cultural order and stability reside in repeated acts of collective violence against a lone victim or group of victims, the scapegoat. Girard postulates a hypothetical morphogenetic mechanism accounting for the generation of cultural and social order: the surrogate victim mechanism.
He also discusses religion as a way of regulating social violence and creating social cohesion, arguing that through sacrifice, the violence that threatens the community is ritually cast out, turned outwards rather than inwards on to the members of the community. Girard, who sees society as an affair of men and says this explicitly, relates sacrifice to religion: he sees the function of religion as keeping violence out of the community by means of the mechanism of the scapegoat, or the ritual which substitutes for it. Girard's thought is dense at times, but the hypotheses and cultural examples make this a thought-provoking tome that is worth reading. On the question of competing structuralisms, your mileage may vary solely contingent upon whether you think his notions operate absent the colonial misogyny and racism. Rene girard is very reassured of the uber-comprehensiveness of his system compared to freud, his rival oedipal brother dead meat.
Other than that this is something to help prop up the argument on the essential violence of the social. If the system of valuation is violent then certainly the sacred is also. This text works well wit on the question of competing structuralisms, your mileage may vary solely contingent upon whether you think his notions operate absent the colonial misogyny and racism. Rene girard is very reassured of the uber-comprehensiveness of his system compared to freud, his rival oedipal brother dead meat. Other than that this is something to help prop up the argument on the essential violence of the social.
If the system of valuation is violent then certainly the sacred is also. This text works well with agamben, it's just super boring to read.
I don' t know if it's the translation or the original prose. I wanted to climb out of my face. “Religion, then, is far from 'useless.' It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor.
Religious misinterpretation is a truly constructive force, for it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis as it actually took place. To think religiously is to envision the city's destiny in terms of that violence whose mastery over man increases as man believes he has gained mastery over it. To think religiously (in the primitive sense) is to see violence as something superhuman, to be kept always at a distance and ultimately renounced.
When the fearful adoration of this power begins to diminish and all distinctions begin to disappear, the ritual sacrifices lose their force; their potency is not longer recognized by the entire community. Each member tries to correct the situation individually, and none succeeds. The withering away of the transcendental influence means that there is no longer the slightest difference between a desire to save the city and unbridled ambition, between genuine piety and the desire to claim divine status for oneself. Everyone looks on a rival enterprise as evidence of blasphemous designs. Men set to quarreling about the gods, and their skepticism leads to a new sacrificial crisis that will appear - retrospectively, in the light of a new manifestation of unanimous violence - as a new act of divine intervention and divine revenge.
Men would not be able to shake loose the violence between them, to make of it a separate entity both sovereign and redemptory, without the surrogate victim. Also, violence itself offers a sort of respite, the fresh beginning of a cycle of ritual after a cycle of violence.
Violence will come to an end only after it has had the last word and that word has been accepted as divine. The meaning of this word must remain hidden, the mechanism of unanimity remain concealed. For religion protects man as long as its ultimate foundations are not revealed. To drive the monster from its secret lair is to risk loosing it on mankind. To remove men's ignorance is only to risk exposing them to an even greater peril. The only barrier against human violence is raised on misconception. In fact, the sacrificial crisis is simply another form of that knowledge which grows grater as the reciprocal violence grows more intense but which never leads to the whole truth.
It is the knowledge of violence, along with the violence itself, that the act of expulsion succeeds in shunting outside the realm of consciousness. From the very fact that it belies the overt mythological messages, tragic drama opens a vast abyss before the poet; but he always draws back at the last moment. He is exposed to a form of hubris more dangerous than any contracted by his characters; it has to do with a truth that is felt to be infinitely destructive, even if it is not fully understood - and its destructiveness is as obvious to ancient religious thought as it is to modern philosophers. Thus we are dealing with an interdiction that still applies to ourselves and that modern thought has not yet invalidated. The fact that this secret has been subjected to exceptional pressure in the play Bacchae must prompt the following lines: May our thoughts never aspire to anything higher than laws!
What does it cost man to acknowledge the full sovereignty of the gods? That which has always been held as true owes its strength to Nature.” —.
Non-fiction
Author by: Agamemnon Maverick Language: en Publisher by: Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 71 Total Download: 643 File Size: 55,5 Mb Description: Violence and the Sacred (La violence et le sacr ) is a 1972 book by French anthropologist Ren Girard. Turning his interest towards the anthropological domain, Girard began to study anthropological literature and proposed his second great hypothesis: the victimization process, which is at the origin of archaic religion.
Since the mimetic rivalry that develops from the struggle for the possession of the objects is contagious, it leads to the threat of violence. Girard himself says, 'If there is a normal order in societies, it must be the fruit of an anterior crisis.' Author by: R. Scott Appleby Language: en Publisher by: Rowman & Littlefield Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 96 Total Download: 830 File Size: 41,9 Mb Description: Terrorists and peacemakers may grow up in the same community and adhere to the same religious tradition.
The killing carried out by one and the reconciliation fostered by the other indicate the range of dramatic and contradictory responses to human suffering by religious actors. This book explains what religious terrorists and religious peacemakers share in common, what causes them to take different paths in fighting injustice, and how a deeper understanding of religious extremism can and must be integrated more effectively into our thinking about tribal, regional, and international conflict. Author by: Federico Finchelstein Language: en Publisher by: Duke University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 24 Total Download: 561 File Size: 50,7 Mb Description: In Transatlantic Fascism, Federico Finchelstein traces the intellectual and cultural connections between Argentine and Italian fascisms, showing how fascism circulates transnationally.
From the early 1920s well into the Second World War, Mussolini tried to export Italian fascism to Argentina, the “most Italian” country outside of Italy. (Nearly half the country’s population was of Italian descent.) Drawing on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Finchelstein examines Italy’s efforts to promote fascism in Argentina by distributing bribes, sending emissaries, and disseminating propaganda through film, radio, and print. He investigates how Argentina’s political culture was in turn transformed as Italian fascism was appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted by the state and the mainstream press, as well as by the Left, the Right, and the radical Right. As Finchelstein explains, nacionalismo, the right-wing ideology that developed in Argentina, was not the wholesale imitation of Italian fascism that Mussolini wished it to be. Argentine nacionalistas conflated Catholicism and fascism, making the bold claim that their movement had a central place in God’s designs for their country.
Finchelstein explores the fraught efforts of nationalistas to develop a “sacred” ideological doctrine and political program, and he scrutinizes their debates about Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, imperialism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism. Transatlantic Fascism shows how right-wing groups constructed a distinctive Argentine fascism by appropriating some elements of the Italian model and rejecting others. It reveals the specifically local ways that a global ideology such as fascism crossed national borders. Author by: Susan Juster Language: en Publisher by: University of Pennsylvania Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 85 Total Download: 657 File Size: 50,8 Mb Description: Sacred Violence in Early America offers a sweeping reinterpretation of the violence endemic to seventeenth-century English colonization by reexamining some of the key moments of cultural and religious encounter in North America. Susan Juster explores different forms of sacred violence—blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction, and iconoclasm—to uncover how European traditions of ritual violence developed during the wars of the Reformation were introduced and ultimately transformed in the New World. Juster's central argument concerns the rethinking of the relationship between the material and the spiritual worlds that began with the Reformation and reached perhaps its fullest expression on the margins of empire.
The Reformation transformed the Christian landscape from an environment rich in sounds, smells, images, and tactile encounters, both divine and human, to an austere space of scriptural contemplation and prayer. When English colonists encountered the gods and rituals of the New World, they were forced to confront the unresolved tensions between the material and spiritual within their own religious practice. Accounts of native cannibalism, for instance, prompted uneasy comparisons with the ongoing debate among Reformers about whether Christ was bodily present in the communion wafer.
Sacred Violence in Early America reveals the Old World antecedents of the burning of native bodies and texts during the seventeenth-century wars of extermination, the prosecution of heretics and blasphemers in colonial courts, and the destruction of chapels and mission towns up and down the North American seaboard. At the heart of the book is an analysis of 'theologies of violence' that gave conceptual and emotional shape to English colonists' efforts to construct a New World sanctuary in the face of enemies both familiar and strange: blood sacrifice, sacramentalism, legal and philosophical notions of just and holy war, malediction, the contest between 'living' and 'dead' images in Christian idology, and iconoclasm.