Quotes About René Girard

That's why he's called Legion—in a way he's the embodiment of the crowd. It's the crowd that comes out of him and goes and throws itself off of the cliff. We're witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence.

Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.

Instead of reorganizing the demoniac, rearranging it a bit, like a psychoanalyst, you do away with it entirely.

The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.

Myths are the retrospective transfiguration of sacrificial crises, the reinterpretation of those crises in light of the cultural order that has arisen from them.

The underground appeared in this novel as the failure and reversal of Christianity.

we imitate the detached generosity of God, then the trap of mimetic rivalries will never close over us.

If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.

Christianity is a founding murder in reverse, which illuminates what has to remain hidden to produce ritual, sacrificial religions.

Even the two thieves crucified at either side of Jesus are no exception to universal contagion: they too imitate the crowd; like it they shout insults at Jesus.

Vengeance succeeds in spanning generations and encompassing the world. It transcends time and space. One should not be surprised that in the ancient world vengeance was taken to be sacred.

chapitre xviii Aux sources des religions La thèse développée par l'anthropologue français René Girard dans La Violence et le Sacré 1 , et dans Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde 2 , illustre la manière dont, des religions traditionnelles les plus anciennes

René Girard proposes that rituals of sacrifice are a necessary counter to endemic aggression and violence in society.

I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.

The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.

In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an example of cathartic victimization.