Triangolo di pensieri: Girard, Freud, Lacan

The work of René Girard constitutes one of the most singular theoretical itineraries of the last half century. Born in Avignon in 1923, he is in the USA, where he permanently resides from the late forties, that Girard completes his education and begins his teaching. 1 Professor of French literature from 1957 to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Girard made his debut in 1961 with Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque . 2 It will follow in 1972 La Violence et le sacre which remains, together with Des Choses cachées, depuis la fondation du monde of 1978, his most famous book. From then until the publication of his latest work - Celui par here the scandal arrive (2001) - this "irregularity of culture" has committed itself without rest in an attempt to show the centrality of imitation, rivalry, violence, religion, as cornerstones of human culture. Even before its contents, the charm of René Girard resides in his style. From Mensonge romantique to The Theater of Envy of 1991, dedicated to the work of Shakespeare, Girard has constantly turned to the great writers to find the key to the interrogations of the human sciences, provoking provocatively the superiority of knowledge of Sophocles, Proust or of the Book of Job compared to Freud or to structuralism. All the great texts of Girard are also "yellow": there are traces of the murder, the founding event of society, there is culture as immense work of dissimulation of the corpse, as a pyramid that conceals the violent origins. 3Religions and mythology both reflect and camouflage this process: "far from being a gratuitous invention, myth is a text falsified by the belief of the perpetrators in the guilt of their victim". 4 René Girard is not only the unmasking of this extraordinary méconnaissance in which men are immersed, the lawyer ( parakletos for the Gospels 5 ) who commits himself to exonerate the victims from the false accusations that are addressed to him (and the most famous is certainly Oedipus). He is at the service of a greater Revelation: not by chance, by Des choses cachéesforward, a good half of his books are entitled to an evangelical verse. Judeo-Christian writing is at work in history, says Girard, to reveal the innocence of the expiatory victim. Even the great atheistic and rationalist thoughts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be unconsciously inscribed in this progressive and inexorable triumph of the biblical text, which alone would possess the key to fully revealing the violent secret of origins. Girard's Christianity is not the private faith of an intellectual who remains detached from his theoretical horizon: it is rather a gnosis - "Hegel of Christianity", has been defined by Jean-Marie Domenach - which leads to a kind of « Christianization of the human sciences ". 6 Judeo-Christian writing knows it the longest in terms of deconstruction of our brilliant critical mythologies: thus, Girard sweeps away the laborious "liberal" compromise through which the cognitive claims of the biblical text were neutralized in modernity. Girard explicitly inscribes his research in the Christian register starting from Des Choses cachées , and accentuates this reference more and more, up to claim a real apologetic will 7 in his last works. But already in his early work we can clearly see how much weight in the text is an Augustinian cut Christianity. "Men, here is a text in perfect Girard style, they flatter themselves of having rejected the old superstitions but are sinking underground, in the subsoil where more and more gross illusions triumph". 8 In a theoretical scenario that will always remain dual, Girard contrasts, already in his first work, with the romantic lie the truthromance that the writer reaches through a sort of religious conversion. We could say of René Girard who is a spoilsman, a trickster of contemporary thought: the theorist of victim mechanisms, he himself played the scapegoat of the culture of his time, choosing provocatively to think from what the sciences contemporaries expel their own paradigm. To an intellectual world enchanted by differences, Girard has made the poisoned gift of a thought obsessively aimed at revealing the only mechanism structuring the plurality of texts and cultures. 9 In a certain sense, his work can be defined as a stubborn counterpoint to the currents that have gone through this last forty years: hermeneutics, structuralism, deconstruction. For these reasons, the receipt of René Girard has sharply divided: on one side the silence and almost total ostracism by the dominant disciplines, 10 other enthusiastic welcome of a group of "disciples" who, meeting in 'COV & R association ( Colloquium on Violence and Religion ), has attempted to develop the major insights of Girardian thought. 11 Thirty years from La Violence et le sacre, however, the results of the influence of Girardian ideas do not seem to have proved equal to the ambitions of departure. A few exceptions are happy to make openly some keys to reading Girard's thought, pointing to a sort of theoretical "weakening" of his research frame. 12