Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire

by René Girard, Mark R. Anspach (Editor)

Did Oedipus really kill his father and marry his mother? Or is he nothing but a scapegoat, set up to take the blame for a crisis afflicting Thebes? For René Girard, the mythic accusations of patricide and incest are symptomatic of a plague-stricken community's hunt for a culprit to punish, and Girard succeeds in making us see an age-old myth in a wholly new light. The hard-to-find writings assembled here include three major early essays, never before available in English, which afford a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the emergence of Girard's scapegoat theory from his pioneering analysis of rivalry and desire. Girard unbinds the Oedipal triangle from its Freudian moorings, replacing desire for the mother with desire for anyone―or anything―a rival desires. In a wide-ranging and provocative introduction, Mark R. Anspach presents fresh evidence for Girard's hypotheses from classical studies, literature, anthropology, and the life of Freud himself.

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 3, 2004

About the author

René Girard was a French-born American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy.

He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year’s fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.

Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.

René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.

Reviews

[Ilaria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raccolta di saggi sul tema del mito di Edipo e sulle tragedie di Sofocle “Edipo re” ed “Edipo a Colono”. L’intuizione principale di Gerard è che l’interpretazione freudiana del mito sia corretta ma sostanzialmente limitata, e per tanto si prefigge di “liberare” dal ristretto campo della psicanalisi il significato dell’ uccisione del padre e dell’incesto con la madre. Il filosofo ragiona sulle tematiche del capro espiatorio, del pharmakos, della differenza e della simmetria/dissimmetria all’interno del mito, arrivando a sostituire l’immagine della rivalità padre-figlio con quella dei fratelli nemici. Edipo è in sostanza innocente di quanto accusato, non nel senso che non ne sia l’autore, ma nel senso che la sua punizione va ben oltre la portata del misfatto, perché essa serve alla comunità tutta come sacrificio per salvarsi dalla peste. Tale meccanismo, lungi dall’essere il prodotto di una civiltà superstiziosa e irrazionale, è in opera ancora oggi nello scontro tra culture ed è riscontrabile persino in letteratura (Gerard getta anche le linee guida di una nuova critica letteraria che superi lo strutturalismo, soprattutto per mezzo della teoria del desiderio mimetico, che ci rende tutti simili ma tutti in lotta, indipendentemente dall’oggetto del desiderio). Se il capro espiatorio è innocente, è perché egli è, come tutti gli altri, colpevole. Il doppio mitico è indagato in modo di leggervi la reciprocità delle accuse e la gratuità del capro espiatorio come dialettica necessaria all’interno delle civiltà. Il superamento di tale condizione si colloca nel passaggio dal mito alla narrazione biblica: qui i miti vengono consapevolmente svuotati di significato, evidenziando l’ingiustizia dell’allontanamento del capro espiatorio e propugnando come soluzione la sostituzione volontaria al soggetto del martirio, cosa che permette di passare dai fratelli nemici ai veri fratelli. Brillante, rivoluzionario, imprescindibile.