René Girard
René Noël Théophile Girard, born in Avignon in 1923, was a literary critic, historian, and philosopher renowned for his mimetic theory. He proposed that human desire is not autonomous but imitative, sparking rivalry and conflict. This dynamic culminates in the scapegoat mechanism, where collective violence against a victim restores social order, forming the basis of ritual, myth, and religion. His seminal works—Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), Violence and the Sacred (1972), and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978)—explored these themes. Girard taught at Stanford, was elected to the Académie française in 2005, and died in California in 2015.
We don’t even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires