Anthropoetics XXI, No. 2 Spring 2016 in Honor of René Girard
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Anthropoetics XXI, 2 Anthropoetics XXI, no. 2 Spring 2016 In Honor of René Girard Jean-Pierre Dupuy - A Tribute to René Girard Benjamin Barber - Mimetic Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Byron's Historicizing Lyricism Andrew Bartlett - Girard and the Question of Pacifism Thomas F. Bertonneau - Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine: Three Approaches Chris Fleming and John O'Carroll - Paganism: Promising Promises and Resentful Results Peter Goldman - Girard and Bakhtin on the Novel Trevor Cribben Merrill - The Comedy of Desire: Four Variations and a Coda in Homage to René Girard Richard van Oort - René Girard’s Shakespeare Benchmarks Download Issue PDF Subscribe to Anthropoetics by email Anthropoetics Home Anthropoetics Journal Anthropoetics on Twitter Subscribe to Anthropoetics RSS Home Return to Anthropoetics home page Eric Gans / [email protected] Last updated: 11/18/48298 16:14:06 index.htm[4/29/2016 11:41:06 PM] Dupuy - Tribute to Girard Anthropoetics 21, no. 2 (Spring 2016) A Tribute to René Girard Jean-Pierre Dupuy Stanford Memorial Church, January 19, 2016 On the last page of his great book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1979, René Girard wrote the following lines. According to Martha’s wish I will first read it in French so that René’s native tongue is heard during this memorial. I regret that I am unable to say it with his beautiful Provençal accent which he kept during all his American life: Je crois que la vérité n’est pas un vain mot, ou un simple « effet » comme on dit aujourd’hui. Je pense que tout ce qui peut nous détourner de la folie et de la mort, désormais, a partie liée avec cette vérité. Mais je ne sais pas comment parler de ces choses-là. Seuls les textes et les institutions me paraissent abordables, et leur rapprochement me paraît lumineux sous tous les rapports. An approximate translation could read as follows: I do not believe that truth is a vain word, no more than a sham as many contend today. I believe that from now on everything that can divert us from madness and death is intimately linked to that truth. However I am unable to address these things properly. I am only good at reading texts and analyzing institutions, but this sheds an incredible light on our world. It is vertiginous to consider that René has now the possibility of contemplating that truth without mediation. At least, that’s what he believed when he pondered over Saint Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians: "Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." But what do these little words: "now", "then", mean or refer to? And what truth is that? Once René told his daughter Mary that he had managed—and that is true—to produce the first truly secular account of this fact that should be the central focus of any science of the human: all known human societies are governed by what anthropologists of the old school named the sacred—all societies save one: ours, which we call modernity. And this because our modern world is shaped by the Christian message and the latter is responsible for the de-sacralization of the world. We know that the truth, human but revealed, that René has been searching for all his life has to do with the relationship between violence and the sacred. I cannot believe that what happened during the night of November 13th to 14th of last year was a sheer coincidence. Just a few hours before the first memorial service for René was celebrated in the church of Thomas Aquinas here in Palo Alto, Paris was struck by a series of abominable terrorist attacks. The cruel irony is that René’s hypothesis, as he liked to call his fundamental insight, provides the best account for this insane deployment of violence. It’s neither the place nor the time to flesh out what René could have said about the wave of terrorist violence that is sweeping the world today. Only this: "They hated me without reason" says the Gospel of John that René preferred to quote in this translation. The usual version is "without a cause." But the Greek original (dôron) refers to the gratuitousness of God’s gift to the world. Isn’t it astounding that the violence Christ is victim of should be referred to by the very word that serves to designate the absence of reason that presides over God’s love for us ? The terrorists’ violence certainly has a million causes that have been analyzed by as many scholarly articles. But as far as reason is concerned, this violence doesn’t go beyond murderous imbecility. In his last book, the most pessimistic of all, René Girard prophesized that this violence 2102dupuy.htm[4/29/2016 11:13:45 PM] Dupuy - Tribute to Girard which he called "essential" was about to carry off everything in its path. Anthropoetics subscribers may copy or download this text from the network, but its distribution or publication shall constitute an infringement of the Author's copyright. Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology Volume XXI, number 2 (Spring 2016) ISSN 1083-7264 URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2102/ 2102dupuy.htm[4/29/2016 11:13:45 PM] Barber - Mimetic Drama in Shakespeare and Byron Anthropoetics 21, no. 2 (Spring 2016) Mimetic Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Byron's Historicizing Lyricism Benjamin Barber Department of English University of Ottawa Ottawa, ON Canada, K1N 6N5 [email protected] The influence of Shakespeare's lyricism on the work of Lord Byron is undeniable, yet among the Romantic poets there is perhaps no author so derisive of his literary forbear than the author of Childe Harold and Don Juan. Byron's famous claim that he was born for opposition (Don Juan 15.22) highlights the antagonistic mimeticism that animates his ambition for literary greatness and significance as an early literary celebrity. However, Byron's celebration of his vocation for contrarian opinion and action is not without irony or self- criticism. Indeed, in his engagement with Shakespeare, Byron struggles to articulate the process of desire that alternately causes him to appropriate and repudiate the lyricism of his famous predecessor. As Jonathan Bate has argued, Byron's public derogations of Shakespeare are a pose that hides the respect he had for the playwright's powerful poetic vision, a regard which is recorded most comprehensively in the Shakespearean references of Don Juan (Bate 230-231). As Girard demonstrates in A Theatre of Envy, Shakespeare recognizes the emulous nature of desire and uses his plays and lyric poems to expose its machinations. Shakespeare's exposition of mimeticism as the true source of sacral violence is part of the wider modern shift away from ritual society, wherein religious means of mitigating desire's potentially inimical movements are supplemented with an increased reliance on market society to defer the effects of emulation and resentment. With his widely remarked upon knowledge of Shakespeare,(1) Byron's poetic vision—in its observations on the contagious nature of desire—bears traces of Shakespeare's own vivid representations of imitation as a conduit for his characters' lusts, cupidity, ambitions, and violence. Though Don Juan contains the bulk of Byron's allusions to Shakespeare's plays, in his lyric poems Byron's speakers echo conceptions of desire's interdividuality that resemble those of Shakespeare's most famous lyrics: the Sonnets. Unlike drama, the lyric poem is typically understood as referring primarily to the individual speaker's affective and personal experience. However, the boundary between the dramatic and lyric genres is not impermeable, as both Shakespeare's Sonnets and Byron's lyrics demonstrate. While lyric poems typically present the reader with a single speaker, they often refer to other figures, who relate to the speaker along lines of reciprocal desire. Shakespeare's Sonnets figure the imitative quality of this mimetic reciprocity, as it manifests in the complex relationships between the figures of the poets, the young man, and dark lady. Helen Vendler, Eve Sedgwick, and René Girard all note the compelling nature of the drama that the Sonnets' speaker obliquely refers to in his addresses and reflections. By focusing on this drama, Sedgwick and Girard extrapolate sociopsychological insights, which are sharpened by examining the speaker's nuanced subjective analysis of his situation relative to the other figures. Simon Palfry and Tiffany Stern's recent research into the early modern practice of dividing a play into materially distinct, individual parts illuminates the continuity between the lyric and the dramatic by pointing up how Shakespeare, as a playwright and an actor, understood each role as provisionally separable from the drama as a whole. Practically speaking, these parts function as atomized lyrical reflections on a larger drama in a mode similar to both the Sonnets' and Byron's lyrics. Byron's poems echo the Sonnets' dramatization of a particular subject's intimate mimetic relationships, emotions, and thoughts as they pertain to the socius as it changes through time. Byron's refiguring of the mimetic dynamics in the Sonnets serves to tragically dramatize his own life, as it engages flows of desire operating beyond the traditional subjectivity of lyric poetry and touches the passions driving the social and political events of his day, which he understood as having world-historical import. 2102barber.htm[4/29/2016 10:44:33 PM] Barber - Mimetic Drama in Shakespeare and Byron In Shakespeare's oeuvre there is perhaps no more explicit and concise a rendering of mimetic desire than that found in Sonnet 42: That thou hast her, is not all my grief, And yet it may be said I loved her dearly; That she hath thee is of my wailing chief, A loss in love that touches me more nearly.