The academician René Girard died – Liberation

He was nicknamed “ the new Darwin humanities .” The French philosopher and academician René Girard died Wednesday at the age of 91 years in the US, announced Stanford University where he long taught.

“The renowned French teacher Stanford, one of the 40 immortals of the prestigious French Academy, died at his home in Stanford Wednesday following a long illness , “said the Californian university in a statement.

Widely translated, often admired beyond our borders, like the United States or Italy, the work of René Girard still not well known to the general public in France. “ For an intellectual who has long been regarded as a writer against the current and unusual, the election to the Academy is a form of recognition ,” he told the daily La Croix on December 15 2005, the day it is received at the French Academy.

“ I can say without exaggeration that for half a century, the only French institution that has persuaded me that I was not forgotten in France, my own country, as a researcher and as a thinker, it is the French Academy ‘, he explained that day in his speech to the Immortals.

If it was sometimes overlooked in France, his books translated worldwide “ offered a bold and broad vision of nature, history and human destiny ” , according to Stanford University

scriptures and classics

Girard began his career as a literary theorist fascinated by all the social sciences. history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy , religion, psychology and theology. “ He influenced writers such as JM Coetzee the Nobel prize and the Czech writer Milan Kundera even if he never enjoyed the cachet of its peers structuralist, post-structuralist, déconstructionistes and other “the statement said Stanford.

Christian, born on Christmas Day 1923 in Avignon, he has written extensively on the diversity and unity of religions. This humanist whose father was curator of the library and the Musée Calvet d’Avignon and the Palais des Papes, based his thinking on the Holy Scriptures, read as much as the great classics of literature (Proust, Stendhal and Dostoevsky).

He is known for his concept of “ mimetic desire ” which he defined as: “ it’s always imitating the desire of my fellow that I introduce rivalry in human relations and therefore violence . ” For him, the Bible is a huge business out man of violence.

After the School of Charters, archivist palaeographer training René Girard was installed since 1947 in the United States. There is taught in many universities such as Duke, Johns Hopkins and especially Stanford, where he has long led the language department, French literature and civilization. Doctor honoris causa of many universities (Amsterdam, Innsbruck, Antwerp, Padua, Montreal, Baltimore, London …), he finished his academic career at Stanford in 1995, where he lived for.

He was the author of books like Deceit and romantic truth (1961), Violence and the Sacred (1972), Shakespeare, fires of envy (trial Prix Médicis 90), I see Satan fall like lightning (1999) or Home from the Hill (2001).

AFP