Jean Girard Quotes

MT: The arrival of Christ disturbs the sacrificial order, the cycle of little false periods of temporary peace following sacrifices? RG: The story of the “demons of Gerasa” in the synoptic Gospels, and notably in Mark, shows this well. To free himself from the crowd that surrounds him, Christ gets on a boat, crosses Lake Tiberias, and comes to shore in non-Jewish territory, in the land of the Gerasenes. It's the only time the Gospels venture among a people who don't read the Bible or acknowledge Mosaic law. As Jesus is getting off the boat, a possessed man blocks his way, like the Sphinx blocking Oedipus. “The man lived in the tombs and no one could secure him anymore, even with a chain. All night and all day, among the tombs and in the mountains, he would howl and gash himself with stones.” Christ asks him his name, and he replies: “My name is Legion, for there are many of us.” The man then asks, or rather the demons who speak through him ask Christ not to send them out of the area—a telling detail—and to let them enter a herd of swine that happen to be passing by. And the swine hurl themselves off the edge of the cliff into the lake. It's not the victim who throws himself off the cliff, it's the crowd. The expulsion of the violent crowd is substituted for the expulsion of the single victim. The possessed man is healed and wants to follow Christ, but Christ tells him to stay put. And the Gerasenes come en masse to beg Jesus to leave immediately. They're pagans who function thanks to their expelled victims, and Christ is subverting their system, spreading confusion that recalls the unrest in today's world. They're basically telling him: “We'd rather continue with our exorcists, because you, you're obviously a true revolutionary. Instead of reorganizing the demoniac, rearranging it a bit, like a psychoanalyst, you do away with it entirely. If you stayed, you would deprive us of the sacrificial crutches that make it possible for us to get around.” That's when Jesus says to the man he's just liberated from his demons: “You're going to explain it to them.” It's actually quite a bit like the conversion of Paul. Who's to say that historical Christianity isn't a system that, for a long time, has tempered the message and made it possible to wait for two thousand years? Of course this text is dated because of its primitive demonological framework, but it contains the capital idea that, in the sacrificial universe that is the norm for mankind, Christ always comes too early. More precisely, Christ must come when it's time, and not before. In Cana he says: “My hour has not come yet.” This theme is linked to the sacrificial crisis: Christ intervenes at the moment the sacrificial system is complete. This possessed man who keeps gashing himself with stones, as Jean Starobinski has revealed, is a victim of “auto-lapidation.” It's the crowd's role to throw stones. So, it's the demons of the crowd that are in him. That's why he's called Legion—in a way he's the embodiment of the crowd. It's the crowd that comes out of him and goes and throws itself off of the cliff. We're witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence. MT

Harlean wasn’t certain she could be any happier than she was at this moment, doing something she loved, with people she so admired. Life’s road was certainly full of twists and turns but she had really begun to enjoy the ride.

I don’t mind being a contradiction as long as I know my own mind.

You’re threatening me?” she asked as incredulity tumbled over her anger, and her heart began to sink again beneath the weight of a thousand disappointments in him that had come before this one.

In spite of her newfound celebrity, Harlean still believed herself to be the property of others, a circumstance from which she longed to break free.

chapitre xviii Aux sources des religions La thèse développée par l'anthropologue français René Girard dans La Violence et le Sacré 1 , et dans Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde 2 , illustre la manière dont, des religions traditionnelles les plus anciennes

dans les mythes et les rituels des religions primitives, Girard l'applique au judéo-christianisme, le Christ étant le fameux bouc émissaire d'abord rejeté, puis divinisé, sacrifié par ses congénères puis reconnu comme leur libérateur par bon nombre d'entre eux.

no society before ours has taken aim at sacrificial mechanisms. So, what's revealed by all of this is the tenacity of those mechanisms. If you stamp them out here, they pop up again over there. The value of Foucault's work consists in having shown this. One day, he told me that “we shouldn't invent a philosophy of the victim.” I replied: “No, not a philosophy, I agree—a religion! But it already exists!” Foucault understood the very thing that optimistic rationalism didn't foresee: new forms of “victimization” are constantly emerging from the instruments that were intended to do away with them. It's his pessimism that separates us: unlike him, I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this, or else face utter despair. Today, after the end of ideologies, the only way to embrace this meaning is to rediscover religion. Of course, even as the victimary mechanism keeps being reborn, Christianity is always there to transform and subvert it, like a leavening agent—in the humanist rationalism of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, for example. When Voltaire defended Jean Calas, the persecuted Protestant, he was being more Christian than the Catholic priests who were against him. His mistake was to have had too much faith in his own perfection, to imagine that the correctness of his position was due to his own genius. He couldn't see how much he owed to the past that stretched out behind him. I respect tradition, but I'm not justifying History. MT

Otto, for example, whose book on Dionysus appeared in Germany in 1933.10 Otto stands opposed in this respect to the French Hellenist Jean-Pierre Vernant, who is incapable of seeing anything other than the “normal.” Vernant finds the very idea of disorder absolutely shocking. He's just written an essay on Tocqueville that I would like to read. If ever there was a mimetic author, it's Tocqueville; and if there is a true science of politics, it begins with Tocqueville. It's only in the second volume of Democracy in America that Tocqueville really comes into his own, by the way. He was the first to perceive the difference between democracy and monarchy, which he rightly saw as being based on a unique kind of sacrificial animal, the king. Democracy, although it contains as many obstacles as there are individuals in society, leads people to believe that there are no more obstacles, because the king has been overthrown. No one before Tocqueville saw that, to the contrary, if the shadow of the cripple is no longer cast over the world, it is because the world is on its way to becoming a cemetery. MSB

Almost at the same time, one of Lacan’s young followers, Françoise Girard, asked Klein for permission to translate the book; Klein replied that someone else was already working on it, although she did not mention who that person was. She advised Girard to translate Contributions to Psycho-Analysis instead. When Lacan returned to Paris, he began translating The Psycho-Analysis of Children, but soon put it aside and asked René Diatkine—who at that time was being analysed by Lacan—to continue the work. When Diatkine finished translating the first part of the book from the German edition, Lacan asked to see the translation. Diatkine gave it to him, but Lacan never returned it. Unfortunately it was the only copy of the French translation that then existed. Two years later, at the Amsterdam Congress in 1951, Diatkine told Klein about what had happened.

Aramis = Peter Harratt (also Henri Lassot) Artus & Auguste = Henry and Alfred Newton Bishop = Abbé Robert Alesch (also René Martin) Bob = Raoul Le Boulicaut Carte = André Girard Célestin = Brian Stonehouse Christophe = Gilbert Turck Constantin = Jean de Vomécourt Fontcroise = Captain Henri Charles Giese Georges = Georges Bégué Gévolde = Serge Kapalski Gloria = Gabrielle Picabia Lucas = Pierre de Vomécourt (also Sylvain) Marie = Virginia Hall (also Germaine, Philomène, Nicolas, Diane, Diana, Marcelle, Brigitte, Isabelle, Camille, DFV, Artemis) Nicolas = Robert Boiteux (also known as Robert Burdett) Olive = Francis Basin Pépin = Dr Jean Rousset René = Victor Gerson (also Vic) Sophie = Odette Wilen Victoire = Mathilde Carré (or La Chatte)

Je boirai du thé un peu corsé, c'est vrai, mais je croulerai à ma guise, et surtout je n'éprouverai aucune crainte à l'endroit de l'effondrement, car c'est un véritable ami, confident du voyageur et frère de l'écrivain ; une étape vers notre accomplissement paisible, certains parlent de notre fin, je pense que nous pouvons pacifiquement les laisser braire. J'enfilerai des trombones l'un à l'autre, je perdrai sciemment mon temps en jonglant avec les devoirs étranges de ceux qui regardent tout simplement en face la chance immense d'être en vie.