René Girard, who died three years ago, was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His sprawling oeuvre might be called anthropological philosophy. His books make connections through theology, literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, psychology, mythology, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy. His core theory is that our human motivations are rooted in “mimetic desire”—a form of envy which is not simply desiring what another has, but also desiring to be like them. This competitive drive then sparks all other human conflict on both the micro- and macroscopic levels. He explained how mimetic desire leads us to blame others when our desire is frustrated, which then leads to blaming others and ultimately to the mechanism of scapegoating on the societal level, which forms the basis for ritual sacrifice. An accomplished academic, journalist, and author, Cynthia Haven was not only a colleague of Girard but also a close friend to him and his wife. Her biography is a warm, personal memoir while also providing an introduction to his thought and the historical context for the development of his ideas. (…)  Brought up in a conventional French Catholic home, by the time he was at university he had adopted the fashionable atheism of the day. Witnessing the treatment of the Jews and the scapegoating of French collaborators in the aftermath of the Second World War no doubt had an impact on the development of Girard’s thought. The academic vigor and enthusiasm in postwar United States provided the perfect setting for a philosopher and historian who was constantly thinking outside the boundaries of strict academic territories. He would come to interact with the avant-garde writers and philosophers of his day—Camus, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida—and yet rise above them and their frequent rivalries and needy egos. In a world of narrowing academia, in which professors knew more and more about less and less, Girard was one who transcended the blinkered biases, the bureaucratic boundaries, and artificially defined territories. As T.S. Eliot’s entire life’s work must be understood through the lens of his 1927 conversion to Christianity, so I believe Girard is also best understood through his profound reversion to his Catholic faith. (…) Girard’s own awakening began in the winter of 1958-59 as he was working on his book about the novel. (…) His intellectual awareness was combined later with a series of profound mystical experiences as he rode on the train from Baltimore to Bryn Mawr. (…) A bit later he had a health scare which pushed the intellectual and the subjective mystical experiences into a firm commitment to religion. (…) For those who like to spot little signs of a providential plan, it might be noted that René Girard (also called Noël) who was born on Christmas Day, dated his conversion to March 25—the feast of the Annunciation—traditionally the date for the beginning of God’s redemptive work in the world, and in medieval times the date for the celebration of the New Year. Girard’s conversion and subsequent practice of his Catholic faith was an act of great courage. His huge leonine profile with his contemplative gaze grants him a kind of heroic stature that reflects the heroism of his witness. As post-modern academia drifted further and further into Marxist ideologies, fashionable atheism, and nihilistic post-structuralism, Girard was able to put forward an intellectual explication for age-old Christian themes using a fresh vocabulary and perspective. (…) What Girard did was to provide a fresh synthesis and applications of old truths within non-religious disciplines. He also re-vivified the concept of sacrifice, explaining its underlying dynamic rather than simply writing it off as a barbaric superstition. In an age where atheism is all the rage and all religions (especially Catholicism) are suspect, Girard does a great service in refreshing the language of the tribe and giving the intellectual universe a way of seeing old truths in a new way and new truths through an old lens. As a result, his work has already been hugely influential in a range of disciplines, both academic and cultural. (…) Ms. Haven is not much of a name-dropper, but when she describes, for example, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man symposium held at John Hopkins in 1966, the pomposity of the whole affair is comedic. I sensed a touch of sarcasm as she reports the competing egos of famous French philosophers and the rivalry between intellectuals trying to see whose presentations can be the most incomprehensible, while they are also comparing notes on the luxury of their accommodations and the numbers of young women they are able to lure into philosophical discussions between the sheets. Dwight Longenecker

Girard’s mimetic theory— majestic in its simplicity, sweeping in its scope — has a way of gathering up stray anecdotes and incidents into its collective force, like a hurricane that swallows up every bit of moisture within range. Cynthia Haven’s Evolution of Desire offers the first of two long-awaited bibliographies of Girard (the other, which has the official sanction of the Girard family, is by Benoît Chantre). Rather than providing a biographer’s biography— full of footnotes, every stone overturned, weighty enough to ensure nobody else tries to write one — Haven has instead provided a portrait of sorts, bringing to life the Girard she came to know in the winter of his life. This is not to say that Evolution of Desire reads as a kind of “ last days and sayings ” of René Girard; Chantre has already provided that in Les derniers jours de René Girard (Grasset, 2016). Haven prefers the early Girard, providing remarkable insights into his childhood, and underscoring the importance of his birthplace, Avignon, for his intellectual development. Of his intellectual collaborators, Haven favors those from Girard’s first stint at Hopkins, rather than later figures. By doing so, she downplays the interactions between theological interlocutors like Raymund Schwager and James Alison, perhaps the most important current translator of mimetic theory into Christian theology. Schwager receives some attention, but Alison’s name does not grace the book. Even those familiar with the brazen and iconoclastic interdisciplinary style of Girard can forget what an autodidact he was. Girard’s training, both in France and in the United States, was in history. The École des Chartes formed students into librarians and archivists. From there Girard went to the United States, where his forgettable dissertation at the University of Indiana covered American opinions on France during the Second World War. When Girard came to literature in the 1950s and 60s, he did so as an outsider. And he continued this pattern of butting into adjacent fields, among them anthropology, ethnology, and eventually theology. Haven ’s recounting of Girard’s early years highlights the panache that would mark Girard. Whether as a prankster in school, or as the organizer of an exhibit that brought Picasso to Avignon in 1947 — this event initiated the world-renowned Avignon Festival — Girard displayed winning qualities before becoming an immortel in the Académie Française. For those who’ve tracked Girard for the past three decades, it is easy to start with Girard’s occupancy of the Hammond Chair at Stanford, beginning in 1981. Haven points out the importance of the earlier academic posts, especially his first stint at Johns Hopkins from 1957 – 68. There Girard made his reputation and also experienced a two-fold conversion, first with the help of great literature, and then through a cancer scare in 1959. During this period Girard published Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) and rose to full professor, hardly an anticipated development given his failure to publish at Indiana. Girard enthusiasts know these details, mostly from his interview with James Williams at the end of The Girard Reader. Haven embellishes them through corroborating witnesses from these years. In perhaps the most enjoyable chapter, “The French Invasion,” she recalls Girard’s role in a monumental conference at Hopkins: “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” This event marked the American emergence of Derrida, and decisively shifted Johns Hopkins as well as many other departments toward post-structuralism, or postmodernism. Although Girard had helped organize the conference, it led indirectly to his departure for Buffalo, as he could not bring himself to accept what he understood to be the anti-realist impulse of postmodern theory, which would become all the rage in literature departments. In his first stint at Hopkins, Girard became Girard. He trained his first graduate students there, including Andrew McKenna and Eric Gans. Girard also found important companions in Baltimore, including Richard Macksey, described as “a legendary polymath” (84), and a rising Dante scholar, John Freccero. Girard’s former chair at Hopkins, Nathan Edelman, recalls, “I thought of him as fearless. He had a tremendous self- confidence, in the best sense […] He never felt threatened by people who had different ideas […] We were enthralled by him. We desperately wanted his approval” (85). These sentiments arose well before Girard became a pied piper to Christian intellectuals. The strongest personal accusation from these years was that Girard could overgeneralize and dismiss too easily. (…) During these years Girard also met Jean-Michel Oughourlian, the first of many collaborators who would help Girard develop his distinctive interview-book. (…) Things Hidden signaled Girard’s coming out as a Christian, nearly twenty years after re-conversion in 1959. North Americans have developed a domesticated portrait of Girard: an interesting and important intellectual in the thrall of certain theologians. Yet in France, where the intellectual appetite is greater, Girard made an impact difficult to fathom. Haven notes that Things Hidden sold 35,000 copies in the first six months, which put it #2 on French non-fiction lists at the time. Eventually it sold 100,000 copies. That type of volume puts its somewhere between Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in terms of immediate impact, and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age or Alistair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, in terms of longevity. In France, if you had not read Things Hidden, you at least needed to fake it. Girard credited his publisher for the success, but Haven brings out Girard’s penchant for melding social critique with self-examination, which often produced the experience of realizing, while reading his books, that they were reading you. Haven describes Girard’s conversion and attends to his practice of Christianity, but does not make it the central thread of her biography. Although she relies on exchanges with friends of Girard, she pays less mind than some would to the encounter with Schwager, the Swiss Jesuit, despite the fact that their letters have recently been published and translated into English. Schwager first wrote Girard in 1974, and at that time saw what had only been a plan in Girard’s mind: the connection between the Bible and Girard’s theory of the sacred. When Schwager wrote Must There Be Scapegoats? , it actually appeared a few months prior to Things Hidden. As their letters make clear, despite a great debt to Girard, Schwager was an original thinker in his own right, and eventually helped Girard to change his mind about the relationship between sacrifice and Christianity. Haven credits Schwager with encouraging Girard’s desire to be theologically orthodox, although this had mixed results. By becoming a sort of defender of the Catholic faith, it “took him one large step farther away from fashionable intellectual circles and their feverish pursuit of novelty” (228). Haven also passes over The Scapegoat (1982), and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (2001), which provide perhaps the richest sources for understanding Girard as a Christian thinker. This decision is somewhat remedied by Haven’s attention to Girard’s final major work, Battling to the End (2007). Haven was close to Girard at the time, and provides several first-hand anecdotes important for his readers. The pessimism and apocalyptic tone in the book really was Girard’s, and not Chantre’s. She also relays that Girard and Chantre had plans for an additional book on Paul. Although Battling to the End made a minor splash in the United States, it sold 20,000 copies in the first three months in France, was reviewed in all of the major newspapers, and was even cited by then-president Sarkozy. While Girard was in Paris, reporters waited outside his doorstep, whereas at Stanford, “Girard walked the campus virtually unnoticed and unrecognized” (254). Haven’s account focuses more on Girard than on the expansions of his influence. For many Girardians, the story of Girard’s intellectual journey should culminate in the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, founded in 1990 with Girard’s blessing, and faithfully attended by Girard until ill-health prevented him. The Colloquium continues to draw between one and two hundred attendees to its annual meeting. Although not all attendees are theologians or Christians, the attendees who work in literature tend to study figures like Tolkien, and many of the invited plenary speakers are major theologians or Christian intellectuals like Jean-Luc Marion or Charles Taylor. It will take some recalibration for these kinds of readers to understand that Girard’s interests cannot simply be distilled into a Christian apologetic, however subtly one might want to apply that term to Girard. Still, those invested in carrying on Girard’s legacy should welcome a book that traces Girard’s appeal so broadly. (…) The man claimed on more than one occasion that his theory sought to give Christianity and Christian theologians the anthropology that it deserved. Haven has provided a warm and magnanimous biography that Girard most certainly deserves. Grant Kaplan