Abstract

Jacques Derrida’s critique of philosophical origins, in his essay on Plato and elsewhere, unveils a sacrificial dynamic that René Girard hypothesizes as the origin of human culture. Girard’s latest book, Achever Clausewitz, applies his mimetic theory to history: the Prussian general’s analysis of increasingly violent «reciprocal action» in modern, post-revolutionary warfare exposes the mimetic principle of lethally violent doubles. This «trend to extremes» works to the dissolution of institutions – national sovereignty, international law, politics, war itself – that Derrida explores in Voyous, his book-length essay on terrorism. Both authors see the world of globalized commerce and the globalized terrorism that goes with it as enmeshed in violent undifferentiation. Girard’s historically grounded work supplies a narrative line to Derrida’s structural analyses. Derrida’s call for an ever more vigorous deconstructive rationality as a solution is symptomatic of philosophy’s blindness to the interactive crescendos of human violence that is unveiled in Girard’s religious anthropology.