Abstract

In his final original book, Battling to the End, Girard could hardly have been clearer: "Violence" he wrote, "can no longer be checked. From this point of view we can say that the apocalypse has begun."1Faced with the rise of global Islamist terror and the declaration of a "war against terror," Girard observed the collapse of politics as a mechanism to contain violence. History is not inevitably and dialectically converging on a rational Hegelian Aufhebung but has the pattern of a duel, as observed by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz after the defeat of the Prussian army by Napoleon's revolutionary French army at Jena. Far from converging on reconciliation, the logic of mimetic rivalry predicts...