Download or read book Battling to the End written by René Girard and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2009-12-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Battling to the End René Girard engages Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), the Prussian military theoretician who wrote On War. Clausewitz, who has been critiqued by military strategists, political scientists, and philosophers, famously postulated that "War is the continuation of politics by other means." He also seemed to believe that governments could constrain war. Clausewitz, a firsthand witness to the Napoleonic Wars, understood the nature of modern warfare. Far from controlling violence, politics follows in war's wake: the means of war have become its ends. René Girard shows us a Clausewitz who is a fascinated witness of history's acceleration. Haunted by the French-German conflict, Clausewitz clarifies more than anyone else the development that would ravage Europe. Battling to the End pushes aside the taboo that prevents us from seeing that the apocalypse has begun. Human violence is escaping our control; today it threatens the entire planet.
Download or read book The One by Whom Scandal Comes written by René Girard and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Why is there so much violence in our midst?” René Girard asks. “No question is more debated today. And none produces more disappointing answers.” In Girard’s mimetic theory it is the imitation of someone else’s desire that gives rise to conflict whenever the desired object cannot be shared. This mimetic rivalry, Girard argues, is responsible for the frequency and escalating intensity of human conflict. For Girard, human conflict comes not from the loss of reciprocity between humans but from the transition, imperceptible at first but then ever more rapid, from good to bad reciprocity. In this landmark text, Girard continues his study of violence in light of geopolitical competition, focusing on the roots and outcomes of violence across societies latent in the process of globalization. The volume concludes in a wide-ranging interview with the Sicilian cultural theorist Maria Stella Barberi, where Girard’s twenty-first century emphases on the continuity of all religions, global conflict, and the necessity of apocalyptic thinking emerge.
Download or read book Anorexia and Mimetic Desire written by René Girard and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Girard shows that all desires are contagious—and the desire to be thin is no exception. In this compelling new book, Girard ties the anorexia epidemic to what he calls mimetic desire: a desire imitated from a model. Girard has long argued that, far from being spontaneous, our most intimate desires are copied from what we see around us. In a culture obsessed with thinness, the rise of eating disorders should be no surprise. When everyone is trying to slim down, Girard asks, how can we convince anorexic patients to have a healthy outlook on eating? Mixing theoretical sophistication with irreverent common sense, Girard denounces a “culture of anorexia” and takes apart the competitive impulse that fuels the game of conspicuous non-consumption. He shows that showing off a slim physique is not enough—the real aim is to be skinnier than one’s rivals. In the race to lose the most weight, the winners are bound to be thinner and thinner. Taken to extremes, this tendency to escalation can only lead to tragic results. Featuring a foreword by neuropsychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian and an introductory essay by anthropologist Mark R. Anspach, the volume concludes with an illuminating conversation between René Girard, Mark R. Anspach, and Laurence Tacou.
Download or read book Evolution of Desire written by Cynthia L Haven and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the leading thinkers of our era—a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history, and human destiny. His oeuvre, offering a “mimetic theory” of cultural origins and human behavior, inspired such writers as Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee, and earned him a place among the forty “immortals” of the Académie Française. Too often, however, his work is considered only within various academic specializations. This first-ever biographical study takes a wider view. Cynthia L. Haven traces the evolution of Girard’s thought in parallel with his life and times. She recounts his formative years in France and his arrival in a country torn by racial division, and reveals his insights into the collective delusions of our technological world and the changing nature of warfare. Drawing on interviews with Girard and his colleagues, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard provides an essential introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and original minds.
Download or read book The Enough Moment written by John Prendergast and published by Broadway Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspirational call to action against brutal warfare activities throughout the world reveals how people's movements and new policies have slowed the progress of genocide, child-soldier recruitment and rape as a war weapon in Sudan, Uganda and Congo. Original.
Download or read book Ren Girard and Secular Modernity written by Scott Cowdell and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis, Scott Cowdell provides the first systematic interpretation of René Girard’s controversial approach to secular modernity. Cowdell identifies the scope, development, and implications of Girard’s thought, the centrality of Christ in Girard's thinking, and, in particular, Girard's distinctive take on the uniqueness and finality of Christ in terms of his impact on Western culture. In Girard’s singular vision, according to Cowdell, secular modernity has emerged thanks to the Bible’s exposure of the cathartic violence that is at the root of religious prohibitions, myths, and rituals. In the literature, the psychology, and most recently the military history of modernity, Girard discerns a consistent slide into an apocalypse that challenges modern ideas of romanticism, individualism, and progressivism. In the first three chapters, Cowdell examines the three elements of Girard’s basic intellectual vision (mimesis, sacrifice, biblical hermeneutics) and brings this vision to a constructive interpretation of “secularization” and “modernity,” as these terms are understood in the broadest sense today. Chapter 4 focuses on modern institutions, chiefly the nation state and the market, that function to restrain the outbreak of violence. And finally, Cowdell discusses the apocalyptic dimension of Girard's theory in relation to modern warfare and terrorism. Here, Cowdell engages with the most recent writings of Girard (particularly his Battling to the End) and applies them to further conversations in cultural theology, political science, and philosophy. Cowdell takes up and extends Girard’s own warning concerning an alternative to a future apocalypse: “What sort of conversion must humans undergo, before it is too late?”
Download or read book Sacrifice written by René Girard and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sacrifice, René Girard interrogates the Brahmanas of Vedic India, exploring coincidences with mimetic theory that are too numerous and striking to be accidental. Even that which appears to be dissimilar fails to contradict mimetic theory, but instead corresponds to the minimum of illusion without which sacrifice becomes impossible. The Bible reveals collective violence, similar to that which generates sacrifice everywhere, but instead of making victims guilty, the Bible and the Gospels reveal the persecutors of a single victim. Instead of elaborating myths, they tell the truth absolutely contrary to the archaic sense. Once exposed, the single victim mechanism can no longer function as the model for would-be sacrificers. Recognizing that the Vedic tradition also converges on a revelation that discredits sacrifice, mimetic theory locates within sacrifice itself a paradoxical power of quiet reflection that leads, in the long run, to the eclipse of this institution which is violent but nevertheless fundamental to the development of human culture. Far from unduly privileging the Western tradition and awarding it a monopoly on the knowledge and repudiation of blood sacrifice, mimetic analysis recognizes comparable, but never truly identical, traits in the Vedic tradition.
Download or read book Fighting to Win written by David J. Rogers and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1984 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applies the precepts of samurai philosophy and practice to the problems of doing business and of daily living and shows how to defeat opponents by overcoming the "inner opponents"
Download or read book Violence Unveiled written by Gil Bailie and published by Crossroad. This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how the system of sacred violence at the heart of the conventional culture is being undermined by the bibical tradition, especially the Gospel.
Download or read book Fighting to the End written by C. Christine Fair and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-25 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Pakistan was founded in 1947, its army has dominated the state. The military establishment has locked the country in an enduring rivalry with India, with the primary aim of wresting Kashmir from it. To that end, Pakistan initiated three wars over Kashmir-in 1947, 1965, and 1999-and failed to win any of them. Today, the army continues to prosecute this dangerous policy by employing non-state actors under the security of its ever-expanding nuclear umbrella. It has sustained a proxy war in Kashmir since 1989 using Islamist militants, as well as supporting non-Islamist insurgencies throughout India and a country-wide Islamist terror campaign that have brought the two countries to the brink of war on several occasions. In addition to these territorial revisionist goals, the Pakistani army has committed itself to resisting India's slow but inevitable rise on the global stage. Despite Pakistan's efforts to coerce India, it has achieved only modest successes at best. Even though India vivisected Pakistan in 1971, Pakistan continues to see itself as India's equal and demands the world do the same. The dangerous methods that the army uses to enforce this self-perception have brought international opprobrium upon Pakistan and its army. And in recent years, their erstwhile proxies have turned their guns on the Pakistani state itself. Why does the army persist in pursuing these revisionist policies that have come to imperil the very viability of the state itself, from which the army feeds? In Fighting to the End, C. Christine Fair argues that the answer lies, at least partially, in the strategic culture of the army. Through an unprecedented analysis of decades' worth of the army's own defense publications, she concludes that from the army's distorted view of history, it is victorious as long as it can resist India's purported drive for regional hegemony as well as the territorial status quo. Simply put, acquiescence means defeat. Fighting to the End convincingly shows that because the army is unlikely to abandon these preferences, Pakistan will remain a destabilizing force in world politics for the foreseeable future.
Download or read book When Breath Becomes Air written by Paul Kalanithi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson
Download or read book Battling for Peace written by Shimon Peres and published by Lawbook Company. This book was released on 1996 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Battling for Peace is the memorable autobiography of an organisational, gifted politician, colourful raconteur and international statesman who is now at the heart of the peace-making process. This book offers a unique, first-hand account of history in the making and the people who shaped it.
Download or read book Violence in the Name of God written by Joel Hodge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the trajectory of militant jihadism to show how violence is more intentionally embraced as the centre of worship, social order and ideology. Undertaking an in-depth analysis of militant jihadist groups and utilising the work of René Girard, Joel Hodge argues that the extreme violence of militant jihadists is a response to modernity in two ways that have not been sufficiently explored by the existing literature. Firstly, it is a manifestation of the unrestrained and escalating state of desire and rivalry in modernity, which militant jihadists seek to counter with extreme violence. Secondly, it is a response to the unveiling and discrediting of sacred violence, which militant jihadists seek to reverse by more purposefully valorising sacred violence in what they believe to be jihad. Relevant to anyone interested in Islam, philosophy of religion, theology, and terrorism, Violence in the Name of God imagines new ways of thinking about militancy in the name of Islam in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Psychopolitics written by Jean-Michel Oughourlian and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For thousands of years, political leaders have unified communities by aligning them against common enemies. However, today more than ever, the search for “common” enemies results in anything but unanimity. Scapegoats like Saddam Hussein, for example, led to a stark polarization in the United States. Renowned neuropsychiatrist and psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian proposes that the only authentic enemy is the one responsible for both everyday frustrations and global dangers, such as climate change—ourselves. Oughourlian, who pioneered an “interdividual” psychology with René Girard, reveals how all people are bound together in a dynamic, contingent process of imitation, and shows that the same patterns of irrational mimetic desire that bring individuals together and push them apart also explain the behavior of nations.
Download or read book Shakespearean Cultures written by João Cezar de Castro Rocha and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespearean Cultures, René Girard’s ideas on violence and the sacred inform an innovative analysis of contemporary Latin America. Castro Rocha proposes a new theoretical framework based upon the “poetics of emulation” and offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding the asymmetries of the modern world. Shakespearean cultures are those whose self-perception originates in the gaze of a hegemonic Other. The poetics of emulation is a strategy developed in situations of asymmetrical power relations. This strategy encompasses an array of procedures employed by artists, intellectuals, and writers situated at the less-favored side of such exchanges, whether they be cultural, political, or economic in nature. The framework developed in this book yields thought-provoking readings of canonical authors such as William Shakespeare, Gustave Flaubert, and Joseph Conrad. At the same time, it favors the insertion of Latin American authors into the comparative scope of world literature, and stages an unprecedented dialogue among European, North American, and Latin American readers of René Girard’s work.
Download or read book Battling for Saipan written by Francis A. O'Brien and published by Presidio Press. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When V Amphibious Corps were preparing for the invasion of the Marianas Islands—Saipan, Guam, and Tinian—they were expecting a relatively easy fight. The Japanese appeared to be on the run. As D day for Saipan (the first of the three islands scheduled for conquest) loomed, V Corps planners felt safe in allocating a single army division as corps reserve for the conquest. As Lt. Col. William J. O’Brien’s First Battalion and the 105th Infantry landed on Saipan, they had little idea what was in store for them. Enemy opposition was fierce. For the next several weeks they faced the unremitting terror of nearly continuous combat. For the 105th Infantry, the battle climaxed in an overwhelming Japanese banzai attack July 7, 1944. The regiment suffered more than 900 casualties, almost half of whom were killed in action, including First Battalion’s commander, William O’Brien, who later received the Medal of Honor for his efforts. Throughout the battle, O’Brien provided a stirring example of frontline leadership to his previously untested troops. His story is just as inspiring today.
Download or read book Battling for Hearts and Minds written by Steve J. Stern and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-25 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Battling for Hearts and Minds is the story of the dramatic struggle to define collective memory in Chile during the violent, repressive dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, from the 1973 military coup in which he seized power through his defeat in a 1988 plebiscite. Steve J. Stern provides a riveting narration of Chile’s political history during this period. At the same time, he analyzes Chileans’ conflicting interpretations of events as they unfolded. Drawing on testimonios, archives, Truth Commission documents, radio addresses, memoirs, and written and oral histories, Stern identifies four distinct perspectives on life and events under the dictatorship. He describes how some Chileans viewed the regime as salvation from ruin by Leftists (the narrative favored by Pinochet’s junta), some as a wound repeatedly reopened by the state, others as an experience of persecution and awakening, and still others as a closed book, a past to be buried and forgotten. In the 1970s, Chilean dissidents were lonely “voices in the wilderness” insisting that state terror and its victims be recognized and remembered. By the 1980s, the dissent had spread, catalyzing a mass movement of individuals who revived public dialogue by taking to the streets, creating alternative media, and demanding democracy and human rights. Despite long odds and discouraging defeats, people of conscience—victims of the dictatorship, priests, youth, women, workers, and others—overcame fear and succeeded in creating truthful public memories of state atrocities. Recounting both their efforts and those of the regime’s supporters to win the battle for Chileans’ hearts and minds, Stern shows how profoundly the struggle to create memories, to tell history, matters. Battling for Hearts and Minds is the second volume in the trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. The third book will examine Chileans’ efforts to achieve democracy while reckoning with Pinochet’s legacy.
