René Girard, the Avignon prophet of the woke plague and social media exiled in America

Today, a single social media post can ruin a career. It can even bring down a government, if the stars are aligned. Vicious mobs gather online instantly, new ideologies form overnight, and cancel culture punishes dissent. This is a precarious, dangerous new world we live in. But decades before anyone heard of this, a French literary scholar at Stanford warned. “When the whole world is globalized, you can set everything on fire with a match,” wrote René Girard.

Girard organized a symposium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins in 1966. Jacques Lacan gave an incoherent speech in broken English, but the triumph was a speech by a young French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who was just beginning to “deconstruct” the grand patterns of thought as mere creations of “discourse.” Thanks to Girard, poststructuralism came to America and has reigned supreme in the humanities ever since. Girard called it “the plague.” As Freud, who came to America in 1913 to proselytize psychoanalysis, told Carl Jung, “They don’t know we’re bringing them the plague.”

If in 1979, with “The Postmodern Condition”, Jean-François Lyotard wrote that grand narratives had ceased to convince, Girard went in the opposite direction, building a theoretical apparatus that openly competed not only to supplant those of Marx and Freud, but to do for culture what Darwin had done for nature.

In a container at the port of San Francisco, Girard's immense library awaits its return to Avignon, where his remains rest.

In a container at the port of San Francisco, Girard's immense library awaits. Since his death in 2015, all his books have remained in Palo Alto, California. They will soon arrive in France, where they will be kept at the library of Avignon, his hometown. Two years after the transfer of Girard's ashes to the family tomb, the operation will complete the repatriation of a thinker who lived his entire life overseas.

Girard's influence is growing in the United States ten years after his death: Vice President JD Vance cites him and billionaire Peter Thiel, a leading figure in conservatism, claims his legacy. The anthropologist known for his theories on scapegoating and mimetic desire has become, in spite of himself, the new master of the American right. It is rare for the writings of a European thinker to reach the heights of American power (one recalls the influence of Herbert Marcuse on the Berkeley 1968 movement and Leo Strauss on neoconservatism).

Girard was born in Avignon, an ancient city on the Rhone, enclosed by medieval walls, where the centuries linger in the air. In the 14th century, seven popes lived in this nest of political intrigue and crisis. His father, an irreligious and anticlerical republican, wanted him to be an archivist, a future Girard did not want. But he followed in his father’s footsteps to the École Nationale des Chartes, the great school for training archivists and librarians. Then came World War II, with its horrors and privations—“the eclipse of culture,” Girard called it. At the end of the war, America was scouring Europe for brilliant young people. Twenty-four-year-old Girard, with his great-school credentials, left for the United States in September 1947. He wanted adventure and an American car. He found both.

At Indiana University, Girard discovered a lush, green campus, untouched by war and full of new opportunities. He earned his doctorate in history in Bloomington. There he also found his future wife, Martha McCullough, a student in one of his first classes. The marriage would last 64 years, produce three children, and end with his death. In his works, the French philosopher demonstrated that the secret of violence lies neither in social relations (Marx), nor in the will to power (Nietzsche), nor in the unconscious (Freud), but in the heart of human relationships. Girard has given a generation back to reading the classics that had been left gathering dust in a corner of globalized chaos.

Today in Silicon Valley, his work is also admired for the economic potential of his insights. As cultural critic Ted Gioia wrote: “I doubt Girard wanted to influence Silicon Valley capitalists or social media experts, but it’s happening. Girard has dedicated his life to exposing the lies behind fads and trends. And now, after his death, he’s in fashion and trend. It’s almost like a kind of punishment.”

Thiel and Girard’s relationship was first and foremost personal. Thiel came to Stanford in 1985, where he earned his bachelor’s degree and law degree. Those were the years when the protagonists of Stanford’s “Western Civilization” program (a course in which students read the great texts from Plato to Freud) were being challenged by left-wing multicultural groups. Thiel was on the other side, with Girard and the Western canon: he founded the libertarian Stanford Review and, together with a fellow student, the future millionaire David Sacks, wrote “The Diversity Myth.” Thiel interpreted multiculturalism, “diversity,” and political correctness as a new conformism: the revolutions of the 1960s had created a new orthodoxy that waged war on tradition.

Girard, who navigated intellectual history from Gilgamesh to Proust, was a dissident and an antidote, precisely because of his return to tradition. “More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that meaning is terrifying,” Girard would say. For Thiel, Girardian mimetic theory served as a mirror for the new conformism. Thiel’s relationship with Girard is symptomatic of a particular moment in Silicon Valley history. Steve Jobs’s generation had been shaped by the leftist counterculture; Thiel saw it as a new conformism. Thiel would return to Stanford to teach a course in the university’s German department. Students in the course “Sovereignty and the Limits of Globalization and Technology” read Girard with Carl Schmitt and the 2006 Regensburg lecture given by Benedict XVI.

Thiel would frequent Girard for the next two decades. In 2008, he even founded Imitatio, a philanthropic fund aimed at funding Girardian studies and research on mimetic desire, across all disciplines. After Girard’s death, Thiel gave a speech at the memorial on the Stanford campus, along with his son, Martin Girard. As Kieran Keohane recalled in Le Grand Continent, Peter Thiel and Girard also organized a seminar on “Politics and Apocalypse” at Stanford in July 2004.

Where did Girard’s great speculations come from? Cynthya Haven’s biography, “Evolution of Desire,” tells us that Girard had witnessed the scapegoating of the French “collaborators” in Avignon, after the liberation. He had spent a year in the South of the United States, in Duke, when the lynching of blacks took place, with the murder of Emmett Till. It is difficult to imagine someone further removed from Trumpian political excesses. And yet, Girard even anticipated the woke. In his book “I See Satan Fall Like a Lightning,” Girard wrote that a fundamental value “dominates the entire planetary culture in which we live,” much more than technological progress or economic growth: “Concern for the victims.” As Girard had already perceived in 1999, we live under the reign of “victimhood,” which uses the ideology of caring for the victims to gain power.

In his New York Times article on Girard’s death, Thiel explains how Girard’s ideas also shaped his own fortune: “Facebook was word-of-mouth and word-of-mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic.” Thiel added: “Social media has turned out to be more important than it seemed, because it’s about our nature.” Understanding our nature has proven profitable, for Thiel at least. Some see his funding of Facebook as an application of Girard’s mimetic theory: Social media allows the world to pit itself against itself and globalizes the imitation of desire. Today, technology allows us to incite envy and blame on a planetary scale and to destroy each other on that scale as well.

He was the kind of thinker Isaiah Berlin would have called a hedgehog, not a fox. He courted darkness all his life.

“Like Nietzsche, I wonder if Girard is the 20th-century thinker who will be very important in the 21st,” Thiel said in the 2023 documentary “Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard.” Girard has been called the “godfather of the like,” yet he was completely indifferent to going viral. Girard was absorbed in reading, thinking, and research. He courted obscurity and remained largely unknown even on the Stanford campus. He was the kind of thinker Isaiah Berlin would have called a hedgehog, not a fox. His popularity was purely circumstantial. He had the right idea at the right time in the right place: Stanford, the premier university in Silicon Valley.

In 2011, Thiel gave a lecture on mimetic desire at Yale. In the audience was Vance, a law student, who was fascinated by the investor’s intervention. This was how Vance was introduced to Girard’s thinking. After working as a lawyer for two years, Vance moved to San Francisco, where Thiel hired him at his law firm, Mithril Capital, before financing his 2022 Senate campaign with fifteen million. The two became friends. Girard is one of the key readings that pushed the vice president, born into an evangelical family, to convert to Catholicism.

It was precisely his marginality that made Girard interesting: he was a voice crying in the wilderness. Girardians still treat him as a prophet today, and it is clear that Girardian thought is more suited to conservatives than to progressives: the pessimism about human nature, the distrust of revolutions, the importance of the strength of tradition and the critique of modernity and relativism. But the complexity and subtlety of his theories are far from the brutal simplism of Trumpians. And it is an understatement to say that his life was not exactly Trumpian. Girard slept soundly and to tell this is equivalent to telling his books. A man who claimed to live in his head. Girard remains a meteorite in our intellectual sky. Even if the mimetic theory hovers over Silicon Valley like a zeitgeist, his colleague at Stanford, Professor Joshua Landy, wrote a cruel but fair article: “Why Are Girardians There?” The reasons for his success: “A cheap theory.”

Girard’s mother always told him, “Les gens sont mauvais,” people are evil. Girard was not as pessimistic as his mother, but his final warning, found at the end of his book “The Scapegoat,” is unequivocal: “The time has come to forgive one another. If we wait any longer, there will be no time left.” Our postmodern world is full of Girardian concepts gone haywire.