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We learn what to want from each other, and our desires spread contagiously because we copy each other, hoping the people we admire hold the magic key to success and happiness. The more we imitate each other, the more we become the same – and it is our sameness, not our differences, that makes us fight.
All desire is a desire for being.
When mutual love is absent, the only sentiment that can reconcile human beings is its opposite, a common hatred.
Masochists are always fascinated artisans of their own unhappiness.
As long as we are not provided with a goal worthy of our emptiness we will copy the emptiness of others and constantly regenerate the hell from which we are trying to escape.
Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them.
When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.
Christ didn’t write, but he is identical with his word. He dies for the reasons that cause him to speak. He speaks for the reasons that cause him to die.
It’s not enough to put people on the same social level because they’ll all find new ways of excluding one another.
The imperative of originality at all costs has killed creativity.
To be the first to leave a crowd, to be the first not to throw stones, is to run the risk of becoming a target for the stone-throwers.
Academia, that vast herd of sheep-like individualists.
The intensity of conflicts has nothing to do with the reality of differences.
Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured – our need is to escape from meaninglessness.
On Foucault: One day, he told me that ‘we shouldn’t invent a philosophy of the victim.’ I replied: ‘No, not a philosophy, I agree – a religion! But it already exists!’
It’s now no longer possible to persecute except in the name of victims.
The question about our world is not really why so much violence, but why so little? Why are we not always at each other’s throats?
1966 With Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Girard organizes an international symposium from 18 to 21 October: ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.’ Lucien Goldmann, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and others participate in the standing-room-only event. The conference marks the introduction of structuralism and French theory to America; it marked Derrida’s debut in America.
