The Evolution of Desire: The Life of René Girard
14.99 €
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The Evolution of Desire: The Life of René Girard
14.99 €
"Every desire is a desire to be," said the famous Franco-American philosopher René Girard. It is our desires that define who we are, but they do not belong to us: being mimetic (imitative and mirroring), they turn us into an endless series of other people's reflections. Desire is a life-long evolution: we start imitating as children, compete at school and work, want more and more, suffer when we don't get what we want, and repent on our deathbed.
Cynthia Haven's book is the first biography of Girard, based on conversations with him, his family, friends and colleagues in France and the United States. The life of the thinker appears in it as an illustration of his theory, which is revealed not as an abstract speculative concept, but as a philosophy for life, which he first sought to practice. Years of study in his native Avignon and dank occupied Paris, a fateful move to the United States, a religious conversion in the late 1950s, the discovery of the violent origins of culture, doubt, acceptance and its temptations - the reader learns how his spiritual and creative evolution unfolded from his first work, The Lies of Romanticism and the Truth of the Novel, through the seminal Violence and the Sacred to the dark apocalyptic prophecies of his final book, To Complete Clausewitz.
Cynthia Haven's book is the first biography of Girard, based on conversations with him, his family, friends and colleagues in France and the United States. The life of the thinker appears in it as an illustration of his theory, which is revealed not as an abstract speculative concept, but as a philosophy for life, which he first sought to practice. Years of study in his native Avignon and dank occupied Paris, a fateful move to the United States, a religious conversion in the late 1950s, the discovery of the violent origins of culture, doubt, acceptance and its temptations - the reader learns how his spiritual and creative evolution unfolded from his first work, The Lies of Romanticism and the Truth of the Novel, through the seminal Violence and the Sacred to the dark apocalyptic prophecies of his final book, To Complete Clausewitz.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series Intellectual history