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Did Oedipus really kill his father and marry his mother? Or is he
nothing but a scapegoat, set up to take the blame for a crisis
afflicting Thebes? For Rene Girard, the mythic accusations of
patricide and incest are symptomatic of a plague-stricken
community's hunt for a culprit to punish, and Girard succeeds in
making us see an age-old myth in a wholly new light. The
hard-to-find writings assembled here include three major early
essays, never before available in English, which afford a
behind-the-scenes glimpse at the emergence of Girard's scapegoat
theory from his pioneering analysis of rivalry and desire. Girard
unbinds the Oedipal triangle from its Freudian moorings, replacing
desire for the mother with desire for anyone-or anything-a rival
desires. In a wide-ranging and provocative introduction, Mark R.
Anspach presents fresh evidence for Girard's hypotheses from
classical studies, literature, anthropology, and the life of Freud
himself.
Did Oedipus really kill his father and marry his mother? Or is he
nothing but a scapegoat, set up to take the blame for a crisis
afflicting Thebes? For Rene Girard, the mythic accusations of
patricide and incest are symptomatic of a plague-stricken
community's hunt for a culprit to punish, and Girard succeeds in
making us see an age-old myth in a wholly new light. The
hard-to-find writings assembled here include three major early
essays, never before available in English, which afford a
behind-the-scenes glimpse at the emergence of Girard's scapegoat
theory from his pioneering analysis of rivalry and desire. Girard
unbinds the Oedipal triangle from its Freudian moorings, replacing
desire for the mother with desire for anyone-or anything-a rival
desires. In a wide-ranging and provocative introduction, Mark R.
Anspach presents fresh evidence for Girard's hypotheses from
classical studies, literature, anthropology, and the life of Freud
himself.
How do humans stop fighting? Where do the gods of myth come from?
What does it mean to go mad? Mark R. Anspach tackles these and
other conundrums as he draws on ethnography, literature,
psychotherapy, and the theory of Rene Girard to explore some of the
fundamental mechanisms of human interaction. Likening gift exchange
to vengeance in reverse, the first part of the book outlines a
fresh approach to reciprocity, while the second part traces the
emergence of transcendence in collective myths and individual
delusions. From the peacemaking rituals of prestate societies to
the paradoxical structure of consciousness, Anspach takes the
reader on an intellectual journey that begins with the problem of
how to deceive violence and ends with the riddle of how one can
deceive oneself.
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