Rene Girard - Violence and the Sacred (Johns Hopkins, 1977). 333 pages.

Thanks to penfag for the source file, which was posted on tpb earlier today. The file size of this new version is bigger than I would have liked, but it can't be helped. Basically all the page images were reprocessed in Scan Tailor, dewarping was applied when possible, then the images were re-assembled and Acrobat's clearscan was applied.

The result is pretty good, but not great. At least the right and left margins are mostly vertical now.


description:

"Violence and the Sacred", a study of human evil, was originally published in French in 1972 [La violence et le sacré] by French anthropologist René Girard, who was awarded the Prix de l'Académie Française for the book.

Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.

According to Chris Fleming, "Violence and the Sacred" "represents the first substantial stage of Girard's exploration of the ramifications of his theory of mimetic desire in relation to anthropology, Greek tragedy, and mythology."

"Girard's fascinating and ambitious book provides a fully developed theory of violence as the 'heart and secret soul' of the sacred. Girard's fertile, combative mind links myth to prophetic writing, primitive religions to classical tragedy."--Victor Brombert, 'Chronicle of Higher Education.'