Selfhood and sacrifice:
“making sacred” and “making the modem identity”
(A Comparative Study of Selected Works by René Girard and Charles Taylor)
O'Shea, Andrew
(2008)
Selfhood and sacrifice:
“making sacred” and “making the modem identity”
(A Comparative Study of Selected Works by René Girard and Charles Taylor).
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
This thesis examines key works of René Girard (both his earlier literary criticism and
his later cultural anthropology) and of Charles Taylor (both his philosophical history
and his philosophical anthropology). Both thinkers see the loss of traditional
frameworks grounded in religious worldviews as precipitating a crisis of order in the
modem period. Girard's diagnosis of this loss of order stems from his analysis of
desire as mimetic, an analysis that leads him to argue that scapegoating and sacrifice
are essential to the creation of cultural stability and are no longer available today
either to individuals or communities. I shall claim that this analysis of desire
thoroughly - and, even on Girard’s own terms, problematically - debunks
subjectivity and undermines the possibility of any coherent ethical agency. And I
shall then go on to argue that Taylor’s philosophy, while taking due cognizance of
the crisis of order so acutely identified by Girard, allows us to meet it with a robust
and nuanced account of subjectivity and ethical agency - an account that allows us to
reject Girard’s apocalyptic forebodings and to imagine that ‘hope and history
rhyme’.