AMERICAN, NOT FRENCH:

Something that many of his academic colleagues could not forgive Girard for was his religion. While he started from a purely secular position ("I am rooted in the avant-garde and revolutionary tradition"), Girard adopted Christianity for philosophical reasons. His theory led him to think that the Passion of Christ (as recorded in the Gospels) was a turning point in history because it put an end to an uninterrupted line of violent scapegoating by exposing the scapegoat mechanism for what it was. As Haven shows in Evolution of Desire, Girard's was primarily an "intellectual" conversion. He needed to believe in order to make better sense of the world--as he observed, "conversion is a form of intelligence."

Yet many could not comprehend how such a brilliant and sophisticated man (and a Frenchman to boot) could go so medieval. Conversions were not exactly in intellectual fashion in American academia. When "theory," the latest French import, was Gospel truth in the humanities, Girard would never cease to poke savage fun at it. "If a Rabelais shows up at the right time," he said in 1993, "he will do hilarious things with our current scholasticism and in particular with our use of the word 'theory.'" Girard grew up and was educated in France, and could see right through the whole thing. In the United States, "theory" was a fad that would soon die out, as fads always do:

The next generation will wonder what impulse could so move so many people that go on endlessly writing the most convoluted prose in a complete void of their own making, disconnected not only from the reality of their world but from the great literary texts, of which recent theory has been making a shamelessly parasitic use.

Prophetic though Girard was in other respects, he was dead wrong here. The next generation of literary scholars may have abandoned "theory," but only to venture into new voids.

What depressed Girard most about academia (even though it was yet another confirmation of his theory) was the combination of ferocity and nihilism he observed among his colleagues. They were the representatives of a most peculiar brand of fanaticism: fanatics who don't believe in anything. They could wage the nastiest of intellectual wars, hurt and humiliate others, even destroy careers, in the name of absolutely nothing:

Whenever people really believe in some truth larger than the academic world, they do not dedicate themselves to the pursuit of academic success with as much ferocity as the people who believe absolutely nothing.... far from making people more relaxed and generous, the current nihilism has made academic life harsher and less compassionate than before.

This pushed Girard into an increasingly isolated position within American academia. Not that he disliked being in such a situation--if anything, he may have found it exhilarating. The more his colleagues shunned him, the more he mentioned the emperor's nakedness; the deeper their silence, the sharper his criticism. The contrarian's role seemed to suit him well. While most of his peers were advertising their disdain for religion, Girard was praising the virtues of true faith: "If we had more genuine religion, we would have less violence." Nothing too scandalous here, certainly. However, right after this, he adds a coda. "This is what most ordinary people still believe," he said, "and, as a rule, when the ordinary people and the intellectuals do not agree, it is safer to go with ordinary people." One can get away with saying many things in today's university, but not this. The theorist of scapegoating was courting trouble.

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