One of Calasso’s many interlocutors in “Ardor” is the religious anthropologist René Girard, who believes that mimetic desire — the desire to own what others possess — or envy, rather than transcendental authority, now underpins social order in secularized societies. But the mutual hatred and possibility of an “all against all” war it seeds is still defused by periodic scapegoating, the identification of internal or external enemies, whose violent suppression releases the tension built up by frustrated desire and unappeasable envy. . . . The philosophers of India, T. S. Eliot once wrote, “make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.”
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 18:34:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015