Renéssance Men

In his review of All Desire Is a Desire for Being, Cynthia Haven’s selection of René Girard’s writings [“Overwhelming and Collective Murder,” Reviews, November], Sam Kriss contrasts Girard’s singular (not to say single-minded) vision of society with today’s scholars, who, he claims, are unable to generate “grand unifying theories.” Girard drew from his early-career studies of literary figures such as Proust the insight that desire is essentially imitative (or mimetic) rather than straightforwardly directed toward its apparent objects.

Eve Sedgwick, who made a similar point in Between Men, her foundational work of queer theory, later noted that Girard’s interest in elevating these observations to the status of general psychological truths was essentially religious. Arguing that imitative desires scale up from the triangles of our erotic lives to collective patterns, Girard warned that they generate violent competition and, as a cruel sort of pseudo-solution, sacrificial scapegoating. His own solution was literally messianic: Christianity. The message of the Gospels, he argued, was that the self-sacrifice of Christ will bring an end to “mimetic rivalry.” He insisted in his 2007 book Battling to the End that institutional Christianity has long held back this radical message, but in our secular age—as liberalism promotes cycles of envy escalating to extremes—we are approaching the end-times. Taking Girard to be a stimulating crank rather than a genuine, and disturbing, champion of messianic apocalypticism, Kriss laments that “the world feels poorer” for a dearth of similar thinkers. One shudders to imagine how wealth, so conceived, would feel.

Blake Smith

Sofia, Bulgaria

Kriss identifies the summer of 2020 as the inflection point in René Girard’s recent reception, but I would trace it back to 2015, the year he died. As it happens, this was also the year that Jon Ronson published So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a popular account of some of the first people subjected to massive online “cancellations.” Girard dedicated his career to making sense of the all-against-one dynamic of mob violence, and social media was putting this tendency on display in dramatic new ways. As a result, his ideas abruptly gained relevance for anyone attempting to understand how new communications technologies had reactivated these archaic social mechanisms.

Another vector of Girard’s influence that Kriss identifies, via Peter Thiel, is on the so-called New Right. “Girardianism,” he writes, “has become a secret doctrine of a strange new frontier in reactionary thought, one that’s begun to question not just the utility but the existence of democracy and social progress.” The extent of this influence is questionable. One of the figures he mentions, the podcaster and writer Costin Alamariu, aka Bronze Age Pervert, is a popularizer of Nietzsche who glorifies the pitiless violence of ancient societies. Girard admired Nietzsche, but he deplored exactly the dimension of his work that Alamariu emphasizes: his glamorization of pagan brutality. What’s more, Girard may have seen human nature as unchanging, as the New Right does, but he also saw social progress as both real and inexorable, evident in humans’ growing sensitivity to victims of violence and in the construction of mechanisms that attempt to hold collective violence in check. To be sure, he didn’t see any guarantees in this: modern people’s greater distance from violence might ultimately make us more susceptible to falling back into it.

Geoff Shullenberger

Brooklyn, N.Y.

UFOria

As a seasoned participant-observer in the fuzzy edges of popular belief, I’ve seen frenzies surrounding UFOs arrive, populate the papers, and then vanish as mysteriously as their subjects. But as Hari Kunzru notes [“Disclosure,” Easy Chair, November], the present wave stands out for its origins in military activity, reported in the mainstream news instead of the usual pulp fare. It has a gravity that, while welcome, has also drawn Congress’s iconoclasts into the fray. Some, I fear, are leveraging long-held suspicions about a UFO cover-up to amplify distrust in—and, crucially, within—government, military, and intelligence establishments: something the CIA warned about in a secret report in 1953, during the subject’s infancy.

My sense is that we used to see UFO waves—periods with an increase in recorded sightings—every decade or so, with scattered incidents making headlines from time to time: for instance, the alleged sightings in Gulf Breeze following the publication of Whitley Strieber’s abduction memoir Communion in 1987, or the furor surrounding the 1995 alien autopsy hoax footage, conveniently sandwiched between the arrival of The X-Files, Independence Day, and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1947 Roswell crash. But, perhaps aided by the online era, the current UFO fixation has persisted since 2017. The believers, entertainers, charlatans, grifters, politicians, and military misinformers seem finally to have worked out how to keep the mystery machine rolling without a hitch. This suits everyone, since, contrary to appearances, the point is not to solve the UFO enigma, but to let it evade us: that’s what we want it to do.

Mark Pilkington

Wiltshire, England

Correction

“The Machine Breaker” by Christopher Ketcham [Report, November] incorrectly stated that Ted Kaczynski was held at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado until his death. In fact, Kaczynski was transferred in 2021 to FMC Butner in North Carolina, where he died in June 2023. We regret the error.