Search
Log in
  • Home

  • Categories

  • Audiobooks

  • E-books

  • For kids

  • Top lists

  • Help

  • Download app

  • Use campaign code

  • Redeem gift card

  • Try free now
  • Log in
  • Language

    🇦🇹 Österreich

    • AT
    • EN

    🇧🇪 Belgique

    • FR
    • EN

    🇩🇰 Danmark

    • DK
    • EN

    🇩🇪 Deutschland

    • DE
    • EN

    🇪🇸 España

    • ES
    • EN

    🇫🇷 France

    • FR
    • EN

    🇳🇱 Nederland

    • NL
    • EN

    🇳🇴 Norge

    • NO
    • EN

    🇨🇭 Schweiz

    • DE
    • EN

    🇫🇮 Suomi

    • FI
    • EN

    🇸🇪 Sverige

    • SE
    • EN
  1. Books
  2. Culture
  3. Literature

Read and listen for free for 14 days!

Cancel anytime

Try free now
0.0(0)

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In its scope and interest it can be compared with Freud's Totem and Taboo, the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the listener compelled to respond, one way or another.

This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the book by which they will stand or fall. In a dialogue with two psychiatrists (Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort), Girard probes an encyclopedic array of topics, ranging across the entire spectrum of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cultural production.

Girard's point of departure is what he calls mimesis, the conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all difference dissolves in indiscriminate violence. In primitive societies, such crises were resolved by the scapegoating mechanism, in which the community, en masse, turned on an unpremeditated victim. The repression of this collective murder and its repetition in ritual sacrifice then formed the foundations of both religion and the restored social order

The book is not merely, or perhaps not mainly, biblical exegesis, for within its scope fall some of the most vexing problems of social history. the paradox that violence has social efficacy, the function of the scapegoat, the mechanism of anti-semitism.

Produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont. ©1978, 1987 Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle; translation copyright by The Athlone Press (P)


Author:

  • René Girard

Narrator:

  • Mike Fraser

Format:

  • Audiobook

Duration:

  • 21 h 25 min

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Culture
  • Literature
  • Religion and faith
  • Christianity
  • Society and Social Sciences
  • Philosophy

More by René Girard

Skip the list
  1. Das Ende der Gewalt : Analyse des Menschheitsverhängnisses. Erkundungen zu Mimesis und Gewalt mit Jean-Michel Oughourlian und Guy Lefort

    René Girard

    book
  2. Clausewitz en los extremos : Política, guerra y apocalipsis

    René Girard

    book

Help and contact


About us

  • Our story
  • Career
  • Press
  • Accessibility
  • Partner with us
  • Investor relations
  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Explore

  • Categories
  • Audiobooks
  • E-books
  • Magazines
  • For kids
  • Top lists

Popular categories

  • Crime
  • Biographies and reportage
  • Fiction
  • Feel-good and romance
  • Personal development
  • Children's books
  • True stories
  • Sleep and relaxation

Nextory

Copyright © 2025 Nextory AB

Privacy Policy · Terms · Imprint ·
Excellent4.3 out of 5