Nell’occhio del ciclone: Girard contro Hegel tra pre- e post-politica

The position held by René Girard on politics remains ambivalent since the foundational phenomena he studied (desire, violence, sacrifice) are both pre- and post-political. The polemical view of philosophy plays an essential role in this ambiguity starting from Girard’s first important work, where he presents his theory of mimetic or triangular desire or mediation through a sharp commentary of some of the main European novelists. The article studies how Girard plays a strange game of hide-and-seek with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a work then closely related to the prestigious philosophers raging in Paris with whom he was in competition without being a philosopher. This attitude seriously influences Girard’s view of politics, about which his theory does not manage to consider conceptual tools different from his mimetic theory. To avoid such a result and look for a new form of political science, we must take advantage of Girard’s insightful ideas but fully recover a rational mediation aiming at a human and historical object.