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Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist (2012)
Mr. Casaubon called the future volumes . . . the Key to all Mythologies.—George Eliot, Middlemarch Here are two readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Which do you think we should be teaching in our schools and universities?[1]Reading 1. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, has no desires of his own, and therefore has no being, properly speaking. The best he can do is to find another person to emulate, since that’s the only way anyone ever develops the motivation to do anything. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth.Reading 2.
Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, is full of body thetans, harmful residue of the aliens brought to Earth by Xenu seventy-five million years ago and disintegrated using nuclear bombs inside volcanoes. (Wolfgang Pauli once said of a scientific theory that it was “not even false”; I think that’s an apt characterization of all primordial fantasies, whether Sigmund Freud’s “Original Father,” Denis Dutton’s “Pleistocene campfire,” or René Girard’s founding scapegoat.) From his surprisingly caustic condemnations of people like Frazer and Auerbach and Plato—not to mention of ethnologists, classicists, and theologians at large, or indeed academic readers tout court —it is clear that Girard himself is no stranger to that particular feeling.)
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