+1 862 207 3288 Rene Girard is a French philosopher as well as a famous literary critic and historian. I shall be writing this book review on one of his most famous works, a book written in 1972, ‘Violence and The Sacred’. The books main focus is violence being at the centre of all religion as well as historical events and the subconscious. I shall be giving the book a brief overview whilst concentrating on two chapters in particular, Sacrifice and Oedipus and The Surrogate Victim. The first chapter addresses the main underlying reasons behind violence within religion whereas the second begins to describe the idea of the scapegoat. Two of the most important ideas in the book in my opinion. Engels and Sorel both viewed violence in the name of religion as ‘a justified means to a non-religious end’ (Rennie, Tite, 2008, 14). It is this which I shall also be exploring as a result of reviewing Girard’s b…(short extract)
