For almost 2000 years Western culture has spoken of God in Christian terms. The question confronting Christian (and other) thinkers at the beginning of the 21st century is whether this grand narrative is now exhausted. For many, this would seem to be an accomplished fact; Christianity may be appreciated for having provided a framework for modern society, but since the Enlightenment it is now taken for granted that the values informing the West can be accepted and justified without the support traditionally provided by Christianity.

This unit locates a trajectory in the critique of Christianity begun by Friedrich Nietzsche, pursuing it through the responses of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, and, especially, in our own time, the French philosophical anthropologist and literary critic, René Girard. Also studied are intersecting and alternative approaches to Christianity by contemporary philosophers.

The first part of the unit will be devoted to an examination of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. The second part of the unit will consist of a reading of Scheler’s essay, Ressentiment. The third part of the unit examines Girard’s notions of scapegoating, sacred violence and the founding of the social order in the light of his model of mimetic or triangular desire. The final part will consider the strengths and weaknesses of Girard’s theory in the light of a number of contemporary philosophers, including the relevance of Girard’s theory to a number of topical issues pertaining to Australian identity.

Prerequisites

none

Requirements

3 hours per week

Assessment

Bibliography

• Fleming, Chris. René Girard: Violence and Mimesis. Cambridge: Polity, 2004.
• Fraser, Giles. Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief. London: Routledge, 2002.
• Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Translated by Oscar Burge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• Girard, René.The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986.
• ———. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977.
• Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
• Nietzsche, Frederich W. On the Genealogy of Morality. Rev. ed. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Scheler, Max. Ressentiment. Translated by Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim. Marquette Studies in Philosophy, no 4. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1994.
• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Vattimo, Gianni. Belief. Translated by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.