Description

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Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes is an account of Paolo Diego Bubbio’s twenty-year intellectual journey through the twists and turns of Girard’s mimetic theory. The author analyzes philosophy and religion as “enemy sisters” engaged in an endless competitive struggle and identifies the intellectual space where this rivalry can either be perpetuated or come to a paradoxical resolution. He goes on to explore topics ranging from arguments for the existence of God to mimetic theory’s post-Kantian legacy, political implications, and capacity for identifying epochal phenomena, such as the crisis of the self, in popular culture. Bubbio concludes by advocating for an encounter between mimetic theory and contemporary philosophical hermeneutics—an encounter in which each approach benefits and is enriched by the resources of the other. The volume features a previously unpublished letter by René Girard on the relationship between philosophy and religion.
 

About the Author

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PAOLO DIEGO BUBBIO is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. The winner of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, he has been researching and writing about mimetic theory for twenty years. He is the author of Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition and God and the Self in Hegel: Beyond Subjectivism.
 

Praise For…

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“Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes is an excellent piece of historical and critical research. Bubbio’s book travels far and wide down many paths, and exemplarily shows the violent struggle between a metaphysical philosophy and a metaphysical religion in the history of Western thought. Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes is one of the best works on mimetic theory that I have ever read.”
—GIANNI VATTIMO, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Turin, Italy, author of Belief and Weak Thought, and coauthor (with René Girard) of Christianity, Truth, and Weak Faith