Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes is a 2018 book by Paolo Diego Bubbio about sacrifice and René Girard’s mimetic theory. It collects Bubbio’s key writings from 1999 to 2019, showing his long engagement with mimetic theory.

The first part revisits an Italian book from 1999 and argues that philosophy and religion participate in a mimetic rivalry of ideas at a scholarly level.

The second part expands the discussion, developing a dialogue between Girard’s mimetic theory and Post-Kantian philosophy, especially modern hermeneutics.

The final chapter calls for turning mimetic theory into Hermeneutic Mimetic Theory (HMT), which could resolve some issues in the original theory and offer a new way to understand the self, the “I.”