Texte remanié de : thèse doctorat : Lettres : Université de Lund : 2003. / Bibliogr. p. 189-199.

Mediation promises a way for conflicting parties to address differences and reach an agreement to settle their dispute. This study looks at mediation discourse of five cases from a university conflict resolution center through the lens of Girard’s (1977) theory of mimetic desire. Girard (1977) suggests that we are all in a pattern of mimesis. Antagonism that is prevalent in conflict develops, in Girard’s view, from the cycle of desire when one person wants an object and another person copies that desire for the object. The two parties quickly forget the object, but antagonism emerges as the mimetic desire continues. Girard argues parties have a tendency to place blame on a scapegoat to break the antagonism pattern. Alternatively, in her application of Girard’s theory, Cobb (1997, 2003, 2010a, 2010b) advocates a social constructionist perspective where disputants work on turning thin conflict stories into thicker ones to break the pattern. This project addresses a need for research on cycles of antagonism in discourse constructed by disputants during real mediation sessions. Knowing how disputants construct discourse lends insight into how people handle their most challenging interpersonal problems. The analysis of discourse through the guiding frameworks of conflict tactics, production format, and tenor of discourse sheds light on how disputants construct perpetuated mimicked antagonism and how they break the pattern. Additionally, findings highlight the emergence of weapons and wounds in the discourse suggesting that communicative violence is constructed whether or not there was actual physical violence. Components of thin conflict narratives are evident in findings from all five cases. Yet, while two cases are characterized by discourse of perpetuated mimicked antagonism, three represent a break in that pattern without placing blame on a scapegoat or constructing a thicker conflict narrative. The distinctions between a perpetuated and broken cycle are unpacked through the discussion of: a) animator-only position; b) indirectness and presumptive attribution; and c) shift in footing between talking to the other disputant and the mediators. This project provides a more nuanced understanding of the Girardian perspective relating to conflict mediation to contribute to the extant literature on conflict discourse and mediation practice. / text

A knowledge of the basic biology of any fish is a primary requirement for the practical management of that stock of fish. This investigation was directed at a pure culture population of Yellowstone cutthroat trout, to describe the basic biology and provide a basis for management and further research. Kiakho Lake has a surface area of 67.42 acres, a maximum depth of 32 feet and a mean depth of 16.5 feet. Due to the rocky substrate, lack of littoral development and low total dissolved solids, the production of plankton and bottom fauna was small and characteristic of oligotrophic conditions. The food of cutthroat trout in Kiakho Lake in May was comprised of 83.9 percent by volume and 81.3 percent by occurrence of chironomid pupae. In June the food was 46.7 percent by volume and 45.8 and 35.5 percent by occurrence of chironomid larvae and Gammarus respectively. In July the Gammarus were 57.8 percent by volume and 60.3 percent by occurrence. In Lumberton Reservoir and Monroe Lake the Gammarus comprised 51.0 and 55.6 percent by volume and 34.4 and 78.2 percent by occurrence respectively of the food. In Garcia Lake, Chaoborus was 32.9 percent by volume and 36.0 percent by occurrence and the redside shiner, Richardsonius balteatus, was 27.8 percent by volume and 31.8 percent by occurrence. The fish appeared to be second in preference to Chaoborus. The body-scale relationship is described by a straight line having a slope of 1. A graph of instantaneous growth rate plotted against length, revealed that faster growing fish have a faster decrease in growth rate. Due to the absence of certain characteristics e.g. a concavity in the upper limit of the graph, the growth of Kiakho Lake cutthroat appeared to support the view that faster growing fish are selected by the fishery, and that it can be demonstrated in this type of graph. The data, fitted to a Parker and Larkin (1959) growth equation gave a z value of 0.71. The absence of "Lee's Phenomenon" gave support to the premise that the phenomenon can result from selection by a fishery, and invalidated the other ideas concerning the causes as far as this population was concerned. The spawning run in Kiakho Lake was estimated at 3,000 fish. A tagging program revealed that the fish spent on the average of 13 days to spawn, and that there was approximately a 54 percent mortality. The male fish appeared on the spawning grounds first. The female fish showed a decrease in size, later in the run, which was not shown by the males. The eggs hatched sometime in mid June and the young fish apparently spend one year in the outlet stream. The female fish mature between the ages of 2—4 and the males between 1—3. The mean number of eggs per female, plus or minus two standard deviations was 944± 393.29. A multiple regression analysis revealed that body length affected the number of eggs produced, 2.5 times as much as egg diameter. Recommendations were made, due to the probable effects of competition, that cutthroat trout be kept in pure culture populations. It was further suggested that cutthroat trout numbers be maintained in view of the severe reduction and almost extinction of the species in other areas. / Science, Faculty of / Zoology, Department of / Graduate

This thesis will engage with the relationship between justice and suffering in order to more clearly understand what being just entails and how we can theorise justice as demanding in a desirable way. Theorising this relationship will focus on the role of various conceptions of self and community to show how justice, as contextual and communal, can be demanding in a way that does not drive the self that suffers apart from those that benefit from justice. Methodologically the thesis will follow in the tradition of self-reflection in the way it was described by Alan Blum and Peter McHugh. This means that the thesis will try to understand justice and suffering by looking at the foundations of justice, or, put differently, by trying to theorise what it is that makes some instances of suffering just. To this end the argument will begin by outlining a concept of community and of justice to then begin looking at various arguments that relate justice with suffering, either explicitly or implicitly and describe this relationship as desirable. Understanding community in a way that is based on Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of being-with-others the thesis already sets out a way of conceptualising a social actor that is essentially related to other actors. This is then used as the foundation of a community in what will be called a place. This placing of the social self will also be used to place justice and move away from justice as relying on universal principles. The thesis challenges three main arguments: a) René Girard’s justification of excessive spectacular violence against a scapegoat as a means of controlling the violent desires of a community by performing sacred and public acts of violence; b) universal principles using individualist theories of justice by John Rawls and Immanuel Kant; c) benevolence as an alternative to justice as presented by virtue ethicists and also communitarians (specifically Michael Sandel). These three theories are shown not to appreciate various aspects of justice as fairness and a community (in Nancy’s sense); particularly the silencing of difference in Girard’s false utilitarianism, the ignorance of existing injustice and suffering in Rawls’ universalism and the antagonism between the self and the universal interest in virtue ethic’s benevolence (Christine Swanton and Aristotle in particular). The thesis concludes that, in order for justice to be demanding in a way that does not disrupt a community, and in order for members of the community to suffer as part of the demands of justice, the community needs to be able to engage with itself theoretically, allowing it to commit itself to achieving justice. In this process of recognizing injustice and then pursuing fairness, a community has to be able to bind itself to its commitment in such a way that it can affirm itself as a community that is committed to justice, even if this commitment will cause some members of that community to suffer.

The study attempts to bring together the mimetic theory of René Girard and the theology of Raymund Schwager to address questions inherent in the contemporary notion of human rights. The impetus derives from the phenomenon of human violence, the universal presence of which points to a problematic that seems to defy conventional explanations and political solutions. In dialogue with Girard and Schwager, the project seeks to shed light on the causes not only of the apparent fragility of the human rights system, but also of the persistence with which large-scale human rights violations recur despite the proliferation of human rights norms. It argues that the human rights crisis is neither an accident nor a shortfall in techniques of implementation, but reflects the subconscious and collective structure of civilization. Following a description of the crisis, this investigation examines the nature of human violence, especially the contagious manner in which it works at the root of the crisis, offering understanding where conventional anthropological reflections fall short. The study argues with Girard that vengeance and retribution resonate deeply with the human psyche and easily evoke an archaic image of the divine. While this arouses moral protest in the post-modern mind, we meet here one of the fundamental issues mimetic theory elucidates, namely that it is on account of such an unconscious image of the “sacred” that vengeful violence has remained for so long a determining element in human history. In a theological key, the study presents human mimesis as a divinely constituted structure that makes possible divine/human intimacy and reciprocity. However, this exalted capacity is perverted. Human sin casts God into the image of an envious rival which corrupts the personal and structural dimensions of human sociality of which the so-called “human rights crisis” is but a contemporary manifestation. What rules the social order is not the true image of God but a resentful human projection that deceptively demands victims in exchange for peace and security. Thus “mimetic victimage” is the essential clue to the fallenness of nations and their institutions, including the institution of human rights, as well as to the fallenness of individuals in their profound alienation from God, from themselves and from one another. Nonetheless, mimesis is also a structure of hope and transcendent longing. So understood, it opens the way to a profound and practical appropriation of the meaning of Christ as the restoration of the image of God in humanity whereby rivalistic resentment, the epicenter of the human predicament, is undone through forgiveness. While there is an enabling aspect to violence when it restrains and coerces us for our benefit as we rightly fear the greater violence that might ensue in its absence, the study also argues that because mimetic human agents carry out the “deed of the law”, the human rights system cannot overcome the mimetic impulse. As a judicial system, human rights belong structurally to the same order as the system they seek to correct. This ambiguity takes on special significance in the “age of annihilation”. For the first time in history limitless violence has become feasible through weapons capable of planetary destruction so that humanity not only faces its own complicity with violence, but also the relative powerlessness of the human rights project to keep its mimetic escalation in check. This raises the central question of the study. If the institution of human rights cannot offer a rigorous critique of structural violence, let alone free humanity from complicity with it, where shall the world place its hope for a more humane future? It concludes that such a hope is not to be found in the proliferation of rights norms and their enforcement but in the transformation of human desire through the restoration of the true image of God as revealed in the Christ-event. This revelation judges as futile all attempts at human sociality that retain violence as their hidden core. Thus God’s freedom granting action in history is both revelatory and “political”: in its prophetic stance against the powers of human sin and domination, it calls humanity to its true vocation to be the image of God grounded in a new pacific mimesis that resonates freely and unflinchingly with the self-giving love of God in Christ.

Thèse (de maîtrise)--Université Laval, 1997. / Bibliogr.: f. [106]-110. Publié aussi en version électronique.

Thesis advisor: John Baldovin / Traditionally, Church teaching has examined the Eucharist in metaphysical terms (‘what is it?’: substance, presence, and causality) and its liturgical celebration as a sacrifice (a re-presentation of Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross). Prompted by Vatican II’s exhortation to the faithful for ‘full, conscious, active participation’ in the liturgy (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium 14, 27, 30), this dissertation re-interprets the Eucharistic liturgy and participants’ role in it through the root metaphor of gift: a gift of desire, which impacts participants’ desires, relationships, and selfhood. It proposes a ‘relational approach’ to the Eucharist by asking: What is going on ‘relationally’ in the Eucharistic celebration? How might the Eucharist impact our desire, relations, identity? How does or ought the liturgy of the Eucharist concern relationships between the participants and others? What specifically does the Church celebrate in its liturgy of the Eucharist? Louis-Marie Chauvet’s ‘symbolic exchange’ model of the Eucharistic Prayer, when put in conversation with both Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of gift and René Girard’s mimetic theory, yields an understanding of the Eucharist as God’s gracious and scandalous gift of divine desire. The gift is gracious as an embodied expression of divine love, and also scandalous as it challenges recipients’ autonomy with a radical call to charity demanding an existential response. This dissertation upholds Christ’s self-gift as the ultimate decision to love in a perfect reversal of sacrificial violence, which Christians are called to imitate. It emphasizes the liturgy’s structure as a dynamic event of being encountered by God’s gift of himself and reception of this gift through particular responses. This understanding aims to re-appropriate traditional Catholic teaching on the Eucharist in more contemporary terms. It aims to explain how ‘fully conscious and active participation’ in the sacred mysteries occurs, that liturgy and life may be more richly interrelated. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

In 1994 genocide occurred in the tiny, crowded country of Rwanda in the Great Lakes region of Africa. What was unique to that genocide was its efficiency and use of low technology weapons: somewhere around 800,000 to one million persons were killed, mainly by machetes and bullets, and often by neighbors, former friends, or relatives that they knew by name. The killers had been well-prepared for their roles via myth-building and reinforcement of old fears against the victims. There was little to no international intervention, although Rwanda had close political ties with France and a colonial history with Germany and Belgium. Although dozens of books and articles have been written seeking to understand, in both practical and theoretical ways, the motivations of the killers, this research looks to add to that body of knowledge by considering the ideas of a theorist outside traditional political theory — René Girard — and how they may shed some light on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Girard's conception of mimetic rivalry and his theorization of scapegoating illuminate society-based characteristics of political competition between well-established factions of Rwandan society. These characteristics, if subjected to various manipulations of social positioning and control, can serve to precipitate brutal acts of believed conciliatory violence against a perceived causal group. Without examining the origin of violence in society, an understanding of the 1994 genocide is incomplete, and policies designed to prevent such genocides from recurring may not be effective. / Master of Arts

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-03T12:19:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DANIEL ALVES DOS SANTOS.pdf: 753945 bytes, checksum: afda5a269470fca58eeade14eb681377 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-04-09 / In his theory of mimetic desire, René Girard presents Christ as an ideal to be followed since Jesus has demonstrated how is it possible to solve conflicts without associating it to vengeance of violence. Through his victimization on the Cross, Jesus reveals the truth about whom we are and who the Lord is. By demonstrating his innocence, He reverts to himself the accusation of those keeping themselves on the circle of self-justification by transfer of guilt. Thereby, the Christ decides to forgive by his own will. This is a new form of forgiveness that is called Novum.The Novum reveals a new way to bond with people who have wronged us and to try to understand ourselves through the other. This new mimesis values life, freedom, and care for the neighbor, the reconciliation more than gifts and sacrifices. This is dialectical overcoming because in this process the decision of forgiving belongs to the subject and the decision of reconciliation also depends on the one that was offended.Through the novum it is possible to change the direction of the past, destroy fatality and not to continue being a hostage of guilt. This attitude allows the subject to look to the future with hope. Focusing on the Passion and the Resurrection the subject finds who he really is and will be able to decide to pursue the Christ centric model. This decision takes him off the violent mimesis to start to elaborate the will to decide to forgive the one that has offended him. Finally, the subject recognizes the novum forgiveness as a model that when is imitated and donated is capable of remaking the one forgiving as well as the one that is forgiven. / Em sua teoria mimética do desejo, René Girard apresenta Cristo como modelo ideal a ser seguido, uma vez que Jesus demonstrou como é possível resolver conflitos sem associá-los à vingança ou à violência. Através de sua vitimização na Cruz, Jesus revela toda a verdade de quem somos e quem Deus é, ao manifestar sua inocência, Ele reverte para si a acusação daqueles que se mantêm no círculo da auto justificação por transferência da culpa. Assim, o Cristo decide, por sua livre vontade, perdoar. Isto é, uma nova forma de perdão, que denominamos novum. Fundamentado no amor, ele vem de fora e fura o círculo da violência. O novum revela uma nova maneira de se relacionar com as pessoas que nos prejudicaram, de tentar compreender quem somos através do Outro. Essa nova mimesis valoriza a vida, a liberdade, o cuidado com o próximo, a reconciliação mais do que ofertas e sacrifícios. Trata-se de uma superação dialética, pois, apesar de nesse processo a decisão de perdoar estar de posse do sujeito sendo esta uma via de mão única , a decisão de reconciliação depende também do ofendido/ofensor, esta outra, via de mão dupla . Através do novum é possível mudar o sentido do passado, destruir a fatalidade e não ter necessidade de continuar como refém da culpa. Esta atitude possibilita o sujeito olhar o futuro com esperança. Ao focar a Paixão e a Ressurreição, o sujeito descobre quem ele realmente é e poderá decidir seguir o modelo Cristocêntrico. Essa decisão leva-o a sair da mimesis violenta e passar a elaborar a vontade, para então decidir perdoar àquele que o ofendeu. O sujeito, por fim, reconhece o perdão novum como modelo que ao ser imitado e doado é capaz de refazer a pessoa de seu doador, bem como àquele que é perdoado.

This essay aims to examine the scapegoat motif in Birgitta Trotzig's novel En berättelse från kusten (1961). The important part is to study how the scapegoat motif is portrayed in the novel, how the plot leads to persecution and final sacrifice and how it is related to the novel as a whole. I discuss the term scapegoat through the French theoretician René Girard, who developed some criteria to be met in order to the scapegoat motif to work. The essay results show that the three stages in Girard's theories exist in the novel. At first a great disease that causes children of almost every family to die and it makes the society to slowly collapse. The frustration leads to a search for a cause to the disease, however not the real cause, rather a crime and someone to blame. Someone, is not just anyone, the person has some distinctive victims markers. The scapegoat, Merete, is both socially and physically aberrant and that makes her the perfect scapegoat. The result shows that her death is a ritual reconciliation that ends the chaos and makes people free of the guilt they felt. This motif is also a part of a bigger reconciliation theme. Everything seems to weave into a pattern that requires suffering and great sacrifice to achieve reconciliation. Both the city and the monastery's restoration required suffering where Merete and Apelone both suffered and died to save the whole nation from perish. / Denna uppsats syfte är att studera syndabocksmotivet i Birgitta Trotzigs roman En berättelse från kusten (1961). Huvudsakligen studeras hur motivet gestaltas i romanen, hur berättelsen leder till förföljelser och det slutliga offrandet samt hur syndabocksmotivet kan relateras till romanhelheten. Jag diskuterar begreppet syndabock utifrån den franska teoretikern René Girard kriterier och stadier. Resultatet visar att kriterierna har uppfyllts och att Girards tre stadier också förekommer i romanens samhälle. Till en början drabbas barn från nästan varje familj av en dödlig sjukdom och det får samhället att långsamt kollapsa. Frustrationen hos folket övergår i ett sökande efter orsaken till sjukdomen, dock inte den verkliga orsaken, snarare ett brott och någon att anklaga. Någon, är inte vem som helst, utan personen har tydliga offermarkörer. Syndabocken Merete är både socialt och fysiskt avvikande och det gör henne till den perfekta syndabocken. Resultatet visar att hennes död blir en rituell försoning som avslutar det rådande kaoset och friar folket får deras skuldkänslor. Motivet är också en del av en större försoningstematik, nämligen ett mönster som kräver lidande och stora uppoffringar för att nå försoning. Både staden och klostrets återupprättelse kräver offrande och både Merete och Apelone lider och dör för att inte hela samhället ska förintas.