René Girard and the the Paradox of Modernity

Abstract

This paper takes into account the paradoxical nature of the western modernity which lies according to the author in that, on the one hand, the national State, the science and the market, as modern institutions, deploy themselves as instruments of pacification to end the wars of religion that devastate Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, but, on the other hand, such artefacts created to end the fear create, as unintended consequence, new implants of fear, such as the monstrous Shoah, which question the former premises. The author analyzes this paradox with the tools taken from the work of René Girard.