Abstract

In a letter to Raymund Schwager from October 1991, René Girard arrived at a very critical verdict concerning his 1978 book Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World—the very book about which he had written almost one and a half decades before, that it contained the “essence of what I have to say” and “clarified and dissipated former misunderstandings.”1 The reason for this change of mind was Raymund Schwager himself, who had sent him the manuscript of a paper on “Mimesis and Freedom” he had presented seven years earlier, in 1984, at a symposium on Girard’s thinking in Provo, Utah.2 For Girard, who had actually attended the Provo symposium, this text as such was, naturally, not new. And it was not new for him ..