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 The volume features a previously unpublished letter by René Girard on the relationship between philosophy and religion.
 

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.