Can You Take It? A Dark Enemies-to-Lovers Romance

"His fascinating and ambitious book provides a fully developed theory of violence as the `heart and secret soul' of the sacred. Girard's fertile, combative mind links myth to prophetic writing, primitive religions to classical tragedy."--Victor Brombert, 'Chronicle of Higher Education.' Cover 1 Title 2 Copyright 3 Contents 4 Acknowledgments 6 Chapter One Sacrifice 10 Chapter Two The Sacrificial Crisis 48 Chapter Three Oedipus and the Surrogate Victim 77 Chapter Four The Origins of Myth and Ritual 98 Chapter Five Dionysus 128 Chapter Six From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double 152 Chapter Seven Freud and the Oedipus Complex 178 Chapter Eight Totem and Taboo and the Incest Prohibition 202 Chapter Nine Levi-Strauss, Structuralism, and Marriage Laws 232 Chapter Ten The Gods, the Dead, the Sacred, and Sacrificial Substitution 259 Chapter Eleven The Unity of All Rites 283 Conclusion 318 Bibliography 328 Index 334 Violence and the Sacred is Rene Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.

This brilliant study of good and evil examines the presence of ritual violence in sacred ceremony.