El contagio y la violencia en las sociedades contemporáneas : política, literatura y religión

Abstract

Thinking about violence is the philosophical reason expressed in the research condensed in this book. Violence, as the establishment of evil in history, is the unsolvable expression of the inertia and chaos crossing societies, particularly those of today. From which philosophical horizon do we seek to frame the present analysis of violence? It is not easy to determine a single view of the problem because from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes to the Martinique thinker Frantz Fanon referred to the political power and social segregation exercised by violence. We will go to the mimetic theory proposed by the French thinker, René Girard (1923-2005) in the interest of delimitation. We believe that this philosophical approach allows us to think about violence in the dynamic terms of difference and sameness. The mimetic theory explains the origin of violence in direct relation to the human desire for another (otherness) that seeks to be imitated to the point of its ontological appropriation. Desire mimics another way of desiring, which explains the chain reaction of a violent appropriation that goes through gestures, ways of being, objects, persons, etc. Difference, therefore, is one of the elements integrating the analysis of violence from the mimetic desire, since it is a way of perceiving that human life in social terms exists due to the existence of the other, who is the referent of imitation and at the same time of rivalry. In this order of ideas, the study of violence proposed in this research intertwines the concepts of difference, imitation, otherness, and rivalry.