Prospettivismo e secolarizzazione: l'eredità post-kantiana della teoria mimetica

The chapter has three main goals. The first goal is to contextualise Girard within the current debate between the “new atheists” and the “new theists”, showing how the debate itself is made possible only by a shared endorsement of a meta-naturalism that rejects the “transcendental turn” of Kantian and post-Kantian perspectivism. I therefore investigate the extent to which Girard belongs to such philosophical tradition. More specifically, the second goal consists in showing what Girard has in common with contemporary hermeneutics, considered as the philosophical development of post-Kantian perspectivism. In the context of this analysis, I argue that Girard’s thought implies a fundamental distinction between a “sacred” and a religious hermeneutics. Building on the result of this twofold investigation, I then proceed to analyse the notion of secularization, considered as a process of progressive endorsement of perspectivism. I conclude by arguing that the perspectivism of the mimetic theory leads to a non-foundationalist stance analogous to Pascal’s “wager”.