Rene Girard: I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning

Reader Response ~ - - Rene Girard and the Dynamics of Imitation , Scapegoating

Richard Boyd's "Reading Student Resistance" and his earlier JAC article "Imitate Me; Don't Imitate Me" have convinced me that Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire may have much to teach us about the dynamics of composition. Both articles offer an impressive analysis of imitation as a moment of coercion and "double bind" for students and teacher. In my view, Boyd's most significant insight con...

I went; I saw: I was never the same!

The Best Thing I Saw at ASCO

The 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting was a practice-changing event sure to excite even the most dispassionate among us. In my own field of gastrointestinal oncology, there were seismic alterations in the way many will now approach adjuvant therapy in colorectal and biliary tract cancers. And as we enter the brave newworld of histology agnosticism, even Kuhn would...

The most memorable patient I never saw.

Soon after midnight, after a busy day on the inpatient psych unit, I slipped into a deep sleep. Then the phone rang in the residents’ on-call room. “Dr. Lazarus?” the voice on the other end inquired. “Yes,” I replied, half asleep. “This is Dr. Hendricks (not her real name) in the ER. Are you the on-call psych resident tonight?” “I am,” I answered drowsily. Every physician knows that nightly awa...

Girard Couples of Quantales

We introduce the concept of a Girard couple, which consists of two (not necessarily unital) quantales linked by a strong form of duality. The two basic examples of Girard couples arise in the study of endomorphism quantales and of the spectra of operator algebras. We construct, for an arbitrary sup-lattice S, a Girard quantale whose right-sided part is isomorphic to S.