Au Revior I Guess

Battling to the End: Politics, War, and Apocalypse by Rene Girard, a fellow I just heard about in passing, is said to be his best last book in a long and remarkably distinguished career (qualifying him for election to the self-consciously famous French Académie française of France at that), a book that achieved some level of notoriety there when it was issued in that land's language in 2007 as Achever Clausewitz.

Just from the article's blurbed mention of that book and another earlier one with perhaps even greater notoriety in France called Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde(1978), which would become Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World when published in English in 1987, makes me think I should know about this guy already, who, after all, lived a thirty minute drive from here and thrived on a good French-style argument, which, like many of their cheeses and a few of their wines, are about as good as you're ever going to need, argument about the kind of stuff I'm always at least tangentially interested in, and never once got wind of him while he lived. Sad the best I can do now is feed, zombie-like, on the remains of the brain of Girard.