Ep 53: Scapegoats & the Beginning of Infinity with Kahlil Corazo and Max Schultz
Kahlil Corazo and Max Schultz explore the unlikely intersection of René Girard and David Deutsch, explain why ritual human sacrifice was ended by a story, and ask whether the beginning of infinity can survive without the religion that started it.
Kahlil Corazo writes from the Philippines: his historical novel Rajah Versus Conquistador rebuilds Magellan's 1521 encounter with Rajah Humabon of Cebu on Girardian foundations, he writes the Substack Explorations, and he recently published in Contagion, the René Girard journal. Max Schultz writes the Substack Mimesis and Infinity — "a search for moral and epistemic explanations, through Girard and Deutsch" — where he argues that Christian culture is the essential, unacknowledged component of Deutsch's "beginning of infinity." Together they may constitute the world's smallest school of thought — and this conversation is an attempt to launch it as a field.
- Read Rajah Versus Conquistador: A King's Gambit in the Age of Conquest — Kahlil Corazo's debut novel
- Explorations — Kahlil Corazo's Substack
- Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
- Mimesis and Infinity — Max Schultz's Substack
- Read René Girard: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
- Read The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch
- Read Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life — Luke Burgis
- Read Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind — Tom Holland
- Read The Beauty of the Infinite — David Bentley Hart
- Read The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist
- Watch on YouTube