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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611862737 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2018 |
| Series: | Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 244 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Intellectual Expulsion
1. The Mechanism of Mimetic Victimage
The theoretical unity of René Girard's mimetic theory relies on the fundamental tenet that every person feels as though she or he is missing "something," a being with which others, by contrast, seem to be endowed by nature.
If the subject desires to be something more, it is because there is a model, an other who seems to personify this being of which the subject feels deprived. The best metaphor for expressing this triple relation of disciple-model-object is the triangle. Indeed, according to Girard, the preliminary stage of every subjective behavior moves via a "third element," an object, which will determine the target of the subject's desire. The corners of the resulting triangle are occupied by the subject, by the object, and by this "third element," the model, which, by virtue of its own potentiality, Girard calls the "mediator."
The object appears to the subject-disciple to constitute the sign of success; this, however, is an illusion, generated by the fact that the object is possessed, or at least desired, by the model-mediator, and thus has no value beyond its relation to that model. The disciple will therefore remain disappointed, for it is not the possession of the object that can bestow the being that the subject feels she or he lacks. However, this will almost never cause the subject to question the model. If anything, it will intensify the subject's sense of inferiority: she will conclude that she has made some sort of error, having not imitated the model well enough, and will convince herself that a perfect imitation will unquestionably endow her with this being. The subject, wishing to be what the model is, will wish to have what the model has, and will desire what the model desires. This confluence of desires onto identical objects will generate rivalry between disciple and model.
It is therefore possible to speak of metaphysical desire insofar as desire no longer has an object — or at least the object endures only as a sign that leads back to the mediator — and aspires to nothing specific, transcending instead the objective dimension to refer exclusively to the being of the model. Metaphysical desire is extraordinarily contagious: every individual may become the mediator of her or his neighbor without realizing the role she or he is performing, and can therefore find her- or himself being a rival without having done anything — apparently — to provoke this rivalry. In short, the model is an object of hatred, qua persecutor, and indissolubly also an object of love, qua possessor of the desired being.
The subject desires the object because the object is also desired by the rival: the rival is the subject's model on the plane of desire; and it is this mimetic desire that produces conflict. The significance of the being that everybody seeks, but that nobody possesses, is violence. In the convergence of mimetic desires, each subject equates the being that is at stake with the violence of every other subject (the violence with which everybody defends the possessed object). In the course of this process, there arises what Girard calls, using a psychiatric expression, cyclothymia: each subject lives her or his own moment too intensely to comprehend reciprocity. Every subject feels able to master violence, insofar as she or he feels extraneous to it; but on the contrary, it is violence that masters every subject and generates violent reciprocity. Each subject sees in the other the sole perpetrator of the crisis, while in reality everybody is responsible for it. At the paroxysm of crisis, how is it possible to restore a unity that has been completely undone?
If violence renders everyone the same, anyone may become the double of any other, and thus an object of universal hatred. Thus, human beings choose a scapegoat or victim. It is important that the victim be similar to those she substitutes, without leading to a catastrophic confusion caused by pure assimilation. This extraneousness of the scapegoat, although it originates from some distinguishing characteristics of the victim, only becomes established in the act of expulsion itself. The scapegoat is therefore fully loaded with violence and expelled, and if all truly believe the scapegoat to be solely responsible for the violence that is threatening the community, all are effectively liberated from that violence through the scapegoat's expulsion.
Since the expulsion of the victim restores peace, it is the victim — the scapegoat — who is credited with the beneficial ending of the crisis. The victim therefore becomes a kind of supernatural creature, sowing violence to reap peace. If discord causes disgrace, and sacrifice restores lost peace, then sacrifice is the source of all fruitfulness.
The set of actions aimed at preventing violence constitutes the sphere of religion. Thus, violence coincides with the sacred. This is the explanation for the paradoxical nature of sacrifice, at once a culpable and deeply sacred act. The religious moment liberates human beings from the suspicions that would poison them if they were to recall the crisis as it really unfolded. Violence and the sacred fundamentally coincide.
Religious rites are attempts to provide a "technique" for catharsis. The ritual victim is a substitute neither for a sole member of the community nor for all members, but for the victim of the original expulsion. There is, in other words, a first substitution, which we may call original, in which the victim does substitute for the whole community, and a second substitution, which we may call ritual, in which the place of the original victim is taken by a member of some sacrificeable category. Ritual substitution is aimed at perpetuating the beneficial effects of the original expulsion. Human beings would not succeed in placing their own violence outside themselves if there were no expiatory victim to expel, and indeed they could not expel the victim if they were conscious of the transfer of violence from them onto the victim. The effectiveness of any sacrifice therefore depends on misrecognition (méconnaissance).
If mimetic victimage lies at the basis of all cultures, then it is also possible to trace all myths back to it. Common to many myths is the negative connotation of the scapegoat (the "eliminated fragment"), and the positive connotation of elimination itself, which generally takes the form of a collective expulsion. Indeed, more or less organized forms of lynching feature in the majority of myths. In fact the true project of mythology is to collectively recall foundational crises and lynchings, that is, the sequence of events that constitute or reconstruct a cultural order.
If behind all mythical and ritual meanings it is possible to trace the violence that we may rightfully call foundational, it is, on the other hand, impossible to retrieve a myth that reproduces original violence in every detail, because misrecognition constitutes a fundamental dimension of the religious (victimization can have beneficial effects only if all believe that it does). Every demystification of the system is already its dismantling. The abundance of fraternal conflicts that feature in Greek tragedies, for example, confirms the presence of a sacrificial crisis, which generally involves brothers brought together and then divided by something that both desire.
The disintegration of the sacrificial system appears as a fall back into reciprocal violence. Sacrificial crisis means first of all the loss of differences — that is, violent confusion. In the evolution from ritual to secular institutions, human beings distance themselves from essential violence, but never break away from it.
The equivalent of myths for an epoch that may no longer be chronologically close to the birth of its culture is constituted by texts of persecution. Examples of texts of persecution are some medieval documents that refer to acts of collective violence that occurred during the Black Death, in the middle of the fifteenth century, and to ordeals of auto-da-fé imposed on Jews accused of spreading the plague. The only difference between these texts of persecution and myths is that here the sacralization of the victim is entirely absent or scarcely suggested. This difference derives from the fact that the demystification of persecution is an exclusive development of the modern Western world. Societies that possess texts of mystification do not possess properly defined myths; societies that possess myths do not possess texts of persecution. In primitive societies, it is the notion of persecution itself that is absent; violence always has an aura of sacredness. A society that produces texts of persecution is already a society on the path to desacralization. Our present situation represents an intermediate state between the sacralizing misapprehension of primitive societies and a practically accessible knowledge. This intermediate state consists of a limited recognition of mimetic victimage, which never fully comprehends its foundational role of the originary lynching for the establishment of human civilization.
Sacrificial crises, however, have not occurred only in the remote past. If in texts of persecution up to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the presence of innocent and, to a degree, arbitrary scapegoats is more apparent, it is only because today we face persecutors who are clever enough to leave no trace of their crimes.
If we are now able to analyze and to "dismantle" cultural mechanisms, that is because of the indirect and imperceptible but extraordinarily binding influence that Judeo-Christian Scripture exerts upon us. Although undoubtedly there are numerous resemblances between biblical myths and all other myths, what seems equally indubitable to Girard is the distinctiveness of biblical myths. In the Bible we witness an effort to trace a way back to origins and to return to the establishing transfers, to discredit and destroy them — to contradict and demystify myths. But the full revelation of foundational murder comes only in the Gospels. They present Jesus Christ as the innocent victim of a collective in crisis that rediscovers unity by scapegoating him.
The Gospels revolve around the Passion of Christ, or rather around the same drama that is present in every mythology in the world: the collective murder of a scapegoat. The Gospels are not, however, myths in the sense described above, because the Gospels direct responsibility for the violence to the persecutors and not to the victim. Such a "deconstruction" reveals the foundational mechanism and leaves human beings without sacrificial protection, prey to the ancient mimetic discord that is free to take its typically modern form: each person assigns to her or his neighbor the responsibility for persecutions and injustices, whose universality she or he begins to glimpse, but without being prepared to assume her or his own responsibility. The Gospels are no longer part of mythology, because with increasing eloquence they resist the sacred ambivalence and reveal the arbitrariness of the violence to which the victim is subjected.
In an anthropological sense, then, the Gospels fulfill an essential role inasmuch as they shed light on the crisis that jeopardizes the whole representation of persecution when the mechanisms that support it begin to be revealed. The Gospels keep showing us what persecutors attempt to suppress — that is, the fact that their victim is a scapegoat. The Passion of Christ makes visible that which must remain invisible if such powers are to sustain themselves: mimetic victimage. The violent order of culture that is revealed in the Gospels, and primarily in the Passion, cannot survive its own disclosure.
It is necessary, however, to formulate a nonsacrificial reading of the Gospels. According to Girard, the Passion is presented in the Gospels as an act that does bring about the salvation of humanity, but that is not a sacrifice in the sense mentioned above. Jesus provides violence with the most perfect victim imaginable, the victim whom violence has most reason to choose: the most innocent. Jesus, in effect, stands as the expiatory victim par excellence, the most arbitrary because the least violent.
It is on these grounds that Girard draws an argument for Christ's divinity. To denounce the mechanism one must be outside it; someone is needed who owes nothing to violence, who does not think according to its norms, and who is entirely extraneous to it, when the whole of humanity is caught in its ambit. The fact that the Gospels enclose a genuine knowledge of violence and the way it works shows that such knowledge cannot be merely human in origin.
If the God of victims intervenes in the world in favor of victims, the outcome of that undertaking cannot be a victory: all that can happen to a victim is what happens to Jesus, to Job, and to all prophets. Rather than inflicting violence, Christ prefers to suffer it. Christ is the God of victims primarily in the sense that he shares their fate in its entirety. This seems to be a failure, but it transforms immediately into a victory.
In fact, the violent order of culture revealed in the Gospels and primarily in the Passion cannot survive its own revelation. Sooner or later, then, that which Christianity has fermented in culture must bring about the collapse of societies that it has penetrated, including those that are apparently grounded on Christian principles, so-called Christian societies, which effectively depend on the revelation of the Gospels, but do so in an ambiguous way because of a partial misunderstanding of the Christian principles, a misunderstanding that is necessarily sacrificial and rooted in the deceptive resemblance of the Gospels to mythological religious texts.
The Paraclete, the Spirit of truth as presented in the Gospel according to St. John, represents the knowledge that ever more progressively irrupts into the world, continuing the revelation of Christ. Even if the victory of Jesus is achieved immediately, from the beginning, in the moment of the Passion — the reality of the roles of victims and persecutors is clearly established — it is only made real for the majority of humanity at the end of a long history secretly governed by revelation and guided by the Spirit of truth.
2. "Religion" and "Philosophy"
Girard's theory explicitly asks to be considered in a scientific way and to acquire universal application. Such demands are, in fact, one and the same: a theory can only be scientific if it is valid for all observable phenomena — if, in other words, it is universally valid; only when this is the case is it possible to qualify a theory with the scientific label.
According to Girard, collective violence toward the originary victim constitutes not merely a fact, but the central event in the birth of civilizations. The applicability of mimetic victimage in all fields of cultural knowledge thus constitutes the conditio sine qua non of the validity of Girard's theory: either this is always valid, or it is never valid.
There have been numerous attempts to apply mimetic theory to various fields of knowledge: literary criticism, psychology, economics, and anthropology, just to mention a few. Contributions in the sphere of philosophy are rarer, probably because of Girard's unorthodox formation and his problematic affirmations of the "death of philosophy."
In the first part of the current volume, I apply mimetic theory to the philosophy of religion, to verify the cogency of Girard's hypothesis in this field, and to establish whether such an application can yield significant results. It is possible to attempt such an application thanks to the universal ambitions of Girard's theory in other fields: aesthetics, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of law, and political philosophy. My choice of the philosophy of religion is not arbitrary, however, and I believe the reason will become clear as the work proceeds.
The first step will be to clarify what Girard means by "religion" and "philosophy."
2.1. "Religion"
The expulsion of a scapegoat restores peace to a community. In order for such a miracle to happen again, thus preventing the community from sliding into the chaos of violence, two developments are necessary. The first is the conceptualization of the expulsion of the victim, with the aim of being able to repeat it; the second is the expression of that expulsion, with the aim of agreeing upon its details with other members of the community. Reason and language are generated in this way.
The expulsion is repeated by continually substituting new scapegoats for the original victim: it is this that generates rites. Sacrifice will become ever less gruesome, and rites will ever less recall the foundational event, the more chronologically distant we are removed from it. On the other hand, the memory of that experience will be preserved in narratives that are more or less explicit in recalling the foundational event: myths.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Intellectual Sacrifice and Other Mimetic Paradoxes"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Paolo Diego Bubbio.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xvii
Abbreviations xxi
Part 1 Intellectual Sacrifice
Chapter 1 Intellectual Expulsion 3
Chapter 2 Historical Forms of Mystification 25
Chapter 3 The Path of Demystification 75
Conclusion 93
A Letter from René Girard 99
Part 2 Other Mimetic Paradoxes
Transition: Corrections and Paradoxes 105
Girard's Ontological Argument for the Existence of God 115
Mimetic Theory's Post-Kantian Legacy 129
Mimetic Theory and Hermeneutic Communism 143
The Self in Crisis 159
Hermeneutic Mimetic Theory 181
Bibliography 209
Index 217