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Violence and the Sacred
Violence and the Sacred is Rene Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
René Girard
122 books651 followersRené Girard was a French-born American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy.
He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year’s fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.
René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.
He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year’s fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.
René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.
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April 27, 2016
In the 1972 work, Violence and the Sacred, the French literary critic Rene Girard undertakes a “scientific” exploration of the dual aspect of sacrifice, attempting to resolve the contradiction articulated in the work of Henri Hubert and Marcel Maus: “Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him- but the victim is only sacred because he is to be killed.” The results of this inquiry yield, according to the author, the origins of all religion and culture.
At the core of Girard’s theory is the concept of mimetic, or imitative, desire. Human beings, like animals, are essentially mimetic; that is they learn primarily through imitation. An individual understands what is valuable by imitating another person, who then becomes a model. Initially, the rivalry between the model and the imitator has an object. However, the value of this object is not intrinsic; its sole worth lies in the fact that it is desired by the other. The two figures, struggling to obtain the same object and insisting that the other imitate him in order to validate his own worth, become almost interchangeable. This contradictory imperative, simultaneously being told to imitate and not imitate the rival, is termed the double bind. The two figures are so similar that they don’t realize that they are rivals. Each time the imitator/disciple comes close to the desired object, he comes into conflict with his rival/model and thus he associates violence with desire. The experience of this contradictory imperative sometimes transforms the rival into what Girard calls “the monstrous double.” The image of the rival is distorted, hallucinations occur, and these hallucinations are represented by the various monsters that exist in myths.
Mimetic desire is, according to Girard, the primary impulse of living creatures. Accordingly, the violence that such desire inevitably engenders is an almost inescapable facet of human society. Left unchecked, the mimetic impulse leads to violence and murder. Murder ultimately leads to another murder and thus to the beginning of an unstoppable chain of reciprocal violence and vengeance which threatens to destroy the entire community. This period of chaotic violence is termed the sacrificial crisis.
When society is on the verge of collapse due to ongoing reciprocal violence it channels all of its violence onto a scapegoat and the scapegoat mechanism fosters social cohesion and creates a new society from the ruins of the old. The entire community participates in the murder which serves the dual function of creating social cohesion among all the participants and channelling all the violence onto one person. This is termed by Girard as being “generative” or “unanimous” violence. Because the purpose of the original sacrifice is to maintain the social fabric, the scapegoat cannot be from the heart of the community but is usually an “exterior or marginal individual” who is not fully integrated into society. Myths arise concealing the actual nature of the violence and sacrificial rites are initiated in which a surrogate victim is used in place of the original victim. Because he has managed to still the violence that threatened to consume the community, the scapegoat eventually evolves from being a reviled figure to being a revered as divine.
The rites of sacrifice are performed as a “preventative measure” attempting to contain the community’s latent violence and evoking the almost forgotten memory of the original sacrifice. The obscured function of the sacrifice is essential in order for the process to be effective: “the celebrants do not and must not comprehend the true role of the sacrificial act.” However, when the memory of the original sacrifice becomes too distant, the rites begin to lose their efficacy and it is possible that another sacrificial crisis can arise and the whole process may begin again. Society begins to collapse, but the mechanism of the scapegoat allows the society to regenerate and the cycle begins again.
Girard outlines his theory in the first chapter of the book and fleshes out the details in the subsequent chapters. He suggests that tragedy, by virtue of the fact that it differs in details from other forms of the myth, is particularly importance in giving us glimpses into the actual nature of the sacrificial crisis. Further, the dialogue in tragedy is such that the characters seem to be interchangeable and this reveals the nature of mimetic rivalry. Though he makes brief references to several tragedies, the bulk of his discussion is focussed on The Bacchae and Oedipus the King, which leads the reader to suspect that the two plays are the only ones which fit easily into the Girardian paradigm.
Girard also suggests that all rites dare linked to the sacrifice; exorcism is mock sacrifice, with the evil spirit acting as a sacrificial victim; rites of passage attempt to recreate the desperation of the sacrificial crisis for young members of the community who lack all memory of it. This seems to be a difficult claim to substantiate as there are many rituals, the marriage ceremony for instance, which are important in many cultural systems but which seem to have no links to violence or sacrifice.
Chapters seven and eight are taken up with a discussion of Freud, who as one critic suggests, seems to be Girard’s own model. Girard first takes apart the Oedipus complex. Whereas in Freudian thought desire for the object (the mother) leads to rivalry, in Girard’s conception desire is the product of the rivalry. Girard is particularly interested in a one Freudian work, Totem and Taboo, which has been dismissed by most Freudians. The work hints at a theory of collective murder but, because Freud was so intellectually attached to his notion of the Oedipus complex, “the mechanism of the surrogate victim eluded him.”
Because he insists that his theory is all-encompassing, Girard uses a comparative approach that examines everything from anthropological studies of primitive cultures to Shakespeare to Greek tragedy. His methodology is composite, having been described by one commentator as a “mixture of anthropology, literary theory, and cultural philosophy.” Girard’s ability to examine a broad variety of sources in admirable, yet one wonders if the specialists in the various areas he plucks from would not find his work lacking in nuances. Nonetheless, the sheer ingenuity of Girard’s thought and his ability to bring together such different source materials cannot be denied.
The main criticism that can be levied against Girard is the same one that every mono-theorist is accused of, namely that he is unabashedly reductionist: “There can be nothing in the whole range of human culture that is not rooted in violent unanimity- nothing that does not find its source in the surrogate victim.” Girard is seems insistent on the notion that one theory can reveal all the nuances of human culture and rejects the notion that such reductionism is invalid. The failure of such theorists as Freud, James Frazer and W. Robertson Smith does not mean that attempting to “get... to the bottom of things” is a fruitless enterprise. There is a certain amount of arrogance to Girard’s belief that he will boldly achieve what no previous mythographer has achieved before and to his insistence that he has uncovered the unity underlying “the whole of human culture.”
Ultimately, this is where Girard fails. The criticism that Girard levies against Freudian thought, “psychoanalysis is a closed system that can never be refuted,” can be applied to Girard himself. He notes that traces of the surrogate victim and generative violence can be so transformed within a myth as to become “unrecognizable.” Thus any holes found in his theory can be dismissed; if a particular myth does not conform to the Girardian designated patterns, then it simply has been transformed beyond all recognition in an attempt to cover up the generative violence. Thus Girard has removed himself from all criticism.
At the core of Girard’s theory is the concept of mimetic, or imitative, desire. Human beings, like animals, are essentially mimetic; that is they learn primarily through imitation. An individual understands what is valuable by imitating another person, who then becomes a model. Initially, the rivalry between the model and the imitator has an object. However, the value of this object is not intrinsic; its sole worth lies in the fact that it is desired by the other. The two figures, struggling to obtain the same object and insisting that the other imitate him in order to validate his own worth, become almost interchangeable. This contradictory imperative, simultaneously being told to imitate and not imitate the rival, is termed the double bind. The two figures are so similar that they don’t realize that they are rivals. Each time the imitator/disciple comes close to the desired object, he comes into conflict with his rival/model and thus he associates violence with desire. The experience of this contradictory imperative sometimes transforms the rival into what Girard calls “the monstrous double.” The image of the rival is distorted, hallucinations occur, and these hallucinations are represented by the various monsters that exist in myths.
Mimetic desire is, according to Girard, the primary impulse of living creatures. Accordingly, the violence that such desire inevitably engenders is an almost inescapable facet of human society. Left unchecked, the mimetic impulse leads to violence and murder. Murder ultimately leads to another murder and thus to the beginning of an unstoppable chain of reciprocal violence and vengeance which threatens to destroy the entire community. This period of chaotic violence is termed the sacrificial crisis.
When society is on the verge of collapse due to ongoing reciprocal violence it channels all of its violence onto a scapegoat and the scapegoat mechanism fosters social cohesion and creates a new society from the ruins of the old. The entire community participates in the murder which serves the dual function of creating social cohesion among all the participants and channelling all the violence onto one person. This is termed by Girard as being “generative” or “unanimous” violence. Because the purpose of the original sacrifice is to maintain the social fabric, the scapegoat cannot be from the heart of the community but is usually an “exterior or marginal individual” who is not fully integrated into society. Myths arise concealing the actual nature of the violence and sacrificial rites are initiated in which a surrogate victim is used in place of the original victim. Because he has managed to still the violence that threatened to consume the community, the scapegoat eventually evolves from being a reviled figure to being a revered as divine.
The rites of sacrifice are performed as a “preventative measure” attempting to contain the community’s latent violence and evoking the almost forgotten memory of the original sacrifice. The obscured function of the sacrifice is essential in order for the process to be effective: “the celebrants do not and must not comprehend the true role of the sacrificial act.” However, when the memory of the original sacrifice becomes too distant, the rites begin to lose their efficacy and it is possible that another sacrificial crisis can arise and the whole process may begin again. Society begins to collapse, but the mechanism of the scapegoat allows the society to regenerate and the cycle begins again.
Girard outlines his theory in the first chapter of the book and fleshes out the details in the subsequent chapters. He suggests that tragedy, by virtue of the fact that it differs in details from other forms of the myth, is particularly importance in giving us glimpses into the actual nature of the sacrificial crisis. Further, the dialogue in tragedy is such that the characters seem to be interchangeable and this reveals the nature of mimetic rivalry. Though he makes brief references to several tragedies, the bulk of his discussion is focussed on The Bacchae and Oedipus the King, which leads the reader to suspect that the two plays are the only ones which fit easily into the Girardian paradigm.
Girard also suggests that all rites dare linked to the sacrifice; exorcism is mock sacrifice, with the evil spirit acting as a sacrificial victim; rites of passage attempt to recreate the desperation of the sacrificial crisis for young members of the community who lack all memory of it. This seems to be a difficult claim to substantiate as there are many rituals, the marriage ceremony for instance, which are important in many cultural systems but which seem to have no links to violence or sacrifice.
Chapters seven and eight are taken up with a discussion of Freud, who as one critic suggests, seems to be Girard’s own model. Girard first takes apart the Oedipus complex. Whereas in Freudian thought desire for the object (the mother) leads to rivalry, in Girard’s conception desire is the product of the rivalry. Girard is particularly interested in a one Freudian work, Totem and Taboo, which has been dismissed by most Freudians. The work hints at a theory of collective murder but, because Freud was so intellectually attached to his notion of the Oedipus complex, “the mechanism of the surrogate victim eluded him.”
Because he insists that his theory is all-encompassing, Girard uses a comparative approach that examines everything from anthropological studies of primitive cultures to Shakespeare to Greek tragedy. His methodology is composite, having been described by one commentator as a “mixture of anthropology, literary theory, and cultural philosophy.” Girard’s ability to examine a broad variety of sources in admirable, yet one wonders if the specialists in the various areas he plucks from would not find his work lacking in nuances. Nonetheless, the sheer ingenuity of Girard’s thought and his ability to bring together such different source materials cannot be denied.
The main criticism that can be levied against Girard is the same one that every mono-theorist is accused of, namely that he is unabashedly reductionist: “There can be nothing in the whole range of human culture that is not rooted in violent unanimity- nothing that does not find its source in the surrogate victim.” Girard is seems insistent on the notion that one theory can reveal all the nuances of human culture and rejects the notion that such reductionism is invalid. The failure of such theorists as Freud, James Frazer and W. Robertson Smith does not mean that attempting to “get... to the bottom of things” is a fruitless enterprise. There is a certain amount of arrogance to Girard’s belief that he will boldly achieve what no previous mythographer has achieved before and to his insistence that he has uncovered the unity underlying “the whole of human culture.”
Ultimately, this is where Girard fails. The criticism that Girard levies against Freudian thought, “psychoanalysis is a closed system that can never be refuted,” can be applied to Girard himself. He notes that traces of the surrogate victim and generative violence can be so transformed within a myth as to become “unrecognizable.” Thus any holes found in his theory can be dismissed; if a particular myth does not conform to the Girardian designated patterns, then it simply has been transformed beyond all recognition in an attempt to cover up the generative violence. Thus Girard has removed himself from all criticism.
January 25, 2019
Che fai tu, dormitore?
“Presto, in nome degli dèi, nascondetemi da qualche parte lontano da qui: uccidetemi o gettatemi in mare in un punto dove non mi vediate mai”. Sofocle, Edipo Re
Che cos'è il sacro? Secondo René Girard, è ciò che domina l'uomo tanto quanto egli si creda capace di dominarlo. La sua origine risiede in un evento primordiale, taciuto e ripetuto, attraverso il misconoscimento e il sacrificio rituale. La violenza reciproca porta l'essere umano sulla soglia di una crisi sacrificale, dove l'intera comunità, per proteggersi, sostituisce unanimemente l'oggetto (ovvero sé stessa) con una vittima espiatoria, chiamata anche capro espiatorio. La teoria della religione primitiva di Girard si basa come prove su testi etnologici e su testi della tragedia greca classica, in particolare Sofocle e Euripide, oltre che sulla mitologia; Girard afferma l'esistenza di un evento reale fondatore, un linciaggio o un'uccisione, che dà luogo al meccanismo della vittima espiatoria sul piano del mito e del rituale, permettendo così alla società il rovesciamento della violenza in ordine culturale. Tuttavia vivere in società è sfuggire alla violenza (ma anche subirne il fascino, secondo il kùdos), quindi si attua un perpetuo misconoscimento collettivo, per arrivare alla disintegrazione dei conflitti; per questa via interpretativa, si intuisce la funzione rituale della violenza, ma la luce accesa su essa comporta una negazione oscura, una crisi ermeneutica. Sull'orlo della rivelazione c'è il buio. I segni della fine si manifestano molteplici e si diffonde la decadenza in forma di inasprimento, rappresaglia, polemica, odio. Così il sacro ritorna in qualità immanente e in modo nascosto produce un nuovo sapere della violenza: laddove la crisi non è mai la stessa e la violenza essenziale torna su di noi in modo spettacolare. Ciò che ha determinato il passaggio da non umano a umano e da clan familiari e tribali a società unite si ripresenta sotto forma di mostruosità, vendetta, arbitrarietà del male. La crisi del pensiero moderno ci invita quindi, secondo l'antropologia di Girard, a rendere pienamente manifesto, in una luce razionale, il ruolo della violenza nelle società umane. L'ombra di un fenomeno ossessivo e iterativamente rimosso muove dalle nostre coscienze ai luoghi naturali di pericolo e minaccia dove le rivalità interne si trasformano in terrore, brutalità e assurdità verso gli innocenti. Confrontandosi con Freud e Lèvy-Strauss, con i filosofi presocratici e la tragedia classica (Edipo Re e Le Baccanti), il pensatore francese ci ricorda che la violenza è sempre ambivalente e che coloro che si oppongono allo sviluppo della violenza spesso sono coloro che gli permettono di trionfare: insomma, il rimedio è insieme veleno (secondo la natura del pharmakon), il benefico si inverte in malefico, l'anticultura e la menzogna hanno potere sovrano, l'intolleranza può essere fatale tanto quanto la tolleranza. Non siamo mai realmente al sicuro, mai al riparo, mai immuni al contagio. È importante, nel discorso di Girard, porre estrema attenzione allo sviluppo della violenza, che può sempre prendere una brutta piega: è esclusa la vittoria, l'opposizione simmetrica non si spezza (il thymos è ciclico), il tragico distrugge ogni forma di relazione, non si riconoscono differenze e si diffonde ovunque l'uniformità. Dappertutto è lo stesso desiderio e le strategie tutti contro tutti ingannano il vero, identificando un altro colpevole, sempre un individuo sacrificabile: lo straniero, il prigioniero, il povero, lo schiavo, il malato, il minorato, il disadattato (tutti contro uno). Siamo così còlti dentro un paradosso, a una dualità irriducibile, una situazione da double bind: la violenza inscrive se stessa dietro tutti i significati possibili, e rimane indecifrabile fino a che un significato ultimo continua a mascherarcela, conducendoci a uno stato di anomìa, ossia assenza di legge, intesa in senso kafkiano, tra occultamento e divisione. L'uomo girardiano adora la violenza come portatrice di pace: è attuale parlare di logica sacrificale ed escalation dei conflitti?
“Nella vita animale la violenza è fornita dai freni individuali. Gli animali di una stessa specie non lottano mai a morte; il vincitore risparmia il vinto. La specie umana è priva di tale protezione. Al meccanismo biologico individuale viene a sostituirsi il meccanismo collettivo e culturale della vittima espiatoria. Non vi è società senza religione perché senza religione non sarebbe possibile nessuna società”.
“Presto, in nome degli dèi, nascondetemi da qualche parte lontano da qui: uccidetemi o gettatemi in mare in un punto dove non mi vediate mai”. Sofocle, Edipo Re
Che cos'è il sacro? Secondo René Girard, è ciò che domina l'uomo tanto quanto egli si creda capace di dominarlo. La sua origine risiede in un evento primordiale, taciuto e ripetuto, attraverso il misconoscimento e il sacrificio rituale. La violenza reciproca porta l'essere umano sulla soglia di una crisi sacrificale, dove l'intera comunità, per proteggersi, sostituisce unanimemente l'oggetto (ovvero sé stessa) con una vittima espiatoria, chiamata anche capro espiatorio. La teoria della religione primitiva di Girard si basa come prove su testi etnologici e su testi della tragedia greca classica, in particolare Sofocle e Euripide, oltre che sulla mitologia; Girard afferma l'esistenza di un evento reale fondatore, un linciaggio o un'uccisione, che dà luogo al meccanismo della vittima espiatoria sul piano del mito e del rituale, permettendo così alla società il rovesciamento della violenza in ordine culturale. Tuttavia vivere in società è sfuggire alla violenza (ma anche subirne il fascino, secondo il kùdos), quindi si attua un perpetuo misconoscimento collettivo, per arrivare alla disintegrazione dei conflitti; per questa via interpretativa, si intuisce la funzione rituale della violenza, ma la luce accesa su essa comporta una negazione oscura, una crisi ermeneutica. Sull'orlo della rivelazione c'è il buio. I segni della fine si manifestano molteplici e si diffonde la decadenza in forma di inasprimento, rappresaglia, polemica, odio. Così il sacro ritorna in qualità immanente e in modo nascosto produce un nuovo sapere della violenza: laddove la crisi non è mai la stessa e la violenza essenziale torna su di noi in modo spettacolare. Ciò che ha determinato il passaggio da non umano a umano e da clan familiari e tribali a società unite si ripresenta sotto forma di mostruosità, vendetta, arbitrarietà del male. La crisi del pensiero moderno ci invita quindi, secondo l'antropologia di Girard, a rendere pienamente manifesto, in una luce razionale, il ruolo della violenza nelle società umane. L'ombra di un fenomeno ossessivo e iterativamente rimosso muove dalle nostre coscienze ai luoghi naturali di pericolo e minaccia dove le rivalità interne si trasformano in terrore, brutalità e assurdità verso gli innocenti. Confrontandosi con Freud e Lèvy-Strauss, con i filosofi presocratici e la tragedia classica (Edipo Re e Le Baccanti), il pensatore francese ci ricorda che la violenza è sempre ambivalente e che coloro che si oppongono allo sviluppo della violenza spesso sono coloro che gli permettono di trionfare: insomma, il rimedio è insieme veleno (secondo la natura del pharmakon), il benefico si inverte in malefico, l'anticultura e la menzogna hanno potere sovrano, l'intolleranza può essere fatale tanto quanto la tolleranza. Non siamo mai realmente al sicuro, mai al riparo, mai immuni al contagio. È importante, nel discorso di Girard, porre estrema attenzione allo sviluppo della violenza, che può sempre prendere una brutta piega: è esclusa la vittoria, l'opposizione simmetrica non si spezza (il thymos è ciclico), il tragico distrugge ogni forma di relazione, non si riconoscono differenze e si diffonde ovunque l'uniformità. Dappertutto è lo stesso desiderio e le strategie tutti contro tutti ingannano il vero, identificando un altro colpevole, sempre un individuo sacrificabile: lo straniero, il prigioniero, il povero, lo schiavo, il malato, il minorato, il disadattato (tutti contro uno). Siamo così còlti dentro un paradosso, a una dualità irriducibile, una situazione da double bind: la violenza inscrive se stessa dietro tutti i significati possibili, e rimane indecifrabile fino a che un significato ultimo continua a mascherarcela, conducendoci a uno stato di anomìa, ossia assenza di legge, intesa in senso kafkiano, tra occultamento e divisione. L'uomo girardiano adora la violenza come portatrice di pace: è attuale parlare di logica sacrificale ed escalation dei conflitti?
“Nella vita animale la violenza è fornita dai freni individuali. Gli animali di una stessa specie non lottano mai a morte; il vincitore risparmia il vinto. La specie umana è priva di tale protezione. Al meccanismo biologico individuale viene a sostituirsi il meccanismo collettivo e culturale della vittima espiatoria. Non vi è società senza religione perché senza religione non sarebbe possibile nessuna società”.
February 11, 2017
Girard's is a hugely ambitious project: a sort of grand-theory-of-everything, a prodigal son to psychoanalysis, bent on criticising mercilessly the Freudian project, while pursuing an essentially similar goal with, according to the author, a much more rigorous analysis. Despite such scope, the book stands out by its clarity and its careful (and elegant) avoidance of unnecessary jargon – the paperback in fact became my companion in the public transport, a place generally reserved to works of fiction. Girard develops his theory slowly, illustrating it profusely with many examples drawn from his extensive knowledge of anthropology, of Greek tragedies, and to a much lesser extent, of history and political theory. He is at times a little bumptious in his attacks on the grand dinosaurs of Xxth century culture, but it is easy to forgive him in light of the simple, even humble style of his prose.
Girard's most famous concept is that of mimetic desire: the reason why we desire an object is not in the object itself, but because another appear to us as desiring the said object. Desire, then, is always mediated by the presence of someone else, thus escaping for example psychoanalysis' tendency to ascribe an essential value in the object of desire.
What this mimetic desire means is that it is not the differences between the various members of a community that brings about violence, but rather the erosion of those differences: what he calls the 'sacrificial crisis' is the theoretical and historical event in which the cultural order, warrant of social differentiation, looses its authority. The result is the spread of violence, as one crime calls for a vengeance, and the vengeance in turn calls for another crime, and so on, in what he terms a deadly reciprocity.
Spontaneously a seemingly inbuilt mechanism can however thwart this apocalyptic prospect: the highly emotional and irrational nature of violence means that its object can be displaced, and in extreme situations the group members tend naturally to displace their violence on a single individual, the scapegoat, in actual fact no more no less guilty than the others, but identified as the source and the reason of violence itself.
A highly ambiguous figure, Girard identifies him with the Greek sparagmos and pharmakos, Bushong and other African sacrificed kings, with Oedipus, and with many other examples taken from myths and rites across the world. The scapegoat somehow 'absorbs' the crimes and the violence itself, and is either cast-out of the community or sacrificed. His pivotal position between the chaotic crisis and the re-established order is the source of his fundamental ambiguity, which makes him both a criminal and a founding father. The event is then commemorated ritually throughout the existence of the culture it created.
At the light of this theory, Girard then explore a lot particular cases, showing how his model can explain the seemingly more intractable debates in theory. He eventually turns it against psychoanalysis and use it to move beyond structuralist anthropology. He eventually opens it up to make all sorts of bold claims, starting with the continued relevance of his model to our contemporary societies, and going all the way to claiming that all sacred and all divinities are merely transcendent violence.
So is it any good? Well it is a very enjoyable read, not least because Girard is found of those ever entertaining anthropological limit-cases, which to the western eyes seems so intriguing and mysterious. It is, as I mentioned, easy to read, and remarkably clear. Certainly the theory resonates, with its emphasis on the Machiavellian 'criminal virtue' (although Girard does not mention it by name) and its inbuilt irrationality, with the puzzles of Xxth century radical politics, those of Sorel or those Carl Schmitt for example. However, maybe because Girard himself fails to connect it too explicitly (save for small passage on Kantorowicz) to politics, we are left to do the guess-work.
Another, more important issue is Girard's rather nebulous hyspostasis of violence, which is a bit of everything, the omnitool of his post-structuralist project: it is the 'other', that which lives outside the boundaries of the recognised order, it is the archaic and haunting memory of primordial violence, but it is also the constant (unconscious) threat which maintain social cohesion when the law's more concrete hazard is absent or weak. It is the irrational ground from which the binaries of language emerge, as well as the meeting point of opposites and the sacred itself.
We can agree with Girard that violence is universal and an intrinsic component of any social form – but in order to assimilate violence to the sacred or the divine, violence need to be absolutely transcendent: there are two modes for experiencing violence, as perpetrator or as victim. For a victim the locus of transcendence would probably not be a nebulous and abstract notion of violence, but rather the oppressor himself. For the perpetrator, violence become synonymous with an acute form of agency, with, precisely, the ability to shape or distort the order of things – in which case violence is no longer perceived as 'other'.
Girard would probably argue, as he does about many other things in the book, that the separation between the two 'faces' of violence (perpetrator and victim) is a modern distortion. Yet the social dynamics of the great apes or a wolf pack seem to me to prove just the opposite. I completely understand Girard's (and Bataille's) fascination with the inbuilt ambivalence of the sacred, both positive and negative until the rise of Christianity, but he does use it way too often as a 'get out jail free' card.
Girard's most famous concept is that of mimetic desire: the reason why we desire an object is not in the object itself, but because another appear to us as desiring the said object. Desire, then, is always mediated by the presence of someone else, thus escaping for example psychoanalysis' tendency to ascribe an essential value in the object of desire.
What this mimetic desire means is that it is not the differences between the various members of a community that brings about violence, but rather the erosion of those differences: what he calls the 'sacrificial crisis' is the theoretical and historical event in which the cultural order, warrant of social differentiation, looses its authority. The result is the spread of violence, as one crime calls for a vengeance, and the vengeance in turn calls for another crime, and so on, in what he terms a deadly reciprocity.
Spontaneously a seemingly inbuilt mechanism can however thwart this apocalyptic prospect: the highly emotional and irrational nature of violence means that its object can be displaced, and in extreme situations the group members tend naturally to displace their violence on a single individual, the scapegoat, in actual fact no more no less guilty than the others, but identified as the source and the reason of violence itself.
A highly ambiguous figure, Girard identifies him with the Greek sparagmos and pharmakos, Bushong and other African sacrificed kings, with Oedipus, and with many other examples taken from myths and rites across the world. The scapegoat somehow 'absorbs' the crimes and the violence itself, and is either cast-out of the community or sacrificed. His pivotal position between the chaotic crisis and the re-established order is the source of his fundamental ambiguity, which makes him both a criminal and a founding father. The event is then commemorated ritually throughout the existence of the culture it created.
At the light of this theory, Girard then explore a lot particular cases, showing how his model can explain the seemingly more intractable debates in theory. He eventually turns it against psychoanalysis and use it to move beyond structuralist anthropology. He eventually opens it up to make all sorts of bold claims, starting with the continued relevance of his model to our contemporary societies, and going all the way to claiming that all sacred and all divinities are merely transcendent violence.
So is it any good? Well it is a very enjoyable read, not least because Girard is found of those ever entertaining anthropological limit-cases, which to the western eyes seems so intriguing and mysterious. It is, as I mentioned, easy to read, and remarkably clear. Certainly the theory resonates, with its emphasis on the Machiavellian 'criminal virtue' (although Girard does not mention it by name) and its inbuilt irrationality, with the puzzles of Xxth century radical politics, those of Sorel or those Carl Schmitt for example. However, maybe because Girard himself fails to connect it too explicitly (save for small passage on Kantorowicz) to politics, we are left to do the guess-work.
Another, more important issue is Girard's rather nebulous hyspostasis of violence, which is a bit of everything, the omnitool of his post-structuralist project: it is the 'other', that which lives outside the boundaries of the recognised order, it is the archaic and haunting memory of primordial violence, but it is also the constant (unconscious) threat which maintain social cohesion when the law's more concrete hazard is absent or weak. It is the irrational ground from which the binaries of language emerge, as well as the meeting point of opposites and the sacred itself.
We can agree with Girard that violence is universal and an intrinsic component of any social form – but in order to assimilate violence to the sacred or the divine, violence need to be absolutely transcendent: there are two modes for experiencing violence, as perpetrator or as victim. For a victim the locus of transcendence would probably not be a nebulous and abstract notion of violence, but rather the oppressor himself. For the perpetrator, violence become synonymous with an acute form of agency, with, precisely, the ability to shape or distort the order of things – in which case violence is no longer perceived as 'other'.
Girard would probably argue, as he does about many other things in the book, that the separation between the two 'faces' of violence (perpetrator and victim) is a modern distortion. Yet the social dynamics of the great apes or a wolf pack seem to me to prove just the opposite. I completely understand Girard's (and Bataille's) fascination with the inbuilt ambivalence of the sacred, both positive and negative until the rise of Christianity, but he does use it way too often as a 'get out jail free' card.
August 2, 2020
واحد من أهم الكتب اللي مرت عليا في علم الأديان.
الكتاب بيرسي لنظرية مهمة في محاولة لفهم المجتمع البدائي، بل إنها بتساعد على فهم المجتمع الحالي أيضا، وهي نظرية العنف التأسيسي اللي خلقت أزمة زبائحية، أزمة لاتمايز كلي أدت لتفشي العنف داخل الجماعة، مما يؤدي إلى الإجماع العنفي ضد ضحية فدائية في محاولة لكبت العنف.. هذه الآلية تكشف عن ذاتها في مختلف الطقوس والأساطير، يتتبع جيرار النظريات الإثنولوجية والأنثروبولجية والتحلينفسية لمحاولة كشف ما لم تستطع هي الكشف عنه، أو بالأصح كشفت عن جزء منه لكنها لم تستطع أن تراه بشكل واضح.
من خلال تحليل الأساطير والطقوس البدائية والدراما الإغريقية بيرسي جيرار نظريته بعبقرية ودقة في الربط والتحليل للكشف عن آلية العنف أو المقدس، حيث عن إن العنف هو أحد أوجه المقدس الأساسية.
كتاب تقيل ومحتاج دراية كافية بالنظريات الهامة اللي سبقت جيرار في علم الأديان لتستطيع استيعابه، هو بدون مبالغة أهم طرح نظري قابلته في علم الأديان.
الكتاب بيرسي لنظرية مهمة في محاولة لفهم المجتمع البدائي، بل إنها بتساعد على فهم المجتمع الحالي أيضا، وهي نظرية العنف التأسيسي اللي خلقت أزمة زبائحية، أزمة لاتمايز كلي أدت لتفشي العنف داخل الجماعة، مما يؤدي إلى الإجماع العنفي ضد ضحية فدائية في محاولة لكبت العنف.. هذه الآلية تكشف عن ذاتها في مختلف الطقوس والأساطير، يتتبع جيرار النظريات الإثنولوجية والأنثروبولجية والتحلينفسية لمحاولة كشف ما لم تستطع هي الكشف عنه، أو بالأصح كشفت عن جزء منه لكنها لم تستطع أن تراه بشكل واضح.
من خلال تحليل الأساطير والطقوس البدائية والدراما الإغريقية بيرسي جيرار نظريته بعبقرية ودقة في الربط والتحليل للكشف عن آلية العنف أو المقدس، حيث عن إن العنف هو أحد أوجه المقدس الأساسية.
كتاب تقيل ومحتاج دراية كافية بالنظريات الهامة اللي سبقت جيرار في علم الأديان لتستطيع استيعابه، هو بدون مبالغة أهم طرح نظري قابلته في علم الأديان.
Read
August 11, 2020A lot of the ideas in this book had already filtered down to me from essays published about Girard's work, but even more thoroughly through Pankaj Mishra's book Age of Anger which also draws heavily on the notion of mimetic desire as a driving force in human relations. As such, I was a little underwhelmed when I finally came to this and found the argument very repetitive as well as a bit too sweeping and reductionist. Many of the points struck me personally as obvious: that the violent unanimity produced by scapegoating violence is a tool for social cohesion. It is a means to ward off the terrifying threat of unlimited violence, which destroyed many societies before the modern age which has the luxury of delegating legitimate violence to the ideal of a justice system.
The idea of the surrogate victim used as the symbol of communal rage, catharsis and stabilization likewise seems both correct and readily intuitive. Girard has an essentially functionalist view of religion. In his view the function is positive, but he doesn't seek to penetrate beyond that. My main problem with the book is not that the argument is necessarily false, but that it seems to be more or less unfalsifiable. He draws heavily on stories from Greek myth and the practices of primitive cultures to make his case. It is very difficult to either accept an argument built almost entirely on such a foundation or to reject it.
The idea of the surrogate victim used as the symbol of communal rage, catharsis and stabilization likewise seems both correct and readily intuitive. Girard has an essentially functionalist view of religion. In his view the function is positive, but he doesn't seek to penetrate beyond that. My main problem with the book is not that the argument is necessarily false, but that it seems to be more or less unfalsifiable. He draws heavily on stories from Greek myth and the practices of primitive cultures to make his case. It is very difficult to either accept an argument built almost entirely on such a foundation or to reject it.
February 4, 2015
الكتاب بعيد عن اي تصور مسبق لنهايه الكلام فيبدأ رينيه في رسم صوره للاجرام المقدس بدراسه الشعوب الرعويه ثم ينتقل الي محاكاه هذا التحليل من خلال الادب وخصوصا اوديب الذي يضفي عليه اهميه امتلاكه الي الكثير من الامراض السيكولوجيه ونظريات فرويد التي تتضمن عقدة اوديب وكتابه الطوطم والحرام، وبالحديث عن الرغبه التي كثير مايجعلونها معروفه بالنسبه للانسان ولكنه في حقيقه الامر لايفطن اليها حتي بعد ان يحقق جميع احتياجاته لان الرغبه كيان لايشعر بها الانسان الا عندما يراها ملك غيره، كما يتحدث عن الشذوذ الذي يصيب بعض الجماعات باتخاذها صله اعمال العنف والذبائحيه مع الرياضات بل تمتد الي كونها تتعلق بالمصادفه والقرعه كما حدث مع يونان،وان يجب ان ان تكون نتيجه ماتوصلت اليه الانسانيه الان هو قطع الحبل السري لكل ماهو اسطوري.
ويستشهد بالقصص المقدسه التي تسعي دائما الي عمليه الاستبدال بين القربان المقدمه الي الاله سواء في الديانات السماويه او حتي الادب القديم، ثم ينتقل الي كونها متعلقه دائما باحتياجات الانسان فليس هناك مالا يمكن ان يطلب من خلال ذبيحه.
منطقيا اذا اراد رينيه لن يجد الحل الوحيد في الفرق بين المجتمعات البدائيه والحضاريه هو القضاء فمن الواجب ان يضع فرضيه احتمال فساد القضاء فلابد ان تعود البدائيه مره اخري .
بالحديث عن بعض القبائل التي تقوم بقتل اضحيتها بنفسها اذا حدث ان اخطأ فرد من الجماعه دون اللجوء الي النزاعات باعتبارها ان الدنس يعم علي الجميع ، بالاضافه الي دم الحيض الذي ينظر له كونه دنسا وهو في كل الديانات السماويه متأثرا بنفس النظره البدائيه.
ثم ينتقل الي توضيح الفارق بين توازن الصراع وهو امتلاك كل طرف الي مبرراته القتاليه للاخر ومايسمي بالحياد وهو التنزه عن الانحياز ومايشير اليه هنا الكاتب ان النظام الطبيعي قائم علي الرتبه وان اختلاف الرتب يساعد علي احتفاظ كل فرد بمقامه وعدم التعدي علي الاخر.
وهناك مايمسي برهاب التوأمين وليس بالاحري مايعانيه الاخوين ولكن فيه بعض القبائل ماتعتبر الاهانه بالاشاره الي وجود الشبه بني الاقارب الي حد انه يضمر الشر لاخيه كما تحكي معظم الميثولوجيا والتاريخ عن صراعات الاخوات ويستند بذلك ايضا الي بعض الاحاديث المقدسه للنبي ارميا.
ان العيد المضاد لهو ا��اره صريحه الي تلك التي تمتلكها جميع الديانات حتي يتم تلافي كل انواع الترفيه والتضييق علي النفس فكل الديانات تمتلك شهرا تصوم فيه حتي يكون عيدها مايقام فيه الذبائح! ، ثم ينتقل الي مفهوم الالوهه وماهي الا وجود متعال مابعد نبذ العنف كما حدث في قصه اوديب، ففي البدايه ظهر العنف قبل ان يكون ابا او حتي ملكا ولكنه تهديد طبيعي ويؤكد علي كونه غريزيا، وبالتالي ماجعل لايوس ابا هو عنفه وليس العكس.
وبالانتقال الي عقده اوديب التي لا يخلو كتاب نسوي من التحدث بشأن تعلقها بمكانه الانثي داخل الاسره لانها لا تستطيع المنافسه مع الذكر في التماهي بالاب فان فرويد يقر ان الابن يريد ان يصبح محلا لمكان الاب في كل شىء وهو يبرر التخلص من الاب.
بالحديث عن المسوخ يتضح ان ليس هناك من حضاره لم تمزج بين اكثر من صفه لكي تتجمع بها تلك الصفات المميزة للشيء نفسه فنجد في الادب مثل اوديب الذي ظهر في دور الاب والابن والزوج اما في الحضاره الفرعونيه مثلا ان ابو الهول ونجد في الحضاره السومريه الاسد المجنح ذو الراس البشري.
في النهايه يطرح رينيه وجهه نظر حيال التقدم في النظره الي الدين والرؤيه الشفافه التي نحصل عليها والرؤيه الكامله للدين الا انها مازالت عاجزة عن كشف آليه الضحيه الفدائيه واعتقد ان تلك اجابه وافيه الي من يعلم الحقيقه وعقله يعجز عن اتخاذ اي رد فعل تجاها.
ويستشهد بالقصص المقدسه التي تسعي دائما الي عمليه الاستبدال بين القربان المقدمه الي الاله سواء في الديانات السماويه او حتي الادب القديم، ثم ينتقل الي كونها متعلقه دائما باحتياجات الانسان فليس هناك مالا يمكن ان يطلب من خلال ذبيحه.
منطقيا اذا اراد رينيه لن يجد الحل الوحيد في الفرق بين المجتمعات البدائيه والحضاريه هو القضاء فمن الواجب ان يضع فرضيه احتمال فساد القضاء فلابد ان تعود البدائيه مره اخري .
بالحديث عن بعض القبائل التي تقوم بقتل اضحيتها بنفسها اذا حدث ان اخطأ فرد من الجماعه دون اللجوء الي النزاعات باعتبارها ان الدنس يعم علي الجميع ، بالاضافه الي دم الحيض الذي ينظر له كونه دنسا وهو في كل الديانات السماويه متأثرا بنفس النظره البدائيه.
ثم ينتقل الي توضيح الفارق بين توازن الصراع وهو امتلاك كل طرف الي مبرراته القتاليه للاخر ومايسمي بالحياد وهو التنزه عن الانحياز ومايشير اليه هنا الكاتب ان النظام الطبيعي قائم علي الرتبه وان اختلاف الرتب يساعد علي احتفاظ كل فرد بمقامه وعدم التعدي علي الاخر.
وهناك مايمسي برهاب التوأمين وليس بالاحري مايعانيه الاخوين ولكن فيه بعض القبائل ماتعتبر الاهانه بالاشاره الي وجود الشبه بني الاقارب الي حد انه يضمر الشر لاخيه كما تحكي معظم الميثولوجيا والتاريخ عن صراعات الاخوات ويستند بذلك ايضا الي بعض الاحاديث المقدسه للنبي ارميا.
ان العيد المضاد لهو ا��اره صريحه الي تلك التي تمتلكها جميع الديانات حتي يتم تلافي كل انواع الترفيه والتضييق علي النفس فكل الديانات تمتلك شهرا تصوم فيه حتي يكون عيدها مايقام فيه الذبائح! ، ثم ينتقل الي مفهوم الالوهه وماهي الا وجود متعال مابعد نبذ العنف كما حدث في قصه اوديب، ففي البدايه ظهر العنف قبل ان يكون ابا او حتي ملكا ولكنه تهديد طبيعي ويؤكد علي كونه غريزيا، وبالتالي ماجعل لايوس ابا هو عنفه وليس العكس.
وبالانتقال الي عقده اوديب التي لا يخلو كتاب نسوي من التحدث بشأن تعلقها بمكانه الانثي داخل الاسره لانها لا تستطيع المنافسه مع الذكر في التماهي بالاب فان فرويد يقر ان الابن يريد ان يصبح محلا لمكان الاب في كل شىء وهو يبرر التخلص من الاب.
بالحديث عن المسوخ يتضح ان ليس هناك من حضاره لم تمزج بين اكثر من صفه لكي تتجمع بها تلك الصفات المميزة للشيء نفسه فنجد في الادب مثل اوديب الذي ظهر في دور الاب والابن والزوج اما في الحضاره الفرعونيه مثلا ان ابو الهول ونجد في الحضاره السومريه الاسد المجنح ذو الراس البشري.
في النهايه يطرح رينيه وجهه نظر حيال التقدم في النظره الي الدين والرؤيه الشفافه التي نحصل عليها والرؤيه الكامله للدين الا انها مازالت عاجزة عن كشف آليه الضحيه الفدائيه واعتقد ان تلك اجابه وافيه الي من يعلم الحقيقه وعقله يعجز عن اتخاذ اي رد فعل تجاها.
November 5, 2011
Maybe the best book of Rene Girard. It should be read as a book of philosophy, its vast ambitions taken into account.
I feel that a comment on the pertinent (but in my opinion symptomatic) review made by Fatima has its place here (read that review first).
>>
The idea that Girard, or anybody, may be above all criticism, that one can put oneself above that, is not true, and too seductive by its own right. (The Fatima's text ends with some criticism - as it should - isn’t’ it?)
This kind of criticism against a theory like that of Girard’s seems necessary in order to have a “scientific” approach. But is it true? What is the truth of the matter? What are the facts? Or maybe there are no facts? Girard states that there are.
Is there no contradiction in saying that Girard enters too many different domains of research and also that he does not discuss more than two Greek tragedies? This is implying that he should have limited himself to studying Greek tragedy, and that exhaustively, following the methodology of that domain. These contradictions are not errors of argumentation but contradictions of fact. One cannot have the cake and eat it.
I understand exactly what "remove himself from all criticism" means. But this kind of argument is too self-explanatory. What does it really say? Where can we apply it and where can't we? It seems to me that the sheer vastness of an author’s ambition tends to bring this accusation. And that only pettiness of design can avoid it. Specialization is the rule of the day but that some might just think and manifest beside the rule of their day is not a surprise; it is the rule of those who will be read after centuries. The risk of ridicule is high, but does that matter?
Free thinking is not a healthy sport that we all can train for and enjoy together, but rather a difficult and problematic result of seeing certain things that we would rather forget; saying that Girard is in this sense Freudian is praising him. We are too easily too clever for people like Girard or Freud. Great thinkers are not made for peer-review. And this is, without irony, sad, and true, as usually are things that we would rather forget…
<<
I feel that a comment on the pertinent (but in my opinion symptomatic) review made by Fatima has its place here (read that review first).
>>
The idea that Girard, or anybody, may be above all criticism, that one can put oneself above that, is not true, and too seductive by its own right. (The Fatima's text ends with some criticism - as it should - isn’t’ it?)
This kind of criticism against a theory like that of Girard’s seems necessary in order to have a “scientific” approach. But is it true? What is the truth of the matter? What are the facts? Or maybe there are no facts? Girard states that there are.
Is there no contradiction in saying that Girard enters too many different domains of research and also that he does not discuss more than two Greek tragedies? This is implying that he should have limited himself to studying Greek tragedy, and that exhaustively, following the methodology of that domain. These contradictions are not errors of argumentation but contradictions of fact. One cannot have the cake and eat it.
I understand exactly what "remove himself from all criticism" means. But this kind of argument is too self-explanatory. What does it really say? Where can we apply it and where can't we? It seems to me that the sheer vastness of an author’s ambition tends to bring this accusation. And that only pettiness of design can avoid it. Specialization is the rule of the day but that some might just think and manifest beside the rule of their day is not a surprise; it is the rule of those who will be read after centuries. The risk of ridicule is high, but does that matter?
Free thinking is not a healthy sport that we all can train for and enjoy together, but rather a difficult and problematic result of seeing certain things that we would rather forget; saying that Girard is in this sense Freudian is praising him. We are too easily too clever for people like Girard or Freud. Great thinkers are not made for peer-review. And this is, without irony, sad, and true, as usually are things that we would rather forget…
<<
February 18, 2016
Oh, how I love reading anthropology! Just when I get caught up in the endless facebook stream of arguments and memes--religion, politics, TV, and corporate-controlled and produced mass culture--I step back into a culturally removed, dispassionate space and compare my culture to ancient Greece, or the Bushmen, or some tribe in Borneo and understand how silly and deadly serious are our bizarre choices manifest as cultural institutions. Perspective is everything. So refreshing.
Girard's arguments here are amply summed-up and synopsized elsewhere (even on this page by one Jennifer who does a fine, exhaustive job) so I'll leave it to you to explore this book and its detailed contents on your own. It posits that human culture begins with groups of people attempting to deal with the problem of human-on-human violence through the institution of sacrifice and the argument is largely convincing. The argument is also soiled/weakened somewhat by being both too strenuously (and repetitively) argued and, as in most blanket, all-encompassing theories of anything (particularly ALL world cultures) there has to be a reductionist element and a "latency" clause so that anything that doesn't fit into the system actually fits into the system by not fitting into the system. Still. 99% of the non-fiction books published are useless self help, celebrity gossip, and silly politicians arguing battles that philosophers solved centuries ago but the common idiot can still not grasp with their nationalistic education and superstitious adherence to religion. So five fucking stars to a real thinker and the finger to all major publishing houses, the MacDonalds-s of contemporary culture!
We need more scapegoats after all. As Girard points out, poets are anti-social because we pity the scapegoat. I'd like to see society sacrificed so that one outsider might finally realize him/herself as both the sacred and the profane. A true deity? Who wants all that order anyway?
We're still the flowers in the dustbin.
Girard's arguments here are amply summed-up and synopsized elsewhere (even on this page by one Jennifer who does a fine, exhaustive job) so I'll leave it to you to explore this book and its detailed contents on your own. It posits that human culture begins with groups of people attempting to deal with the problem of human-on-human violence through the institution of sacrifice and the argument is largely convincing. The argument is also soiled/weakened somewhat by being both too strenuously (and repetitively) argued and, as in most blanket, all-encompassing theories of anything (particularly ALL world cultures) there has to be a reductionist element and a "latency" clause so that anything that doesn't fit into the system actually fits into the system by not fitting into the system. Still. 99% of the non-fiction books published are useless self help, celebrity gossip, and silly politicians arguing battles that philosophers solved centuries ago but the common idiot can still not grasp with their nationalistic education and superstitious adherence to religion. So five fucking stars to a real thinker and the finger to all major publishing houses, the MacDonalds-s of contemporary culture!
We need more scapegoats after all. As Girard points out, poets are anti-social because we pity the scapegoat. I'd like to see society sacrificed so that one outsider might finally realize him/herself as both the sacred and the profane. A true deity? Who wants all that order anyway?
We're still the flowers in the dustbin.
September 24, 2023
'La violencia y lo sagrado' de René Girard es un libro provocador que se centra en la naturaleza de la violencia y su relación con lo sagrado en la historia de la humanidad. Girard propone la teoría de la víctima expiatoria como mecanismo fundamental para la resolución de conflictos y la creación de la sociedad humana.
La obra comienza explorando el concepto de "deseo mimético", que sugiere que los seres humanos tienden a imitar los deseos y comportamientos de los demás. Girard argumenta que este deseo mimético puede llevar a conflictos y tensiones en la sociedad, ya que las personas compiten por los mismos recursos y deseos. La víctima expiatoria es un individuo o grupo señalado como responsable de los problemas de la comunidad y luego sacrificado o expulsado. Girard argumenta que esta práctica se convierte en un ritual sagrado que, de alguna manera, libera a la sociedad de sus tensiones violentas y la une temporalmente en torno al acto sacrificial. Esto, según Girard, es un aspecto central de la religión y la cultura.
A medida que la obra avanza, Girard explora una amplia gama de mitos, textos religiosos y obras literarias para respaldar su teoría. Examina casos históricos, desde la mitología griega hasta la crucifixión de Jesucristo, para ilustrar cómo la víctima propiciatoria y la violencia ritualizada han sido componentes esenciales en la formación de la sociedad humana. Aunque algunas de sus ideas pueden ser controvertidas, el libro sigue siendo una lectura valiosa para aquellos interesados en explorar las interacciones complejas entre la violencia y lo sagrado en la historia y la sociedad humanas. Sim embargo, cabe señalar al lector que es una obra densa, con pasajes de cierta complejidad y un lenguaje académico que en algunos momentos puede resultar algo farragoso de leer.
La obra comienza explorando el concepto de "deseo mimético", que sugiere que los seres humanos tienden a imitar los deseos y comportamientos de los demás. Girard argumenta que este deseo mimético puede llevar a conflictos y tensiones en la sociedad, ya que las personas compiten por los mismos recursos y deseos. La víctima expiatoria es un individuo o grupo señalado como responsable de los problemas de la comunidad y luego sacrificado o expulsado. Girard argumenta que esta práctica se convierte en un ritual sagrado que, de alguna manera, libera a la sociedad de sus tensiones violentas y la une temporalmente en torno al acto sacrificial. Esto, según Girard, es un aspecto central de la religión y la cultura.
A medida que la obra avanza, Girard explora una amplia gama de mitos, textos religiosos y obras literarias para respaldar su teoría. Examina casos históricos, desde la mitología griega hasta la crucifixión de Jesucristo, para ilustrar cómo la víctima propiciatoria y la violencia ritualizada han sido componentes esenciales en la formación de la sociedad humana. Aunque algunas de sus ideas pueden ser controvertidas, el libro sigue siendo una lectura valiosa para aquellos interesados en explorar las interacciones complejas entre la violencia y lo sagrado en la historia y la sociedad humanas. Sim embargo, cabe señalar al lector que es una obra densa, con pasajes de cierta complejidad y un lenguaje académico que en algunos momentos puede resultar algo farragoso de leer.
June 15, 2020
Girard's theory of the origins of culture and religion as being founded on a horrific act of unanimous violence was groundbreaking and controversial when it first appeared in 1972. To my view, it represents an astounding and nearly unbelievably comprehensive synthesis of sacred, ritualistic, and religious phenomena. The book carefully explains the theory piece by piece, exploring Greek tragedy and anthropological and ethnological study of primitive societies and rituals in search of the sacrificial scapegoat; the person whose violent death saves the community from being engulfed in a crisis of retributive violence. Once this act has restored order, the community mythologizes the events and recreates them for future generations in the form of myths and sacrificial rituals which obscure the true nature and character of the generative act of violence. The prohibitions and ritual sacrifices that result all are aimed at keeping the next sacrificial crisis at bay and are thus perpetuated as religious rites and ceremonies, with the sacrificial crises being attributed to divine wrath and destruction. This straightforward theory can account parsimoniously for all of the data with which it is tested. It is a remarkable theoretical and pragmatic treatment.
Despite seeming a bit simplistic in accounting for all desire in terms of mimesis and being derailed a bit in the middle by some Freud bashing (deserved in my opinion) this book is one that has fundamentally changed the way I view the world and religion. I can think of no greater compliment.
Despite seeming a bit simplistic in accounting for all desire in terms of mimesis and being derailed a bit in the middle by some Freud bashing (deserved in my opinion) this book is one that has fundamentally changed the way I view the world and religion. I can think of no greater compliment.
December 18, 2017
Ο καλύτερος τρόπος για να διατηρούμε μια στάση αναστοχασμού και σύνθεσης μέσα στην συνεχή ροή της βιβλιοπαραγωγής και τον καταιγισμό ιδεών της εποχής μας, είναι να διαβάζουμε τα κρίσιμα κείμενα στοχαστών που αποκαλύπτουν το νόημα της πραγματικότητας.
Ο Ρενέ Ζιράρ είναι ένας από αυτούς τους στοχαστές και αυτό το μικρό βιβλιαράκι που περιλαμβάνει μια μικρή διάλεξη του για τη βία και τη θρησκεία, δύο συνεντεύξεις και μια πολύ κατατοπιστική εισαγωγή πάνω στο έργο του από τον μεταφραστή Αντώνη Καλαϊτζή, είναι ότι πρέπει για κάποιον που θέλει μια πρώτη επαφή.
Στη διάλεξη αναπτύσσει τις ιδέες του σχετικά με τη βία και την θρησκεία με αναφορά στις αρχαϊκες θρησκείες και στο διαφορετικό που κομίζουν τα βιβλικά κείμενα ενώ πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα είναι και η πρώτη συνέντευξη με αναφορές σε λογοτεχνικά έργα που τον απασχόλησαν.
Δυστυχώς αρκετές αβλεψίες υπάρχουν στην επιμέλεια του κειμένου ενώ έχει γίνει και κατάχρηση των υποσημειώσεων.
Ο Ρενέ Ζιράρ είναι ένας από αυτούς τους στοχαστές και αυτό το μικρό βιβλιαράκι που περιλαμβάνει μια μικρή διάλεξη του για τη βία και τη θρησκεία, δύο συνεντεύξεις και μια πολύ κατατοπιστική εισαγωγή πάνω στο έργο του από τον μεταφραστή Αντώνη Καλαϊτζή, είναι ότι πρέπει για κάποιον που θέλει μια πρώτη επαφή.
Στη διάλεξη αναπτύσσει τις ιδέες του σχετικά με τη βία και την θρησκεία με αναφορά στις αρχαϊκες θρησκείες και στο διαφορετικό που κομίζουν τα βιβλικά κείμενα ενώ πολύ ενδιαφέρουσα είναι και η πρώτη συνέντευξη με αναφορές σε λογοτεχνικά έργα που τον απασχόλησαν.
Δυστυχώς αρκετές αβλεψίες υπάρχουν στην επιμέλεια του κειμένου ενώ έχει γίνει και κατάχρηση των υποσημειώσεων.
October 11, 2018
I asked Santa for this book in Christmastide 2015, and in April 2018 I finally started it. I had to make sure I was old enough for 'the incest talk'.
Long, sprawling, repetitive: it’s sometimes frustrating wading through this book, but when it’s hot it’s hot. There's no lack of lucidity in Girard’s prose—it’s elegant, clean, and eschews the laughable patois of that other shat-pack that wants to conflate Oedipus with psychoanalysis and anthropology—but how many chapters are necessary for G. to restate, argue, and redefend the same thesis? Eleven, apparently.
Violence and the Sacred is firstly a discussion about the origins of ritual sacrifice in society, and how ritual slaughter became a scape-goat mechanism to deal with that most sacred of human horrors: violence. Within the campus of Girard’s arguments there are three primary wells: Freud, Oedipus (the tragedy and/or the incest taboo), and mimetic desire. The first two chapters cannot have enough positive superlatives placed upon them, and they deal directly with the violence and the sacred.
The sacred in primitive societies, Girard argues, is any dominating force that increases its power over society in direct proportion to a society's attempts to control it. More or less, y=y/(1/x), where y equals violence and x equals man’s attempts to control it. As Oedipus and Jocasta say to each other, plug and chug, baby.
Trying to stop a fire means more people get burned. Trying to conquer the sea means more people drown. And, most pointedly, trying to bring justice creates violence. Violence is the heart and soul of the sacred. The more fervently proto-societies tried to control it, the worse it became.
One need not be very learned in the Theban cycle—or modern society—to see immediately how the essential elements of community are in place to curtail violence. Agamemnon commits filicide on Iphigenia to appease the sea storm. To appease her wrath, Clytemnestra commits mariticide on Agamemnon. To avenge Agamemnon’s death, Orestes commits matricide on Clytemnestra. Where does it fucking end? The Oedipus myth—the Theban Cycle—is the pre-eminent instance in Western civilisation of sacred violence: a bloodletting that can’t let enough blood out. The inability to yield is the crux of the tragic phenomenon.
Sacrifice is the tourniquet of violence: (typically) one thing—an infant, a criminal, a randomly selected bastard, and eventually an animal—takes upon its shoulders the rage of the offended. Orestes and Oedipus both become scapegoats to alleviate the violence and plague within their societies. Thus, someone—possibly not even the progenitor of the problem—is ostracised or killed to stop the bleeding.
Crucially, Girard emphasises that primitive societies lack legal systems, a thing we can’t *actually* fathom. We can try to imagine it, like a Dionysian ritual or DMT, but we can’t fathom it unless we exist in the absolute power of the contagion of the thing itself. Primitive violence and its sacredness live within us like a dream within a dream. Inaccessible, yet in our DNA. But it’s lost on modern society, kind of. Today mass-murderers are incarcerated and we somehow believe ‘justice is served’. Perpetrators of the Holocaust were hanged and somehow ‘brought to justice’. How incompatible we are with the justice-seeking violence of early cultures. Incarceration cannot absolve blood. Rather, our societies have undergone evolutions whereby new guards are put in place to prevent pestilential violence: judges, police, prisons, fines. Yet in yestermillennia, the horror of proto-humanity and greatest precaution against the unlimited propagation of violence was sacrifice. Sacrifice was firmly rooted in reality since even the slightest offence to one community could quickly escalate into the eradication of any society implicated in the violent cycle.
Millennia hence, nothing seems sillier than sacrifice. The ritual murder of animals has been turned into even sillier rituals. (Eating bread at church and calling it ‘the body’ of a sacrificed god must be one of the strangest.) These rituals and sacrifices seem useless because they worked. And when a ritual such as sacrifice works, then the contagion disappears. When the contagion disappears, all that remains is the regular ritual. When all that remains is the regular ritual, the ritual is pointless. It is as useful to us as discarded snakeskin is to a python. Indeed, the inability adapt to a new condition, G. says, is a trait characteristic of myth and religion (39).
Girard is careful to note that he isn’t using Greek tragedy so much as he is relying upon it to gain access to a pre-Homeric Mediterranean, which (as Nietzsche argues correctly) would be unfathomably profane to us. Girard cross-reads how myths were treated by different authors to flesh out his points. He cross-reads Oedipus in ‘Oedipus the King’, or ‘Oedipus at Colonus’; he contrasts Creon’s role in Sophocles’ Oedipus, and then Sophocles’ Antigone (150). This serves two purposes. (1) Girard can scrape away the veneer of the playwright and try to gain access to the myth itself; (2), Girard can show that tragedy, like violence, is rarely about good or evil: it is instead about role reversals: society attacks society, king displaces king, son kills father, rich becomes poor, and the oppressed become the rulers. None of this has to do with right or wrong, nor good and evil; this is the haunting origin of all archaic cognition. Hence why Girard calls upon proto-Hellenic myths and their earliest recordings. There’s no reason to call upon Roman tragedy, nor Shakespearean tragedy. The function of Greek tragedy is that it comes to us seemingly out of nowhere, almost as the Bible came to the Israelites, and thus it feels proper to use Athenian tragedy—the visceral representation of ruling the polis to discuss the society.
That's not the best idea. Yes, Athenian tragedy helps us understand the early democratic polis, but theatre isn't a direct route to archaic Greece. For starters, the Oedipus myth most certainly was about patricide. The incest-taboo was added later, possibly even by Sophocles. So while we have a clever book for reading Greek myth here, we don’t have a book that gets to the anthropological heart of the Theban cycle.
Often in lieu of—or in support of—Girard’s classical examples, Girard calls upon the work of anthropologists working with modern primitive societies. Typically, these are African tribes ruled by kings who are still at an early stage in Girard’s epoch of civilisation. In this first stage of civilisation, the ritualisation of violence and sacrifice is often clear even to the practitioners because the threat of the contagion of violence is still noticeable.
Because Girard’s argument is so watertight, once you get it, you get it. And once you get it, hearing it said different ways in different arguments is tiring. It’s especially circular because Girard’s argument is not falsifiable. Myth and incest in Greece confirm Girard’s hypothesis, but if an incest culture exists (Hawai'i) or a non-violent culture exists (Indus Valley), then Girard’s hypothesis gobbles it as proof that cultures do indeed wash away the origins of their rituals and myths. Any argument can be harmonised and refuted. Maybe that’s a sign of a thesis? Maybe it's a sign of a problem.
• • •
Some more problems. As state above, within the campus of Girard’s arguments there are three primary wells: Freud, Oedipus (the tragedy and/or the incest taboo), and mimetic desire. Sometimes, Girard withdraws mineral-rich water from these wells. Other times he climbs down them and won’t come out no matter how tirelessly one begs him. The man is insufferably repetitive with mimetic desire, but it entertains so long as he’s putting Freud in his crosshairs. A lecturer once said to me that the problem facing Freud’s descendants is that they have to figure out how to cope with Freud being the origin of Freudianism. G. refers to these followers of Freud as ‘that voracious pack of neopsychoanalytic bloodhounds, hot on the track’, trying to reconcile the obstinate duality of Freud’s theories (209). Don’t think I don’t love it.
I don’t want to discuss G.’s argument too much because it’s long, pedantic, and carefully organised—a lot like Freud. But G. is right when he says that repressed desire and patricide—Freud’s left-right hook—do not adequately represent Greek tragedy, nor do they adequately explain primitive societies. Firstly, both of Freud’s ideas (repressed desire, patricide) project onto toddlers profound powers of discernment, far beyond the self-reflexivity of most adults. Secondly, Girard takes aim at ideas which scarcely hold up in Freud’s own work, most specifically Totem and Taboo (chapter eight). Freud, Girard writes, carefully sidestepped issues he saw in his own theories, especially in Totem and Taboo, presumably because he thought subsequent followers would work them out. (I think of Ptolemy here, drawing celestial orbs around the earth and hoping someone else is bothered to figure out the pesky problem of retrograde.)
From the looks of things, Freudianism is like a repeatedly punched mirror, with more fractioned schools of thought than I have time to devote; yet Freudian analysis is not, in G’s estimation, a fully articulated system, and Freud is no more ‘Freud’ than Marx can be called ‘Marx’. From what I’ve read, I agree. These sections had me licking my fingers, keen to turn the pages—sometimes because I wanted more, sometimes because I couldn’t stand more.
Girard doesn’t takedown Freud. He merely moves things a few inches to the left: F.’s incest-patricide becomes G.’s mimetic desire. G. primarily objects to F.’s intransigent commitment to a philosophy of consciousness. Freud’s obstinate refusal to let go of a rotten-at-the-core motif that Freud knew had so many flaws is Girard’s frustration. G. is correcting F. only by rearranging a few objects in the living-room, but God is Girard angry that Freud didn’t see to do so in the first place. Five chapters for that is a lot.
• • •
I wish Girard had spent more time demonstrating how Freud’s model falls apart outside of the west. (If you know something, send it my way.) I wish someone had had the decency at Johns Hopkins Press to tell Girard that the incestuous aspects of the Oedipus cycle are a much later addition (Jebb, 1893), because one cannot conflate the Oedipus myth with the Oedipus play if one wishes to play classicist, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst. What else: I wish there had been a longer discussion about the origins of exogamy.
Lastly, I wish Girard had acknowledged the limits of his thinking. Can you really solve the problem of what came before societal pacts and taboo generation? Can a problem that requires thinking with language and culture address a society without language and culture, one whose equation is built upon phonemes and pre-human logic? We can understand what came before us in many senses—astrophysics, linguistics, biology—but knowing what taboos and thoughts existed in cultures that couldn’t express taboos and thoughts seems impossibly irretrievable. Good luck telling Girard that. We still don’t know what a cat is saying when it meows, so how can we recall the origins of sacrifice? The sacred? The incest-taboo? Or even belief itself? Those minds ran on a different operating system, and all we have left of the first sacrifice is a cosmic microwave background.
More so than Girard would like to admit, he has a lot in common with Freud. As I wrote above, both want to have their mother and eat her, too. In Girard’s thesis of violence and ritual sacrifice, any evidence that confirms his beliefs *is* evidence; yet anything that goes against his thesis is *also* evidence, since it would logically concur with Girard’s argument that society slowly deletes the purpose of sacrifice, and eventually sacrifice itself, in order to curtail violence. Is Freud so different?
Wrapping it up, I do have one question for Girard, because I see an obvious, mammoth moth-hole in the brocade of this book. If sacrifice curtails violence until sacrifice itself can be curtailed—then why are we more violent than ever? When an individual brought violence into early societies, rituals were made and surrogate victims chosen to stop the bleeding. Today, society is global, and the individuals who bring violence into it are nations. We are in a post-myth world. With more judiciary systems in place than ever before, why have we resorted to deadlier, apocalyptic means of murder, and what scapegoat can come after disbelief has died?
Five stars for the first five chapters, three for the last six. Take into account how fabulous the cover is and it all goes back to a 5/5.
Long, sprawling, repetitive: it’s sometimes frustrating wading through this book, but when it’s hot it’s hot. There's no lack of lucidity in Girard’s prose—it’s elegant, clean, and eschews the laughable patois of that other shat-pack that wants to conflate Oedipus with psychoanalysis and anthropology—but how many chapters are necessary for G. to restate, argue, and redefend the same thesis? Eleven, apparently.
Violence and the Sacred is firstly a discussion about the origins of ritual sacrifice in society, and how ritual slaughter became a scape-goat mechanism to deal with that most sacred of human horrors: violence. Within the campus of Girard’s arguments there are three primary wells: Freud, Oedipus (the tragedy and/or the incest taboo), and mimetic desire. The first two chapters cannot have enough positive superlatives placed upon them, and they deal directly with the violence and the sacred.
The sacred in primitive societies, Girard argues, is any dominating force that increases its power over society in direct proportion to a society's attempts to control it. More or less, y=y/(1/x), where y equals violence and x equals man’s attempts to control it. As Oedipus and Jocasta say to each other, plug and chug, baby.
Trying to stop a fire means more people get burned. Trying to conquer the sea means more people drown. And, most pointedly, trying to bring justice creates violence. Violence is the heart and soul of the sacred. The more fervently proto-societies tried to control it, the worse it became.
One need not be very learned in the Theban cycle—or modern society—to see immediately how the essential elements of community are in place to curtail violence. Agamemnon commits filicide on Iphigenia to appease the sea storm. To appease her wrath, Clytemnestra commits mariticide on Agamemnon. To avenge Agamemnon’s death, Orestes commits matricide on Clytemnestra. Where does it fucking end? The Oedipus myth—the Theban Cycle—is the pre-eminent instance in Western civilisation of sacred violence: a bloodletting that can’t let enough blood out. The inability to yield is the crux of the tragic phenomenon.
Sacrifice is the tourniquet of violence: (typically) one thing—an infant, a criminal, a randomly selected bastard, and eventually an animal—takes upon its shoulders the rage of the offended. Orestes and Oedipus both become scapegoats to alleviate the violence and plague within their societies. Thus, someone—possibly not even the progenitor of the problem—is ostracised or killed to stop the bleeding.
Crucially, Girard emphasises that primitive societies lack legal systems, a thing we can’t *actually* fathom. We can try to imagine it, like a Dionysian ritual or DMT, but we can’t fathom it unless we exist in the absolute power of the contagion of the thing itself. Primitive violence and its sacredness live within us like a dream within a dream. Inaccessible, yet in our DNA. But it’s lost on modern society, kind of. Today mass-murderers are incarcerated and we somehow believe ‘justice is served’. Perpetrators of the Holocaust were hanged and somehow ‘brought to justice’. How incompatible we are with the justice-seeking violence of early cultures. Incarceration cannot absolve blood. Rather, our societies have undergone evolutions whereby new guards are put in place to prevent pestilential violence: judges, police, prisons, fines. Yet in yestermillennia, the horror of proto-humanity and greatest precaution against the unlimited propagation of violence was sacrifice. Sacrifice was firmly rooted in reality since even the slightest offence to one community could quickly escalate into the eradication of any society implicated in the violent cycle.
Millennia hence, nothing seems sillier than sacrifice. The ritual murder of animals has been turned into even sillier rituals. (Eating bread at church and calling it ‘the body’ of a sacrificed god must be one of the strangest.) These rituals and sacrifices seem useless because they worked. And when a ritual such as sacrifice works, then the contagion disappears. When the contagion disappears, all that remains is the regular ritual. When all that remains is the regular ritual, the ritual is pointless. It is as useful to us as discarded snakeskin is to a python. Indeed, the inability adapt to a new condition, G. says, is a trait characteristic of myth and religion (39).
Girard is careful to note that he isn’t using Greek tragedy so much as he is relying upon it to gain access to a pre-Homeric Mediterranean, which (as Nietzsche argues correctly) would be unfathomably profane to us. Girard cross-reads how myths were treated by different authors to flesh out his points. He cross-reads Oedipus in ‘Oedipus the King’, or ‘Oedipus at Colonus’; he contrasts Creon’s role in Sophocles’ Oedipus, and then Sophocles’ Antigone (150). This serves two purposes. (1) Girard can scrape away the veneer of the playwright and try to gain access to the myth itself; (2), Girard can show that tragedy, like violence, is rarely about good or evil: it is instead about role reversals: society attacks society, king displaces king, son kills father, rich becomes poor, and the oppressed become the rulers. None of this has to do with right or wrong, nor good and evil; this is the haunting origin of all archaic cognition. Hence why Girard calls upon proto-Hellenic myths and their earliest recordings. There’s no reason to call upon Roman tragedy, nor Shakespearean tragedy. The function of Greek tragedy is that it comes to us seemingly out of nowhere, almost as the Bible came to the Israelites, and thus it feels proper to use Athenian tragedy—the visceral representation of ruling the polis to discuss the society.
That's not the best idea. Yes, Athenian tragedy helps us understand the early democratic polis, but theatre isn't a direct route to archaic Greece. For starters, the Oedipus myth most certainly was about patricide. The incest-taboo was added later, possibly even by Sophocles. So while we have a clever book for reading Greek myth here, we don’t have a book that gets to the anthropological heart of the Theban cycle.
Often in lieu of—or in support of—Girard’s classical examples, Girard calls upon the work of anthropologists working with modern primitive societies. Typically, these are African tribes ruled by kings who are still at an early stage in Girard’s epoch of civilisation. In this first stage of civilisation, the ritualisation of violence and sacrifice is often clear even to the practitioners because the threat of the contagion of violence is still noticeable.
Because Girard’s argument is so watertight, once you get it, you get it. And once you get it, hearing it said different ways in different arguments is tiring. It’s especially circular because Girard’s argument is not falsifiable. Myth and incest in Greece confirm Girard’s hypothesis, but if an incest culture exists (Hawai'i) or a non-violent culture exists (Indus Valley), then Girard’s hypothesis gobbles it as proof that cultures do indeed wash away the origins of their rituals and myths. Any argument can be harmonised and refuted. Maybe that’s a sign of a thesis? Maybe it's a sign of a problem.
• • •
Some more problems. As state above, within the campus of Girard’s arguments there are three primary wells: Freud, Oedipus (the tragedy and/or the incest taboo), and mimetic desire. Sometimes, Girard withdraws mineral-rich water from these wells. Other times he climbs down them and won’t come out no matter how tirelessly one begs him. The man is insufferably repetitive with mimetic desire, but it entertains so long as he’s putting Freud in his crosshairs. A lecturer once said to me that the problem facing Freud’s descendants is that they have to figure out how to cope with Freud being the origin of Freudianism. G. refers to these followers of Freud as ‘that voracious pack of neopsychoanalytic bloodhounds, hot on the track’, trying to reconcile the obstinate duality of Freud’s theories (209). Don’t think I don’t love it.
I don’t want to discuss G.’s argument too much because it’s long, pedantic, and carefully organised—a lot like Freud. But G. is right when he says that repressed desire and patricide—Freud’s left-right hook—do not adequately represent Greek tragedy, nor do they adequately explain primitive societies. Firstly, both of Freud’s ideas (repressed desire, patricide) project onto toddlers profound powers of discernment, far beyond the self-reflexivity of most adults. Secondly, Girard takes aim at ideas which scarcely hold up in Freud’s own work, most specifically Totem and Taboo (chapter eight). Freud, Girard writes, carefully sidestepped issues he saw in his own theories, especially in Totem and Taboo, presumably because he thought subsequent followers would work them out. (I think of Ptolemy here, drawing celestial orbs around the earth and hoping someone else is bothered to figure out the pesky problem of retrograde.)
From the looks of things, Freudianism is like a repeatedly punched mirror, with more fractioned schools of thought than I have time to devote; yet Freudian analysis is not, in G’s estimation, a fully articulated system, and Freud is no more ‘Freud’ than Marx can be called ‘Marx’. From what I’ve read, I agree. These sections had me licking my fingers, keen to turn the pages—sometimes because I wanted more, sometimes because I couldn’t stand more.
Girard doesn’t takedown Freud. He merely moves things a few inches to the left: F.’s incest-patricide becomes G.’s mimetic desire. G. primarily objects to F.’s intransigent commitment to a philosophy of consciousness. Freud’s obstinate refusal to let go of a rotten-at-the-core motif that Freud knew had so many flaws is Girard’s frustration. G. is correcting F. only by rearranging a few objects in the living-room, but God is Girard angry that Freud didn’t see to do so in the first place. Five chapters for that is a lot.
• • •
I wish Girard had spent more time demonstrating how Freud’s model falls apart outside of the west. (If you know something, send it my way.) I wish someone had had the decency at Johns Hopkins Press to tell Girard that the incestuous aspects of the Oedipus cycle are a much later addition (Jebb, 1893), because one cannot conflate the Oedipus myth with the Oedipus play if one wishes to play classicist, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst. What else: I wish there had been a longer discussion about the origins of exogamy.
Lastly, I wish Girard had acknowledged the limits of his thinking. Can you really solve the problem of what came before societal pacts and taboo generation? Can a problem that requires thinking with language and culture address a society without language and culture, one whose equation is built upon phonemes and pre-human logic? We can understand what came before us in many senses—astrophysics, linguistics, biology—but knowing what taboos and thoughts existed in cultures that couldn’t express taboos and thoughts seems impossibly irretrievable. Good luck telling Girard that. We still don’t know what a cat is saying when it meows, so how can we recall the origins of sacrifice? The sacred? The incest-taboo? Or even belief itself? Those minds ran on a different operating system, and all we have left of the first sacrifice is a cosmic microwave background.
More so than Girard would like to admit, he has a lot in common with Freud. As I wrote above, both want to have their mother and eat her, too. In Girard’s thesis of violence and ritual sacrifice, any evidence that confirms his beliefs *is* evidence; yet anything that goes against his thesis is *also* evidence, since it would logically concur with Girard’s argument that society slowly deletes the purpose of sacrifice, and eventually sacrifice itself, in order to curtail violence. Is Freud so different?
Wrapping it up, I do have one question for Girard, because I see an obvious, mammoth moth-hole in the brocade of this book. If sacrifice curtails violence until sacrifice itself can be curtailed—then why are we more violent than ever? When an individual brought violence into early societies, rituals were made and surrogate victims chosen to stop the bleeding. Today, society is global, and the individuals who bring violence into it are nations. We are in a post-myth world. With more judiciary systems in place than ever before, why have we resorted to deadlier, apocalyptic means of murder, and what scapegoat can come after disbelief has died?
Five stars for the first five chapters, three for the last six. Take into account how fabulous the cover is and it all goes back to a 5/5.
June 27, 2015
This book is a remarkable achievement by Girard. He has managed to provide a context and framework by which to understand sacrifice, so closely related linguistically to "sacred", and the violence that accompanies it-and their role in society.
Anyone terrorized as a child by the 1969 Encyclopedia Britannica film "The Lottery", based on a short story by Shirley Jackson, will understand the undercurrent of Girard's book. He holds that violence has been ritualized by society, and that it can serve as a kind of relief valve - but much more - that keeps the social fabric of society knit together.
Girard mines Greek mythology, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and finally Shakespreare to explore his theory. What seemed to be a glaring weakness was resolved in the final pages - the seeming omission of Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition from his conversation. He says briefly mid-book that Christ was one of the few of his era that understood the power of violence and sacrifice. In the final chapter, he engages the Jonah story and the casting of lots to see who would be thrown from the boat-bringing to mind again the film "The Lottery". More satisfyingly, he notes that a whole separate book will be needed to explore the Judeo-Christian story.
Apply Girard's theory to current events and one's mind begins to reel. Ponder the terrorism perpetuated by ISIS and the Taliban. The multiple mass shootings in the last few years balanced against the power and activity of the gun lobby. The death penalty. Our treatment of those different than ourselves, from ethnic and religious minorities to immigrants and gays. The Greek economic crisis and the European Union. Girard would hold that there is some much, much deeper stuff going on, and I'm inclined to agree.
Girard has left me with a great deal to think about. I'm convinced now to add to my list his books "The Scapegoat" and "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World", which will delve more deeply into my own faith traditions. I am grateful for this work by Girard; it has not so much shifted my thinking as as prodded it, giving me very useful tools by which to further understand and contemplate the role of the sacred - and violence - in our world.
Anyone terrorized as a child by the 1969 Encyclopedia Britannica film "The Lottery", based on a short story by Shirley Jackson, will understand the undercurrent of Girard's book. He holds that violence has been ritualized by society, and that it can serve as a kind of relief valve - but much more - that keeps the social fabric of society knit together.
Girard mines Greek mythology, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and finally Shakespreare to explore his theory. What seemed to be a glaring weakness was resolved in the final pages - the seeming omission of Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition from his conversation. He says briefly mid-book that Christ was one of the few of his era that understood the power of violence and sacrifice. In the final chapter, he engages the Jonah story and the casting of lots to see who would be thrown from the boat-bringing to mind again the film "The Lottery". More satisfyingly, he notes that a whole separate book will be needed to explore the Judeo-Christian story.
Apply Girard's theory to current events and one's mind begins to reel. Ponder the terrorism perpetuated by ISIS and the Taliban. The multiple mass shootings in the last few years balanced against the power and activity of the gun lobby. The death penalty. Our treatment of those different than ourselves, from ethnic and religious minorities to immigrants and gays. The Greek economic crisis and the European Union. Girard would hold that there is some much, much deeper stuff going on, and I'm inclined to agree.
Girard has left me with a great deal to think about. I'm convinced now to add to my list his books "The Scapegoat" and "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World", which will delve more deeply into my own faith traditions. I am grateful for this work by Girard; it has not so much shifted my thinking as as prodded it, giving me very useful tools by which to further understand and contemplate the role of the sacred - and violence - in our world.
November 5, 2019
read this if you want to go Hog Wild
December 29, 2021
Very impressive work overall, just a shame I'm a bit too much of an idiot to fully understand it.
March 5, 2022
3.5
After a very long hiatus I returned to this book today and I just binged it.
the reason I put it on hiatus is its overgeneralisation and ad nauseam repetition of the same arguments and the same comments. This continued in the latter part of the book, but I've decided to read all my physical books!
This gives a fairly comprenesive overview of the violence/sacrifice/sacred in human society - the emergence of them, the ritual importance and the overall importance those played (and still play) in the formation and continuation of societies.
After a very long hiatus I returned to this book today and I just binged it.
the reason I put it on hiatus is its overgeneralisation and ad nauseam repetition of the same arguments and the same comments. This continued in the latter part of the book, but I've decided to read all my physical books!
This gives a fairly comprenesive overview of the violence/sacrifice/sacred in human society - the emergence of them, the ritual importance and the overall importance those played (and still play) in the formation and continuation of societies.
October 25, 2023
لمن يُريد فهم الية طرد العنف وتباعتها في المجتمعات البدائية، فعليه قراءة هذا الكتاب.
الكتاب يحتوي فصول جيدة جداً في نقد لفرويد وليفي شتراوس.
تجربتي مع الترجمة وطريقة البحث للمؤلف (رينيه جيرار) كانت ممتازة.. انصح بنسخة مركز الوحدة.
الكتاب يحتوي فصول جيدة جداً في نقد لفرويد وليفي شتراوس.
تجربتي مع الترجمة وطريقة البحث للمؤلف (رينيه جيرار) كانت ممتازة.. انصح بنسخة مركز الوحدة.
February 4, 2019
миметический эффект и миметическая теория в деталях.
July 7, 2017
¿Cuál es el papel de la violencia en las sociedades? Como otros han hecoh antes que él, Girard le atribuye un papel constitutivo, pero con una agudeza increíble va mucho más allá de las nociones intelectuales comunes de ese papel central de la violencia - nos cuenta, retomando los trabajos de autores como Frazer y Freud, en qué se equivocaron ellos, o más bien, en qué quedaron atascados, y nos demuestra que sus tesis no están erradas sino mal sostenidas: en efecto, la violencia es lo que funda las sociedades, articulada, como cara doble, con lo sagrado, con una sacralidad ritual que es siempre ambivalente y que así como destruye, construye. Nos señala, finalmente, nuestro más grande error racionalista: creer que nuestra sociedad moderna (¿o posmoderna?) está más alejada de lo sagrado, y por lo tanto de la violencia, error en el que nos hemos cegado, sin darnos cuenta que la violencia y con ella, lo sagrado, nos están esperando, o nos acechan, o quizás ya nos alcanzaron, y vienen a revelarnos la verdad de nuestros orígenes.
April 4, 2008
I had just been attacked by demons, my life was spinning around, so I decided to go back to temple. I had spent years challenging the buddhist beliefs I was raised in, but it seemed the right choice. At the same time I was reading this book I began to hear from the lama of our temple words that I had previously only heard in Christian/Catholic doctrine and churches and twelve step programs. The combination of renewed disillussionment with the buddhist temple and the revelation of this book transformed my perspective on life.
June 4, 2022
De manière claire et extrêmement convaincante, René Girard semble mettre le doigt sur les fondements de toute société et civilisation. À l’aune de la violence fondamentale et de la victime émissaire, il semblerait que Girard a identifié un mécanisme qui éclaire tout: des mythes greco-romains, aux pratiques culturelles de sociétés primitives, jusqu’à notre système judiciaire. Brillant.
November 11, 2020
Imagine a prehistorical time when a band of early homo sapiens committed an act of violence that resonated in such a powerful way that we still feel its effects hundreds of thousands of years later. This act of human sacrifice had a profound impact on the structure of the human psyche and how societies manage conflict. Such a belief is outlined by Rene Girard in his book Violence and the Sacred. His provocative theory is well-developed and, at the very least, plausible. Girard, however, runs into major problems when he tries to explain the disconnection between his theory and the social practices of humanity in the modern world.
Girard develops a hypothesis about the origin of human culture based on an unrecorded event that happened so far back in history that no one actually knows what or how it happened. He claims that an act of transgression, probably a murder, occurred within a community and the members of that community retaliated by committing acts of violence against members of the opposing faction. Think of a blood feud situation in which members of an organized crime family kill off members of an enemy family in retaliation for an act of violence committed against them. The cycle of retaliatory violence spiraled so far out of control that the survival of the band of humans was in jeopardy. Then somebody realized that the key to ending the feud would be to unite the opposing sides by having them team up together to perform a ritual sacrifice, one involving a human scapegoat. The community’s collective consciousness blended and was then directed towards the sacrificial victim, channeling the murderous energy into one common direction so that it no longer dispersed throughout the society.
Rene Girard traces the survival of this behavioral framework from prehistory into the so-called primitive societies of Africa and beyond. Mythologies were invented to explain the ceremonial killing and these myths eventually transformed into religions. As the human diaspora spread all over the globe, the diverse communities continued this ceremonial rite, taking it with them, and changing it according to their own needs and styles. Many tribes began substituting animals for human sacrifices and some abandoned the practice altogether. The ancient Greeks sublimated this ritual slaughter into tragedy and beyond that, traces of the ceremony still remain today in various forms like literature and political theory. This is a structural-functional sociological argument and the implication is that an act of violence is necessary to form tight community bonds and prevent the spread of cyclical violence throughout society.
Girard justifies his hypothesis by comparing the places where this rite of sacrifice has survived. He applies the framework of his description to tribes in Africa like the Dinka of what is now South Sudan and the Incwala of Swaziland. A mythology of the Tsimshian Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest is also analyzed. The idea is that all of these rituals and myths are ancestrally related to the one original human sacrifice and the differences in detail are a result of cultural evolution. Up to this point this is a very tightly wound and well-reasoned theory which gets backed up with fairly legitimate evidence.
Girard builds on his hypothesis by analyzing mimetic desire as a motivational force. The tragedy of Oedipus and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex exemplify what he means. Humans learn by imitating others; first and foremost, men learn by imitating their fathers. A young boy desires to be like his father but he also builds his individuality by desiring to be different from his father. This is a double bind and the resolution of this conflict is necessary for the individual to effectively grow up and adjust to society. One of the ways he wishes to be like his father is in the possession of his mother. Therefore competition for the mother leads to conflict with the father which is the source of violence in the human individual. Sex and violence, being two forms of libidinal energy, need to be suppressed and controlled through social taboos to prevent a person from becoming a danger to himself or others. Incest taboos became a way of controlling human instincts and that is why religious practice is partially characterized by prohibitions. Girard’s contention is that religious myth and ritual are necessary to keep a society from self-destructing.
The breaking of taboos can be dangerous and people who do so can be elevated as kings, sometimes later to be sacrificed, or degraded as marginalized individuals. Since the goal of sacrifice is the preservation of social order, victims are chosen from the periphery of a community. The victim can be a domestic animal, for instance, or sometimes it can be a human, possibly a slave, a prisoner of war, a physically or mentally disabled person, an elderly person, a child, or someone deemed to be a social deviant. In some societies, human sacrifice became too disturbing so animals or effigies were substituted for the same purpose.
Girard’s hypothesis works well when he applies it to pre-modern myth and ritual but when he begins to critique modern society this book goes completely off the rails. From an intellectual point of view, modernism is defined as era of releasing humanity from its bindings. Industrial workers were to be liberated from economic slavery by communism. Psychoanalysis was meant to remove taboos and end the repression of mental energy that had built up over the centuries. Humanity would reach its full potential through technology and the free exchange of ideas. Nietzsche announced the death of God and religion was one of the casualties of modernism since it was seen as being one of the major obstacles to humanity reaching a higher stage of evolution. Girard’s take on all this is that modern society, where the judicial system has replaced religion as the primary regulatory institution, is off-balance and plagued by never-ending problems. He believes we need to return to religion to prevent the modern world from collapsing.
While his analysis of pre-modern societies is provocative and well-thought out, he leads us in the direction of a conservative agenda. He doesn’t explicitly say that we should restart using human sacrifice as a means of regulating society but he sure does hint at it loudly. His hypothesis is fundamentally conservative because the rite of sacrifice is described as a method of maintaining the status quo. It pits a conformist society, massed to participate in the ritual, against a peripheral outsider who is to be sacrificed as a scapegoat. Turned on its head and looked at from the sacrificial victim’s point of view, this is not good. Social order is more important and if you happen to be the scapegoat, that is your tough luck. The victim is someone distinct from society, possibly a non-conformist, an individualist, an artist, a member of a minority group, a person who question the established order or refuses to go along with the herd. The underlying social message is that the individual risks persecution, in the form of marginalization and possibly violence, so conforming to the community reduces the risk of being singled out for an act of persecution. This is the essence of religious communities or political parties that draw a strong line of demarcation between insiders and those outsiders. Reactionary thinking of this type can lead to fascism, genocides, holocausts, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, and other forms of crimes against humanity when taken to logical extremes. Girard does not appear to be advocating for violations of human rights when he defends a rebirth of religion in the modern world but he could easily tread that path if not cautious. In the self-critique of his own theory, he does acknowledge that rites of sacrificial violence do not always result in their intended effects and therein lies a potential for extreme danger. He would probably say that the sacrificial rite is meant to prevent those types of atrocities but still, the idea of murdering a peripheral individual to maintain the status quo of does not resonate well with moral or civilized people.
There are further problems in the examples Girard uses to support his theory. His chapter on Claude Levy-Strauss seems like a pointless sidetrack. The ceremonies and myths he dissects are taken far out of context and appear to even be incomplete. His explanation of the biblical story of Jonah is the most obvious example. The idea of the sailors throwing Jonah off their sinking ship can loosely be interpreted as a form of scapegoating and human sacrifice but it ignores the actual meaning of the story; Girard does not mention how Jonah prays to God after being swallowed by the whale and gets regurgitated as a symbolic form of redemption. The moral of the story has nothing to do with the details given by Girard. This can be said of the Dinka ritual involving the sacrifice of a cow; the full ritual is not explained and the Dinka people’s understanding of its meaning is never examined. Girard, a literary critic, appears to have no understanding of anthropological or sociological methodologies or theories but he employs cherry picked ideas from social science texts. He interprets anthropological data the same way he interprets poetry and literary fiction, without regard to the fact that literary criticism and anthropology do not overlap as disciplines in any convincing way. He also doesn’t provide enough data to support the theory that all ceremonies are variations of the one original human sacrifice. He uses less than ten examples to support a theory that would apply to a vast quantity of data, so vast that collecting all of it is an unrealistic and unrealizable goal. We can take him at his word but only up to a certain point.
He makes the same blunder in his definition of certain Greek words like “kudos”, for example. He makes assertions about the complexity of encoded information in lexical items from Ancient Greek but he is not fluent in Ancient Greek and borrows his material from other scholars who may not be entirely accurate in their explanations to begin with. Girard takes these words out of context to support ideas but he has no concept of how semantic systems operate. Words have fluid, not static, definitions and their meanings are heavily dependent on context. Think of how the word “like” can be used as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or a discourse marker depending on its lexical and syntactic environment, for example. His knowledge of linguistics is laughable. You can’t take the definition of a word in a language you don’t understand and use it to make sweeping generalizations about psychology and religion that pertain to humanity in its entirety. Girard just found some writings by other scholars who said what he wanted to hear so he lifted those ideas out of their theoretical context and used them to support his own theories. This is a matter of adjusting the evidence to fit the claim.
Finally, the idea that there was one human sacrifice that initiated all human culture, social praxis, and even language itself is an unprovable claim, at best, speculation. Girard admits himself that this can not be proven or empirically justified. Some credit can be given because he has identified and analyzed one thread of human behavior and belief that appears to run through many human societies but it doesn’t take into account all the other threads of human behavior that have, do, or will ever exist. It is one thread among many and to ascribe it the importance he does is just a little bombastic.
The idea that culture originated in this event is not convincing either. If the people who performed the first human sacrifice used any kind of tool, even something as simple as a rock or a sharpened animal bone, then culture existed before the sacrifice. Food, clothing, and shelter are the basic human elements of survival. These are biological necessities. Tools are used by humans to make the acquisition of these materials more convenient. Language is used for abstract thoughts and for the coordination of human societies to maximize the potential for survival. Since all of these innovations are rooted in biological need, it would be plausible to consider that human biology is the root of human culture. If a community leader convinced a whole society to sacrifice a human with some sort of tool, that could entail the idea that culture preceded such a happening. Girard claims that this was a religious event that caused human culture and language to develop but it is more likely that religion was a product of abstract and symbolic thought; most likely, language and culture caused religion, not the other way around.
Rene Girard has developed an interesting hypothesis about the origins of sacrificial rites and their relation to human violence. He ends the book by claiming that his theory will revolutionize the way we think about human culture, religion, art, language, and literature. That change has not yet come. It probably never will. Girard did not recognize the limitations of his own ideas or their limited applicability in the real world. He identified and described a pattern of human behavior then made grandiose claims about its importance. He was a narrow but intense thinker and the mechanics of his ideas are plausible up to a point. It’s actually surprising that he maintained his status as a scholar since his laser focus on one idea makes him more likely to have been a fanatic, a radical fundamentalist, or a cult leader. In the end though, he was a one trick pony with an ulterior motive and his overestimation of his own importance ultimately sabotaged his ideological success. People who are predisposed to religious belief will probably swallow Violence and the Sacred as a whole without asking many questions about it; those of a more secular mind probably won’t.
Girard develops a hypothesis about the origin of human culture based on an unrecorded event that happened so far back in history that no one actually knows what or how it happened. He claims that an act of transgression, probably a murder, occurred within a community and the members of that community retaliated by committing acts of violence against members of the opposing faction. Think of a blood feud situation in which members of an organized crime family kill off members of an enemy family in retaliation for an act of violence committed against them. The cycle of retaliatory violence spiraled so far out of control that the survival of the band of humans was in jeopardy. Then somebody realized that the key to ending the feud would be to unite the opposing sides by having them team up together to perform a ritual sacrifice, one involving a human scapegoat. The community’s collective consciousness blended and was then directed towards the sacrificial victim, channeling the murderous energy into one common direction so that it no longer dispersed throughout the society.
Rene Girard traces the survival of this behavioral framework from prehistory into the so-called primitive societies of Africa and beyond. Mythologies were invented to explain the ceremonial killing and these myths eventually transformed into religions. As the human diaspora spread all over the globe, the diverse communities continued this ceremonial rite, taking it with them, and changing it according to their own needs and styles. Many tribes began substituting animals for human sacrifices and some abandoned the practice altogether. The ancient Greeks sublimated this ritual slaughter into tragedy and beyond that, traces of the ceremony still remain today in various forms like literature and political theory. This is a structural-functional sociological argument and the implication is that an act of violence is necessary to form tight community bonds and prevent the spread of cyclical violence throughout society.
Girard justifies his hypothesis by comparing the places where this rite of sacrifice has survived. He applies the framework of his description to tribes in Africa like the Dinka of what is now South Sudan and the Incwala of Swaziland. A mythology of the Tsimshian Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest is also analyzed. The idea is that all of these rituals and myths are ancestrally related to the one original human sacrifice and the differences in detail are a result of cultural evolution. Up to this point this is a very tightly wound and well-reasoned theory which gets backed up with fairly legitimate evidence.
Girard builds on his hypothesis by analyzing mimetic desire as a motivational force. The tragedy of Oedipus and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex exemplify what he means. Humans learn by imitating others; first and foremost, men learn by imitating their fathers. A young boy desires to be like his father but he also builds his individuality by desiring to be different from his father. This is a double bind and the resolution of this conflict is necessary for the individual to effectively grow up and adjust to society. One of the ways he wishes to be like his father is in the possession of his mother. Therefore competition for the mother leads to conflict with the father which is the source of violence in the human individual. Sex and violence, being two forms of libidinal energy, need to be suppressed and controlled through social taboos to prevent a person from becoming a danger to himself or others. Incest taboos became a way of controlling human instincts and that is why religious practice is partially characterized by prohibitions. Girard’s contention is that religious myth and ritual are necessary to keep a society from self-destructing.
The breaking of taboos can be dangerous and people who do so can be elevated as kings, sometimes later to be sacrificed, or degraded as marginalized individuals. Since the goal of sacrifice is the preservation of social order, victims are chosen from the periphery of a community. The victim can be a domestic animal, for instance, or sometimes it can be a human, possibly a slave, a prisoner of war, a physically or mentally disabled person, an elderly person, a child, or someone deemed to be a social deviant. In some societies, human sacrifice became too disturbing so animals or effigies were substituted for the same purpose.
Girard’s hypothesis works well when he applies it to pre-modern myth and ritual but when he begins to critique modern society this book goes completely off the rails. From an intellectual point of view, modernism is defined as era of releasing humanity from its bindings. Industrial workers were to be liberated from economic slavery by communism. Psychoanalysis was meant to remove taboos and end the repression of mental energy that had built up over the centuries. Humanity would reach its full potential through technology and the free exchange of ideas. Nietzsche announced the death of God and religion was one of the casualties of modernism since it was seen as being one of the major obstacles to humanity reaching a higher stage of evolution. Girard’s take on all this is that modern society, where the judicial system has replaced religion as the primary regulatory institution, is off-balance and plagued by never-ending problems. He believes we need to return to religion to prevent the modern world from collapsing.
While his analysis of pre-modern societies is provocative and well-thought out, he leads us in the direction of a conservative agenda. He doesn’t explicitly say that we should restart using human sacrifice as a means of regulating society but he sure does hint at it loudly. His hypothesis is fundamentally conservative because the rite of sacrifice is described as a method of maintaining the status quo. It pits a conformist society, massed to participate in the ritual, against a peripheral outsider who is to be sacrificed as a scapegoat. Turned on its head and looked at from the sacrificial victim’s point of view, this is not good. Social order is more important and if you happen to be the scapegoat, that is your tough luck. The victim is someone distinct from society, possibly a non-conformist, an individualist, an artist, a member of a minority group, a person who question the established order or refuses to go along with the herd. The underlying social message is that the individual risks persecution, in the form of marginalization and possibly violence, so conforming to the community reduces the risk of being singled out for an act of persecution. This is the essence of religious communities or political parties that draw a strong line of demarcation between insiders and those outsiders. Reactionary thinking of this type can lead to fascism, genocides, holocausts, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, and other forms of crimes against humanity when taken to logical extremes. Girard does not appear to be advocating for violations of human rights when he defends a rebirth of religion in the modern world but he could easily tread that path if not cautious. In the self-critique of his own theory, he does acknowledge that rites of sacrificial violence do not always result in their intended effects and therein lies a potential for extreme danger. He would probably say that the sacrificial rite is meant to prevent those types of atrocities but still, the idea of murdering a peripheral individual to maintain the status quo of does not resonate well with moral or civilized people.
There are further problems in the examples Girard uses to support his theory. His chapter on Claude Levy-Strauss seems like a pointless sidetrack. The ceremonies and myths he dissects are taken far out of context and appear to even be incomplete. His explanation of the biblical story of Jonah is the most obvious example. The idea of the sailors throwing Jonah off their sinking ship can loosely be interpreted as a form of scapegoating and human sacrifice but it ignores the actual meaning of the story; Girard does not mention how Jonah prays to God after being swallowed by the whale and gets regurgitated as a symbolic form of redemption. The moral of the story has nothing to do with the details given by Girard. This can be said of the Dinka ritual involving the sacrifice of a cow; the full ritual is not explained and the Dinka people’s understanding of its meaning is never examined. Girard, a literary critic, appears to have no understanding of anthropological or sociological methodologies or theories but he employs cherry picked ideas from social science texts. He interprets anthropological data the same way he interprets poetry and literary fiction, without regard to the fact that literary criticism and anthropology do not overlap as disciplines in any convincing way. He also doesn’t provide enough data to support the theory that all ceremonies are variations of the one original human sacrifice. He uses less than ten examples to support a theory that would apply to a vast quantity of data, so vast that collecting all of it is an unrealistic and unrealizable goal. We can take him at his word but only up to a certain point.
He makes the same blunder in his definition of certain Greek words like “kudos”, for example. He makes assertions about the complexity of encoded information in lexical items from Ancient Greek but he is not fluent in Ancient Greek and borrows his material from other scholars who may not be entirely accurate in their explanations to begin with. Girard takes these words out of context to support ideas but he has no concept of how semantic systems operate. Words have fluid, not static, definitions and their meanings are heavily dependent on context. Think of how the word “like” can be used as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or a discourse marker depending on its lexical and syntactic environment, for example. His knowledge of linguistics is laughable. You can’t take the definition of a word in a language you don’t understand and use it to make sweeping generalizations about psychology and religion that pertain to humanity in its entirety. Girard just found some writings by other scholars who said what he wanted to hear so he lifted those ideas out of their theoretical context and used them to support his own theories. This is a matter of adjusting the evidence to fit the claim.
Finally, the idea that there was one human sacrifice that initiated all human culture, social praxis, and even language itself is an unprovable claim, at best, speculation. Girard admits himself that this can not be proven or empirically justified. Some credit can be given because he has identified and analyzed one thread of human behavior and belief that appears to run through many human societies but it doesn’t take into account all the other threads of human behavior that have, do, or will ever exist. It is one thread among many and to ascribe it the importance he does is just a little bombastic.
The idea that culture originated in this event is not convincing either. If the people who performed the first human sacrifice used any kind of tool, even something as simple as a rock or a sharpened animal bone, then culture existed before the sacrifice. Food, clothing, and shelter are the basic human elements of survival. These are biological necessities. Tools are used by humans to make the acquisition of these materials more convenient. Language is used for abstract thoughts and for the coordination of human societies to maximize the potential for survival. Since all of these innovations are rooted in biological need, it would be plausible to consider that human biology is the root of human culture. If a community leader convinced a whole society to sacrifice a human with some sort of tool, that could entail the idea that culture preceded such a happening. Girard claims that this was a religious event that caused human culture and language to develop but it is more likely that religion was a product of abstract and symbolic thought; most likely, language and culture caused religion, not the other way around.
Rene Girard has developed an interesting hypothesis about the origins of sacrificial rites and their relation to human violence. He ends the book by claiming that his theory will revolutionize the way we think about human culture, religion, art, language, and literature. That change has not yet come. It probably never will. Girard did not recognize the limitations of his own ideas or their limited applicability in the real world. He identified and described a pattern of human behavior then made grandiose claims about its importance. He was a narrow but intense thinker and the mechanics of his ideas are plausible up to a point. It’s actually surprising that he maintained his status as a scholar since his laser focus on one idea makes him more likely to have been a fanatic, a radical fundamentalist, or a cult leader. In the end though, he was a one trick pony with an ulterior motive and his overestimation of his own importance ultimately sabotaged his ideological success. People who are predisposed to religious belief will probably swallow Violence and the Sacred as a whole without asking many questions about it; those of a more secular mind probably won’t.
October 22, 2020
Şiddet temel bir arzu olarak tüm kültürlerde yerleşiktir. Şiddet kültürel düzenler için yıkıcı niteliktedir. Bu nedenle şiddetin kontrol edilmesi ve yönlendirilmesi gerekir. Dinin temel misyonu budur. Kurban şiddetin başka bir varlıkta ikamesidir. Kurban anlaşmazlık, kavga ve rekabeti ortadan kaldırarak toplumsal uyumu sağlar. Dinler ayinler yoluyla şiddeti kontrol eder. Din yoluyla şiddet grup dışına yönlendirilir. Eğer bir grup dış düşmana yönelmezse kendi içinde şiddet yeniden doğar. Her topluluğun kurulmasında oy birliğine dayanan kutsal bir kurucu şiddet olayı vardır.
Bunlar gibi düşündürücü tezlerin yer aldığı kült bir eser. Din sosyolojisiyle veya antropolojisiyle ilgilenenlerin okumasında fayda var. Freud, Frazer ve modern din araştırmalarına yönelik eleştiriler de çok değerli.
1945 sonrası tüm Fransız yazarlar gibi Rene Girard da beni çok zorladı. Bir daha dönüp bakabilir miyim bilmiyorum. Ama eğer bilgi düzeyimi geliştirebilirsem ve ilerleyen yıllarda bir daha okuyabilirsem bana çok şey öğretecektir. Özellikle Yunan dinleri ve trajedisi alanlarındaki bilgimi geliştirmiş olmam gerekecek.
Bunlar gibi düşündürücü tezlerin yer aldığı kült bir eser. Din sosyolojisiyle veya antropolojisiyle ilgilenenlerin okumasında fayda var. Freud, Frazer ve modern din araştırmalarına yönelik eleştiriler de çok değerli.
1945 sonrası tüm Fransız yazarlar gibi Rene Girard da beni çok zorladı. Bir daha dönüp bakabilir miyim bilmiyorum. Ama eğer bilgi düzeyimi geliştirebilirsem ve ilerleyen yıllarda bir daha okuyabilirsem bana çok şey öğretecektir. Özellikle Yunan dinleri ve trajedisi alanlarındaki bilgimi geliştirmiş olmam gerekecek.
June 22, 2022
Ok, so it turns out my upbringing in the conservative Christian revival tradition has been a strange mix between metaphysically romantic i.e. escapist religion acting as a unifying denominator for a socially similar Middle class group of People, being a cover for the covert desires and rivalries of the neurotic masses
And of course some elements of genuine biblical intuition, without which authentic People wouldnt bother participating.
I strongly feel that modern Christian revival tradition is deeply flawed and is driven by the romantic ideals rather than authentic biblical intuitions
To my understanding Girard is a prophet who soberly and with ease explains what is at the core of the human condition. Reading kierkegaard is unbelievably complicated, as is Jung, McGilchrist, dostojevskij, sartre, frankl and even Jordan peterson. They are all mysticists with some or other potent intuition that strikes a nerve in the dephts of the soul. Girard is like a master surgeon who calmly dissects the entire human being and world history, with all of it coming together. Simply astounding and wonderful
And of course some elements of genuine biblical intuition, without which authentic People wouldnt bother participating.
I strongly feel that modern Christian revival tradition is deeply flawed and is driven by the romantic ideals rather than authentic biblical intuitions
To my understanding Girard is a prophet who soberly and with ease explains what is at the core of the human condition. Reading kierkegaard is unbelievably complicated, as is Jung, McGilchrist, dostojevskij, sartre, frankl and even Jordan peterson. They are all mysticists with some or other potent intuition that strikes a nerve in the dephts of the soul. Girard is like a master surgeon who calmly dissects the entire human being and world history, with all of it coming together. Simply astounding and wonderful
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July 20, 2023core ideas about the role of sacrifice in humans, however the book is so fucking french in every aspect. for a book from '72, it does attempt to make some apologies from its own contribution to the western de-humanisation of tribal communities, but a rough read. i liked the part comparing the language surrounding the mechanism of mRNA in vaccines with ritual scapegoating in Greek tragedy
July 19, 2019
Our foundations and our walls, respectively.
November 7, 2021
De la dynamite!!
June 1, 2022
This one takes some big swings
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