An Introduction to the Work of René Girard By Peter Stork
January 13, 2011
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In Girard’s proposal, the “scene of [human] origin” lies in the horror of an outbreak of unstoppable violence within the archaic community. It is the internal crisis, the spilling over of violent reciprocity into the “interior” of their social space that fills the group with dread and now brings about the perception of an encounter with the “sacred”. This notion has important implications for Girard’s interpretation of the origin of sacrifice and the nature of religion.
First, sacrificial ritual originates with a human victim, not with animal sacrifices. For Girard, animal sacrifices belong to later substitutionary development. Second, Girard perceives violence as a reciprocal phenomenon, which, like vengeance, lends violence its self-perpetuating and interminable character. Therefore, the function of sacrifice and victimary substitution is the transmutation of reciprocal violence into a culturally “safe” ritual by venting it on a victim from whose death no one needs to fear reprisals. As long as this act is perceived by all as “sacred violence”, it breaks the destructive momentum of vengeance and transposes it into a protective one.
In other words, in primitive society sacrifice holds the impulse for revenge in check in the guise of religious violence. Third, this understanding throws light on the choice of sacrificial victims.
To be “sacrificiable”, victims had not only to be sufficiently similar to allow substitution, but also sufficiently different and marginal to make them legitimate targets of collective violence that would draw the focus away from the community proper. This explains why slaves, prisoners of war, the deformed and children qualified. As they were not fully integrated into the community, their slaughter would not pose a reciprocal threat of revenge or blood feud.[/b]
Anthropologists have often related sacrifice to the notion of guilt. Girard denies this link. For him, sacrifice is ritualized vengeance, not an act of expiation. In primitive society, the orientation is not towards a wrongdoer but towards a victim designated to absorb the communal violence. Girard argues that the question of guilt only arises in judicially structured societies with their orientation towards the concepts of transgression and a guilty party.
Girard draws attention to the similarity between the sacrificial system of earlier civilizations and the judicial system of more advanced societies. He argues that they are functionally identical in that both fulfill the same purpose: to save society from its own violence. However, both will “work” only as long as they are perceived as having exclusive access to the means of vengeance. In the case of the sacrificial system this is established by the centrality of the “sacred”, and in the case of the judicial system by the “independent authority” of the law.
While each system declares its own violence “holy” and legitimate over and against any other source of violence, each equally obscures the fact that human beings need protection from their own reciprocal violence. Should this veil be lifted, both systems lose their efficacy. In another way, demystification robs both systems of their power to break the cycle of reciprocal violence. The ensuing weakening of the victimage mechanism leaves society open to loss of identity and to outbreaks of undifferentiated violence or anarchy. Under such conditions, society enters what Girard calls the “sacrificial crisis”.
When the notion of legitimate violence is lost, society is exposed to the irrepressible powers of reciprocal violence and its contagious escalation. Then, writes Girard, “man’s desires are focused on one thing only: violence”. The key to an understanding of this startling conclusion lies in Girard’s notion of desire and its relation to violence. To understand Girard’s notion of desire, it is important to grasp that in his scheme desire is “mimetic”. With this qualifier Girard means, on the one hand, that desire is distinct from appetite or biological needs such as hunger or thirst. On the other hand, it is to say that human beings imitate each other. They copy not only gestures, language and other cultural expressions but also each other’s desires. Conflict results when this process leads to convergence of desires on the same object.
If desire is mimetic, the conflictual nature of human interactions may be explained. It is a well-known tendency in ethology to extrapolate animal behavior into the human sphere. The idea that human aggression and violence are “instinctive” owes its existence to this tendency. However, violence in animals rarely leads to the death of an opponent or rival. A built-in mechanism terminates the combat before it reaches the lethal stage. Such a constraint is lacking in humans. Consequently, when faced with a rival, humans are defenseless against their own impulses which they do not know how to control. However, before we can understand Girard’s notion of “desire”, we need to trace his thoughts about the pivotal role he ascribes to the “rival” in relation to desire and its violent manifestations.
In Girard’s thought, desire does not arise in a subject as an autonomous and spontaneous attraction to an object, neither is a rival defined as the result of two autonomous desires spontaneously and concurrently converging upon the same object. Rather, “the subject desires the object because the rival desires it.” In other words, the desirability of an object for the subject lies not in the object itself, but in its desirability in the eyes of another. Girard explains: In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject, not only in regard to such secondary matters as style and opinions but also, and more essentially, in regard to desires.
We will not understand the intensity and significance of this “imitation of desire” until we see its essential motif. Desire not only seeks to possess the object to which the model points, but also seeks to be “possessed” by it, for the acquisitiveness of desire is not primarily directed at the object itself but at what it signifies, namely the model proper. In other words, this acquisitiveness aims at the very being of the one who finds the object so desirable.
According to Girard, it is the imitator’s perceived lack of being or his sense of ontological emptiness that drives the intensity of acquisitiveness. An existential void which the successful acquisition promises to remedy appears at the core of human desire. This acquisitiveness is therefore, as Fleming explains, “merely a path, the perceived privileged route, to the attainment of the ontological self-sufficiency detected in the rival”.
This dynamic renders desire essentially conflictual, and the ensuing conflict is irreconcilable, except at the expense of the model or a substitutionary victim. What is more, the outworking of this conflict locks both model and imitator into what Girard has called the double-bind in which they constantly signal contradictory messages to one another – “imitate me, but don’t desire my object”. This phenomenon, Girard contends, forms the basis of all human relationships and is, in the final analysis, the instigator of the sacrificial crisis where desire and violence are no longer distinguished. At the point of a mimetic crisis, violence begets more violence as each participant resorts to more violence to overcome the violence of his opponent. Under the dynamics of the double-bind, the distinction between model and imitator vanishes so that the mimetic crisis becomes a crisis of non-differentiation that threatens the cohesion of the community (which is built on distinctiveness) unless at the height of undifferentiated violence a surrogate victim is arbitrarily slain.
The unanimity of the collective murder causes the violence to subside and the vicious cycle of mimetic violence to be broken. This death and the ensuing peace (absence of violence) transmute the energies of reciprocal violence into sanctioned ritualistic forms so that their later performances occur as re-enactments of the scene of origin through which the cultural order is preserved. Religion is thus not an attempt to contact “the gods” but ritualized vengeance that prevents its uncontrollable outbreak.
The five chief elements of Girard’s “mimetic anthropology” may be summarized as follows:
1.
Mimesis In Girard, mimesis is not the copying of actions but the imitation of desire, or the replication of another’s attraction towards an object. In this definition, mimesis is acquisitive and desire is “suffered desire” that arises spontaneously when the object is valued by a mediator. Girard distinguishes between external and internal mediation. The greater the distance between the subject and the mediator, the freer is the relationship between them from the possibility of rivalry. In that case, Girard speaks of external mediation. If the distance diminishes, not only does the possibility of rivalry increase but its intensity also rises proportionately. Then Girard speaks of internal mediation, in which case the model or mediator has also become the obstacle. He or she now obstructs the desired acquisition while constantly signaling the desirability of the object. This model/obstacle dynamic shifts the value from the object itself to the obstruction which also explains why prohibition heightens the object’s desirability.
2.
Metaphysical Desire and Transcendence When mimesis progresses towards rivalry, the object becomes less and less important as desire focuses on the mediator become obstacle. At the height of the conflict the object is forgotten altogether. At this point, desire has become metaphysical and now seeks to possess not the object but the being of the other, in fact to become the other. The conflict is over recognition and prestige. Since human desire is mediated desire, i.e. it does not arise from within but from an external source, Girard interprets its triangular nature to mean that human beings are structured towards transcendence. Human desire is to be mediated by a truly transcendent spiritual source. Therefore, mimetic rivalry is the pathological variant of desire awakened by a false transcendence, that is, by the proximity of the desire of another human being.
3.
The Mimetic Crisis A further progression of mimetic conflict leads to the formation of doubles. The subject and the mediator of desire become more and more like each other. In this instance, the rivals copy each other’s desire and in the process erase their differences. Girard calls this point in the progression the “mimetic crisis”. Since mimetic desire is highly infectious, it affects groups and society to the point where it can spin out of control and threaten the existence of community. However, the operation of mimesis ensures that at the extreme the total reciprocal violence is vented unanimously on a surrogate victim which is killed. The murder of the victim brings peace. But if the cause for their unanimity is misattributed to the victim rather than to the function of mimesis aroused by the victim mechanism, the peace is based on a delusion. Because the resolution of the crisis demands the blood of a victim, the mimetic crisis is also called “sacrificial crisis”.
4.
The Victim and the Sacred According to Girard, this misattribution occurs spontaneously at the height of the crisis when the group transfers its violence to the victim. Violence is not repressed, but through the process of transference it becomes “detached”. This turns the victim into a god who miraculously transforms the destructive violence of the conflict into legitimate violence for the sake of peace in the community. The result is a double delusion. The victim is seen as “supremely active and powerful”,9 while its corpse has become the transcendent signifier of the “sacred” whose violence, like a double- edged sword, cuts both ways: it ensures the order of society but also has the power to destroy it. Under this delusion, the “sacred” masquerades as the cause as well as the cure of mimetic violence and as such represents “the transcendental pole of primitive religion”.
5.
The Scapegoat The term relates to the unconscious transference of violence onto another along with its associated guilt. In myths, the scapegoat is represented by “texts of persecution”, similarly in stories which tell the tale from the perspective of the persecutors. It is both a term in common language as well as a ritual act that communicates the dynamic and result of transference. By pointing indirectly to the need for transference, however, it partly discloses the underlying problem of the human subconscious which, since the originary scene is structured on the basis of a lynching, seeks to rid itself of violence and guilt by laying it on others. In short, Girard rejects the idealistic notion that it is natural for human beings to live in peace with each other.
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