Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
arrested; but at the same time he says: happy are those to whom I will not be a scandal. So
there are nevertheless a few who are not scandalized. That scandals must happen might sound
like determinism, but it is not.
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RA:
So are you saying that mimesis, imitation and the violence it engenders, is extremely
seductive and powerful like a current in a river, but it is not as if a person cannot resist it?
R.G.:
Even if persons cannot resist it, they can convert away from it.
R.A.:
But again, that's the idea of renunciation of the will, isn't it?
R.G.:
The idea of renunciation has, no doubt, been overdone by the Puritans and the Jansenists, but the blanket hostility that now prevails against it is even worse. The idea that
renunciation in all its forms should be renounced once and for all may well be the most
flagrant nonsense any human culture has ever devised. But as to whether I am advocating
"renunciation" of mimetic desire, yes and no. Not the renunciation of mimetic desire itself, because what Jesus advocates is mimetic desire. Imitate me, and imitate the father through
me, he says, so it's twice mimetic. Jesus seems to say that the only way to avoid violence is to
imitate me, and imitate the Father. So the idea that mimetic desire itself is bad makes no
sense. It is true, however, that occasionally I say "mimetic desire" when I really mean only the type of mimetic desire that generates mimetic rivalry and, in turn, is generated by it.
R.A.:
This is an important clarification. It seems that it wouldn't make sense, in light of your theory itself, to say mimetic desire should be renounced, because mimetic desire is itself a
pharmakon
-- a medicine or a poison. The claim at the end of
Things Hidden
that to "give up"
or renounce mimetic desire is what we must do is, I think, particularly misleading in this
regard. Perhaps mimetic desire per se is not to be done away with, but is to be fulfilled --
transformed, "converted."
R.G.:
A simple renunciation of desire I don't think is Christian; it's more Buddhist.
Undoubtedly there are similarities between what I am saying and Buddhism. If you read the
descriptions of Buddhism, they are very profound; they are very aware of mimetic desire, and
of contagion, and of all the things that matter in human relations. Like all great religious
writing. The thing that is unique about Christianity is that it wants to go back to the origin, to
the sacrificial origin, and uncover it. Buddhism is not interested in doing this at all. And
Buddhism advocates getting out of the world altogether. Christianity never does that.
Christianity says, the Cross will be there for you, inevitably. But that kind of renunciation is
very different.
R.A.:
What you are advocating, actually, is not renunciation of desire but imitation of a
positive model. St. Paul, too, says "imitate me." He also says, think upon these positive
things, the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, and so forth. In his book
The Peace of the
Present: An Unviolent Way of Life
, John S. Dunne has a short section in which he has an
exchange with you over this issue of desire. His concept of "heart's desire" seems initially to be very similar to what you mean when speaking of "imitating" Christ; if the heart's desire is indeed mimetic, in other
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words, it would express itself in imitating Christ, or God through Christ. But Dunne doesn't
talk about desire in mimetic terms. He speaks as if we have an active, positive agency to
desire the good, the capacity and choice to desire nonviolently.
R.G.:
But I would say that mimetic desire, even when bad, is intrinsically good, in the sense
that far from being merely imitative in a small sense, it's the opening out of oneself.
R.A.:
Openness to others.
R.G.:
Yes. Extreme openness. It is everything. It can be murderous, it is rivalrous; but it is
also the basis of heroism, and devotion to others, and everything.
R.A.:
And love for others and wanting to imitate them in a good sense?
R.G.:
Yes, of course. And the fact that novelists and playwrights, and that primitive religion, are inevitably concerned with rivalry -- conflictual mimetic desire, which is always in the
way and is a huge problem for living together -- doesn't mean it is the only thing there is.
Now writers are what I would call "hypermimetic," which cannot be considered necessarily
pathological. Literature shifts into hypermimeticism, and therefore writers are obsessed with
bad, conflictual mimetic desire, and that's what they write about -- that's what literature is
about. I agree with Gide that literature is about evil. That doesn't mean evil is the whole of
life. I hear this question all the time: "Is all desire mimetic?" Not in the bad, conflictual sense.
Nothing is more mimetic than the desire of a child, and yet it is good. Jesus himself says it is
good. Mimetic desire is also the desire for God.
R.A.:
For those who would not a priori accept a religious framework, nor a concept of the
"imitation of Christ" as you employ it, it might be understood also as the desire for love, for creativity, for community.
R.G.:
Cultural imitation is a positive form of mimetic desire.
R.A.:
In
Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy
, Edith Wyschogrod, a
contemporary moral philosopher, talks about excessive desire on behalf of the Other as the
basis for ethics: desiring for the other because of the otherness of the other. Note how this
would look in terms of mimetic desire. Positive mimetic desire works out to recapitulate the
Golden Rule: we desire for the other
what the other desires for her or himself
This kind of
desire is therefore neither colonialist, nor does it scapegoat. Wyschogrod calls for a new
postmodern sainthood based on this excessive desire and the genuine valuing of difference. I
guess I'm wondering whether it's possible within your theory to fully account for this desire
on behalf of the Other -- for nonviolent, saintly desire -- as an excess of desire rather than as a
renunciation of desire.
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R.G.:
Your question makes sense to me, and more so these days since I no longer hesitate to
talk about theology. Wherever you have that desire, I would say, that really active, positive
desire for the other, there is some kind of divine grace present. This is what Christianity
unquestionably tells us. If we deny this we move into some form of optimistic humanism.
R.A.:
Divine grace is present, you would say, whether or not it is recognized as such?
R.G.:
Whether or not it is recognized as such.
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Part III Sacrifice
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Chapter 6 Sacrifice as Sacral Violence and Substitution
Mimetic desire may be contained and routed through the differences of language and
culture if these are effectively conveyed in religious and cultural traditions. It may lead
to human redemption if the mimesis is a conversionary, nonviolent imitation of divine
love (see chapter 5 and chapters 11 and 12). Cultural traditions stem from the disorder,
the actual or potential violence that is experienced when mimetic desire gets out of hand
and the hominids in the process of becoming human, which includes a sense of
community, tradition, symbolic universe, etc., discover that convergence upon a victim
brings them unanimity and thus relief from violence. (See chapter 1 of this Reader and
Things Hidden
, book 1. esp. pp. 84-104.) Both sacrifice and rituals of scapegoating
represent, in camouflaged form, the disorder resulting in the originary violence of
immolation or expulsion of the victim and the order stemming from the newly found
relief from conflict and violence. This disorder and order are the function of the
double
transference
(see under Scapegoat/Scapegoating)* of the scapegoat* effect: those
involved in the collective violence transfer the disorder and the offenses producing it to
the victim, but they transfer also their newly found peace to the victim, ascribing to him
or her the power that brings it about. From this double transfer Girard hypothesizes the
origin of the gods and kingship (see
"A Note to the Reader"
and the concluding
interview).
Sacrifice, the act of making the offered victim or object sacred (note Latin
sacrificare
),
is thus sacred violence. In this selection from
Violence and the Sacred
, 1-18, 39-44,
Girard focuses on sacrifice as sacred violence in relation to its essential elements and
other aspects of given cultural systems: substitution, particularly of an animal for
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a human victim; the cultural necessity of
méconnaissance
; the role of vengeance; the
primitive character of sacrifice as compared to the emergence of judicial systems; and
the sacrificial crisis that occurs when sacrifice fails to perform one of its main functions,
which is to distinguish or maintain the distinction between "good" and "bad" violence.
As for
méconnaissance
, it is translated in this text as "misunderstanding," but it has the connotation of unconscious distortion and concealment in ritual and myth (see under
Scapegoat/Scapegoating).* In the context of Girard's research it often connotes
"delusion," and has been translated as such in some of his writings. As delusion it would
be a cultural assumption concealing a generative mechanism (see Scapegoat Mechanism
under Scapegoat)* which is blind or extremely resistant to ordinary reason.
It should be noted that already in
Violence and the Sacred
Girard recognized and
indicated that sacrifice is not simply violence; it is violence that is limited for the sake of achieving or maintaining order. But in recent years he has become much more positive
about sacrifice and the use of the adjective "sacrificial." It is not only that the violence underlying institutions and rituals* of sacrifice is preferable to the alternative of
widespread violence, but that the vision of nonsacrificial and nonviolent relationships
must be understood and held in tension with the sacrificial context out of which the
vision arises. To forget or dismiss this fact of our biblical and postbiblical traditions is to
be doomed to repeat it in some new guise. In keeping with the tension between the
empirical and historical grounding of sacrifice and the revealing of a new way in the
biblical prophets, especially the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 52-53, and Jesus Christ in
the Gospels, he affirms a positive, derived sense of "sacrificial" as the willingness to
give of oneself to others and to commit oneself to God, not for sadomasochistic
purposes (i.e., to inflict injury on others or oneself, ostensibly for the sake of faith*), but
out of love and faithfulness to the other. See the citations in the introduction to chapter
5; also Girard, "Mimetische Theorie und Theologie," in
Vom Fluch und Segen der
Sündenböcke: Raymund Schwager zum 60. Geburtstag
, ed. J. Niewiadomski and W.
Palaver ( Thaur, Austria: Kulturverlag, 1995), 15-29.
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In many rituals the sacrificial act assumes two opposing aspects, appearing at times as a
sacred obligation to be neglected at grave peril, at other times as a sort of criminal
activity entailing perils of equal gravity.
To account for this dual aspect of ritual sacrifice -- the legitimate and the illegitimate,
the public and the all but covert -- Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, in their
"Essay on
the Nature and Function of Sacrifice,"
1. adduc
e the sacred character of the victim.
Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him -- but the victim is sacred only
because he is to be killed. Here is a circular line of reasoning that at a somewhat later
date would be dignified by the sonorous term
ambivalence
. Persuasive and authoritative
as that term still appears, it has been so extraordinarily abused in our century that
perhaps we may now recognize how little light it sheds on the subject of sacrifice.
Certainly it provides no real explanation. When we speak of ambivalence, we are only
pointing out a problem that remains to be solved.
If sacrifice resembles criminal violence, we may say that there is, inversely, hardly any
form of violence that cannot be described in terms of sacrifice -- as Greek tragedy
clearly reveals. It has often been observed that the tragic poets cast a glimmering veil of
rhetoric over the sordid realities of life. True enough -- but sacrifice and murder would
not lend themselves to this game of reciprocal substitution if they were not in some way
related. Although it is so obvious that it may hardly seem worth mentioning, where
sacrifice is concerned first appearances count for little, are quickly brushed aside -- and
should therefore receive special attention. Once one has made up one's mind that
sacrifice is an institution essentially if not entirely symbolic, one can say anything
whatsoever about it. It is a subject that lends itself to insubstantial theorizing.