Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
come about more slowly in North America. The translation of
Things Hidden
, published by
Stanford University Press in 1987, was a signal step forward. Another was the formation of
the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, to which I will return shortly.
In 1981 Girard accepted his next and last post, that of Andrew B. Hammond Professor of
French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University. These years until his
retirement in 1995 saw the appearance of
Le bouc émissaire
( 1982), published in English as
The Scapegoat by Johns Hopkins
( 1986);
La route antique des hommes pervers
( 1985), put out by Athlone and Stanford as
Job: The Victim of His People
( 1987);
A Theater of Envy:
William Shakespeare
( 1991), translated into French as
Shakespeare: Les feux de Venvie
, which actually appeared in 1990, before the English original; and a very important set of
interviews,
Quand ces choses commenceront . . . Entretiens avec Michel Treguer (When these
things will begin . . . Conversations with Michel Treguer)
, published by arléa in 1994. Also,
as already mentioned, the English version of
Things Hidden since the Foundation of the
World
appeared in 1987.
Stanford University was a good setting for Girard in some respects. Stanford University is
undoubtedly one of the best research universities in the world, the intelligence and
background of its undergraduate students ranks high among American universities, and the
graduate students in French were certainly very good. But Stanford's very position as one of
the leading universities in the Western world has made it prey to the currents of political
correctness that have washed over Ameri-
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can education. The problem from Girard's standpoint is the denigration of traditional
disciplines and classical learning. Certainly Girard, although well known and highly regarded
on campus, became "odd man out" because of his stance toward certain academic fashions
and his avowed Christian identity. But he never felt isolated, and his teaching and research were always interdisciplinary.
One of the most important events of this period from the standpoint of Girard's lifetime of
work and his intellectual and religious commitments was the formation of the Colloquium on
Violence and Religion (COV&R) in 1990. It is characteristic of him that he did not take the
initiative to start it, nor has he attempted in any way to manipulate its governance or the
topics of meetings and approaches to various issues. He has exemplified the lack of that
mimetic obsession with power exhibited by Freud in forming and controlling the inner
council of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and Girard's followers and
sympathizers in COV&R are noticeably free of the esotericism and cultic exclusivism that
have at various times marked disciples of Jung, Heidegger, and Lacan.
The object of COV&R, as stated on behalf of those present at the founding conference at
Stanford University, is "to explore, criticize, and develop the mimetic model of the
relationship between violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture." This
statement presupposes Girard's work as the center and starting point, but the organization
includes many people who do not share his religious views or differ with him on certain
points of the mimetic theory.
From that first meeting of no more than twenty-five people, there are now more than two
hundred members, who are located primarily in the United States and Europe. An annual
symposium is held in middle to late spring, and a shorter meeting takes place each year in
conjunction with the convention of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of
Biblical Literature. A biannual bulletin,
The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence and
Religion
, features a bibliography of literature on the mimetic theory. The bulletin is
financially underwritten by the University of Innsbruck. An annual journal,
Contagion:
journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
, has been published since 1994.
The great majority are academics, many of whom are dissatisfied with the conditions and
attitudes they find in academe. They represent not only the usual complaints of lack of
interest in humanistic and interdisciplinary studies and the greater support of disciplines
which are more closely connected to what is popular and demanded in the marketplace. The
deeper dimension of their reaction is a refusal of that very political correctness which
pretends to uphold the rights of victims and minorities, but ends by affirming a helter-skelter
hodge-podge which undercuts a consistent moral vision and tends to give the upper hand to
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those who exalt individual self-fulfillment at the one extreme and, at the other extreme, to
those who are able to take advantage of the politics of victimization to gain power over
others.
But besides academics holding college or university appointments, COV&R's membership
includes also some ministers and priests, psychiatrists and psychologists, and others who
carry on their vocations in overlapping spheres of academy and church, or academy and the
work of conflict resolution in racial, ethnic, and religious relations.
Retired since the summer of 1995, Girard is still actively engaged in thinking and writing.
His immediate project is a book on Christianity and myth, which is nearing completion.
"Christianity and myth" means for him not primarily the valid points of comparison, which of course must be noted, but above all the differences that disclose the truth of Christianity.
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Part I Overview of the Mimetic Theory
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The most convenient single summary of Girard's mimetic model including its relation to the
Bible, is this article, "Mimesis* and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism," which
appeared in the now defunct
Berkshire Review 14
( 1979): 9-19. It is essential reading for the beginner in Girard's work, and may be useful to others who are already acquainted with his
thought.
If you survey the literature on imitation, you will quickly discover that acquisition and
appropriation are never included among the modes of behavior that are likely to be imitated.
If acquisition and appropriation were included, imitation as a social phenomenon would turn
out to be more problematic than it appears, and above all conflictual. If the appropriative
gesture of an individual named A is rooted in the imitation of an individual named B, it
means that A and B must reach together for one and the same object. They become rivals for
that object. If the tendency to imitate appropriation is present on both sides, imitative rivalry
must tend to become reciprocal; it must be subject to the back and forth reinforcement that
communication theorists call a positive feedback. In other words, the individual who first acts
as a model will experience an increase in his own appropriative urge when he finds himself
thwarted by his imitator. And reciprocally. Each becomes the imitator of his own imitator and
the model of his own model. Each tries to push aside the obstacle that the other places in his
path. Violence is generated by this process; or rather violence is the process itself when two
or more partners try to prevent one another from appropriating the object they all desire
through physical or other means. Under the influence of the judicial viewpoint and of our
own psychological impulses, we always look for some original violence or at least for well-
defined acts of violence that would be separate from nonviolent behavior. We want to
distinguish the culprit from the innocent and, as a result, we substitute discontinuities and
differences for the continuities and reciprocities of the mimetic escalation.
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Violence is discussed, nowadays, in terms of aggression. We speak of aggression as an
instinct that would be especially strong in certain individuals or in man as a zoological
species. It is true, no doubt, that some individuals are more aggressive than others, and that
men are more aggressive than sheep, but the problematic of aggression does not go to the root
of human conflict. It is unilateral, it seems to suggest that the elimination of something called
aggressivity is the problem. Violence is also attributed by many economists to the scarcity of
needed objects or to their monopolization by a social élite. It is true that the goods needed by
human beings to sustain their lives can be scarce but, in animal life, scarcity also occurs and
it is not sufficient, as such, to cause low-ranking individuals to challenge the privileges of the dominant males.
Imitation or mimicry happens to be common to animals and men. It seems to me that a theory
of conflict based primarily on appropriative mimicry does not have the drawbacks of one
based on scarcity or on aggressivity; if it is correctly conceived and formulated it throws a
great deal of light on much of human culture, beginning with religious institutions.
Religious prohibitions make a good deal of sense when interpreted as efforts to prevent
mimetic rivalry from spreading throughout human communities. Prohibitions and taboos are
often ineffectual and misguided but they are not absurd, as many anthropologists have
suggested; they are not rooted primarily in irrational fears, as psychoanalysts have suggested,
since they bear on violence, on mimetic behavior, and on the potential objects of mimetic
rivalry. Rituals confirm, I believe, that primitive societies are obsessed with the
undifferentiation or conflictual reciprocity that must result from the spread of mimetic
rivalry. The chaos, the absence of order, and the various disorders that prevail at the
beginning of many myths must also be interpreted, I believe, in terms of mimetic rivalry; and
so must the natural disasters such as plagues, great floods, or other mythical scourges that
often include an element of conflict between mythical partners generally conceived as close
relatives, brothers, or identical twins. These themes represent what mythology is unable to
conceive rationally, the undifferentiated reciprocity of mimetic conflict.
Many rituals begin with a mimetic free-for-all during which hierarchies disintegrate,
prohibitions are transgressed, and all participants become each other's conflictual doubles or
"twins." Mimetic rivalry is the common denominator, in my opinion, of what happens in
seasonal festivals, of the so-called ordeal undergone by the future initiates in many initiation
rituals, as well as of the social breakdown that may follow the death of the sacred king or
accompany his enthronement and rejuvenation rituals. The violent demonstrations triggered
in many communities by the death of a member must also be interpreted as mimetic
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rivalry. All these rites amount to a theatrical reenactment of a mimetic crisis in which the
differences that constitute the society are dissolved. Why should communities, at certain
appointed times and also at times when a crisis threatens, mimic the very type of crisis they
dread so much at all times -- that generalized mimetic conflict which prohibitions, in normal
circumstances, are intended to prevent?
The inability to find a satisfactory solution to the mystery of ritual has spelled the failure of
religious anthropology. This failure is not diminished but compounded by the present
tendency to deny it as failure, by denying the existence of the problem and minimizing the
role of religion in all aspects of human culture.
I believe that the key to the mystery lies in the decisive reordering that occurs at the end of
the ritual performance, normally through the mediation of sacrifice. Sacrifice stands in the
same relationship to the ritual crisis that precedes it as the death or expulsion of the hero to
the undifferentiated chaos that prevails at the beginning of many myths. Real or symbolic,
sacrifice is primarily a collective action of the entire community, which purifies itself of its
own disorder through the unanimous immolation of a victim, but this can happen only at the
paroxysm of the ritual crisis.
I am aware that not all rituals fit that definition exactly, and I do not have enough time to show you that the apparent deviations can be brought back to the single common
denominator of the sacrificial immolation. Why should religious communities believe they
can be purged of their various ills and primarily of their internal violence through the
immolation of a victim? In my opinion, this belief must be taken seriously, and the variations
as well as the constants of sacrificial immolation suggests a real event behind blood sacrifice
that takes place in all human communities, as a general rule, and that serves as a model for
religious ritual. The religious communities try to remember that event in their mythologies,
and they try to reproduce it in their sacrifices. Freud was right when he discovered that this
model was a collective murder, but he was wrong, I believe, in his interpretation of that
murder. The problem is made difficult by the necessary misinterpretation and transfiguration
of the event by the religious communities themselves. This misinterpretation is an essential