Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
The Scapegoat Text
J.-M.O.:
If I understand you rightly, the process of misunderstanding that is defined in the
text must also be reproduced once again in the restrictive interpretations that have always
been given of it -- first and foremost, of course, in the interpretations that try to limit its
application to those for whom it is immediately destined.
To read the material in this way is to take an attitude full of consequences. The reading will
tend to reproduce, in circumstances which are historically and ideologically different but
structurally invariant, a violent transference upon the scapegoat, the very form of transference
that has been in force since the dawn of humanity. So it is by no means a fortuitous or
innocent reading. It transforms the universal revelation of the founding murder into a polemical denunciation of the Jewish religion. So as not to have to recognize that they are
themselves involved in the message, people will claim that it only involves the Jews.
R.G.:
This kind of restrictive interpretation is indeed the only way out for a type of thought
that is in principle made over to "Christianity" but is firmly resolved to divest itself of any form of violence, and so inevitably brings with it a new form of violence, directed against a
new scapegoat -- the Jew. In brief, what happens again is what Jesus reproached the Pharisees
for doing, and since Jesus has been accepted, it can no longer be done directly to him. Once
again, the truth and universality of the process revealed by the text is demonstrated as it is
displaced toward the latest available victims. Now it is the Christians who say: "If we had
lived in the days of our Jewish fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding
the blood of Jesus." If the people whom Jesus addresses and who do not listen to him fulfill
the measure of their fathers, then the Christians who believe themselves justified in
denouncing these same people in order to exculpate themselves are fulfilling a measure that is
already full to overflowing. They claim to be governed by the text that reveals the process of
misunderstanding, and yet they repeat that misunderstanding. With their eyes fixed on the
text, they do once again what the text condemns. The only way of transcending this blindness
consists in repudiating -- as is done today -- not the process that is revealed in the text and
can maintain itself, paradoxically, in its shade, but the text itself; the text is declared to be
responsible for the acts of violence committed in its name and actually
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blamed for not, up to now, mastering the old violence except by diverting it to new victims.
There is at present a general tendency among Christians to repudiate this text or an any rate
never to take any account of it, concealing it as if it were something to be ashamed of. There
is one last trick, one last victim, and this is the text itself, which is chained to a fallacious
reading and dragged before the tribunal of public opinion. It is the ultimate irony that the
Gospel text should be condemned by public opinion in the name of charity. Face to face with
a world that is, as we well know, today overflowing with charity, the text appears to be
disconcertingly harsh.
There is actually no contradiction between the choice of the Jews, as it is reaffirmed in the
Gospels, and texts like those of the "curses." If anywhere in the world a religious or cultural form managed to evade the accusation made against the Pharisees -- not excluding those that
confess Jesus himself -- then the Gospels would not be the truth about human culture. In
order for the Gospels to have the universal significance Christians claim for them, it is
necessary for there to be nothing on earth that is superior to the Jewish religion and the sect
of the Pharisees. This absolute degree of representativeness is part and parcel of the status of
the Jews as the chosen people, which is never disavowed by the New Testament.
Nor is there any contradiction between a revelation of violence made on the basis of biblical
texts and the veneration that the New Testament never ceased to show for the Old. As we saw
earlier, when we were considering the texts of Genesis and Exodus, the revelation of the
founding murder and of its generative power in regard to myth become increasingly apparent
in these texts. That implies that even at this early stage the inspiration of the Bible and the
prophets is at work on the myths, undoing them in order to reveal their truth. Instead of
invariably displacing the responsibility for the collective murder toward the victim, this form
of inspiration takes a contrary path; it looks once again at the mythical elaborations and tends
to deconstruct them, placing the responsibility for the violence upon those who are really responsible -- the members of the community. In this way, it paves the way for the full and
final revelation.
J.-M.O.:
To understand that the Gospels really do reveal all this violence, we have to
understand first of all that this violence engenders the mythic meanings. Now I can appreciate
why you decided to place our initial discussions on Judeo-Christian texts after the section on
basic anthropology. You wanted to show that we are now in a position to get to the truth
about all non-Christian religious phenomena by means of purely scientific and hypothetical
procedures. Then the shift to the Judeo-Christian texts confirms the analysis and makes it
more compelling.
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R.G.:
What you say seems quite right to me. In fact, that is exactly why I wrote
Violence and
the Sacred
in the way that I did. I am well aware of the blemishes in that work, as I am of the blemishes in what we have been saying here.
The thesis of the scapegoat owes nothing to any form of impressionistic or literary
borrowing. I believe it to be fully demonstrated on the basis of the anthropological texts. That
is why I have chosen not to listen to those who criticize my scientific claims and have
determined to try to reinforce and sharpen the systematic character of my work, and to
confirm the power of the scheme to reveal the genesis and structure of cultural phenomena.
In effect, all that I did in
Violence and the Sacred
was to retrace, with all its hesitations, my own intellectual journey, which eventually brought me to the Judeo-Christian writings,
though long after I had become convinced of the importance of the victimage mechanism. In
the course of this journey, I remained for a long period as hostile to the Judeo-Christian texts
as modernist orthodoxy could wish. But I came to the conclusion that the best way of
convincing my readers was not to cheat on my own experience and to reproduce its
successive stages in two separate works, one of which would deal with the universe of sacred
science, and the other with the Judeo-Christian aspect.
In the "modern" period, Judeo-Christian writings have become more and more alien to
modern philosophy and all our "sciences of man." They now seem more foreign than the
myths of the Ojibwa and the Tikopia. But our intellectual life is being influenced by forces
that, far from taking Judeo-Christian Scriptures further and further away, in fact bring them
closer by a process whose circularity the "sciences of man" still fail to grasp.
We can no longer believe that if it is we who are reading the Gospels in the light of an
ethnological, modern revelation, which would really be the first thing of its kind. We have to
reverse this order. It is still the great Judeo-Christian spirit that is doing the reading. All that
appears in ethnology, appears in the light of a continuing revelation, an immense process of
historical work that enables us little by little to catch up with texts that are, in effect, already
quite explicit, though not for the kind of people that we are -- who "have eyes and see not,
ears and hear not."
Trusting ever more numerous and precise analogies, ethnological research has been trying for
centuries to demonstrate that Christianity is just one more religion like the others and that
Christianity's pretensions to absolute singularity are founded merely on the irrational
attachment of Christians to the religion within which they chanced to be born. It might appear, at first sight, that the discovery of the mechanism that produces religion -- the
collective transference against a victim who is first reviled and then sacralized -- would bring
with it the final and most
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essential stone in the structure of "demystification" to which this present reading, quite
obviously, presents a sequel. Yet the discovery contributes, not just one more analogy, but the
source of all analogies, which is situated behind the myths, hidden within their infrastructure
and finally revealed, in a perfectly explicit way, in the account of the Passion.
By an astonishing reversal, it is texts that are twenty or twenty-five centuries old -- initially
revered blindly but today rejected with contempt -- that will reveal themselves to be the only
means of furthering all that is good and true in the anti-Christian endeavors of modern times:
the as-yet-ineffectual determination to rid the world of the sacred cult of violence. These texts
supply such endeavors with exactly what is needed to give a radically sociological reading of
the historical forms of transcendence, and at the same time they place their own
transcendence in an area which is impervious to any critique by placing it in the area from
which a critique would derive.
Of course the Gospels also speak tirelessly of this reversal of all interpretations. After telling
the parable of the tenants of the vineyard who
all come together to drive out
the envoys of the Master and then finally to kill his son so that they would be the sole proprietors, Christ offers
his audience a problem in Old Testament exegesis:
But he looked at them and said, "What then is this that is written: 'The very stone which the
builders rejected has become the head of the corner."' ( Luke 20:17)
The quotation comes from Psalm 118. People have always supposed that the question only
invited "mystical" replies, replies that could not be taken seriously on the level of the only kind of knowledge that counts. In this respect as in many others, the anti-religious person is
in complete accord with the weak-kneed, purely "idealist" religious person.
If we accept that all human religions and all human culture come down to the parable of the
murderous tenants of the vineyard -- that is, come down to the collective expulsion of the
victim -- and if this foundation can remain a foundation only to the extent that it does not
become apparent, then it is clear that only those texts in which this foundation is made
apparent will no longer be built upon it and so will be genuinely revealing. The words from
Psalm 118 thus have a remarkable epistemological value; they require an interpretation for
which Christ himself ironically calls, knowing very well that he alone is capable of giving it
in the process of being rejected, of himself becoming the rejected stone, with the aim of
showing that this stone has always formed a concealed foundation. And now the stone is
revealed and can no longer form a foundation, or, rather, it will found something that is
radically different.
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The problem of exegesis Christ puts to his audience can be resolved, in short, only if we see
in the words that he quotes the very formula for the reversal, at once an invisible and an
obvious one, that I am putting forward. The rejected stone is the scapegoat, who is Christ. By submitting to violence, Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religion.
The text alerts us, in short, to its own functioning, which eludes the laws of ordinary
textuality, and by virtue of this fact the warning itself eludes us, as it eluded Christ's
audience. If such is indeed the movement of the text, then the claims of Christianity to make
Christ the author of a universal revelation are far more securely founded than even its
defenders would imagine. They fall back inevitably into ordinary textuality, blotting out once
again the true point of origin, which is nonetheless clearly inscribed in Scripture; they reject
all over again, in a final and paradoxical form of expulsion, the stone that is Christ, and they
still fail to see that this selfsame stone continues to serve them as a concealed cornerstone.
If you read the commentaries customarily written about phrases of this kind, not only by
Christians but also by so-called "scientific" exegetes, you will be amazed by the universal
inability to recognize meanings that are for us by now so obvious that we are hesitant to
repeat the train of reasoning which would make them explicit.
The exegetes are aware, obviously, that Christ identifies with the stone rejected by the
builders, but they fail to see the formidable reverberations of this phrase on the
anthropological level, and the reason why it is already present in the Old Testament.
Instead of reading myths in the light of the Gospels, people have always read the Gospels in
light of myths. In comparison with the astonishing work of demystification effected by the
Gospels, our own exercises in demystification are only slight sketches, though they may also