Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2

René Girard and Sacrifice in Life, Love and Literature

Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781501310911
• eBook ISBN:
  9781623562557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This collection of state of the art interpretations of the thought of René Girard follows on from the volume Violence, Desire, and the Sacred: Girard's Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines (2012). The previous collection has been acclaimed for demonstrating and showcasing Girard's mimetic theory at its inter-disciplinary best by bringing together scholars who apply Girard's insights in different fields. This new volume builds on and extends the work of that earlier collection by moving into new areas such as psychology, politics, classical literature, national literature, and practical applications of Girard's theory in pastoral/spiritual care, peace-making and religious thought and practice.

1

Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred: An Overview of the Thought of René Girard1

Chris Fleming

This chapter provides an overview of the thought of the French–American literary and cultural theorist René Girard, beginning with his theorization of “mimetic desire,” the explanatory hypothesis Girard employs to theorize interpersonal relations. Girard postulates that desire is pre-eminently imitative. Thence we turn to the “scapegoat” or “victimage” mechanism—Girard’s model for how cultural and religious formation takes place through the banishment or lynching of a victim. This event—or series of events—functions to initiate and sustain cultural stability. Finally, we consider the relationship between Judeo-Christian scripture and the scapegoat mechanism, considering Girard’s depiction of the Bible as representing a trenchant critique of “sacred violence.”

Mimesis: A theory of desire

Beginning with the books Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure2 and Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky,3 Girard developed a new theory of desire based around the idea of imitation or “mimesis.”4 As Aristotle noted in Poetics,5 imitation is perhaps the single best defining characteristic of humanity, which distinguishes itself from the rest of the animal kingdom through its increased aptitude and propensity for imitation. From the acquisition of language and the development of regional accents, to the practices of religious discipleship and formal education, it is predominantly through imitation that we are able to learn and come to “inhabit” a culture. Girard suggests: “If human beings suddenly ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish.”6 Girard adds that desire is as dependent on imitation as other cultural phenomena, since we learn to desire both what and how others desire. Girard distinguishes between “appetites” and “needs” on the one hand and “desire” on the other. Where the former are constituted by the biological basis of life, and include such things as the basic requirement for food and water (rather than any particular kind of food or water), desire is more amorphous than appetites and far less easy to satisfy:

Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess.7

Thus, Girard argues that what we desire is always “mediated” or “modeled” to us by other people, who in turn have their desires mediated or modeled to them. Desire, in this sense, is contagious—it is capable of being “caught.” This jars with popular, Romantic ideas about individual human autonomy, which tend to suggest that desires are invariably the product of “inner,” subjective (rather than intersubjective) preferences. By claiming that desire is “mimetic,” Girard’s view of desire appears structurally—if not substantively—similar to Freud’s: it is most easily schematized by the triangle. Desire is not a single line of force that runs between the subject and the desired object, but is more properly figured as a triangle in which the real energy of desire is provided by the mediator, who renders an object desirable.

This understanding figures desire as pre-eminently relational; that is, desire (like the Newtonian notion of “gravity”) resides not in any one object or person by itself, but rather is constituted in the relationships between people. In this respect at least, Girard’s thought remains firmly within the tradition of French psychoanalysis of the late twentieth century, which emphasized the radically social character of human psychology over the monadic, or individual, self.8 As Jacques Lacan states in Écrits: “It is in the specific reality of inter-human relations that psychology can locate its proper object and its method of investigation.”9

In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, a collection of studies on the novels of Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust, Girard argued that the theory of mimetic desire, despite his systematization, was not quite his invention. Rather, he identified its incipient logic in certain novels, detecting a comprehension of the mimetic or imitative nature of desire that he argued was on a par with, and often outflanked, the most perceptive of standard behaviorist or psychoanalytic approaches to human behavior. Here, literature has an epistemological value as powerful as, or more powerful than, its esthetic or ethical value.

In Miguel de Cervantes’ seventeenth-century novel Don Quixote the hero announces his desire to be a perfect imitation of the legendary knight Amadis de Gaul:

I want you to know, Sancho, that the famous Amadis of Gaul was one of the most perfect knight errants … Amadis was the pole, the star for brave and amorous knights and we others who light under the banner of love and chivalry should imitate him. Thus, my friend Sancho, I reckon that whoever imitates him best comes closest to perfect chivalry.10

The imitation of Amadis, so enthusiastically taken up by the hero, exerts heavy influences on Don Quixote’s judgment, his actions, and his emotions; it determines his romantic attachments, religious observances, and even his vision. Quixote hallucinates and transforms a quotidian Spanish countryside into a place of damsels in distress, lurking evil, and heroic knights. In turn, Quixote’s imitation of Amadis itself proves to be contagious: Sancho Panza, the simple farmer who is the hero’s companion and who imitates his master’s desires, suddenly wants to become governor of his own island and his daughter to become a duchess.

The kind of mimetic desire at work in Don Quixote is what Girard describes as “externally mediated.” Here, the model/mediator of desire is removed—historically, ontologically, spiritually—from the desiring subject such that there is no realistic possibility for rivalry between the subject and the mediator concerning an object of desire. Don Quixote is as unlikely to become a rival of Amadis of Gaul as a Christian is to become a rival of Christ.

But Girard also provides a description of a type of mimetic desire structured by “internal mediation”: a situation in which the subject’s and the model’s objects of desire overlap and become a matter of potential, and often actual, conflict. For example, in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, the character Monsieur de Rênal decides to hire the tutor Julien Sorel on the basis that his rival, Monsieur Valenod, is thought to be planning to do the same. As it tums out, Valenod wasn’t planning this, but now that Sorel has been employed by Monsieur de Rênal, Valenod also attempts to hire him—although both men are, in actual fact, indifferent to the educational possibilities of tutoring and seem to care very little for the tutor himself. That this constitutes “internal mediation” is evidenced by the explicit rivalry between model and mediator, possible because both Valenod and Rênal occupy a similar social status and live in the same town during the same period in history. Unlike Quixote’s admiration for Amadis, the antagonists of The Red and the Black serve both as models for each other’s desire and, most notably, as obstacles to its consummation.

Having identified this propensity for mimesis to increasingly generate internal mediation, and hence conflict, Girard pursued his inquiry into the new fields (for him) of cultural and social anthropology. By the time his third book, Violence and the Sacred, appeared in 1972, Girard had incorporated his notion of mimetic desire into a more general theory of cultural formation.

Violence and the Sacred: Scapegoating, myth, and texts of persecution

One of the central insights of Girard’s early work was the notion that conflictual (internally mediated) desire moves in the direction of the effacement of differences between people: as rivalry intensifies, characteristics that previously distinguished individuals begin to erode and antagonists effectively become “doubles” of each other. This intensification of the mutual imitation of rival desires and actions produces a situation where the protagonists become progressively more obsessed with each other than with the putative object of their desire. They mirror each other in an attempt to differentiate themselves—to be the one to acquire the object of desire over the other—though such an intensification does nothing but eliminate differences. It is thus an ironic effect of rivalrous (internally mediated) desire that increasingly desperate attempts at differentiation work toward the effacement of all significant differences between people; for example, the more Rênal and Valenod attempt to outdo each other (in their quest for Julien), the more both come to resemble each other.

This escalation of conflict and rivalry operating through the effacement of differences on a social scale is what Girard calls a “sacrificial crisis,” an intensification of violent activity that works—starting at a local level—progressively to undermine cultural order. For Girard, cultural order is simply a “regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual relationships.”11 Logically, then, the sacrificial crisis, being essentially a “crisis of distinctions,”12 gradually undermines the identities of subjects and the social hierarchies that underwrite these: “Culture,” Girard asserts, “is … eclipsed as it becomes less differentiated.”13

But there is a problem with this scenario left simply as it is: if mimetic desire often moves in the direction of internal mediation, and if the pervasiveness of internally mediated desire invariably produces conflict and rivalry—the effacement of differences and the production of conflictual “doubling”—then humanity seems destined to endless cycles of violence and the erosion of social and cultural structures. Given that this is Girard’s contention, how then can one account for the development and maintenance of culture, and the continued operation of highly complex social institutions?

Violence and the Sacred represents Girard’s first sustained attempt to consider this question in detail. Here, he argues that at the most intense moment of conflict, a violent resolution to the crisis will emerge; violence is itself invariably culture’s “answer” to disintegration and disorder: a directed act of violence functions to resolve violence at a general, diffuse level. Girard contends that ultimately we deal with conflict generated by mimetic contagion and progressive undifferentiation by means of fixing our attention on some marginalized figure or group, and, after attributing to them the cause of the te...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Foreword, Paul Dumouchel
• Introduction
• 1 Mimesis, Violence, and the Sacred: An Overview of the Thought of René Girard Chris Fleming
• Part One Politics
• 2 Abolition or Transformation? The Political Implications of René Girard’s Theory of Sacrifice Wolfgang Palaver
• 3 Sacrifice in the Democratic Age: Rivalry and Crisis in Recent Australian Politics Joel Hodge
• 4 Mimetic Theory and Hermeneutic Communism Paolo Diego Bubbio
• 5 War on Terror: The Escalation to Extremes Sarah Drews Lucas
• 6 Scapegoating the Guilty: Girard and International Criminal Law Nathan Kensey
• Part Two Cultural and Textual Analysis
• 7 The Scapegoating of Cheerleading and Cheerleaders Emma A. Jane
• 8 “Things Hidden”: On Shame, Violence, and Concealment in Autobiography Rosamund Dalziell
• 9 “That False Paradise”: Desire, Sacrifice, and the American Dream in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides Carly Osborn
• Part Three Theology
• 10 Hearing the Cry of the Poor: René Girard and St. Augustine on the Psalms Ann W. Astell
• 11 Sacrifice, Pagan and Christian Robert J. Daly SJ
• 12 Living Faithfully “Where Danger Threatens”: Christian Discernment According to John Cassian and René Girard Kevin Lenehan
• Part Four Psychology
• 13 A Psychologist Venturing Across an Interdisciplinary Bridge to Mimetic Theory and Its Applications Marie R. Joyce
• 14 Internet Offenders as Girardian Scapegoats Bruce A. Stevens
• Part Five Applied Mimetic Theory
• 15 A Girardian Reading of the Evagrian “Eight Kinds of Evil Thoughts” Draško Dizdar
• 16 Forsaking Our Violent Ways: A Girardian Reflection on the Sermon on the Mount as a Path to a New Social Order Peter Stork
• 17 Girard’s Interdividual Psychology Applied to Pastoral Leadership in Churches Bruce Wilson
• 18 Ecclesial Roots of Clergy Sexual Abuse: A Girardian Reflection Scott Cowdell
• 19 Practical Reflections on Nonviolent Atonement Michael Hardin
• Glossary of Key Girardian Terms
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright