The Girard Reader (14 page)

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.