The Girard Reader (5 page)

deplored because it is one and the same with our inability to transfigure our victims, with our

growing ability, therefore, to see through the collective delusions of scapegoating. This

ability has grown enormously in the last centuries and, in my opinion, it is still growing. The

recognition of mimetic victimage as the major "referent" behind mythology is about to occur,

and it will be only one more step in an advance that began a long time ago and that is not yet over.

The views I am now expressing seem paradoxical because purely formal, structural, and

nonreferential readings are now in vogue, but this state of affairs is only the most visible and

limited consequence of a development which had to take place before the mimetic victimage

hypothesis could appear, and it is the radical critique of all efforts so far to ground mythology

in psychosocial phenomena. The current vogue is short-sighted only in its failure to realize

that mythological systems as a whole may be amenable to an entirely new type of hypothesis

regarding their ultimate origin. These structuralists and poststructuralists who describe my

hypothesis as theoretically regressive have not fully assessed its nature and its significance.

If a society's growing awareness of victimage effects and the weakening of these effects are

correlated, the phenomena we are dealing with are ruled by something like an "uncertainty

principle." As our knowledge of them increases, they tend, if not to disappear, at least to

become marginalized, and that is the reason why some people object to my thesis on the

grounds that victimage phenomena are not effective enough to account for the religious

practices and beliefs of primitive people. This is true, indeed, of the victimage phenomena we

ourselves can observe. At the root of primitive religion, phenomena must be postulated that

are analogous to but not identical with those still taking place around us. If phenomena

completely identical with those we must postulate were still present among us, they would

still generate primitive religion and could not be scientifically observed; they would appear to

us only in the transfigured and unrecognizable shape of religion.

Victimage is still present among us, of course, but in degenerate forms that do not produce

the type of mythical reconciliation and ritual practice exemplified by primitive cults. This

lack of efficiency often means

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that there are more rather than fewer victims. As in the case of drugs, consumers of sacrifice

tend to increase the doses when the effect becomes more difficult to achieve.

This last metaphor is not quite satisfactory, of course, if victimage and sacrifice are the means

through which human societies have always been created and perpetuated. In our world,

sacrificial means have degenerated more and more as victimage, oppression, and persecution

have become predominant issues. No return to the rigidities of prohibition and ritual is in

sight, and some very special cause must be found to account for this unique evolution.

I have an answer to propose, and it is the presence of the biblical text in our midst. This

answer is bound to surprise and even scandalize an intellectual world for which the complete

exclusion of that text is a prerequisite of rationality and scientific research. No one is

disturbed when religious texts that are not specifically our own are assumed to be important

for our modern psyche and for our modern society. But believers and unbelievers alike tend

to become upset when our own religious texts are brought into the picture.

The biblical tendency to "side with the victims" is obvious, but modern students of the Bible tend to limit its consequences to ethical and purely "religious" considerations. If the

preceding is true, this tendency must have epistemological consequences as well. Even in the

most archaic texts, the collective violence that constitutes the hidden infrastructure of all

mythology begins to emerge, and it emerges as unjustified or arbitrary. Behind the story told by the eleven brothers to their father Jacob, after they violently expel from their midst their

twelfth brother, Joseph, there is the vengeful consensus of this violent group. Unlike

mythology, the biblical text rejects that perspective and sees Joseph as an innocent scapegoat,

a victim of his brothers' jealousy, the biblical formulation of our mimetic desire. Later on, in

Egypt, the same mimetic consensus reappears when Joseph is imprisoned. Everybody

believes Joseph has betrayed his adoptive father, Potiphar, and committed with the latter's

wife an action analogous to the incest of Oedipus. The biblical text, unlike the Oedipus myth,

disbelieves this accusation, recognizing in it the kind of story that can be expected from a

community that, for a number of possible reasons, happens to be disturbed and is

mimetically, i.e., unconsciously, looking for scapegoat relief.

The scapegoat in that story is the main subject under investigation, as in countless other

stories, as in the book of job, as in many of the psalms, and a profound reflection is at work,

everywhere in the Bible, regarding the ethical demands that a revelation of victimage and its

refusal places upon human beings. In the Joseph story, again, this time in the last episode, we

see the hero himself engineer a scapegoat
mise en scène
in order to test the possibility of a

change of heart in his brothers.

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These had come a first time to beg for grain, and Joseph, now the most powerful man in

Egypt, had warned them that they would not be supplied with it a second time unless they

brought with them their youngest brother, Benjamin. Besides Joseph, Benjamin is the only

other son of Jacob by his most cherished wife, Rachel.

The famine becomes so serious that the brothers come back, this time with Benjamin. On

Joseph's orders a precious cup that belongs to him is placed in Benjamin's bag. When the

eleven brothers are searched on their way back to Palestine, the youngest appears guilty of

theft and Joseph announces he will be detained. At this point, Judah, one of the ten brothers,

offers to take Benjamin's place as a prisoner of Joseph, for fear, he says, that his father might

die of grief. This dedication of Judah stands in symmetrical opposition to the original deed of

collective violence which it cancels out and reveals. As he hears Judah, Joseph is moved to

tears and identifies himself.

Unique in many of its features, of course, this story is nevertheless typical of the Bible in the

sense that it exemplifies its counter-mythical thrust in the treatment of victimage. This thrust

is also present not only in other similar stories, but in countless other texts that espouse the

perspective of the victim rather than the mythical perspective of the persecutors, such as the

penitential psalms or the book of job. Prophetic inspiration focuses on the revelation of

victimage and the famous songs of the Servant in Second Isaiah constitute its summit; they

provide a complete revelation of collective victimage as the founding mechanism of human

culture. The responsibility for the victim's death is placed squarely upon the community even

though in other parts of the same text God is presented as responsible. The same ambiguity or

even contradiction remains in Christian theology but not in the text of the Gospels, which

replaces the violent God of the past with a nonviolent one whose demand is for nonviolence

rather than sacrifice. The Christ of the Gospels dies against sacrifice, and through his death,

he reveals its nature and origin by making sacrifice unworkable, at least in the long run, and

bringing sacrificial culture to an end. The word "sacrifice" is not important in itself, but the singularity of the Passion is obscured if the same word is used for the Passion and for what

takes place in sacrificial ritual
s. 1. C
an we use the same word for the deed that is committed at the beginning of Joseph's story, when the eleven brothers expel their own brother, and for

Judah's willingness to die, if necessary, in order to prevent the sacrifice of his brother?

The sacrificial misreading common to Christians and non-Christians alike has obscured the

nonsacrificial significance of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures but not entirely suppressed its

impact. Thus, our society could

____________________

1. See the introduction to chapter 6. -
J.W.

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result from a complex interaction between the Judeo-Christian and the sacrificial. Acting

upon the latter as a force of disruption -- as new wine in old wine-skins -- the former would

be responsible for our constantly increased awareness of victimage and for the decadence of

mythology in our world.

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This excerpt is the conclusion to
Violence and the Sacred
, trans. P. Gregory ( Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 309-18. In it Girard does not develop his

concept of mimetic desire* as such, but focuses on the surrogate victim as the cultural

antidote to violence that is represented in sacrifice,* scapegoating,* Greek drama, and

other great literary texts. His understanding of sacrifice has been modified since the

publication of
Violence and the Sacred
. On this shift see the introduction to chapter 6.

A theory of the nature of primitive religion has emerged from the foregoing inquiry into

the origins of myth and ritual. . . .

My theory depends on a number of basic premises. Even if innumerable intermediary

stages exist between the spontaneous outbursts of violence and its religious imitations,

even if it is only these imitations that come to our notice, I want to stress that these

imitations had their origin in a real event. The actuality of this event, over and above its

existence in rite and record, must be kept in mind. We must also take care not to restrict

this event to any one context, any one dominant intellectual framework, whether

semantic or symbolic, which lacks a firm basis in reality. The event should be viewed as

an absolute beginning, signifying the passage from nonhuman to human, as well as a

relative beginning for the societies in question.

The theory of the surrogate victim is paradoxical in that it is based on facts whose

empirical characteristics are not directly accessible. These facts can be drawn

exclusively from texts that invariably offer distorted, fragmentary, or indirect testimony.

We can gain access to the generative event only through constant reference to these

enigmatic sources, which constitute at once the foreground in which our theory situates itself and the background against which its accuracy must be tested.

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The theory of evolution depends on the comparison and linkage of evidence -- the fossil

remains of living creatures -- corresponding, in the case of my hypothesis, to religious

and cultural texts. No single anatomical fact studied in isolation can lead to the concept

of evolution. No direct observation is possible, nor form of empirical verification even

conceivable, because evolution occurred over a span of time entirely out of scale with

the span of human existence.

In the same way no single text -- mythic, religious, or tragic -- will yield the operating

procedures of violent unanimity. Here, too, the comparative method is the only one

possible. If this method has not been successful to date, that is because there are so

many variables at work; it is hard to locate the single underlying scheme that controls

them all. The theory of evolution, too, constitutes a hypothesis.

The surrogate victim theory presents, as a theory, a distinct superiority over the theory

of evolution. The inaccessible character of the generative event is not merely an obstacle

unrelated to the theory, an aspect that contributes nothing of positive value; rather, it is

an essential part of that theory, something we cannot do without. In order to retain its

structuring influence the generative violence must remain hidden; misapprehension is

indispensable to all religious or postreligious structuring. And the hidden nature of the

event corresponds to the researcher's inability to attribute a satisfactory function to

religious practices. My theory is the first to offer an explanation of the primordial role

that religion plays in primitive societies, as well as of man's ignorance of this role.

This hidden nature is much less problematic than a notion like the unconscious of Freud.

1. '
A comparison of certain myths and rituals, viewed in the light of Greek tragedy, leads to the theory of the surrogate victim and violent unanimity through a path much

more direct than that of "verbal slips" to such psychoanalytic concepts as suppressed

desires and the unconscious. Surely such slips can be attributed to many different

causes. But the surrogate victim theory is the only hypothesis that accounts for all

features of the cultural phenomena presented here. Unlike the psychoanalytical

explanations, it leaves no areas in shadow and neglects no major aspects.

Although generative violence is invisible, it can logically be deduced from myths and

rituals once their real structures have been perceived. The further one advances along

this path and the more transparent the true nature of religious thought appears, the