The Girard Reader (3 page)

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