The Girard Reader (35 page)

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