This book is conceived as a series of conversations on philosophy between Girard and his collaborators. This allows for a back and forth that gradually penetrates deeper into the heart of the matter. This is philosophy book on the very nature of man, social relations, and the founding of civilization. Girard begins by discussing how culture gradually coalesces through imitation, rivalry, and religion. “One must understand religion in order to understand philosophy. Since the attempt to understand religion on the basis of philosophy has failed, we ought to try the reverse method and read philosophy in the light of religion.” Imitation can either be a threat to social cohesion or a cause of conformity. It either contains or gives rise to conflict. Girard begins by taking on early forms of religion. He sees sacrifice as unifying, with the victim as the scapegoat- “the entire community on one side, and on the other, the victim.” Ritual is the attempt to channel crisis into a resolution that will reconcile the community at the expense of this scapegoat. “It is possible to see why the victim is believed to be sacred. The victim is held responsible for the renewed calm in the community and for the disorder that preceded this return.” Culture is created through mimetic rivalry, the banding together against the single victim, and the normative resolution, which reasserts order and calm.
Human relations are about rivalry. “As rivalry becomes acute, the rivals are more apt to forget about whatever the objects are, in principle, the cause of the rivalry and instead become more fascinated with one another. In effect the rivalry is purified of any external stake and becomes a matter of pure rivalry and prestige. Each rival becomes for his counterpart the worshipped and despised model and obstacle, the one who must at once be beaten and assimilated…. The value of an object grows in proportion to the resistance met with in acquiring it.”
Girard goes on to discuss the purpose of early religion. “Religion is nothing other than this immense effort to keep the peace. The sacred is violence, but if religious man worships violence it is only insofar as the worship of violence is supposed to bring peace; religion is entirely concerned with peace, but the means it has of bringing it about are never free of sacrificial violence.” This was the beginning of myth. The hero is killed in response to his bringing about the disintegration of the community. The hero is the victim responsible for all disorder. Sacrifice is the mechanism by which order is restored. The expulsion of the victim unites the previously fractured community. In fact, Girard posits that the motive behind animal domestication was breeding docile animals for sacrifice. The group hunt was another form of bonding through victim searching. “The common denominator is the collective murder.”
Religion created the taboo in order to contain mimetic rivalry between community members. “The most available and accessible objects are prohibited because they are the most likely to provoke mimetic rivalries among the members of the group. Sacred objects, totemic foods, female deities- these have certainly been the cause of real mimetic rivalries in the past, before they were made sacred. That is the reason they were. Therefore they become the objects of strict prohibitions.” Violence within the community is contained through the mechanism of the sacred scapegoat. The victim is set apart from the community. He is foreign and a visitor, outside of the rest. The scapegoat, by being set apart, insures cooperation from within. For this mechanism to bond the community, intra-societal rage has to be effectively suppressed, as well as any desire to topple and confront internal hierarchies. Violence had to be ritualized in order that it be stabilized. Hierarchy was a mechanism to control mimetic rivalries. However, “the only true scapegoats are those we cannot recognize as such.” The founding myth is told from the point of view of the persecutors, the whole community. Modernity threatens this coping mechanism. “The emergence of a true science of man will mark the beginning of a radially new climate; it will open a universe of absolute responsibility…. If man acts as he has in the past and abandons himself to mimetic contagion, there will be no victimage mechanisms to save him.”
Girard next analyzes the Christian scriptures. He focuses on the role of doubles. This concerns the prevalence of brothers and violence. “The combat of doubles results in the expulsion of one of the pair, and this is identified directly with the return to peace and order.” Christianity, from Girard’s point of view, is about “rehabilitating the victim and denouncing the persecutors.” It is pointing out that, in fact, the victim was not the cause of crisis. He was innocent, but the culture, in fact, was founded on his collective murder, dressed as sacred action. Christianity de-mythologizes and de-sacralizes. It puts responsibility on the unanimity of the community, instead of the scapegoat. “Satan denotes the founding mechanism itself- the principle of all human community…. Satan is the name for the mimetic process seen as a whole; that is why he is the source not merely of rivalry and disorder but of all the forms of lying order inside which humanity lives.” Tombs are built to honor the dead, but also to hide them- to hide the ritualized murder. “People do not wish to know that the whole of human culture is based on the mythic process of conjuring away man’s violence by endlessly projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all religions are built on this foundation, which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body that it conceals.”
Christianity lays waste to the myth of the scapegoat. “It means that there will be no more victims from now on who are persecuted unjustly but those persecuted will not eventually be recognized as unjust. For no further sacralization is possible. No more myths can be produced to cover up the fact of persecution. The Gospels make all forms of ‘mythologizing’ impossible since, by revealing the founding mechanism, they stop it from functioning.” The collective murder, told from the point of view of the persecutors, only works before it is revealed for what it is. The victim is innocent. “The Gospels only speak of sacrifices in order to reject them and deny them any validity.” All violence is blamed on humanity, never on God. “Look again at the Sermon on the Mount. We can see that the significance of the kingdom of God is completely clear. It is always a matter of bringing together warring brothers, of putting an end to the mimetic crisis by a universal renunciation of violence…. Only the unconditional and, if necessary, unilateral renunciation of violence can put an end to the relation of doubles. The Kingdom of God means the complete and definitive elimination of every form of vengeance and every form of reprisal in relations between men…. Escaping from violence is escaping from this kingdom into another kingdom, whose existence the majority of people do not even suspect. This is the Kingdom of love, which is also the domain of the true God, the Father of Jesus, of whom the prisoners of violence cannot even conceive.” Violence must be seen as a human construct, apart from God. Violence, even in retribution, must be seen as illegitimate. “Since all violence has a mimetic character, and derives or can be thought to derive from a first violence that is always perceived as originating with the opponent- this act of renunciation is no more than a sham.” Girard finally contemplates the idea of sacrifice in this modern nuclear age, “we who sacrifice fabulous resources to fatten the most inhuman form of violence so that it will continue to protect us, and who pass our time in transmitting futile messages from a planet that is risking destruction to planets that are already dead- how can we have the extraordinary hypocrisy to pretend that we do not understand all those people who did such things long before us: those, for example, who made it their practice to throw a single child, or two at most, into the furnace of a certain Moloch in order to ensure the safety of others?” The City of Man is founded on hating together, while the City of God is founded on unconditional love.
Girard next tackles mimetic desire more broadly and how it infects secular society. Whereas religious societies had rigid frameworks, in modernity social standing has become fluid, differences and barriers have been removed, and so mimetic desire has grown. Freedom has bred competition. Culture is about imitation, but we envy what we do not possess. The disputed object is fought after by all. Desire is never-ending as one desire builds on another in a repetitive cycle. There is never enough. “Desire seeks ever for success. But it will have nothing to do with easy success; like Nietzsche, it is only interested in lost causes.” Soon the object itself disappears. There is only a quest to become the role model, who, in turn, becomes the obstacle. “There is an inbuilt tendency for depression increasingly to overtake the initial mimetic euphoria.” No one can escape mimetic desire, but one must not lose sight of the object of desire and become consumed with the model. “being rational- functioning properly- is a matter of having objects and being busy with them; being mad is a matter of letting oneself be taken over completely by the mimetic models, and so fulfilling the calling of desire…. Madness is particularly human in so far as it carries to an extreme the very tendency that is furthest removed from the animal part of man.” Rivals and obstacles constantly spring up as we are constantly imitating the desires of others. The only desires deemed worthy are those objects that are impossible to actually possess. “In a world that is utterly devoid of objective criteria, desires are devoted entirely to mimetism.” Narcissism becomes a pose to feign self-desire in order to engender the desire of others. Self-sufficiency is a fraud. "In reality, the psychotic goes furthest in objectifying what people have never been able to objectify, since he strives, in his 'metaphysical hubris', to incarnate this stabilizing element within himself.” The aim is to break the mimetic cycle, but this is an almost impossible task. “Mimetic desire thinks that it always chooses the most life-affirming path, whereas in actuality it turns increasingly toward the obstacle- toward sterility and death.”
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