“All Desire is a Desire For Being” by Rene Girard

This is a posthumous collection of Girard’s essays, interviews, and speeches chosen by his biographer, Cynthia Haven. True to form, almost all of the selections center around Girard’s themes of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. Girard suggests, “Even the most passionate among us never feel they truly are the persons they want to be. To them, the most wonderful being, the only semi-god, is always someone else whom they emulate and from whom they borrow their desires, thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”

One of Girard’s essays revolves around Nietzsche and his concept of the death of God, while also discussing the eternal return, organized religion, and the scapegoat function. “Nietzsche defines in rigorous fashion the passage of disorder to the sacrificial order through the mediation of the collective murder and the rituals which spring from it. One cannot kill the gods, any gods, without engendering new ones…. Nietzsche designates it as ‘the most elevated philosophy,’ the philosophy of eternal recurrence…. The philosophy of the eternal recurrence is a reflection on the identity of the forces of life and death in antique and primitive religion. Every dissolution is a new creation…. One must lift oneself above current history to see the totality of cycles and to recognize linear time as illusory.”

Girard admired Freud’s conceptual framework, while considering his theories to be incomplete, if not off-base. Here, Girard riffs on the dance of Salome, “Contrary to what Freud believes, to what we all believe, there is no preordained object of desire. Children in particular have to be told what to desire…. Children are taught desire through example or speech, or both. Children imitate the desire of prestigious adults…. The imitation is fiercer than the original…. The child asks the adult, not to fulfill some desire that would be hers, but to provide her with the desire she lacks…. Our sacrosanct cult of desire prevents our recognizing this sameness. Desire is supposed to generate differences…. Far from individualizing its victims, as our modern cult of desire demands, mimetic desire makes them interchangeable…. As desire intensifies, it renders its victims increasingly interchangeable…. Desire has no worse enemy than its own truth. Desire does its best to turn the truth into a scandal…. The child inevitably takes the nearest adult as his model. If he encounters only people already scandalized, too busy with their scandalous desire to respond positively, he takes their behavior as a model and turns him- or herself into a mimetic reproduction of it, a grotesque caricature.”

In a digression from his usual hobbyhorses, Girard discusses constancy in the thought of the intellectual. “We live in an age of middle-class ‘individualism’ in which self-consistency is rated as a major virtue. But a thinker is not bound by the same rules as a statesman or a banker…. Progress in matters of the spirit is often a form of self-destruction; it may entail a violent reaction against the past.”

Haven ends by selecting a few choice maxims coined by Girard. Girard had little time for politics. “Democracy is one vast middle-class court where the courtiers are everywhere and the king is nowhere.” On society being enraptured by violence, he states, “Violence, far from serving the interests of whoever exerts it, reveals the intensity of his desire; thus it is a sign of slavery.” He pontificates on the tendency of all to scapegoat, “The best way not to be crucified, in the final analysis, is to do as everyone else and join in the cruxifixction.” He elaborates, “The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.” Girard suggests, “Choose your enemies carefully because you will become like them.” He continues, “The rules of the Kingdom of God are not at all utopian: if you want to put an end to mimetic rivalry, give way completely to your rival.”

“The One by Whom Scandal Comes” by Rene Girard

In this book Girard updates and revises some of his framework of mimetic rivalry. But as he makes clear at the outset, he still feels, “mimeticism is the very substance of all manner of human relations…. Passion, intense desire, is born the moment our vague longings are trained on a model that suggests to us what we should desire, typically in desiring the model itself. This model may be society as a whole, but often it is an individual whom we admire. Everything that humanity endows with prestige it transforms into a model…. Far from being the most personal emotion there is, our desire comes from others. Nothing could be more social.” This is how rivalry develops. Once I desire what a model who is close to me desires we both covet the same object. The model has become the obstacle. Furthermore, “desire becomes more intense on both sides. The model becomes the imitator of his imitator.” The spiral escalates as desire grows. “Human relations are the unending exercise in mutual imitation- the essence of which is perfectly captured by a not wholly transparent word, reciprocity.” 

Culture was founded to restrict the escalation of rivalry into violence. It deescalates conflict and puts people in their proper hierarchy. “The prohibition always falls on a family’s nearest, most accessible possessions- which are therefore the ones likeliest to arouse conflict.” In the olden times this was often the womenfolk of the family. “In several languages the word meaning “gift” also means “poison.” In very, very remote times all gifts…. were poisoned: their original owners gave away only things that were a source of trouble and annoyance to them, and that they therefore sought to rid themselves of, in exchange for things that were just as useful but less bothersome, for the simple reason that they came from elsewhere…. The reciprocal exchange of gifts proved to be a workable system because gifts that were poisoned to begin with became harmless once they were transferred to a foreign community.” Still, in the process of gift giving we see the mimetic process involving similarities and differences at work. One has to try hard to get the balance just right. “Prudence requires no less strict equivalence in the giving of gifts than in the bartering of goods. Each party must imitate the other as closely as possible, while at the same time giving the impression of spontaneity.” The right gift must not show up the other party, nor give offense at being too paltry. It must be equivalent, yet unique. “One escapes the Charybdis of insufficient difference only in order to fall into the Scylla of excessive difference.”

Modernism destroyed many of the bounds set up by hierarchy. “Mimetic theory reveals the true reason for the cyclical conceptions one finds among the Hindus and the pre-Socratic philosophers.” Modernism, in contrast, sought to champion equality and reciprocity in their good forms, destroying both the bad and the good of social taboos. “Modernism’s wager is that good reciprocity will win out in the end.” The problem with mimetic violence is that when one is trapped in its spiral neither party is often aware of its onset. “No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to violence committed in the first instance by someone else.” One must act above the fray if one is to end the cycle of violence. An eye for eye might be justice, but it will only inflame the mimeticism. “For if we treat them as they treat us, they will be able to disguise their own injustice by means of reprisals that are fully warranted by the violence we have committed. It is therefore necessary to deprive them of the negative collaboration they demand of us. Violent persons must always be disobeyed, not only because they encourage us to do harm, but because it is only through disobedience that a lethally contagious form of collective behavior can be short-circuited.”

Girard’s other major idea is that of the founding myth created by violence towards scapegoats. This is the very act that initially unites a peoples and creates a culture. “All other members of the society will unite against them by reproducing the founding act of violence, the act that serves as a model for all sacrifices, for all religious rites of purification. The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.” This scapegoat is not an actual perpetrator. He does no wrong. He is arbitrary. He merely serves the purpose of the community. “Behind the ritual of the scapegoat, there is something more than mere superstition; there is also the tendency, universal among human beings, to take out their anger on a substitute, on an alternative victim…. Everywhere and always, when human beings either cannot or dare not take their anger out on the thing that has caused it, they unconsciously search for substitutes, and more often than not they find them.” This process works as long as the myth is not revealed. Only through utter unanimity in the community does the lie succeed in becoming a founding truth. “There is no human society that is not liable to break down as a result of its own violence. Every society seeks to thwart this tendency through a specific behavior of which it resolutely remains unaware…. the spontaneous, mimetic convergence of an entire community upon a single victim- the descendant of an original scapegoat- on whose head all hatreds are discharged so that they will not spread with catastrophic effect, destroying the community.”

Girard makes effort to look at myth through a biblical lens. Myth preceded, and in many ways was shattered by, the Abrahamic traditions. “In biblical texts, victims are innocent and collective violence is to blame. In myths, the victims are to blame and communities are always innocent…. Myths are rooted in crowd phenomena, which fool both the makers of myths and their audience.” The Bible is more moral than myths in the sense that it is reality. “It is more moral because it is the truth. Victims are scapegoats who have been selected solely through a process of violent mimeticism, which is why they are truly innocent. The role of unanimity ensures the victim will be a scapegoat. The “sins” of mythical heroes are too reminiscent of the ones associated with bloodthirsty crowds not the be the product of the same mentality.” The Bible was different because, for the first time, unanimity was broken. The lie was revealed.  Disunion ensued. “The sudden intrusion of the truth destroyed a social harmony that depended on the lie of unanimous violence…. In mythic accounts, the opinion of the crowd is never subjected to criticism from a dissident minority. Conversely, many psalms describe the narrator as being hounded by a crowd, without any provocation on his part.” The Bible takes the perspective of the victim. It calls truth to the violence of the crowd, the founding lie. “The New Testament completes the process of desacralization by revealing what is revealed nowhere else- the mimetic genesis of scapegoats, and their founding and organizing role in human culture.” Jesus “sacrificed” himself, but was not “sacrificed” for he would not allow the community to turn him into the scapegoat. The lie was exposed through his death. “What Jesus proposed to men so that they might escape violence [was he] invited them to be done with mimetic rivalries. Each time a potential rival makes unreasonable demands of us, or what seem to be unreasonable demands, instead of treating him in the same manner one must yield on the issue in dispute; one must avoid escalating violence, which leads directly to scapegoating…. To protect itself against its own violence, mankind had ended up directing it against innocents. Christ did just the opposite. He offered no resistance. It was not in order to play the game of his enemies that he gave himself up to be sacrificed, but in order to put an end to sacrifice…. Christ died so that humanity might abandon the habit of violent sacrifice.” He tried to end the habit of sacrifice of another by assuming a sacrifice of himself. In doing so he not only put a lie to him being the scapegoat, but of all the scapegoats who had preceded him in the archaic past. “Christ is not simply another sacralized scapegoat. Christ became a scapegoat in order to desacralize those who came before him and to prevent those who come after him from being sacralized.” Jesus put an end to God’s responsibility for violence and put it squarely on the heads of man. Collective human violence was shown for what it was: not a sacrifice on behalf of the Gods, but collective murder of an innocent victim.

The second half of the book takes the form of a discussion, where Girard discusses with a colleague the finer points of his mimetic theory. “Knowing the emissary victim requires a certain kind of conversion, namely, that one has to come to see oneself as a persecutor…. What we call conversion is, finally, the experience of the scapegoat becoming the subjective experience of the persecutor.” We finally see the other side of the coin. This is destabilizing for the community, however. “Since the victim is not guilty, he no longer has the power to absorb violence.” Girard discusses the role of submission to tradition in the Catholic Church. “Paul was more radical than Peter. He lectured Peter, and often strongly disapproved of him. But in the end Paul always gave into him because he knew that Christ had wanted Peter to speak for him. Paul went right to the heart of the matter in everything, and here he recognized the authority of tradition- a tradition that had only been in existence for a quarter-century! And it is because he was perfectly aware of what was at stake that he acted as he did. If he hadn’t, Christianity would never have survived; it would have fallen apart at once. To understand Christianity and orthodoxy one must think of Paul. Paul was indeed stronger than Peter, better educated, more cosmopolitan, but he always yielded to Peter’s primacy.”

Girard on Judaism and the history of Jewish people in the world, “the universality of Judaism comes from the fact that the Jews exemplify the experience of all peoples; that is, they resemble all the scapegoats of history.” On the domestication of animals, “why did people keep animals with them? Surely in order to make sacrificial victims of them. It is sacrifice that taught human beings to eat meat, to drink milk, and so on. And it is sacrifice that led to the domestication of those animals that could be domesticated.” The process began in prehistory, but it is first recorded in “the theory and practice of sacrifice in the Brahmanas. Everything is there: doubles, sacrifice as a form of lottery, the creative character of sacrifice, and so on. The explanation of sacrifice, in the strict sense, is inextricable from the reality of evolution. Sacrifices had to be repeated over hundreds of thousands of years in order to produce sacred kings, animal domestication, and many other human institutions. All these things came out of sacrifice just as the Hindus said.” On Tocqueville’s prescient analysis of American republicanism, “he was the first to perceive the difference between democracy and monarchy, which he rightly saw as being based on a unique kind of sacrificial animal, the king. Democracy, although it contains as many obstacles as there are individuals in society, leads people to believe that there are no more obstacles, because the king has been overthrown. No one before Tocqueville saw that, to the contrary, if the shadow of the cripple is no longer cast over the world, it is because the world is on its way to becoming a cemetery.” On modern consumerism, “people say, we all want the same thing; and the economy says, you shall have the same thing…. Mimetic desire is satisfied only for a time, which grows ever shorter. New toys must always be found, and that’s getting harder and harder to do.”

On the prevalence of twins in myth, “the troubling identity of mythic twins is a metaphor for the conflictual collapse of differences, a source of infinite disorder…. Mimetic crisis sharpens oppositions- not by reinforcing differences, as the dominant ideology of individualism claims, but by emptying them of their content, by undifferentiating them.” On the crippled victims of animal and man, “predators typically choose the weakest members of a troop of antelopes, for example, since wounded, injured, or otherwise disabled individuals are always easier to capture than healthy ones. Later they were to be found in human cultures, in the form of the archaic divinities- Greek, Hindu, and so on- to which collective murder gave birth. Human beings in search of scapegoats prey upon this same type of individual, which is why so many of the archaic and ancient gods are lame or crippled. The mimetic genesis of religion may be situated in the seemingly interminable transition between animal and man.” On managing violence in society, “it isn’t consciousness that keeps violence at bay in archaic religion, but prohibitions, which are aimed at eliminating opportunities for violence, and rites, which, in furnishing violence with an outlet that is itself violent, only to a smaller degree, transform the most lethal violence into a less lethal form.” On reason and the mob, “the informative function of reason has no effect on the crowd, which is governed instead by the scapegoat mechanism. Either this mechanism operates as it should and produces unanimity, in which case witnesses are false witnesses, or it fails to produce unanimity and ceases to operate.” Girard sums it all up, “but if you ask me what mimeticism is, I will tell you: it’s pride, anger; it’s envy, jealousy- these are the cardinal sins. It’s lust as well. Human sexuality is very important, because it’s a permanent impulse, not something episodic or intermittent. There are no tranquil interludes in human life. Rivalry is what sustains desire.”

“Conversations with Rene Girard” by Rene Girard (edited by Cynthia L. Haven)

This is a short collection of dialogues between Girard and various interlocutors over the years. The conversations cover much of his career as an anthropologist and historian, particularly his theory of mimetic desire. This project has sought to glean insights into the modern world as it shifts to a post-Christian age. “We live in a world where a great deal more is demanded of the communities and of each individual in terms of self-mastery. But at the same time, very often our world is one which abandons ethics, which abandons any ideal of self-mastery. We surrender to a philosophy of self-gratification that ends up in pure consumerism.” There is a distinct lack of the role of the individual in Girard’s mimetic theory. “Since the individual figures in my scheme only so far as he is involved with other individuals, the epistemology of the isolated consciousness wouldn’t make a great deal of sense for me. I feel that one of the advantages of my theory is its pragmatic effectiveness…. That’s why mimetic theory interests me so much: you can start with it at the animal level and trace it across the threshold of hominization right into human culture. That threshold is when the victim becomes the conscious object of attention by members of the community…. You have cultural specificity, a break between animal and man.” Man is a competitive animal. “The error is always in reasoning from categories of “difference.” The root of all conflicts relies rather on “competition,” in mimetic rivalry between persons, countries, and cultures. Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if necessary…. Human relations are essentially relations of imitation and competition…. What is happening today is mimetic rivalry on a global scale…. But if you ask me what mimeticism is, I will tell you: it’s pride, anger; it’s envy, jealousy—these are the cardinal sins. It’s lust as well. Human sexuality is very important, because it’s a permanent impulse, not something episodic or intermittent. There are no tranquil interludes in human life. Rivalry is what sustains desire…. Mimetic desire is when our choice is not determined by the object itself, as we normally believe, but by another person. We imitate the other person, and this is what “mimetic” means…. And of course, envy is mimetic. You cannot help imitating your model…. Envy is a denial of your own being and accepting the fact that you prefer the being of your rival.” As Girard has detailed before, the scapegoat mechanism was the route that archaic societies used to squash mimetic rivalry before violence spread out of hand within their own communities. “Before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their rituals precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That’s the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed.”

“Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith- A Dialogue” by Rene Girard and Gianni Vattimo

This book contains a series of three public debates between Girard and Vattimo, from the late 1990s, followed by concluding essays by both men, summarizing their differing positions. Girard is a French anthropologist and Vattimo an Italian philosopher, but both are practicing Catholics, though neither doctrinaire by any means. Girard should be regarded as the more traditionalist of the pair, whereas Vattimo considers himself a left Heideggerian nihilist, who has found his way back to Catholicism. The two find plenty in common, however. The debates’ moderator, Pierpaolo Antonello, suggests, “if we seek a unifying philosophical theme encompassing both authors, a common cornerstone of their outlook, that would be “the death of God” in both the philosophical and the anthropological senses.”

Vattimo states that, after reading Girard, a key term he began implementing was secularization. He defines it thus, “secularization, which I take to mean the effective realization of Christianity as a nonsacrificial religion…. Secularization is not the relinquishment of the sacred but the complete application of the sacred tradition to given human phenomena…. Christianity is the religion that opens the way to an existence not strictly religious, if we take “religious” to mean binding restraints, imposition, authority…. Charity takes the place of discipline.” Girard offers a word of caution. “If our cultural evolution has led us to substitute ourselves for God, then we had better realize that we have taken on an enormous responsibility…. Judaism and Christianity are aware that if we try to do away with all the prohibitions, the limits that the archaic religions imposed, we are putting at risk not only ourselves but the existence of the whole world…. Secularization also entails the end of the sacrificial…. When, thanks to Christianity, we get rid of the sacred, there is a salvific opening up to agape, to charity, but there is also an opening up to perhaps greater violence.” Girard goes on by describing the facts common to all archaic myth, as he sees them. “Every myth is a failed Passion. Not in the sense that the victim was not killed, but that the anthropological truth of this death, of this innocent death, was not unveiled. The question the Passion poses is: which side are we on? Are we with the crowd that accuses Jesus of being guilty, or are we on the other side?… Myth is always dominated by the viewpoint of the crowd, which designates the victim and proclaims his guilt, whereas in the Passion story we see the other side too, the position of the innocent victim.”

In the next debate between Girard and Vattimo, the two discuss cultural, ethical, and moral relativism. Vattimo begins, “I think of God as relativist because he is the only entity who really could be, given that he gazes down on the various cultures of humanity from on high.” Girard brings in his ideas on mimetism. “The mimetic theory is an effort to demonstrate that cultural differences, no matter how significant they may be at one level, are insignificant at another…. Man is essentially competitive and inclined to rivalry. He wants to outdo his neighbor, and so he competes with him. Human intelligence, the spirit of initiative, is basically competitive.”

In the final debate, where the men discuss their readings of Heidegger and Nietzsche, Girard brings up what he sees as the crucial point. “The most important thing Nietzsche ever said about religion (and, I would hazard, the most important thing said in theology since the time of Saint Paul) is that in myth the victim is always expelled and justly killed (and in this sense, I, too, could claim to be a bit of a Nietzschean), whereas the community bears no blame. Sacrifice is something necessary and therefore positive because a community, a society, that cannot kill, that cannot victimize, no matter if the victims are innocent, is condemned to extinction; it is condemned to exactly the kind of weakness we have today, a weakness inherited from Christianity…. [Nietzsche] chooses to take the part of violence!” In the end, Girard asks of Vattimo, in a world stripped of the safety valve of the scapegoat mechanism, “How do we control the ever-present tendency of the crowd to veer off into some excess?”

“Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture” by Rene Girard with Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha

As in many of Girard’s other works, this book is constructed as a series of dialogues between Girard and his interlocutors. This book was published in 2008 and thus is an attempt to clarify and modify his mimetic mechanism, first developed in works like “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.”  It also deals with the familiar Girardian themes of doubles, sacrifice, scapegoating, ritual, victimhood, and the founding murder, portrayed through myth, literature, and religion. Girard explains his underlying methodology, “there is also a strong curiosity, and curiosity and understanding are obviously linked. There is a form of humility as well, in the sense that it is a methodological attitude, a postulate that you have to have in order to solve specific problems. I have the impression sometimes that a book I am reading could upset my entire existence.” Girard never claims to be a theologian. He views himself as a literary scholar and an anthropologist.

Girard’s analysis goes back to man’s origins and that is where he seeks to find the beginnings of culture. “Stoning (or crushing) and throwing someone from a rock are forms of sacrificial killings which are related to each other. They are forms of capital punishment where everybody participates and nobody is responsible. Nobody touches the victim. It is a form of collective and unanimous capital punishment, and it is a way of uniting the community when you have neither the central power nor judicial system that can prevent mimetic conflicts. There must be a device that makes collective killing possible at a distance, without any polluting contact with the victim. This is really the beginning of the state as an institution.” He explains the mimetic mechanism, “it describes the whole process, beginning with mimetic desire, which then becomes mimetic rivalry, eventually escalating to the stage of mimetic crisis and finally ending with the scapegoat resolution.” Girard goes on to detail how the scapegoat mechanism works, “in the frenzy of the mimetic violence of the mob, a focal point suddenly appears, in the shape of the ‘culprit’ who is thought to be the cause of the disorder and the one who brought the crisis into the community. He is single out and unanimously killed by the community. He isn’t any guiltier than any other, but the whole community strongly believes he is. The killing of scapegoat ends the crisis, since the transference against it is unanimous. That is the importance of the scapegoat mechanism: it channels the collective violence against one arbitrarily chosen member of the community, and this victim becomes the enemy of the entire community, which is reconciled as a result.” This founding murder is embedded in culture through ritual. “Ritual is a cultural form that prepares for the sacrificial resolution, but it serves mainly as a form of controlling violence, and the increasing sophistication of ritualistic forms and elements helps in distancing further and further a given culture from the original violence implicit in the ritualistic act…. As in all sacrificial rites, it is the ritualization of a spontaneous collective murder…. Repetition is as important as imitation for cultural transmission. ” 

However, Girard also recognizes that mimetic desire can be a positive for society. “Mimetic desire is what makes us human, what makes possible for us the breakdown from routinely animalistic appetites, and constructs our own, albeit inevitably unstable, identities…. There would be no human mind, no education, no transmission of culture without mimesis.” Humans might have come from humans, but there is also a distinction in quality, not just gradient between ethology and ethnology. “Symbolicity is essential. Scientists have the tendency to overlook the emergence of symbolicity as the force behind the discontinuity between animals and humans.”  

Girard sees truth embedded in ancient myths. “Myths are forms of organization of knowledge- and in fact the word veda means knowledge, science- and this knowledge is essentially related to desire and sacrifice…. Why are there myths and stories that seem so similar? Why do all these cultures carry similar features and tell of an original murder?…. I am in search of the innocent victim in any historical, mythical and fictional account…. One has to regard mythology and archaic religion as a riddle, and the solution of that riddle is quite real. Myth is primarily the accusation of the victim presented as guilty. Moreover, the myth is written from the point of view of the accusers.” Myth and ritual are intimately intertwined. “Whatever one demonstrates in myth, there is a direct counterpart of it in ritual, and vice versa…. Ritual is the deliberate reproduction of the mechanism; myth is the narrative…. Normally ritual is more directly revealing than myth, and this is because it confirms the interpretation of the latter as the resolution of the mimetic crisis…. Ritual confirms that the victim is really killed. Myth suggests that the victim is killed in order to reproduce the effects of the first murder.” Girard recounts three elements he finds in these myths, “(1) a crisis of undifferentiation (which corresponds to the orgiastic elements in rituals); (2) a victimary sign that singles out a villain; (3) an expulsion/killing of this villain (which is also represented as a hero because he/she eventually saves the community.” The link between myth and the founding murder (and its coverup) is what is most essential. “In myth, it is much more obvious that there is this logical inconsistency, and when one realizes that inconsistency is an invariant, it no longer looks like a mere logical inconsistency, but it turns into a clue which suggests the violent origin of the myth: a logical break, which is the same in so many myths, can’t be meaningless. This constant similarity, in spite of the diversity of myths, points to the presence of a common cause of logical distortion at the threshold of human culture. I believe that this cause is the original founding murder, and myths do their best- unconsciously at first, and then more consciously- to erase the traces of scapegoating…. Practically every story of origin or foundational myth states that society was founded upon a murder.” This origin of culture gradually evolved until its origins were obscured. “If the scapegoat mechanism is our common cultural ‘ancestor’, ritual sacrifice is an intermediate step in the evolution of cultural forms, while social institutions are mature forms derived from this process.”

Christianity was the break from archaic religion in that it proclaimed the victim as innocent. “Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous mob.” Christianity is actually anti-mythology. “Christianity is also paradoxical, because the more similar it seems to mythology, the more clearly it becomes a radical rereading of myths, the preparation of the deconstruction of all mythical presuppositions…. Myth is against the victim, whereas the Bible is for the victim…. In the Old Testament, the innocent victim appears for the first time. The victim is the only innocent person within a guilty community…. Revelation is the reproduction of the victimary mechanism by showing the truth, knowing that the victim is innocent and that everything is based on mimetism. The Gospel represents the crucifixion as a mimetic phenomenon. The true cause of Peter’s denial, of Pilate’s behaviour, of the bad thief’s attitude, is their imitation of the crowd, the collective mimetism, the violent contagion. Jesus is innocent. But everything lies upon mimetic unanimity…. Jesus saves all human beings because of his revelation of the scapegoat mechanism, which also deprives us more and more of sacrificial protection, therefore forcing us to abstain from violence if we want to survive. In order to reach the Kingdom, man has to renounce violence…. violence which is not divine but human.” According to Girard, it is Nietzsche who has it backwards. “Nietzsche is never more wrong than when he says that Christianity is the religion of the crowd, as opposed to Dionysus, which is seen as the religion of the aristocracy, of a minority. It is exactly the other way around: Dionysus is the crowd and Christianity is the small minority able to resist the crowd.” The revelation in Christianity is that the guilty are the many, while the victim alone is innocent. “This compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity…. We do not have to accuse our neighbour; we can learn to forgive him instead.”

“Oedipus Unbound” By Rene Girard

In this book Girard brings the "Girardian framework" to the myth of Oedipus, as well as to the novel, myth, and stories in general. He first tackles the never-ending human quest for desires and impossible wants. “It is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires…. Behind every closed door, every insurmountable barrier, the hero senses the presence of the absolute mastery that eludes him, the divine serenity of which he feels deprived.” Desire, for Girard, is always framed in opposition to the Other. “Desire, a force oriented toward the Self, an energy which is strictly narcissistic and yet which tears the individual away from himself to make him into the satellite of an Other.” This is the eternal duel between the Self and the Other. The more one seeks to identify differences, the more one loses the reality of the sameness inherent in man. “To turn back against oneself the curse first hurled at the Other, to discover that this wicked Other and the Self are one, means discovering the Same in what once passed for absolute Difference, it means unifying reality. But first of all it means dying.” In the Oedipus myth, Oedipus creates bitter enemies from his closest rivals. “Creon, the enemy brother, and Tiresias, the blind prophet, are the doubles of Oedipus, blind and a prophet himself. Each episode goes a little further in revealing Oedipus’s adversary to be an alter ego.” It is his own subjective viewpoint that blinds him from the truth. 

The tragic conflict of the Oedipus myth begins with Oedipus and his father, Laius. “Driven by the same desire, the two men are constantly headed towards the same violence…. The conflict between the two men does not feed on differences, as all thinking in line with common sense would have it, but on resemblances continually elicited by the identity of aims and the convergence of desire…. The object that lies behind an obstacle is only the more desirable for being forbidden. The obsession with forbidden fruit is not primary, it is not the cause but the consequence of the rivalry.” It is the rivalry the begets the object of desire. Whatever is identified as an obstacle becomes a sign that he is, in fact, on the right path- the path to fulfill life’s desire, the impossible goal. The violence becomes circular as the object disappears and both become focussed on each other instead. The model and the obstacle merge as one, while the object loses all importance. “Each seeing in the Other a real or potential rival, each takes refuge in the same violence…. Each contemplates in the Other the truth of his own desire.” This is an anti-Manichean view of the world. “The signifiers of good and evil superimposed on the tragic relationships are always unstable, always ready to reverse themselves.” There is only “the lie of the myth, the effort of all men to shunt their truth onto the Other…. Each person, at this level, plumbs the other’s “unconscious,” each congratulates himself on his own perspicacity. The more real this perspicacity is, and it is real, the more it focuses us on the Other. It conceals from us the essential aspects of the structure, the role that we personally play in it.” The more similar the Self and the Other, the more obsessed we become with irrelevant differences. Every man is the guilty party to the Other, who he never sees as himself. We speak the truth, but only half-truths, for we cannot see in the Other what is most like ourselves.

The tragedy of the myth of Oedipus is that the contagion of rivalry spreads to the community at large. In the myth this is symbolized by the very real threat of the plague. “The mythic plague is the passive contagion of desire and hatred, which, spreading from one person to the next, shakes the very foundations of society…. Along with the plague there are bad harvests and women dying in child-birth. Everything here is a metaphor of sterility.” In Western culture this problem in society has been intensified as traditional roles and hierarchies have disappeared. There is no rigid system to put the individual in his place. Instead, roles are fluid and rivalries multiply. “With a small number of rigorous prohibitions replacing the immense variety of positive prescriptions, the exchanges display a degree of mobility never before attained.” In the pre-Christian days, sacrifice mitigated the rivalry that arose within the community. “To sacrifice an animal is to have recourse to a means of purification that may originally not be simply ritual, since it substitutes, for the fathers and sons pitted against each other, for those guilty parties of whom the interminable pursuit would lead to a terrible familial vendetta, a living creature, a victim still but a “neutral” one, intermediate between a man and an inanimate object, a victim that can be put to death without aggravating the divisions within the city. To sacrifice an animal is to make allowance for a desire for violence incapable of being entirely sublimated…. The goat takes upon itself the sins of the fathers, of the sons, of the brothers, indeed of all of the citizens. It carries away, into death or into the desert that closes around it, the seeds of those conflicts that the convergence of desires, which is to say the very unity of the culture, its internal cohesiveness, cannot fail to provoke.” 

When an animal will no longer do, often a man becomes the scapegoat. He is kept at a safe distance and excluded from the community even before he is killed or exiled. The choice is often arbitrary. There must be a sameness, but also difference. That is why the selection is often a newcomer or one with a deformity that marks him apart. “The scapegoat is responsible for all guilty desires. He is the only one to commit the crimes these desires suggest. If the myth is a perfect mirror, if it is purely and simply the projection onto a single mythical figure of a reality common to all men, the choice of this figure, the choice of the scapegoat, is completely arbitrary…. Just as an animal was first substituted for man, so the hero substitutes for the animal.” He is the one that absolves the city at large from its crimes. He purifies the city by taking on all its sins. The arbitrary nature of the choice must be hidden from the city for the choice to work. The human sacrifice is now no longer neutral, but he is the only guilty party. He is the exceptional one, apart from the rest. “If the collective decision designating the scapegoat is arbitrary, that is because only this decision can put an end to the hunt of all against each and of each against all.” It puts an end to the skandalon, the scandal, infecting the whole community and spreading throughout it. “If the conflict involved tangible goods, a solution would be conceivable. It is the nullity of the difference that renders the conflict inexpiable.” Cultural creation is the fruit of trying to prevent this contagion. Culture neutralizes rivalry. Taboos, hierarchies, and institutions block the convergence of desires and seek to eliminate confrontations. however, modernity has broken down these walls. “If there is no longer any difference between men, that is because in truth there never was. The truth of the myth is absolute symmetry. There is no true father, and that indeed is the knowledge that the expulsion of the scapegoat obscures…. To choose a scapegoat is to choose the universal other who will put an end to the universal discord. In the case of physical violence, the cure is genuine insofar as the community is truly re-unified against the single victim, insofar, therefore, as the evil qualities of the random victim are unanimously and uncritically accepted.”

“Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World” by Rene Girard

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.”