Rene Girard
February 4, 2010
Here’s a new word for you: hominization. It refers to the process of becoming human and is part of the language of cultural anthropology and archaeology. One of the 20th century giants of this world is Rene Girard, a French thinker and devout Roman Catholic who has contributed numerous books and articles to a wide range of disciplines: history, philosophy, literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics and cultural studies. Girard received his Ph.D. in history from Indiana University and has lived and taught for most of his life in America.
What makes him fun is that while he combines a “deconstructionist” and “debunking” analysis of the origins and bases of human culture he uses it to affirm his Catholic faith and Christianity. Most in academia would belong to a secular or atheist bent but Girard is unapologetically Catholic. His thought, while at times complex and demanding is rooted in a simple phenomena called mimesis, the imitation or representation of aspects of the sensible world, especially human actions, in literature and art. Brian MacDonald, whose interview with Girard is here, gives this explanation of Girard’s thought in his introduction:
“Picture two young children playing happily on their porch, a pile of toys beside them. The older child pulls a G.I. Joe from the pile and immediately, his younger brother cries out, “No, my toy,” pushes him out of the way, and grabs it. The older child, who was not very interested in the toy when he picked it up, now conceives a passionate need for it and attempts to wrest it back. Soon a full fight ensues, with the toy forgotten and the two boys busy pummeling each other.
As the fight intensifies, the overweight child next door wanders into their yard and comes up to them, looking for someone to play with. At that point, one of the two rivals looks up and says, “Oh, there’s old fat butt!” “Yeah,” says his brother. “Big fat butt!” The two, having forgotten the toy, now forget their fight and run the child back home. Harmony has been restored between the two brothers, though the neighbor is now indoors crying.”
McDonald continues: “It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Girard builds his whole theory of human nature and human culture through a close analysis of the dynamics operating in this story. Most human desires are not “original” or spontaneous, he argues, but are created by imitating another whom he calls the “model.” When the model claims an object, that tells another that it is desirable — and that he must have it instead of him. Girard calls this “mimetic” (or imitative) desire. In the subsequent rivalry, the two parties will come to forget the object and will come to desire the conflict for itself. Harmony will only be restored if the conflicting parties can vent their anger on a common enemy or ‘scapegoat.’…Girard shows, throughout the body of his work, how his theory of “mimetic” desire can illuminate and unify an extraordinarily disparate set of human phenomena. It can explain everything from sacrifice to conflict, from mythology to Christianity.
Most of the Christian anthropology I have introduced on this site has come from John Randall Sachs and his wonderful little book called “The Christian Vision of Humanity: Basic Christian Anthropology” (a selection here). Essentially what Sachs does is reason from the gospels to an understanding of man and his anthropology. Well Girard is doing the same thing using his theories of mimetic desire and scapegoating. His theories are easy enough to confirm from your own experience.
The gospels thus become a kind of reversal of scapegoating, where the shift shows that scapegoating comes from a cultural mechanism. In the Gospels we have the revelation of the generative principle of scapegoating that dominates culture and society unconsciously and is not approved by God. There are several examples of this throughout the Old Testament that Professor Girard uses, from Job to the Psalms and Joseph and his brothers.
We ordinarily like to believe that scapegoating stems from rulers or leaders hatching a plot, but it is much more complex than that. As Peter says in Acts, “And now brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. But what God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ should suffer, he thus fulfilled. So repent, and turn again…” (Acts 3:17-19a).
Everyone, as you see there, is guilty, yet not completely responsible, even the rulers. One of our favorite ways of dealing with scapegoating is to see it as a plot of government leaders, whereas the rest of us have not participated in it. But scapegoating, according to Girard, is a collective phenomenon. It would not work if it were not. Of course, leaders can manipulate it, but there must be something to manipulate – it is not created by the leaders but is derived from the belief of the crowd. It seems to function as a sort of original sin.
In the Gospels, for example, the priests plot to scapegoat Jesus, but they cannot accomplish this without stirring up the crowd. The crowd takes over the most significant role in the narrative. Mark, above all, makes this clear. To anyone who has read the role of the crowd at Mass on Good Friday, it becomes apparent how profound the role of the crowd is.
Aside from any other details about Pilate, we see that his main fear is that a riot will occur. Pilate is presented as knowing it is a scapegoat situation. If the situation is still fluid, a substitute for the designated scapegoat could be offered (Barabbas), but things have gone too far, so Jesus is put to death.
It is a crowd that has called for his death, it was a crowd that welcomed him as he entered Jerusalem. There is nothing, by the way, anti-Semitic about this; Girard sees it is the Gospels’ comment on the mimetic behavior of crowds.
Another excellent example of such behavior is found in the book of Job. The people treated him as an idol one day, but turned against him the next. Girard uses a number of examples from the Old Testament, this quote here makes illustration of Girard’s concept of mimetic desire found within the story of Joseph and his brothers.
“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 (arrangement of scenery and properties to represent the place where a play or movie is enacted. stage setting, setting ) in order to test the possibility of a change of heart in his brothers.
They 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 rituals. Can 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 non-sacrificial significance of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures but not entirely suppressed its impact. Thus, our society could 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.”
The following is part of an interview titled The Anthropology of the Cross that James Williams did with Professor Girard:
James Williams: As you look back over your career, what has been the most satisfying thing to you in your work?
René Girard: The most satisfying thing has been the actual experience of discovery. I would say that there have been three great moments in the process of my thinking and writing.
First was mimetic desire and rivalry, when I realized that it accounted for so much. The second was the discovery of the scapegoat mechanism. This basically completed the mimetic theory. I felt it gave a highly plausible interpretation of myth and ritual in archaic cultures. From that time on I was convinced that archaic cultures, far from being simply lost in superstition or having no constancy or stability, represented a great human achievement.
The third great moment of discovery for me was when I began to see the uniqueness of the Bible, especially the Christian text, from the standpoint of the scapegoat theory. The mimetic representation of scapegoating in the Passion was the solution to the relationship of the Gospels and archaic cultures. In the Gospels we have the revelation of the mechanism that dominates culture unconsciously.
It seemed to me, as I experienced these moments, that a great deal of evidence was piling up, an avalanche, to support them. I naively thought that everyone would agree with my theory immediately, because I saw it as so obvious and overpowering.
J.W.: Concerning the relation of the New Testament to the full development of the mimetic scapegoat theory, already in your first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, you recognize the importance of the Gospels. But are you saying it took a number of years for the full extent of the Passion as revelation of the scapegoat mechanism to occur to you?
R.G.: Sure. I recognized the importance of the Gospels in the individual experiences of the novelists who came to grips with mimetic desire and came to a knowledge of mimetic desire. In fact, they have a kind of conversion experience, and this conversion is of the same nature as the shift from mythology to the Gospels. Of course, I didn’t fully understand that at the time.
This is the most difficult thing for people to understand about my theory — that scapegoating does not play an essential role in the Gospels, whereas it has an enormous role in myths since it generates them, Many observers think that because scapegoating becomes more and more visible in them, the Gospels must approve of it, they must advocate some kind of scapegoat religion. But to use a modem analogy from the history of France, this would be like saying the pro-Dreyfus people were really the scapegoaters of Dreyfus. This is the mistake so many theologians and biblical scholars have made regarding the mimetic scapegoat theory. They simply do not understand the enormous difference that the representation of scapegoating makes. They think only in terms of themes rather than a hidden, generative mechanism which cannot appear in what it generates.
J.W.: If the Gospels could be understood by analogy to the pro-Dreyfus party, give another similar historical instance of scapegoating.
R.G.: An example which I have been working on a little bit is Joan of Arc. The people who put her on trial divinized her, or “demonized” her, in the sense of regarding her as a witch. She was avowed to have supernatural powers and turned into a witch, whereas her canonization by the church acknowledges another form of relationship to the supernatural which is different from the demonized-divinized scapegoat. Now there is a form of divinization reported in the Gospels, which is magical and mythical, for instance Herod Antipas’ belief in the resurrection of John the Baptist, and the divinization of Christ, which is just the opposite. The Gospels seem so close to myth in a way, and yet they are poles apart.
This is a difficult problem because certain forms of monotheism move God so far away from any involvement in the scapegoat mechanism that they view with suspicion any contact with it in religious thought and symbolism. But I think the power and truth of Christianity is that it completes the great forms of monotheism, as in Judaism and Islam, by witnessing to the God who reveals himself to be the arch-scapegoat in order to liberate humankind.
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J.W.: Does the analogy of Joan of Arc imply that the scapegoating of Jesus may have occurred even among his own followers?
R.G.: Yes, and the conception of Jesus as some kind of primitive God. You find a recognition of that in Mark and Matthew especially. Peter, James, and John expect him to be a kind of divine potentate when he comes into his full honor and glory. Herod Antipas believes that Jesus is John the Baptist resurrected. This divinizing of John is a kind of mythical genesis. I think this is why there is a fairly long description of the murder, which is an analog of the Passion. But not only an analog of the Passion, for there were many such murders — mythical, non-mythical, prophetic—in which a crowd united against a victim.
In the Herod story the dancing of Herod’s stepdaughter was important in the ritual aspects of the action of the crowd.
J.W.: The dancing is a textual signal of scapegoating?
R.G.: Yes. The story of the beheading of John is one of the reasons why the synoptic Gospels are so incredibly valuable for understanding the anthropology of revelation.
J.W.: The Gospel of Luke omits the banquet and dancing episode.
R.G.: Yes, but Luke has another scene in which Herod and Pilate become friends when Pilate sends Jesus to Herod for questioning after he is arrested. This shows that Luke is aware of the pacifying effect of scapegoating. This is the communion of the scapegoaters as opposed to the Christian communion. So if you put this scene with the beheading of John in Mark and Matthew, you can see how the Gospels complement each other in dealing with the mythical tendencies of scapegoating.
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J.W.: What is the most disappointing aspect of your career?
R.G.: I think that I have not expressed the relation of the Gospel to mythology in a way that makes it clear to everybody. It should be possible to find more metaphors from different areas of experience which are familiar to everyone. Also, I would like to do a better job of showing that the Gospels etmble one to read and decipher myth.
Until now the order of discovery for me has been mimetic desire, archaic religion and culture, and finally the Christian text. It should be possible, especially for a Christian scholar, to reverse this order and analyze myth and culture from the standpoint of the Gospels.
J.W.: The Gospels themselves have come under attack as sources of scapegoating and demonization. To take the Gospels seriously in the way you do is extremely difficult.
R.G.: It is difficult because it is also too simple. Everything that happened to Jesus is happening to the texts of revelation themselves. This scapegoating of the Gospel texts is probably a necessary — but not excusable — phase that we are going through. It is a form of ingratitude toward God, and one should say so, boldly. J.W.: So to discern the relation of the Gospels to myth and misunderstanding in our culture, where do you look? Do you find signs in our time?
R.G.: Well, I look first to the Gospels themselves, and particularly to certain key passages. Of course, the Gospels must look not like a tour de force but another myth to many readers now because they are centered on Jesus, and how could this reveal mythology? But in my view the whole theory of Satan, for example, is completely rational; the Gospels unveil Satan as the principle of destructive mimesis in the world. Or to take another example, Herod murders John, divinizes him, but he never repents. Peter denies his association with Jesus and later recognizes him as his risen lord, and Paul persecutes the followers of Christ before his own revelatory experience. But both Peter and Paul repent. This is the main difference made by the resurrection, as contrasted to human divinization or apotheosis: repentance.
J.W.: Do you want to say any more about the use of metaphor and analogy to understand the Gospel texts?
R.G.: Well, I was talking about Joan of Arc. The sources about her are pretty reliable. This is a perfect example of persecution and ascription of supernatural powers to someone considered a witch and disrupter of public order. An instance like this should be of great interest to the Jews because of what they have suffered in history.
J.W.: Aren’t all these topics, such as the fate of Joan of Arc, encumbered with the “political correctness” and obsession with victims of those who study them?
R.G.: Political correctness is good to the degree that we now have an awareness of victimization and victimary mechanisms. But now this awareness supports attacks on Christianity and its texts, which are the very inspiration of our modern concern for the victim.
J.W.: This brings me back to what has been disappointing for you in your career. When you speak of attacks on the Bible, particularly the Gospel texts, I take it you are talking about your critics, at least in part.
R.G.: Yes, I am talking about my critics in part. But you know, I think the attacks on the Gospel are necessary; they are part of an apocalyptic situation.
J.W.: You mean these attacks are part of a sorting or refining process in history?
R.G.: It’s part of a process that is revealing the truth of the Gospel.
But I know I am primarily responsible for what I write and how I bring my subject to expression. Anthropologists and theologians, many of them, have not understood what I was about, and I should be able to say it better. I would like to begin at the stage of Things Hidden, where the Gospels seem to be explained by the mimetic theory rather than explaining it. It should be possible to move in reverse to myth and mimetic desire. The sequence leading up to Things Hidden, which is true, in part, to my own creative experience, gives the erroneous view of a theoretical movement from mimesis to myth, then to the Gospels, whereas in faa, a more fundamental understanding goes in the opposite direction.
J.W.: Do you see signs that reception of your work is beginning to occur?
R.G.: There are some signs, but I’m not sure that at this time there could be a really good reception, especially among academics. It would be such a change in regard to Christianity that it is most unlikely. One can always hope for a good reception of the Gospels which would be closer and truer to them as they really are. If the mimetic theory became fashionable, I would be really worried.
But it is difficult; there are so many tendencies toward politicization, or toward wandering off into irrelevant individualistic spiritualities. Of course, one could go back and see politicization throughout the whole history of Christianity. These attempts at politicization, which take various forms, are part of the progress and regress of revelation in history.
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J.W.: What would you say is the most important aspect of your thinking to grasp? If the most important is the most difficult, please comment on that.
JG.: The most important thing is too simple, I repeat, not to be difficult. It is the reversal of scapegoating, or the shift that shows that scapegoating comes from a cultural mechanism and is not approved by God. We ordinarily like to believe that scapegoating stems from rulers or leaders hatching a plot, but it is much more complex than that. When I use the term “mechanism,” as in “scapegoat mechanism,” I mean basically and simply a generative principle which works unconsciously in culture and society. As Peter says in Acts, “And now brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. But what God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ should suffer, he thus fulfilled. So repent, and turn again…” (Acts 3:17-19a). Everyone is guilty, yet not completely responsible. I find the mention of the rulers especially interesting. One of our favorite ways of dealing with scapegoating is to see it as a plot of government leaden, whereas the rest of us have not participated in it. But scapegoating is a collective phenomenon. It would not work if it were not. Of course, leaders can manipulate it, but there must be something to manipulate, which is the belief of the crowd, our own belief.
In the Gospels, for example, the priests plot to scapegoat Jesus, but they cannot accomplish this without stirring up the crowd. The crowd takes over the most significant role in the narrative. Mark, above all, makes this clear. Aside from any other details about Pilate, his main fear is that a riot will occur. Pilate is presented as knowing it is a scapegoat situation. If the situation is still fluid, a substitute for the designated scapegoat could be offered (Barabbas). But things have gone too far, so Jesus is put to death. It is a crowd that has called for his death, it was a crowd that welcomed him as he entered Jerusalem. There is nothing, by the way, anti-Semitic about this; it is the Gospels’ comment on the mimetic behavior of crowds. Another excellent example of such behavior is found in the book of Job. The people treated him as an idol one day, but turned against him the next.
J.W.: I wonder whether the crowd behavior is even clearer in the book of Job (Job 29:1-30:15).
R.G.: Yes, this is made clear by the metaphor of the mountain torrent (6:15). It does not have a drop of water when you need it, but turns into a deluge when you don’t need it. It is a wonderful, mimetic metaphor of the crowd.
J.W.: But back to the reversal of the scapegoating phenomenon in the Gospel texts — do you really think this is the most difficult aspect of your model? Conceptually it is not so difficult, but perhaps psychologically…
Let’s face it, readers; including academic ones, usually read texts pretty simplistically. They look for themes, and since they -find a scapegoat theme in the Gospels, for instance, they conclude that the Gospels are built on scapegoating. Myths, they would say, are not about scapegoating because they don’t talk about it. But that’s just the point: they don’t talk about it; they disguise their generative center. It is the most difficult thing to make people conscious of this generative center. It is the sort of thing you either see or do not see. It’s like a flash of lightning; you either get it or you don’t get it. Ordinary reasoning just loops back on to its own premises.
But there should be a way of expressing this insight which is better than I have done so far. I keep trying and trying. That is why I turn to such historical scapegoats as Joan of Are or Dreyfus. The people who condemned Dreyfus are the ones who never called him a scapegoat because they turned him into one. To me the Oedipus myth is a still undeciphered Dreyfus case.
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J.W.: Let’s turn to a part of your theory that maybe conceptually difficult for many people who encounter your work: mimetic desire. Don’t you think that many people have misunderstood mimetic desire or mimesis? Also it would be helpful if you would say something about its pre-representational character.
R.G.: There are many who would prefer to say that the real problem is the wish to kill one’s own father or mother, and they ignore or resist the possibility that the most common problem — our predicament — is that of trying to beat one’s rival at his own game. So there is a resistance to shedding light on the role of rivalry in our own lives.
J.W.: So the difficulty with the concept of mimesis is practically the same as the resistance to the recognition of scapegoating. Just as we ignore or evade knowing ourselves as scapegoaters, so also we ignore or evade our penchant for mimetic rivalry.
R.G.: Yes, a deeper knowledge and self-examination are required. The knowledge of mimesis is really tied to conversion. That is why the matter of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is so important. A personal knowledge, fully rational and yet not always accessible to reason, is needed.
J.W.: René, isn’t part of the problem just what you are touching on, that mimesis is really pre-rational and pre-representational? This is important, and is not included in any of the selections for the Reader. You seem to be saying at times that to break away from the mimetic predicament…
R.G.: You must change your personality.
J.W.: But that also requires mimesis, does it not? A mimesis that is good, a mimesis of love.
R.G.: Sure. Part of the problem is with the phrase “mimetic desire.” And because of Freud the word “desire” connotes the sexual or erotic. I said recently that we should be able to substitute some other term — I don’t know, perhaps “drive,” or élan vital, or even Sartre’s “project.” Almost any word that could express the dynamism, the dynamics of the entire personality.
J.W.: Here you seem to be distinguishing different kinds of mimesis. But you don’t want to say that, do you? In other words, mimesis is always along a continuum.
R.G.: That’s right. It is something that involves the whole personality. Sartre’s idea of the “project” is appropriate in a way, although resorting to Sartre too exclusively would be misleading. Maybe the idea of Kierkegaard, the idea of subjectivity as passionate inwardness and choice, would be helpful…I don’t know; whatever the term, something bigger and other than “desire” should be used. “Desire” has, necessarily, that narrow libidinal connotation.
J.W.: Okay, let’s move on to another part of the question, the relation of mimesis and representation.
R.G.: Well, mimesis is rooted deep in our biology, I’m sure of that. I agree with those who hold that there is a biological basis for holding that the human brain is a kind of mimetic machine. Even ritual, in its earliest stages, is more like a reflexive mimetic repetition than anything that could be called precisely an institution founded on a correct representation of a founding murder. Much like a child’s earliest reactions as it begins to learn…
J.W.: You’re referring specifically to an originary murder…
R.G.: Yes. Then at a certain stage, the scapegoat phenomenon and its ritual repetition create the possibility of representation, which requires some degree of reflection, and not simply reflexive imitation. So it is that mimesis is “undecidable,” in the sense that it is decided in common with the model. Continuity ultimately produced discontinuity. A good model will make our mimesis good (Christ); a bad model will make our mimesis rivalrous.
J.W.: So in beginning stages of what we know as human there was basically reflexive imitation.
R.G.: Yes, that was the primary thing. Representation as such is a late development. It may have taken hundreds of thousands of years, or longer, to reach the representational capacity of “humanity.”
From a theological point of view which is compatible, I hope, with my mimetic anthropology, I would say that the Word or Christ is at work in this whole long process toward humanity and representation. Representation is still distorted, of course, in that it distorts or disguises the violence stemming from originary mimesis. This is what I have called méconnaissance, misrecognition, or even “misprision,” as Shakespeare and Harold Bloom would say (misprision: noun: MF mesprison: error, wrongdoing; a misunderstanding in which one thing is taken for another. “A term used by Harold Bloom to describe the process by which strong writers misread or misinterpret their literary predecessors so as to clear imaginative space for themselves. According to Bloom, every poem is a misprision or misconstrual of a hypothetical parent poem.”) I think Gil Bailie has expressed this well in his recent paper on the vine and the branches: the Word was the light accompanying the “mythic darkness of the sacred violence that accompanied Hominization. Humanity generated its own crude forms of illumination precisely by periodically expelling this light.”
