Renee Girard is a complicated and controversial author. Combining philology, theology, and philosophy in a harsh and unusual way, his books have gained numerous supporters and opponents. A professor at Stanford and a member of the French Academy, he is not a universally recognized classic. However, there are no generally recognized classics in the world of humanities anymore; the maximum a scientist can hope for is the controversial, contradictory reputation that Girard has long won. He began in the 1960s with works on Proust, Dostoyevsky and Stendhal. They have already formulated his most important ideas about mimetic desire. Girard was successful with his book Violence and the Sacred, which responds to the events of 1968. Girard's subsequent books, including Scapegoat, build on these same discoveries in relation to new texts and areas. In the troubled, secular, and invariably liberal world of Franco-American humanitarian theory, Girard takes the unique position of a religious thinker who combines political conservatism with concern for the eternal problems of Christian theology, which he revises in an unusual, even shocking way. Discussing his favorite concepts and images using numerous examples from ancient, gospel and literary texts, Girard does not change his topics. The author of many books, Girard continues to write his only essay. Its most important theme is the hero of this book, the scapegoat. Girard's main predecessors in cultural theory were de Maistre, Nietzsche and Freud. But his interests would also be familiar to Russian authors, from Dostoyevsky, to whom Girard often returns in his works, to Vyacheslav Ivanov, with whom he shares key motives and concerns.
Girard's works reveal one of the eternal and, practically speaking, main secrets of human society, the relationship between violence and order. The author's conclusion is simple, and he has the right to be surprised that it was not disclosed by the great predecessors. For every blow, we should expect a surrender. Violence creates a bloody cycle of revenge. Vengeance is an exchange, perhaps the first in history. As this cycle progresses, the volume and extent of violence are increasing. Revenge is the expanded reproduction of violence. Violence is as contagious as an epidemic, and it destroys society. Culture is the most important defense mechanism against the vicious circle of violence. And like the vaccine, which protects against infection in small doses, culture protects society from epidemic violence through mimetic mechanisms that control and limit violence.
Unlike many post-structuralist thinkers, Girard believes in spiritual and social progress, in the power of culture to change and improve social mechanisms, and in the responsibility of those who have undertaken to think, write and teach people. Those who read this book will have no doubt that it is about Christian cultural theory. For the author, the highest point of a culture that is subject to eternal and progressive comprehension is the words and deeds of Christ, as recorded in the Gospels. In this sense, Girard's works are retrospective; he constantly projects gospel truths, as Girard sees them, onto those who are not involved in them, be it Homer's epic, Old Testament parables, Fraser's anthropology, or Freud's psychoanalysis. The shocking surprise that Girard's books evoke is precisely because he upends the well-developed discoveries of the post-Enlightenment philosophy of Nietzsche, Freud, and Derrida, rewriting them in the light of gospel stories. Willingly or unwittingly, he also performs reverse operations, rewriting Christianity itself in the light of post-structuralist theory. Reproaching Voltaire, Nietzsche, Fraser and Freud for not understanding what Christ understood, Girard shows a new Christ who could hardly be seen and understood without Voltaire, Nietzsche, Fraser and Freud. The Gospel of Girard is not for hypocritical reading. To reveal heresy in Christ as a heresy as the heresy of your own theory. That's why Girard is interesting.
According to his theory, the universal mechanism for society's self-defense against violence is to focus on the chosen victim. Sacrifice is redemption in the exact sense of the word: small violence against the victim redeems much of society's violence against itself. Instead of prowling through society and devouring it, violence becomes a predictable, local ritual. Society focuses violence in the same way that a shaman focuses illness on a bloody lump that he spits out of his mouth. The victims were outcasts, as in Greek cults; kings, as in African monarchies and during European revolutions; people of a different nation, as in Jewish pogroms, the medieval version of which Girard details in this book; and ordinary, randomly chosen citizens, as in Stalin's purges. But the scapegoat is chosen carefully. He doesn't have to be one of us, or we'll have to avenge him; but he can't be a stranger either, or our potential for violence won't be reduced. This means that the scapegoat should be both his own and different, and like us and not like us. This is a subtle dialectic that each society solves in its own way, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. This choice reflects both the long cultural history of this human group, with all its beliefs and hopes, and the nature of the crisis given to modern events.
Why do we need scapegoats? Girard invites every reader to ask themselves what they are doing with this breed of goats. Personally, I don't know anything like this, and I'm sure, dear reader, that this is also the case with you. You and I only have legitimate enemies. For most modern civilized people, the experience of collective violence against a chosen victim is difficult to understand; for many, it is limited to memories of their childhood, how they were tortured and tortured at school. It is not without reason that such situations are important for many adult writers, such as Nabokov. Based on our personal experience, collective violence takes place far beyond it, but always on our behalf. Whenever and wherever you read this book, you know the places where it takes place, places that are exotic and creepy with such familiar names. Collective violence permeates politics, history, anthropology and, as Girard shows, literature of every genre. What matters to him is whether the stories of collective violence are explicitly analyzed and condemned with the same clarity that Girard finds in the Gospels or Dostoyevsky's; or whether the text talks about persecution and violence with the same hatred with which they were carried out. In other words, is this story written from the point of view of an executioner or from the point of view of a victim? This binary opposition cannot be deconstructed; but the example of the Apostle Peter, eloquently analyzed by Girard, shows its real complexity. The Gospels, the lives of martyrs, and memories of the Holocaust or the Gulag were written by witnesses rather than participants. By focusing on Christ as the first victim to understand and discover the cultural mechanism of sacrifice, Girard is creating a new apparatus for analyzing all the evidence of group violence that does not understand it. Victims don't write memoirs; on the other hand, many stories of different genres are written to justify or call for violence. Girard optics is useful to anyone who reads evidence of crises, wars and revolutions.
The victim should be the object of our hatred; but in some cases her role is so important that our gratitude elevates her, deifies her, and makes her sacred. Moses, killed by his fellow tribesmen, retroactively turns into a teacher and prophet. The goat, the symbol of Dionysus, is transformed into a lamb, a symbol of Christ. It seems to me that Girard could explain in more detail the conditions under which this happens. The victim's stories of sacralization are unique and therefore extremely important; but much more often pogroms, persecutions, and murders take place in silence and unconsciousness. In cases that Girard is particularly interested in, religion protects society through successive replacements: universal violence for sacrifice, human sacrifice for the slaughter of an animal, and, finally, blood sacrifice for symbolic sacrifice. The creators of great religions have managed to replace the founding victim with memories of her that do not demand revenge. When this mechanism loses its effectiveness, society self-destructs, but at some point, frightened or repented, it reinvents sacrifice. The Girard story consists of such cycles of aggression, guilt, and redemption. In modern times, however, revenge is being replaced by the courts. The state cannot monopolize violence; spontaneous violence is plentiful everywhere. With great success, the state monopolizes revenge. Society as a whole does what is impossible for anyone else: it takes revenge and avoids revenge. The purple robes of judges and the black masks of the executioners (and current special forces) show the mechanism in action: robes indicate the illegality of court, masks indicate the inaccessibility of revenge. But this does not always work out either. A lack of legitimacy puts state institutions in a vicious circle of violence. A century and a half of Russian terror would provide much evidence and refutation of the theory of sacrificing crisis.
Girard is not at all characterized by postmodern self-irony. He is sure that after Sophocles and Christ, no one came closer to understanding history than himself. He crosses Hobbes and Freud, Fraser and Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss and Bakhtin in combinations that are unexpected if not deadly. None of them would agree with Girard, and Girard wouldn't agree with anyone. This book is full of mockery of professorship and the cultural schizophrenia of the modern academy. Some readers will hate it, others will like it. I am especially close to his idea of the political relevance of classical texts and the vital significance of how we understand them: this is not the idle imagination of our aesthetes, he writes about the medieval author; it is the murky <> imagination, which more reliably leads us to real victims, the more clouded it is.
Girard's conservative idea is addressed to the experience of 1968; the present is just another sacrificing crisis for him. However, nothing in this logic prevents it from being applied to cases such as constitutive violence in Yekaterinburg, Katyn or Chechnya. While justifying the use of local violence instead of global violence, this model does not define the boundary between them. Everyone knows from the history of wars or from our own divorces how small conflicts turn into big ones. The problem in politics and in life is the self-restraint of violence, which, in Girard's examples, is set by ritual and tradition. African kings were fooled around in crap when the government changed; Russian tsars were killed after one; presidents of democratic countries, changing their calendar, go to each other for cocktails. But even today, Girard says in his book on ancient texts, violence and persecution are no less than ever before. What about illusions that justify violence? Read this book and test its logic with fresh examples from life and literature.
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