Rene Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Deep Dive Outline

Episode available on Apple and Spotify.

Part 1: Girard’s core arguments in greater detail

THSTFOTW is from Matthew 13, parables about the kingdom of heaven

Rivalry, escalation and symbolic objects

“Desire is undoubtedly a distinctively human phenomenon  that can only develop when a certain threshold of mimesis is transcended” (283).

Mimesis was instinctively prohibited in early civilizations: so mirrors, twins, etc.

“Our hypothesis makes it logical to imagine that the rigorous symmetry between the mimetic partners… must bring about two things among man's ancestors. little by little: the ability to look at the other person, the mimetic double, as an alter ego and the matching capacity to establish a double inside oneself, through processes like reflection and consciousness” (284)

“It is necessary to think through the logic of mimetic conflict and its resulting violence. As rivalry becomes acute, the rivals are more apt to forget about whatever objects are, in principle, the cause of the rivalry and instead to 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 be at once beaten and assimilated. At this point mimesis is stronger than ever but no longer exerts any force at the level of the object; the object has simply dropped from view. Only the antagonists remain; we designate them as doubles because from the point of view of the antagonism, nothing distinguishes them” (26).

Scapegoat

Will discuss this more in part 3 of the deep dive, but prior to the collective murder, people are going crazy. They are losing their minds. They cannot understand left from right, up from down, and this produces a frenzy, an anxiety, a tension that must be worked out.

“Only an (arbitrary) victim can resolve the crisis because acts of violence, as mimetic phenomena, are identical and distributed as such, within the community. No one can assign an origin to the crisis or judge degrees of responsibility for it. Yet the surrogate victim will eventually appear and reconcile the community; the sheer escalation of the crisis, linked to progressively accumulating mimetic effects, will make the designation of such a victim automatic” (25)

Think of Hunger Games. The ritual of randomly drawing the sacrifice. In this case, the society must recreate the original (arbitrary) sacrifice so that the existing order is maintained.

Social unificiation

“rituals consist in the paradox of transforming the conflictual disintegration of the community into social collaboration” (20).

“The scapegoat mechanism can be compared to the proverbial Freudian tip of the iceberg – the submerged portion is by far more significant. But what is submerged in this case is not an individual or collective unconscious, it is rather an immemorial history… a diachronic dimension that remains inaccessible to modes of contemporary thought” (33-34).

-       1619 project

-       Taylor and his primordial time

“In initiation rites, for example, undifferentiation is equivalent to the loss of a previous identity, a particularity that has now been annulled. The ritual at first emphasizes and aggravates this loss; in fact, it is made. as complete as possible, not because of any supposed 'nostalgia for the immediate, as Lévi-Strauss would say, but in order to facilitate for the initiate the acquisition of a new identity, of a definitive differentiation. Baptismal rites clearly represent submersion in undifferentiation, from. which something better differentiated then emerges (29).

Priority of Religion

“The time has come to abandon any view of religion that remains part of the retroactive perspective, that sees in religion only what is added on, superimposed on basic realities that always turn out to be identical to our own consciousness. And this includes any view of religion as an idealization or sublimation, as something logically or chronologically subordinate to modern ideas” (82).

Monarchy

“Royalty is a mythology in action” (56).

“enthronement makes the king a scapegoat” (56).

“In kingship the dominant element is what happens before the sacrifice, in divinity it is what comes after the sacrifice” (57).

Economy

“Whether warriors are killed alternatively by one side or the other, prisoners are captured, or women are 'exchanged', there can be little difference between Institutions that establish agreement for the sake of hostility (assuring, for example, that neither of two sides will be deprived of ritual enemies) and institutions that promote hostility for the sake of agreement, providing for the exchange of women or goods that cannot be kept within the group. The 'cathartic' function dominates in the first whereas the economic function dominates in the second, but. the two functions are not truly distinct. It is only by means of a posteriori. rationalization that we manage to obscure the common origin of all in. situations, which is the reproduction of generative violence” (79).

Movie Review

The Matrix, Great Gatsby, Eyes Wide Shut

DD Part 2: The Christian Bible and the Centrality of Jesus

“the lesson of the Bible is precisely that the culture born of violence must return to violence” (148)

NT fulfills OT

“radical singularity of the Bible” (154) Pope Benedict

Needs to say that it isn’t god, the divinity that is violent.

Does think there’s progress, “a work of exegesis is in progress, operating in precisely the opposite direction to the usual dynamics of mythology and culture” (157). Which ultimately can’t quite get there. And so the Jews remained in conflict, until Jesus

“For the gospel text to be mythic in our sense, it would have ts take no account of the arbitrary and unjust character of the violence which is done to Jesus. In fact the opposite is the case: the Passion is presented as a blatant piece of injustice. Far from taking the collective violence upon itself, the text places it squarely on those who are responsible for it. To use the expression from the 'Curses', it lets the violence fall upon the heads of those to whom it belongs” (170).

“The first stage is the transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice in the so-called patriarchal period; the second, in Exodus, is the institution of Passover, which accentuates the common meal rather than the burnt sacrifice and can hardly claim to be a sacrifice at all in the proper sense of the term. The third stage is represented by the prophets' wish to renounce all forms of sacrifice, and this is only carried out in the Gospels.” (XXXX)

“The traditional Christian perspective, which is always far too influenced by philosophy, always runs the risk of viewing the transition from the Old to the New Testament as one of ‘idealization' and 'spiritualization’. We can easily see, by examining the skandalon, that the transition ought to be interpreted quite differently. The movement from the Old to the New Testament does not de-materialize the obstacle, turning it into a metaphysical phantom.

Exactly the opposite is true. In the Old Testament, the obstacle is both too much of a thing and too much of a metaphysical entity. In the Gospels, the obstacle is the other as an object of metaphysical fascination- the mimetic model and rival” (425).

Cain and Abel (144-149), Joseph, Jonah and Moses (that should be a story by the Egyptians, 153)

Judgment of Solomon (237-243)

“By accepting the king’s proposal, the second woman reveals her lack of any genuine love for the child. The only thing that counts for her is possessing what the other possesses” (238-239).

John the Baptist and Peter’s denial (will discuss in next book, The Scapegoat)

Jesus (John 11 ref in The Scapegoat)

Martyrdom of Stephen (171-173)

Paul in Ephesus (Acts 19)

Jesus, tombs, and stoning

“What is essential is the cadaver as talisman, as the bearer of life. and fertility; culture always develops as a tomb. The tomb is nothing but the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first most elemental and fundamental matrix of meaning. There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol 33 The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid.

J.-M. O.: We might well consider funeral rites to be the first design and model of all subsequent culture” (83).

Tombs and Jesus (163-166)

He who casts the first stone… crowd

Segue into DD P3

“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. That is why we have fewer and fewer myths all the time, in our universe dominated by the Gospels, and more and more texts bearing on persecution” (174).

DD Part 3: Girard’s Analysis of our Contemporary Age

“… the real founders of capitalism, and also of the Oedipus complex, are the monkeys. All that capitalism, or rather the liberal society that allows capitalism to flourish, does, is to give memetic phenomena a freer rein and to direct them in to economic and technological channels” (295).

“In a society where the place of individuals is not determined in advance and hierarchies have been obliterated, people are endlessly preoccupied with making a destiny for themselves, with ‘imposing’ themselves on others, ‘distinguishing’ themselves from the common herd – in a word, with ‘making a career’” (307).

“it should be observed that in contemporary society, human beings enter into rivalry for highly symbolized objects” (93)

“modern education thinks it is able to resolve every problem by glorifying the natural spontaneity of desire, which is a purely mythological notion” (291).

Differences Today

Differences are being erased so “desire is bubbling over and exceeding its boundaries in the modern world” (284). And this is because we do not live in a religious society anymore

Sexuality

“The human subject does not really know what to desire, in the last resort. He is quite incapable on his own of fixing his desire on one object and, on his own, of desiring that object consistently and relentlessly” (343).

“desire tends to be inflected toward the mimetic model” (336).

“erotic pleasure is quite capable of detaching itself entirely from the object so as to attach itself to the rival alone” (331).

“This attention is necessarily 'ambivalent', since it comprises both the exasperation provoked by the obstacle and, the admiration and even exasperation provoked by the Don Juan's prowess” (340).

“Latent homosexuality has no more existence as a separate entity than masochism or morbid jealousy do. The theory of latent homosexuality presupposes an intrinsic homosexual force, crouching somewhere in the subject's body or in his 'unconscious' and only waiting for the subject's 'resistances to collapse before it shows itself in the full light of Day” (340).

“all sexual rivalry is thus structurally homosexual” (335).

“We must eliminate not just the false difference between masculine and feminine type of homosexuality, but also the false difference between homosexual and heterosexual eroticism” (337).

psychosis

“The Gospels make all forms of 'mythologizing' impossible since, by revealing the founding mechanism, they stop it from functioning. That is why we have fewer and fewer myths all the time, in our universe dominated by the Gospels, and more and more texts bearing on persecution” (174).

“A society that replaces myth by an awareness of persecution is a society in the process of desacralization” (126).

“The Christian and modern worlds produce no mythologies, no rituals, no prohibitions. The theme of the Christian Apocalypse involves human terror, not divine terror: a terror that is all the more likely to triumph to the extent that humanity has done away with the sacred scarecrows humanists thought they were knocking over on their own initiative, while they reproached the Judaeo-Christian tradition for striving to keep them upright. So now we are liberated. We know that we are by ourselves, with no father in the sky to punish us and interfere with our paltry business. So we must no longer look backward but forward; we must show what man is capable of. The really important apocalyptic writings say nothing except that man is responsible for his history” (195).

“the same concern can no doubt be seen in the prohibition of the use of proper names, or in the ear of mirrors, which are often associated with the devil in traditional societies. Imitation doubles the imitated object and produces a simulacrum that can in tern become of the object of types of magic” (11).

“One must also consider the silence that in our society surrounds all intensely mimetic phenomena. Wherever social integration is only partially complete or in a state of regression, phenomena such as trance states or possession occur frequently and attain a quasi-normal status within the human group, provided that the latter agrees to accept them” (34).

“The victim polarizes and arrests the hallucinatory phenomena. This is why the primitive deity is quintessentially monstrous” (35).

“… there can be no ritualistic or victimary resolution, and, if and when it becomes acute, the crisis ensues – what we call psychosis” (288).

“Desire itself leads to madness and death if there is no victimage mechanism to guide it back to ‘reason’ or to engender this ‘reason” (311).

“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 call of desire. It is a matter of pushing to final conclusions what distinguishes desire – only very relatively of course – from animal life and of abandoning oneself to a fascination with the model” (312).

“the manic-depressive embodies the two opposing forces of the sacred, which are interorized and lived through interminably in an alternating pattern… What Nietzsche never detected in his researches.. the identity of God and the scapegoat – he was able to realize in his madness” (310).

Society Today

“..a radical desacralization, of the type indicated in the Gospels, was necessary before. science and technology could invent our modern weapons. Only after the gods were driven out was it possible to steel oneself to treat all of nature as objects obeying natural laws” (259).

“The rise of science and technology is clearly linked to the desacralization of nature in a universe in which victimage mechanisms function less and less well” (136).

“Either we are moving ineluctably toward non-violence, or we are about to disappear completely” (258).

“One can imagine. that human beings, confronted with this situation, will be tempted to restore the lost effectiveness of the traditional remedy by forever increasing the dosage, immolating more and more victims in holocausts that are meant to be sacrificial but that are progressively less so. The always arbitrary but culturally real difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence will weaken. Its power of illusion diminishes, and henceforth there are only enemy brothers to confront one another in its name, which all will claim to embody but which in reality no longer exists; cultural difference will be distinguished less and less from the

mimetic crisis from which it returns” (128).

“Spontaneous collective violence no longer possesses its founding capability and no longer plays a central role in society” (129).

“Any renunciation of technology, pure and simple, seems to be impossible: the machine is so well set up that it would be more dangerous to stop than to go forward. The place to look for reassurance is in the very heart of the existing terror” (256).

“We are reaching a degree of self-awareness and responsibility that was never attained by those who lived before us. What is really frightening today is not the challenge of this new meaning, but the Kafkaesque rejection of all meaning. What is frightening is the conjunction of massive technical power and the spiritual surrender of nihilism” (261).

“I am fully in favour of the major liquidation of philosophy and he sciences of man that is currently taking place. The grave-digger's work is necessary, for what is being buried is truly dead- even if there ; too much ceremony. There is no need to exaggerate the task and make he undertaker the prototype of all future cultural life. We ought to let he dead bury the dead, and move on to other things. The danger today, in fact, is that as the public becomes weary of the interminable funerary rites for meaning and of the funerary metaphysics it has swallowed for so long now, it will lose sight of the real accomplishments of modern thought, all of which are critical and negative… I simply refuse to admit that there is nothing more to be done from

now on than to mull over past failures” (135-136).

“I think that the advent of a true science of man will correspond not to the image that most people have of any scientific achievement, but with the fall of the last illusions that have accompanied science from its beginning through its rise over the last two centuries. Science has come to look more and more like a trap that modern humanity has unknowingly held out for itself” (136).

“But these bodies of thought have done their negative work. They have ana-lysed, dismembered and devoured the sacrificial forms that were in existence, and now they have nothing to get their teeth into. Their only course is to go for one another- so from now on, they are as dead as their victims. They are just like the parasites that die for want of food on the carcasses of the animals that they have slaughtered” (440).

“People tell us that there is no language worthy of our adherence apart from the deadly equations of science, on the one hand, and on the other a form of speech that acknowledges its own futility and ascetically denies itself the universal dimension. As for the unprecedented events that we are witnessing the grouping of the whole of mankind into a single society, which proceeds apace there is nothing to be said, nothing definite or even relevant. None of this is of any interest at all. We must bow down before systems of the infinitely large and the infinitely small because they can prove that their power is ex-plosive. But there is no place for any thinking on the human scale. No one takes the trouble to reflect uncompromisingly about the enigma of a historical situation that is without precedent: the death of all cultures.

Condemning humanity to nonsense and nothingness at the very moment when they have achieved the means of annihilating everything in a. blink of the eye, entrusting the future of the human habitat to individuals who now have nothing to guide them but their desires and their

'death instincts'-all of this is not a reassuring prospect, and it speaks volumes about the incapacity of modern science and ideology to master the forces that they have placed in our hands. This complete skepticism, this nihilism with regard to knowledge is often put across just as dogmatically as the various dogmatisms that preceded it. Nowadays people disclaim any certain knowledge and any authority, but with a more assured and authoritarian tone than ever before. We are getting away from one form of Puritanism, only to fall into another. It is now a matter not of depriving mankind of sexuality, but of something we need even more--meaning. Man cannot live on bread and sexuality. Present-day thought is the worst form of castration, since it is the castration of the signified. People are always on the look-out to catch their neighbours red-handed in believing something or other. We struggled against the Puritanism of our parents only to fall into a form of Puritanism far worse than theirs a Puritanism of meaning that kills all that it touches. This Puritanism desiccates every text and spreads the most deadening boredom even in the newest situations” (441-442).

“A new kind of humanity is in the process of gestation” (445).