Contra Girard, A Reprise

A revision, clearer, more responsible and I hope more persuasive version than the first iteration

As I said in a previous and perhaps too hasty post, I have made intemperate and untoward remarks about my objections to Rene Girard in several online venues of late, partly by way of trailing my coat for a good debate. By way of shoring up this provocation a bit more responsibly, I want to lay out my objections here as succinctly as possible. I must begin, however, by acknowledging again that his theory of sacrifice has had an inexplicably long shelf-life. It has been especially puzzling, given that, as Biblical scholars and anthropologists have pointed out for some time, it is utterly untenable with reference to the ethnographic data, fatally compromised in terms of comparative religion, and theologically tone-deaf to the metaphysical and philosophical issues at stake. Its odd persistence, in spite of these issues and others that would normally be dispositive, must mean that the theory has some purchase on the current global cultural imaginary that itself raises questions and calls for reflection and critique, a matter I can’t pursue at length here but to which I return, for a moment at least, in closing below.

Let me begin by summarizing Girard briefly and I hope not too tendentiously. Like his father-precursor back there in Vienna, Girard takes some very highly and dubiously mediated tales from ‘primitive’ cultures and works them up into a grand narrative of sacrifice and violence. His point of departure is the scenario in Totem and Taboo, where, working similarly, Freud tells a story about a dramatic Bedouin tribal ritual that he makes paradigmatic for what becomes in this respect his entire anthropological theory. According to the account he found in his sources, at the rise of the daystar,  a group of men go out into the desert where a victim, in this case a camel, is bound on an altar to be killed. Someone Freud calls the ‘leader of the band’ inflicts a wound on this living creature and quickly drinks the blood that gushes forth until the camel bleeds out. Immediately, the whole company falls on the carcass and hacks off pieces of flesh, eating them raw in order to observe a protocol that appaprently requires them to demolish the entire carcass before the rising of the sun.

Freud makes of this ritual a scenario that re-enacts or repeats at the level of fantasy the murder of a father or father-figure by a band of brothers, who are driven by the sexual instinct to remove any impediment to full and driven enjoyment of the women of the tribe but who then endure profound guilt, which means they must idealize and revere that now absent father and set him up as a kind of inaugural totem of worship for their tribe. Hence, for Freud, religions, all religions, including paradigmatically the Abrahamic ones. And hence, too, of course, many an Oedipal drama played out at the level of personal as well as communal development. It’s a dark scenario, but Freud’s wager, and later Girard’s, is that exposure and consciousness of its elements, the instinctive, compulsive drive, the acting out, the murder or intended murder, and the subsequent reaction formation is to defang it and mitigate its deleterious and often violent social and individual effects.

Girard has a similar foundational story, though one told in terms of a culturally mediated desire rather than an instinctual drive. With Hegel, to whom he owes a large debt, Girard argues that the desire in play here, the wish to murder the father and possess the women of the tribe, is not a direct animal impulse but a mimetic desire derived from the observation, jealousy and imitation of others. Young men see older men interested in these women and seeking to possess them, and they want both to replace and to emulate those older men and get some of the action for themselves. Freud’s Oedipal conflict is thus for Girard rooted not in the body and its drives but in social life; it is a particular formation of a universal pattern of attraction, envy and hatred, a pattern based on the scarcity and commodification of women and the wish to remove the competition for their sexual favors. This desire leads to endless cycles of conflict and violence.

This mimetic violence can for Girard be mitigated by the selection of a scapegoat, an animal or the like onto which can be projected all this hatred, jealousy and envy so that it can be driven from the scene or in some instances even killed, and order and peace can be restored. With the success of this operation, which is highly psychologically effective, we have a clean slate – at least for a time. In its absence, an idealized image of the distanced and dead scapegoat is set up to underwrite that now pacified order. They now have an imaginary and glorified figurehead, to whom all owe a debt of gratitude for taking away the chaos but in relation to whom all feel also vaguely guilty.  This figurehead, is, however, now usefully unreal and absent, offering no barrier to the enjoyment of the women and no threat of retaliation for the expulsion. In fact, the image of the dead or expelled scapegoat becomes a kind of unifying or rallying point, and a new communal formation of complicity grows up around it.

We see this process at work, Girard thinks, in the Jewish ritual of the Day of Atonement and above all in the fate of Jesus at the crucifixion. In the backstory for the former ritual, a goat is charged with the sin of the whole people, sent out into the wilderness and dispatched, leaving behind a peaceable well-defined community, purified for a time of the ill effects of sexually driven mimetic desire and envy. That desire, however, will of course recur, and the ritual will have to be repeated again and again if only in memory, as indeed it is, yearly, in Jewish tradition. In the Christian story, it is not a goat but a man that is expelled, but he too, indeed pre-eminently, is saddled with the sin of mimesis, and he too is elevated into the status of a revered figurehead for a new community as a result. Here again the sacrifice is also memorialized or re-enacted over and over in ritual terms (in the eucharist) to maintain its efficacy.

For Girard, however, something more and greater is going on in the crucifixion story than this repetition of a fated pattern. Christ’s passion, which looks at first glance like just one more instance of a repeated scenario of scapegoating, exceeds its role as a merely exemplary case-study and becomes the key to unraveling the whole shaky and immoral enterprise.  For the crucifixion leads not just to repeating but to ending the cycle of envy, projection, abjection, recuperation and mystification, at least in its extreme form which involves actual killing. The sacrifice is done here ‘once and for all’ -- a phrase that actually originates in a theologumenon about Jesus’ death in the New Testament book of Hebrews.

Why does it do this? Why does it obviate this recurrent violence?  Because Jesus is so palpably innocent, and his expulsion and death so unwarranted, that for Girard his execution works to expose the immorality of the whole mechanism. His violent expulsion from the community and sacrificial death thus turns back on the perpetrators and lay bare the barbarism, inhumanity, and impropriety of the whole show.  His sacrifice is both paradigmatic and final; it exposes the whole performance of sacrifice as the defensive and reprehensible practice it is and always was.

There are a number of problems with this scenario.  First, in terms of the Abrahamic traditions, it does not accurately reflect the scriptural accounts of sacrifice, including some of the most important ones. Among these are the sacrifice of Isaac proposed by God to Abraham in the book of Genesis and there averted only by a substitute ram. In no way does Isaac carry sin in that story; he is in fact the opposite, clean, legitimate, obedient, and the perfect candidate for the perpetuation of his father’s religious vision as promised by that very same God. That’s precisely the point: Abraham is forced to show willingness to relinquish the very means of establishing what he takes to be his mission: the founding of a new people and a new culture. His total dependence on the God in question to accomplish that mission, rather than on biology, earthly contingency, and even human affinity and affection is assured by his choice.

Even in terms of the back story of Yom Kippur, which does involve a scriptural account of the projection of sin onto an animal that is then driven out to its death, there is a great difference between that expulsion and sacrifice proper in the cultus of Israel. Those familiar with the Yom Kippur observance will remember that there is in fact a second such animal back at the temple whose fate is very different from the expelled goat’s; that animal is sacrificed, not expelled, and plays a very different role in the tradition. Among other things, the body is not consigned to oblivion; it is used to support and feed the priesthood.  Much more could be said here about Girard’s distortion of his sources, and it is not difficult to find critiques in Biblical scholarship which draw attention to these problems. (For an extended and comprehensive treatment of the theoretical and exegetical issues  raised for Biblical scholars by Girard’s analysis here, see among others Naomi Janowitz, “Inventing the Scapegoat,” [Journal of Ritual Studies 25,:1, 2011.])

To pursue these problems even further, it is well-documented in the anthropological literature, both with respect to this and to many if not most other sacrificial practices, that the victim  must be not only perfect and beautiful but  supremely celebrated and idealized, and this not after the event, as a kind of guilty reaction, but before it, as a supreme elevation. The lambs of sacrifice for the temple cult in Israel, for instance, had to be unblemished. They were not driven out of the community but, as Marcel Mauss, the founding of academic theories of sacrifice, long ago and convincingly argued, they were prepared to be sent over the barrier of death in order to carry messages to and from the people about matters beyond the ordinary phenomenal realm. Likewise with the victims of sacrifice in Aztec culture: they were celebrated, groomed, and lauded for a considerable period of time before the event.

Furthermore, most sacrificial discourses insist that the victim has to go willingly, and many devices are frequently offered to make it so, including the use of psychotropics, symbolic indoctrinations, celebrations and forms of honoring and praise. In fact, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the victim does sometimes at least accept the role and the responsibility and affirm the necessity of passing through injury or death. So it appears, at least, in many recorded instances of human sacrifice, including those performed in recent memory in the mountain cultures of the Andes and those proposed, though not enacted, by Bataille and friends during their strenuous, noble but misguided efforts to restore a sacrificial discourse to a benighted world. Even the heifer in ancient Greek rites had to nod, or be induced to nod, for the proceedings to go forward.

So Girard’s theory of scapegoating as the projection of contamination on a mere tool or device for relieving social anxiety as the basic structural principle of ritual sacrifice simply cannot hold.  Although this mechanism, the existence and importance of which, as my colleague Matt Stanley has reminded me, cannot be denied, is definitely a reality, it represents only a very particular kind of violence, a kind not even central to the various religious systems he references. Too generalize that particular unlovely mechanism of violenc as central to ritual sacrifice is to fail to deal with other and more foundational instances of this widespread and vital cultural phenomenon. Among these are rituals that are designed to ensure continuity from generation to generation, to establish sexual boundaries and identities, and to mark coming of age and marriage in various lineages. (See, for instance, Nancy Jay’s far more explanatory and capacious theory of sacrifice in her  seminal Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Paternity and Religion University of Chicago Press, 1992.)

Underlying these problems, as I have indicated, is the problem of mimetic desire itself and of its material base or supposed base in human and animal nature.  The underpinnings of this concept lie in cognitive science and evolutionary biology and the fascination there with mirror neurons, which are indeed part of the apparatus of learning for many mammals. Girard, however, interprets this feature of animal life in a way that sounds as if the only biologist he has read is Konrad Lorenz. The anthropology of the human he seems to presuppose here evinces a near-Calvinist, highly masculinist, and capitalist-inflected view of humans as fundamentally and by nature in a barbaric state of rabid envy, negative projection, and violent competition that must be repeatedly mediated by a fragile civilizing function. The presupposition is that the economy of salvation is a closed loop, a zero sum game, a kind of Hobbesian dystopia, where males are primarily aggressive, females are primarily commodified, and where there is never enough sex to go around. In this scenario, mimetic desire can be nothing but the expression of a fundamentally fallen state, one requiring desperate measures to abate.

Furthermore, Girard does not seem to notice that even in the terms of his own paradigm, the putative unmasking of the mechanism for handling mimetic desire entailed by the crucifixion story is ineffective and moot. For scapegoating violence -- which again I by no means wish to dismiss as a factor in social life but only as the motor for sacrificial practices and their mitigation -- is not fully exposed and ended for all time by the crucifixion but is reconstituted and projected almost immediately onto others, in the first instance Jews and then and now Muslims. This new cycle of scapegoating of others in Christianity is not a minor or adventitious artefact: it is everywhere to be seen and is very clearly stressed in the New Testament gospel of John, which speaks repeatedly of ‘the Jews’ as the enemy of all good.

If I may rehearse here a point made by Richard Boothby in his study of the psychoanalytic dimension of sacrifice, Girard’s theory of mimetic violence can be usefully juxtaposed to that of Lacan, who has a much more nuanced, more comprehensive and in his opinion more liberating view. For Lacan, the function of sacrifice is to enable and install a signifying function, to form a hinge or make a passage between and among what he calls real, imaginary and symbolic registers, with a consequent release of new energies and new forms of social interaction. Sacrifice does not do this, however, by abolishing or denegating mimesis but by rendering it dialectical.  In somewhat more technical terms, for Lacan, sacrifice does not disrupt but subsumes the mimetic function; it interrupts the imaginary, preverbal of human identity and initiates the operation of a signifier, a fragmented petit object a, as he calls it, that helps at once to put us in touch with the real beyond the mirror and in the event to form a bond with others. (See Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, Routledge, 2002).

Far from addressing some primal state of murderous intent then, sacrifice breaks opens the imaginary wholeness to which the human subjects can become captive, and it helps to ground them in the necessity to life of the acceptance destruction and dismemberment – among other things the destruction and dismemberment entailed in birth and death. It mediates between the two-dimensional, ideal reflection in the mirror and the three dimensional and very real messiness of the life outside it, the life of “ontological slime” as Boothby calls it, the life of growth and decay and rebirth again. In doing so it enables that subject to enter a fractured but generative world, one in which stasis may be overcome, fixation released, and materiality given its due but also relativized. In this sense, to put this slightly differently, it enables the dissociation of the infantile human from pure captation by its own imaginary. In doing so, it reformulates desire so as to create a kind of intersubjectivity or proto-community, one that, far from being based on a lie and resulting in an ethical embarrassment, as it does for Girard, becomes instead a potential vector for connection and growth.

Of course, it’s complicated.  And the ethical issue here does not go away, and it is much addressed, if not ever perhaps to our full satisfaction, both within and without sacrificial discourse proper. To kill or put out of use a supreme value requires thought, reflection and social consensus, and these must be conscious and explicitly conveyed —otherwise the practice would never be tolerated.  Thus almost all major sacrificial formations entail rationales that call for recognition and investment. As with the military, these discourses entail strict and formally codified controls and protocols, rules of engagement so to speak, for who or what may be coerced, expelled and/or killed or demolished, for what purpose, on what terms and to the benefit of whom. These understandings and controls often depend upon an entire discourse of substitution, which is fundamental to sacrificial rituals from the start. An entity of lesser value is substituted for the victim in an effort to mitigate the scandal of the deliberate destruction of something valuable – in the case of life, extremely valuable -- for a supposedly higher good. (Think of Abraham and Isaac again, and the substitution of that providential ram.)

What that higher good may be is contested and varies from case to case, but it is above all immaterial and non-ordinary, and it always involves a paradox, unsolvable in rational terms: to create life you must destroy it.  Paradoxes such as this one are disturbing, and one could, somewhat mischievously I admit, read the whole of Girard’s thesis as a defense against that disturbance, well-intentioned, perhaps, but involving a kind of mystification that will not hold up for long under serious analysis.  Be that as it may, let me reierate that Lacan’s and Jay’s analyses here are, for me at least, more generous, more generative, and more true-to-life than Girard’s, as well as being less insouciant toward the data and based on less impoverished anthropologies.  Yet there is no doubt that Girard’s scapegoating meme is persistent and compelling for many.

As I have said, I am puzzled here. The best I can do is to suggest that that to the extent that his theory seems explanatory and satisfying, it is perhaps a symptom of our very particular moment where the standard model of societal formation is rooted in an assumption of fundamental competition and scarcity, one in which envy, jealousy and the acquisition of ever more sexual trophies are thought to be — and insistently so thought — the primary drivers of human life. Sacrifice is then indeed and quite arguably no more than the crude, ineffective and now superseded mechanism for enduring this dark reality.  

Even were this the case, and if then all we can do about this putative dire state is to try to mitigate the resulting violence by recourse to a view of sacrifice as immoral and antiquated and a theory of its mitigation based on distorted data and a supercessionist reading of a particular religious event invidious to other faiths, then we are, I think, at an impasse. I do not, however, not think this is the case, even in our benighted world. Sacrifice, both ritual and moral, is foundational to human life, and it is so at both individual and cultural levels; it cannot be dismissed as a mere mystification based on mimetic desire.

But that is an argument I have obsessed over, made, picked apart, and remade in many venues and at many times, and I will no doubt continue to fret over it in pages to come. I’ll try not to scapegoat Girard in doing so.