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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611861099 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2014 |
| Series: | Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 152 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
MALCOLM DEBEVOISE is a three-time winner of the French-American Foundation Prize for nonfiction and has translated more than forty works from French and Italian in all branches of scholarship.
Read an Excerpt
The One by Whom Scandal Comes
By René Girard, M. B. DeBevoise
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2014 Michigan State UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-109-9
CHAPTER 1
Violence and Reciprocity
How shall we find the concord of this discord?
—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act V, scene i)
Why is there so much violence in our midst? No question is more debated today. And none produces more disappointing answers.
In the past, when people talked about the threats facing humanity, they always mentioned human violence, but it came after other perils that seemed to them still more formidable: destiny, the gods, nature, perhaps also the ferocious beasts that painters and illustrators until not so very long ago imagined to be even more enormous and more frightening than they really were. We may smile on being reminded of this, but in a way that suggests nostalgia more than amusement. Of all the threats presently looming over us, the most dreadful one, as we well realize, the only real threat, is ourselves. This truth becomes more striking every day, for every day our violence grows greater.
With the end of the Cold War, the risks of cataclysmic war receded and pacifists rejoiced. Nevertheless there was a sense of foreboding, that another titanic contest had merely been postponed. It had long been said, though no one really believed it, that terrorism would take the place of traditional warfare. It was hard to see how terrorism could be as terrifying as the prospect of a nuclear exchange between superpowers. Today we see.
Violence seems be to be escalating in a way that may be likened to the spread of a fire or an epidemic. The great mythic images rise up again before our eyes, as if violence had rediscovered a very ancient and rather mysterious form, a swirling vortex in which the most acute kinds of violence merge into one. There is one kind of violence, the kind found in families and in schools, especially in America, where teenagers slaughter their classmates. And then there is the kind of violence that is now seen throughout the world, a terrorism without limits or boundaries that heralds an age of wars of extermination against civil populations. We seem to be hurtling toward a moment when all mankind will be confronted with the reality of its own violence.
So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world's nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World's fairs were staged in its honor, one aft er another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected.
There are two main modern approaches to violence. The first is political and philosophical. It holds that human beings are naturally good and ascribes anything that contradicts this assumption to the imperfections of society, to the oppression of the people by the ruling classes. The second is biological. Within the animal kingdom, which is naturally peaceable, only the human race is truly capable of violence. Freud spoke of a death instinct. Today we seek to identify the genes responsible for aggression.
These two approaches have proved to be sterile. For years now I have argued for a third approach, one that is both very new and very old. When I speak of it a certain interest is awakened, only to be immediately replaced by skepticism once I pronounce the key word of my hypothesis: imitation.
Biologically determined appetites and needs, which are common to both men and animals, and unchanging since they bear upon fixed objects, stand in contrast to desire and passion, which are exclusively human. 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 oft en it is an individual whom we admire. Everything that humanity endows with prestige it transforms into a model. This is true not only of children and adolescents, but also of adults.
In observing people around us we quickly perceive that mimetic desire, or desirous imitation, dominates not only the smallest details of our everyday behavior, but also the most important choices of our lives, the choice of a spouse, of a career, even the meaning that we give to our existence. What we call desire or passion is not mimetic accidentally, or from time to time, but is mimetic unavoidably, all the time. Far from being the most personal emotion there is, our desire comes from others. Nothing could be more social.
Imitation plays an important role among the higher mammals, notably among our closest relatives, the great apes. It becomes more powerful still among human beings, and it is the principal reason why we are more intelligent, but also more combative and more violent, than all the other mammals. Imitation is human intelligence in its most dynamic aspect. It goes beyond animality, then, but it also causes us to lose animal equilibrium; indeed we may fall very far below those whom we used to call our "lower brothers." Once I desire what a model fairly close to me in time and space desires, with a view to bringing the object I covet through him within my grasp, I try to take this object away from him—and so rivalry between the two of us becomes inevitable.
This is mimetic rivalry. It can become extraordinarily acute. Curiously, however, even though mimetic rivalry is responsible for the frequency and intensity of human conflict, no one ever speaks of it. It does everything possible to conceal itself, even from the eyes of those who are party to it, and generally it succeeds.
Internecine conflict can lead to violent death, the prospect of which nevertheless does not deter human combatants. Mimetic rivalry is observed in other mammals, but there it is relatively weak and almost always interrupted before becoming fatal. It produces dominance patterns that, generally speaking, are more stable than human relations, which are subject to a quite particular form of mimeticism.
When an imitator attempts to snatch away from his model the object of their common desire, the model resists, of course, and desire becomes more intense on both sides. The model becomes the imitator of his imitator, and vice versa. Their roles are exchanged and reflected in an ever more perfect mutual imitation that heightens the resemblance between the antagonists. One must not see this as a simple mirror effect, in the Lacanian sense, but as a real action that alters our relations with others and ends up pushing each of us in the very direction we imagined ourselves to have avoided by opposing our model: the greater the resemblance between mimetic rivals, the more closely they identify with each other. This process of undifferentiation is nothing other than the ever greater violence that threatens us at the present hour.
The great Greek philosophers, and particularly Plato and Aristotle, recognized the cardinal importance of imitation in human behavior, but they misunderstood the nature of mimetic rivalry. The case of Plato is especially striking. He creates an ontology in which reality as a whole is imitative, and yet human imitation is held to be deficient, even dangerous. Plato pretends to disdain imitation, but plainly he fears it, even if he never actually says what it is he dreads. This fear is connected, of course, with rivalrous relations that are mostly unidentified as well.
Aristotle, for his part, seems scarcely even to suspect that the cause of violence might be found in imitation, which he takes to be unproblematic. Man, he says, is the most mimetic of all animals. He also says there is nothing we like so much as imitation. He is right in both cases, but, like Plato, he fails to detect the source of violence in imitation. He sees quite clearly that friendship oft en leads to rivalry, but he limits rivalry to an aristocratic form of emulation that involves only virtuous behaviors. Aristotle never considers the situation of those who, unlike him, are neither aristocrats nor more gift ed than others. He does not fear competition. He sees the essential problem but manages with great elegance to avoid coming to terms with it.
The Platonist ontology of imitation and the philosophical and psychological conception that, following Aristotle, limits imitation to external behaviors, to ways of acting or speaking, must therefore be rejected. In both cases, the essential point is evaded. Modern romantic philosophy despises imitation, and the nearer one comes to the present the more pronounced this scorn becomes. Oddly, it is based on the supposed inability of imitators to challenge their models. Mimeticism is supposed to be a renunciation of true individuality, with the result that the individual is beaten down by "others" and forced to yield to the common opinion.
Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more oft en despises.
When we imitate others, as it is usually said, we are being unfaithful to ourselves. The outstanding characteristic of imitators is not violence; it is passivity, herd behavior. This is what I call the romantic lie, which in the twentieth century was most famously described by Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time, the "inauthentic" self is identical with the "they" (das Man) of collective irresponsibility. Passive and conformist imitation abandons the struggle to affirm one's true personality. It is opposed to the authentic self of the philosopher himself, who has no fear of going to war against adversaries who are worthy of him, in the Heracleitean spirit of pólemos—the violence that is "father of all and king of all." Struggle and conflict are seen as proofs of authenticity, of a will to power in the Nietzschean sense of the term.
I maintain that passion and desire are never authentic in the Heideggerean sense. They do not emerge from the depths of our being; we always borrow them from others. Far from seeing conflict as a sign of mastery, as Heidegger does, we must see it as exactly the opposite, a confirmation of the mimetic nature of our desires.
Individualists, as all of us imagine ourselves to be, have the impression that they no longer imitate anyone once they have forcibly overcome their model. Far from being incompatible with imitation, Heracleitean violence is an idealized version of mimetic rivalry. A more penetrating critical eye detects in it the romantic lie of which I just spoke.
To understand our current predicament we must first look inside ourselves—and no less closely than we must then look at the world around us. Our world is filled with competition, frenzied ambition in every domain. Each of us is acquainted with the spirit of competition. This spirit is not a bad thing in and of itself. Its influence has long been felt in personal relations within the dominant classes. Subsequently it spread throughout the whole of society, to the point that today it has more or less openly triumphed in every part of the world. In Western nations, and above all in the United States, it animates not only economic and financial life, but scientific research and intellectual life as well. Despite the tension and the unrest it brings, these nations are inclined on the whole to congratulate themselves for having embraced the spirit of competition, for its positive effects are considerable. Not the least of these is the impressive wealth it has brought a large part of the population. No one, or almost no one, any longer thinks of forgoing rivalry, since it allows us to go on dreaming of a still more glittering and prosperous future than the recent past. Our world seems to us the most desirable one there ever was, especially when we compare it to life in nations that have not enjoyed the same prosperity.
On both sides there is a reliance on ancestral traditions to explain phenomena that, to the contrary, are rooted quite obviously in the loss of these traditions—a loss that has remained uncompensated until the present day. The hatred of the West and of everything that it represents arises not because its spirit is really foreign to the peoples of the third world, nor because they are really opposed to the "progress" that we embody, but because the competitive spirit is as familiar to them as it is to ourselves. Far from turning away from the West, they cannot prevent themselves from imitating it, from adopting its values without admitting it to themselves. They are no less consumed than we are by the ideology of individual and collective success.
The rivalrous ideal that our example imposes on the whole planet cannot make us conquerors without there being uncountably many vanquished, uncountably many victims. It is hardly surprising, then, that this ideology should produce reactions among the vanquished that are very different from the ones it produces among the conquerors themselves. Above all it creates a fervent determination to utterly shatter the enormous competitive machine that the United States, closely followed by all the other nations of the West, has become, a source of immense personal and national humiliation.
People everywhere today are exposed to a contagion of violence that perpetuates cycles of vengeance. These interlocking episodes resemble each other, quite obviously, because they all imitate each other. This is why I say the true secret of conflict and violence is mimetic desire. Even if one admits that such desire and the fierce rivalries it generates are the cause of many conflicts, one may still think that there are other conflictual relations from which mimetic desire is absent, and that I exaggerate its role in making it the principal cause of human conflict. One may suspect me, in other words, of surrendering to the facile pleasures of reductionism.
There are many conflicts, small and large, which seem to have nothing to do with mimeticism, because desire plays no role in them. The least passionate human relations can also be riddled with violence. How can the mimetic conception I propose account for conflicts that break out, and are aggravated with disconcerting ease, among individuals who, it would appear, are neither separated nor drawn together by any common desire?
To reply to this objection, let us take the most insignificant example imaginable: you extend your hand to me and I, in return, extend my hand to you. Together we perform the harmless ritual of shaking hands. Faced with your extended hand, politeness requires that I extend mine. If, for whatever reason, I refuse to take part in the ritual, if I refuse to imitate you, how do you react? At once you withdraw your hand as well. You show a reticence toward me that is at least equal to, and probably a bit greater than, the reticence I have shown toward you.
We suppose that there is nothing more normal, more natural than this reaction, and yet a moment's reflection will reveal its paradoxical character. If I decline to shake your hand, if, in short, I refuse to imitate you, then you are now the one who imitates me, by reproducing my refusal, by copying me instead. Imitation, which usually expresses agreement in this case, now serves to confirm and strengthen disagreement. Once again, in other words, imitation triumphs. Here we see how rigorously, how implacably mutual imitation structures even the simplest human relations.
When the imitator becomes the model and the model the imitator, imitation is given new life by the attempt to deny it. When one of the two partners drops the torch of mimeticism, as it were, the other one catches it before it falls to the ground—not in order to preserve a continuity that is about to be broken, but to complete the rupture by replicating it, mimetically.
If a person B turns away from A, who extends his hand to him, A immediately takes offense and, in his turn, refuses to shake B's hand. In the context of the first refusal, the second one comes too late and risks going unperceived. A will therefore try to make it more visible by emphasizing it a bit, by very slightly overdoing it. Perhaps, more obviously still, he will turn his back on B. The thought of triggering a cycle of violent retaliation is far from his mind. He wants simply to make a point—to make B understand that the insulting character of his behavior has not escaped his attention.
What A interprets as a discourtesy, a deliberate slight, may be nothing more than a momentary distraction on the part of B, whose mind was on something else. And yet the idea that it may have been a conscious insult is less wounding to A's vanity than the thought of being unnoticed, even for a moment. However miniscule the original misunderstanding, if B now tries to explain himself to A, the shadow suddenly cast over their encounter, so far from being dispelled, only grows darker.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The One by Whom Scandal Comes by René Girard, M. B. DeBevoise. Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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Table of Contents
A Note on the Translation vii
Preface ix
Part 1 Against Relativism
Chapter 1 Violence and Reciprocity 3
Chapter 2 Noble Savages and Others 21
Chapter 3 Mimetic Theory and Theology 33
Part 2 The Other Side of Myth
Chapter 4 I See Satan Fall Like Lightning 49
Chapter 5 Scandal and Conversion 57
Chapter 6 I Do Not Pray for the World 67
Chapter 7 The Catholic Church and the Modern World 75
Chapter 8 Hominization and Natural Selection 85
Chapter 9 A Stumbling Block to Jews, Foolishness to Gentiles 93
Chapter 10 Lévi-Strauss on Collective Murder 103
Chapter 11 Positivists and Deconstructionists 113
Chapter 12 How Should Mimetic Theory Be Applied? 127
Notes 131
Index 137