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The Prophetic Law
ESSAYS IN JUDAISM, GIRARDIANISM, LITERARY STUDIES, AND THE ETHICAL
By Sandor Goodhart Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2014 Sandor Goodhart
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-124-2
CHAPTER 1
"I Am Joseph"
Judaism, Anti-Idolatry, and the Prophetic Law
II est juif et donc, dans son milieu et sa culture, il entend ce qu'il doit entendre, qu'il faut arrêter le sacrifice, qu'il faut un substitut.
—Michel Serres
In 1973, Eric Gans wrote that René Girard's research in anthropology seemed to offer an "Archimedean point" from which the human sciences could one day be rethought. Gans may have underestimated the case. For what has occurred since Girard began writing in the early 1960s is a veritable explosion of interest in his work in all major fields of Western inquiry. By the end of the 1970s, Girardian thinking had gained a foothold in literary studies, classical studies, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. More recently, the "mimetic hypothesis" has begun to be extended to fields less commonly associated with the human sciences, fields such as economics and political science, and most recently the hard sciences of physics and biology. If the number and kind of conferences held recently in this country and abroad around Girard's work can be taken as an index to this growing interest, it may not be much longer before we discover in this thought a model for talking responsibly about the conditions for both the humanities and the sciences, a basis for understanding in the most fundamental way the order of behavior and of knowledge in human communities.
My own contribution to this burgeoning Girardian project—both here and elsewhere—will assume the following form. Rather than summarize Girard's ideas (there are already excellent accounts of his work) or "apply" them within my own fields, I would like in the first place to highlight certain aspects of his thinking that I think have been insufficiently emphasized, aspects that I call the "prophetic." And in the second I would like to undertake what I deem to be the next step of this research: to begin to uncover the roots of the Christian revelation which is of such importance for Girard in the source of all prophetic thinking in our culture which is the Hebrew Bible. For that part of my presentation in the present context I will turn to certain texts at the conclusion of Genesis, texts concerning the story of Joseph and his brothers.
Part One
René Girard's work offers us neither more nor less than a theory of order and disorder in human communities. Emerging as it did from the intellectual climate of structuralism and post-structuralism in the late 1960s and early 1970s in this country, Girard's thinking undertook to deal with the one problem evaded by the proponents both of textuality and of power—the problem of the sacred, a problem, I suggest, that comprehends each of these other two discussions and goes beyond them.
In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961), Girard proposed that desire is rooted neither in objects nor in subjects but in the deliberate appropriation by subjects of the objects of others. The simplicity and elegance of this theory should not blind us to the enormity of its explanatory power. In a series of readings of five major European novelists (Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Proust), Girard was able to show that the discovery of the imitative or mimetic nature of desire (in contrast to the romantic belief that desire is original or originary) structures the major fiction of these writers and makes available to us, if we would but read that fiction in context of their total output, an autocriticism of the writer's own emergence from the underground prison of romantic belief.
In La violence et le sacré (1972), Girard generalized his theory of mediated desire to the level of cultural order at large. What is the function of religion at the level of real human relations, he asked. We have long had available to us imaginary theories of sacrifice—such as the kind Frazer and others in the nineteenth century proposed. More recently, with the advent of structural linguistics and structural anthropology, we have tried to explain religion from within a network of social differences or symbolic exchanges—à la Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. What Girard suggests in their place is a theory of human community that would account for behavior at the level of the real. Religion, Girard suggests, has the function of keeping violence out, of transcendentalizing it, of making it sacred. Th us, the first equation he offers toward this end of understanding the foundations of human community is the identity between violence and the sacred. The sacred, he says, is violence efficaciously removed from human communities, and violence is the sacred deviated from its divine position and creating havoc in the city.
But what is violence from a human perspective? Human beings argue, Girard asserts, not because they are different but because they are the same, because in their mutual differential accusations they have become enemy twins, human doubles, mirror images of each other in their reciprocal enmity and violence. Th us, violence is none other than difference itself, asserted in the extreme, no longer efficaciously guaranteeing its own propagation. It is difference gone wrong, as it were, the poison for which difference is the medicine. Such is the nature of the sacrificial crisis.
How do these identities offer us a theory of the origin of culture? In the midst of a sacrificial crisis that verges upon a war of all against all, an extraordinary thing can occur: the war of all against all can suddenly turn into the war of all against one. Since within the sacrificial crisis all approach a state of being identical to all, anyone approaches being identical to everyone and can, therefore, substitute for all those that each dreams of sacrificing. Th us, the most arbitrary differences—hair color, skin color—can come to count absolutely. In the wake of the successful expulsion of an enemy twin or double, peace is restored. Since the trouble was never any other than human violence to begin with, the successful completion of the sacrificial project of each in the collective expulsion of an arbitrary scapegoat can restore difference to the human community. A complex network of ritual interactions can now be elaborated to prevent the reoccurrence of such a crisis, a prevention that can paradoxically take the form of its encouragement (in mock or commemorative form—and only up to a point) in order to reacquire its beneficial effects.
In Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978) and Le bouc émissaire (1982), Girard carried this development to its natural conclusion. How has our knowledge of these sacrificial dynamics been made possible? Why is this very theory not just another sacrificial theory, protective of our own cultural ethnocentrism? The demystification of the sacrificial genesis of cultural order first makes its appearance in the Hebrew Bible and reaches its zenith, Girard argues, in the texts of the Christian Gospel, in particular the texts of the Passion. Stories such as those of Cain and Abel or Jacob and Esau begin already to make available to us within the text this identity of the sacred with human violence. But the full revelation for Girard comes only in the victimage of Jesus. Jesus, Girard argues, is the first innocent victim, one whose innocence renders visible for the first time the arbitrariness of the victims of primitive sacrificial behavior and shows us where our violence is going.
For example, in the curses against the Pharisees, Jesus says to the Pharisees, in effect, "You say that, had you been there, you would not have stoned the prophets. Don't you see that in distinguishing yourself from 'those who stoned the prophets,' you do the same thing? You put yourself at a sacred remove from them which is neither more nor less than what they already were doing in 'stoning' their adversaries. Moreover, for telling you this truth of your own violence, you will differentiate yourself from or 'stone' me. What's more, those who come after you will repeat your very gestures. Believing they are different from you, they will stone you in my name, calling you 'Jews' and themselves 'Christians.'" The history of Christianity for Girard is permeated with such sacrificial misunderstandings, misunderstandings ironically of the demystification of sacrificial understanding itself.
What does it mean, then, for me to identify Girard's thinking as "prophetic?" If we understand the notion of the prophetic as the recognition of the dramas in which human beings are engaged and the naming in advance of the end of those dramas, then Girard's thought, which identifies itself with the Gospel reading, is prophetic in the same fashion. Both elaborate for us the total picture of our implication in human violence, showing us where it has come from and where it is leading us, in order that we may give it up.
But where does such a notion of the prophetic itself come from? To ask this question is to open an inquiry of a different sort.
The notion of the prophetic has particular meaning for us in the modern world, one that is associated for us with religiosity or a kind of false theologism, as in the phrase "nouveau prophétisme." I would argue that if we have rarely recognized the true explanatory power of the prophetic, it is because we have lived within the confines of a Platonic essentialism that has barred that knowledge from us. What I want to argue is that the prophetic is more comprehensive than Platonism, that it is, if we understand the notion in its largest sense, the logic of ritual organization itself, a logic, moreover, that we share with every other culture on the planet and yet to which we remain indefatigably blind by virtue of our idolatry of Platonic reason. Therefore, it is a logic that raises for us as a stake our very ethnocentrism.
In what way? We live in a culture dominated by the thought of the Platonic logos, by discourse, by reason, by difference, or decision making. Within Platonic thinking there have been only two ways that we have been able to conceive of the possibility of knowledge outside of reason. On the one hand, we have imagined it coming to us as the result of divine or providential intercession. Thus, for example, we have imagined poetic inspiration among the Greeks or the language of the Hebrew prophets. On the other hand, we have imagined knowledge as possible for us through fantasies, illusion, dreams, in short, all those experiences that we feel to be the product of fiction or of desire. Thus Freud's discoveries, for example, far from unveiling for us a realm which is genuinely new, a knowledge that is other than conscious knowledge, only display for us a region which, from within Platonism was, as it were, mapped out in advance. It is not coincidental that the two theories of dreams with which we are left after Freud hold that they are either prophetic in the strictly literal sense of fortune-telling or the remnants of unconscious desire.
We have, in short, never been able to imagine the prophetic as a reading of the course of the dramas of human relations in front of us, a reading of what Michel Serres might call "the excluded middle." What I want to suggest is that there is such a conceptualization within our culture, one, moreover, that has been misunderstood precisely to the extent that we have felt it to be accessible to us within Platonism. I am thinking, of course, of Greek tragedy and the Jewish and Christian Bibles.
There is no place here to specify how the prophetic makes its appearance within these two domains. Suffice it to say that I do not want to suggest that the Hebraic prophetic in the ancient sixth century or Greek tragedy in the ancient fifth century are simply extensions of Assyrio-Babylonian or other Mesopotamian rituals (for example, the mantic enthusiasm of the pre-Socratic philosophers), or even a more profound version of those ritual traditions. Rather I propose that Greek tragedy and the prophetic tradition in Judaism appeared at a moment that Girard would identify as a sacrificial crisis of the possibility of religion itself, a moment when no sacrificial system seems to work, when all sacrifices lead only to more violence and all victimage leads only to more victimage and therefore to the need for more sacrifice. Without trying to pinpoint such a moment historically or culturally, I would suggest that Judaism and to a lesser extent Greek tragedy formulate a response to the following question: How can I live in a world in which there are no longer any gods of the sacrificial kind? How is it possible to be prophetic in the face of the collapse of the prophetic?
Apart from the answer that Greek tragedy would offer, Judaism's response is one that has always been understood from within the Jewish community as an orthodox reading, although the path by which I will arrive at this reading may seem somewhat unorthodox: the law of anti-idolatry. At the heart of Judaism is Torah, the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, the Law. And all remaining books of Biblical Scripture, the compilations of midrashic, talmudic, and later rabbinic commentaries, as well as the more mystical and esoteric traditions of Kabbalah and later Hasidic texts, are centered upon Torah and extend its reach. At the heart of the Law is the Decalogue, the aseret hadibrot, the Ten Commandments or ten words. And at the heart of the Decalogue, the Law of the Law, as it were, is the first commandment, the commandment for which all other commandments are themselves extensions, the law against substituting any other God for God, for the prophetic God, for the God of anti-idolatry: anochiy YHWH eloheycha asher hotzeitiycha meieretz mitzrayim mibeiyt avadiym ("I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" [Ex. 20:2]).
The Judaic genius, as readers of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas will immediately recognize, is to have imagined a God completely external to the world, a God for whom nothing within the world is finally sacred. Judaism is "la pensée du dehors," a thought of (or from) the outside or the desert, a thought of exile and of exodus. It is a thought of not confusing anything that is in the world for God, of seeing to the end of the dramas in which human beings are engaged and learning when to stop, a thought therefore of learning to recognize oneself in the other.
Take, for example, the story that Exodus 3 tells of the name of God. Moses is a shrewd and uncanny dealer. He is willing to be a little cagey—even with God. God says to him, "Go back to Egypt and take the Hebrews out of slavery." And Moses responds, "Okay, no problem. Only, who shall I say sent me?" He tries, in other words, to trap God into revealing himself. But God is as cagey as Moses, even cagier. God says, "When they ask you that, here's what you tell them. Tell them ehyeh asher ehyeh (or ehyeh or YHWH) sent you." That is, God does not necessarily reveal His name. He simply says, "Here is what you say when they ask you that." The Hasidic tradition which substitutes the word Hashem ("the name") for YHWH is, in this regard at least, as traditional as the mainstream since it presumes as well that God's name has been revealed in this passage (among others)—which is their reason for not pronouncing it (in accordance with the third commandment).
What does ehyeh asher ehyeh, or ehyeh, or YHWH (the third person form of the same word) mean? Here I turn to an insight offered to me by Jonathan Bishop of Cornell University. Ehyeh is, of course, an imperfect form of the verb "to be," functioning as a future, and it first occurs in this passage in the first person in the form: ehyeh asher ehyeh (3:14–15). Volumes have been written on this sentence. In fact, the kabbalistic tradition takes it as a matter of principle that the unraveling of the name of God is the only important task in Judaism, the one that achieves for us what the Kabbalists take as the primary aim of exegesis, relating the heavens to the earth.
The task may not yet be completed. Here again it may turn out that God is being a little bit cagey with us. Just a moment before Moses asks God His name, God remarks to him, "Go down to Egypt and bring the Israelites out of bondage. And when you do, I will be with you" (3:12). The words employed by Torah for "I will be with you" (ehyeh 'imach) contain the same word employed by God a moment later in place of the name: ehyeh. The word slips by Moses, of course, who has no reason to fix upon it. But after God's next declaration, we can return to it with renewed interest.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Prophetic Law by Sandor Goodhart. Copyright © 2014 Sandor Goodhart. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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