Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
the death of the gods is their life and that the life of the gods is their death? What kind of
eternal return of religion is this? Can Nietzsche himself account for all this?
When it comes to what everybody improperly calls the death of God, the only text that is ever quoted is this one, but no reference is ever made to the substitution of God's murder for the
earlier peaceful death. Is it not strange?
On "the death of God" this is only one text among many, but it is the most memorable.
Unquestionably, the element of novelty in it stems from the replacement of death by murder.
And yet, when the admirers of that text refer to it, they always label it as the greatest text on
the death of God. They always substitute their own concept of God's death for the more
mysterious murder of Nietzsche.
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The aura of this text is inseparable from its dramatic power, and here as in Greek tragedy and
everywhere else, dramatic power is rooted in the collective murder of God. The genius of
Nietzsche takes him to the real beginning.
Perfectly respectable scholars, men who would not touch my own collective murder with a
ten-foot pole, quote Nietzsche's text in preference to any other, but their comments betray no
awareness of the murder theme. They never seem to notice the strange little twist that makes
this text different from all others,
even though it is this difference that determines their
preference
.
They see this difference as a purely
esthetic
difference, of course. The esthetic difference par excellence, I would add. When Nietzsche is quoted, a certain excitement is generated, even
today. Quite innocently and unconsciously, of course, the collective murder of God becomes
our own deed too. We are invited to partake in it. It is a kind of avantgarde version of the
Eucharist, a symbolic sacrifice that has not yet completely exhausted its ritual efficacy
because its significance is not perceived
. Some people have tried to transfer the efficacy of
Nietzsche's text to the "death of man" and now the death of science, of truth, of almost
everything, but they do not see that, each time, they should say murder and anyway, the
sacred
pharmakon
has already evaporated.
Aphorism 125 functions in the same manner as the collective murder itself, which is now
hidden behind the theme of an entirely "natural" and peaceful death, a radically undramatic
death, a death
sans histoire
. The text on the death of God functions as one more murder of
God as long as the theme of the murder remains unacknowledged. Even this textual epiphany
of the divine is the product of a collective murder that the murderers are not aware of having
committed. "This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars --
and yet
they have done it themselves
."
Heidegger gave what is regarded by many as the "definitive" comment about that text. This
essay is separate from his two-volume Nietzsche, and its title already spells out the effort to
reinsert
Nietzsche
into a tradition from which this text secedes, a tradition to which Heidegger had really returned. The title is, of course,
"Nietzsche's Word, God Is Dead."
It is relevant to observe at this point that, except for his vocabulary, Heidegger's
pronouncements on the future of the religious in general are a continuation of nineteenth-
century historicism. Like Victor Hugo or any nineteenth-century idealist, Heidegger felt that
the death of an exhausted religion, the biblical religion, would leave room for the
independent
birth of some new god, a birth that would not be rooted in the death of the hated biblical God.
Heidegger often spoke mysteriously of some god that should appear
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at some point in the future. When he was in the right mood, he would graciously extend the
wondrous promise of some brand new divinity to his theologically minded admirers -- he had
quite a few -- eagerly but respectfully waiting for the latest word from high above, regarding
a possible future for that lesser authority, God.
Even if we had not read it we could have predicted that Heidegger's essay could only bury the
dramatic force of Nietzsche's madman under the crushing weight of its philosophical
pedantry. And indeed it does. According to Heidegger the madman's announcement really
means: "the end of the supra-sensible in the platonic sense."
After this breathtaking announcement you cannot expect from someone like Heidegger that
he would take notice of something as insignificant as the collective murder of God.
Obviously this is the type of rhetorical ornament that a thinker still superior to Nietzsche, one
that has really gone beyond the supra-sensible in the platonic sense, should do well to avoid.
Heidegger wrote that, even though no specific god is mentioned, the only god to whom
Nietzsche can and must allude is the Christian God. That last precision fits well with the rest
of his essay. Even though Heidegger haughtily protests that his interpretation has nothing to
do with the "vulgar atheism" that is so often read into this text, the difference is not always visible to me.
To speak primarily of "the death of God," apropos of this text, as Heidegger does, is to fall into the same trap as everybody before. All gods are "beings" (
Seiende
) with a certain historical lifespan, and then they must die, unlike Being itself (
Sein
). Now that the twilight of the biblical God has finally come, similar to the twilight and death of the pagan gods before,
Dionysus for instance, some entirely new gods may well show up in the future. Heidegger
thought he could recognize his own thought in the text of
The Gay Science
but he was wrong.
He would have been well advised, from his own standpoint, if he had distrusted that text to
the same extent that he did
Dionysus versus the Crucified
. From the standpoint of modernistic
orthodoxy, the one is as treacherous as the other.
But was Nietzsche's own thought really that different from Heidegger's, especially in 1882?
Explicitly perhaps, it was not, but in the writing of that text, when Nietzsche shifted from the
death of God to his murder, he must have felt, as we all feel, the sudden enormous increase in
the symbolical power at his disposal. It was like an unexpected gift from the gods, and
Nietzsche was not the sort of writer who would refuse such a gift.
The fact that he made that shift from death to murder suggests that the real basis, the ultimate
foundation for the later parallel and opposition between Dionysus and the Crucified was
already a preoccupation
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of his, a preoccupation that rarely comes to the fore, it seems -- a careful analysis might still
show otherwise -- but one that must have been quite pregnant with significance in order to
generate such a great and enigmatic text as this collective murder of God.
The ultimate foundation of the collective murder of God is identical, of course, with that
martyrdom
of Dionysus which is recognized as identical to the
martyrdom
of Jesus in
fragment 1052 of
The Will to Power
. There is no difference between this dual insight and the
definition of God's disappearance in our world as one more instance of that martyrdom. This
does not mean that all these murders can really be equated to each other, of course.
The same insight dominates the two texts we have read. And this insight is never more
prominent in Nietzsche's mind than at the very instant before the final breakdown, when the
formula "Dionysus
versus
the Crucified" is changed to "Dionysus
and
the Crucified."
It cannot mean at this late stage that Nietzsche is turning into a positivist and that he gives up
the difference that interpretation makes. But it certainly means that the difference for which
he has been fighting is breaking down and collapsing back into the undifferentiation from
which it had earlier emerged.
Aphorism 125 expresses the first undifferentiation, enormously creative and symbolically
polyvalent in its reaching for the essential significance of the murder of God. If we believe,
with Heidegger, that the Christian God alone is present in this text, we will never apprehend
its enormous polyvalence. The text plays with the murder of God on several primary levels
that tend to contaminate each other but can nevertheless be logically distinguished from one
another.
The most obvious level is the modern disappearance of god as collective murder; a little
behind comes the collective murder of the pagan gods as the generative power behind their
existence, and way behind, the most difficult level of all, is the Passion of Jesus that cannot
be the death of the Christian God if the murders of the gods are always their birth but that
could well be the death of all other gods in the banal sense we have in mind when we talk of
"the death of god." It is not quite true, however, and these pagan gods "die hard," or rather they are perpetually reborn in works like Nietzsche's own.
What are we to do with such a maelstrom of collective murders? In order to make sure that
the madman makes sense on more than one level, let us listen to someone who certainly is not
mad, at least not in our current theoretical Gospel, the great Sigmund Freud.
A few years after Nietzsche wrote
The Gay Science
, Freud discovered, he thought, that all
"festivals of purification and atonement, all sacred games," all the religious rituals of
mankind, are rooted in the collective murder of some real victim men call God. . . .
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My readers are frowning. Yes, I know; that is not a text of Freud that should be quoted. Our
great thinkers do not think much of it. It is an exception. They really think that Freud was
temporarily out of his mind when he wrote it, madly estranged from his own best work. And
indeed he was like the madman of
The Gay Science
. He dared talk about that taboo subject,
the collective murder of God. That is the only reason
Totem and Taboo
has been
excommunicated and declared anathema. just as there are nonpersons nowadays, there are
also nonbooks, which should never be mentioned, even when they seem to belong to the
work of sacred authorities.
Aphorism 125 of
The Gay Science
has been treated very differently from
Totem and Taboo
. It has been enshrined and declared sacred. But this idolatry is really the other side of an
excommunication and the result shows it. Nietzsche's statement on the collective murder of
God is just as ignored as Freud's. The excommunication and enshrinement are two opposite
means to achieve the same end, which is to prevent any perception of a most enigmatic
similarity between Freud and Nietzsche on the question of God. On everything else, these
two texts are extremely distant from each other and their overlapping in respect to the
fundamental theme of the collective murder of God should provide food for thought, but it
does not. Why?
Let us ask Nietzsche for the answer to that question. He knows the answer very well. We are
not yet ready, we are never ready for a real investigation of the subject:
"I come too early," [the madman] said then; "my time has not come yet. This tremendous
event is still on its way, still wandering -- it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning
and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after
they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them
than the most distant stars --
and yet they have done it themselves
."
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The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with René Girard
James Williams:
As you look back over your career, what has been the most satisfying thing
to you in your work?
René Girard:
The most satisfying thing has been the actual experience of discovery. I would
say that there have been three great moments in the process of my thinking and writing.
First was mimetic desire and rivalry, when I realized that it accounted for so much. The
second was the discovery of the scapegoat mechanism. This basically completed the mimetic
theory. I felt it gave a highly plausible interpretation of myth and ritual in archaic cultures.
From that time on I was convinced that archaic cultures, far from being simply lost in
superstition or having no constancy or stability, represented a great human achievement.
The third great moment of discovery for me was when I began to see the uniqueness of the
Bible, especially the Christian text, from the standpoint of the scapegoat theory. The mimetic
representation of scapegoating in the Passion was the solution to the relationship of the
Gospels and archaic cultures. In the Gospels we have the revelation of the mechanism that
dominates culture unconsciously.
It seemed to me, as I experienced these moments, that a great deal of evidence was piling up,
an avalanche, to support them. I naively thought that everyone would agree with my theory
immediately, because I saw it as so obvious and overpowering.
J.W.:
Concerning the relation of the New Testament to the full development of the mimetic