Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
lightning; you either get it or you don't get it. Ordinary reasoning just loops back on to its
own premises.
But there should be a way of expressing this insight which is better than I have done so far. I
keep trying and trying. That is why I turn to such historical scapegoats as Joan of Arc or
Dreyfus. The people who condemned Dreyfus are the ones who never called him a scapegoat
because they turned him into one. To me the Oedipus myth is a still undeciphered Dreyfus
case.
J.W.:
Let's turn to a part of your theory that may be conceptually difficult for many people
who encounter your work: mimetic desire. Don't you think many people have misunderstood
mimetic desire or mimesis? Also, it would be helpful if you would say something about its
prerepresentational character.
R.G.: There are many who would prefer to say that the real problem
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is the wish to kill one's own father or mother, and they ignore or resist the possibility that the
most common problem -- our predicament -- is that of trying to beat one's rival at his own
game. So there is a resistance to shedding light on the role of rivalry in our own lives.
J.W.:
So the difficulty with the concept of mimesis is practically the same as the resistance to the recognition of scapegoating. Just as we ignore or evade knowing ourselves as
scapegoaters, so also we ignore or evade our penchant for mimetic rivalry.
R.G.:
Yes, a deeper knowledge and self-examination are required. The knowledge of
mimesis is really tied to conversion. That is why the matter of
fides quaerens intellectum
(faith seeking understanding) is so important. A personal knowledge, fully rational and yet
not always accessible to reason, is needed.
J.W.:
René, isn't part of the problem just what you are touching on, that mimesis is really
prerational and prerepresentational? This is important, and is not included in any of the
selections for the Reader. You seem to be saying at times that to break away from the
mimetic predicament . . .
R.G.:
You must change your personality.
J.W.:
But that also requires mimesis, does it not? A mimesis that is good, a mimesis of love.
R.G.:
Sure. Part of the problem is with the phrase "mimetic desire." And because of Freud the word "desire" connotes the sexual or erotic. I said recently that we should be able to
substitute some other term -I don't know, perhaps "drive," or
élan vital
, or even Sartre's
"project." Almost any word that could express the dynamism, the dynamics of the entire
personality.
J.W.:
Here you seem to be distinguishing different kinds of mimesis. But you don't want to
say that, do you? In other words, mimesis is always along a continuum.
R.G.:
That's right. It is something that involves the whole personality. Sartre's idea of the
"project" is appropriate in a way, although resorting to Sartre too exclusively would be
misleading. Maybe the idea of Kierkegaard, the idea of subjectivity as passionate inwardness
and choice, would be helpful. . . . I don't know; whatever the term, something bigger and
other than "desire" should be used. "Desire" has, necessarily, that narrow libidinal connotation.
J.W.:
Okay, let's move on to another part of the question, the relation of mimesis and
representation.
R.G.:
Well, mimesis is rooted deep in our biology, I'm sure of that. I agree with those who
hold that there is a biological basis for holding that the human brain is a kind of mimetic
machine. Even ritual, in its earliest stages, is more like a reflexive mimetic repetition than
anything that could be called precisely an institution founded on a correct repre-
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sentation of a founding murder. Much like a child's earliest reactions as it begins to learn . . .
J.W.:
You're referring specifically to an originary murder . . .
R.G.:
Yes. Then at a certain stage, the scapegoat phenomenon and its ritual repetition create
the possibility of representation, which requires some degree of reflection, and not simply
reflexive imitation. So it is that mimesis is "undecidable," in the sense that it is decided in common with the model. Continuity ultimately produced discontinuity. A good model will
make our mimesis good (Christ); a bad model will make our mimesis rivalrous.
J.W.:
So in beginning stages of what we know as human there was basically reflexive
imitation.
R.G.:
Yes, that was the primary thing. Representation as such is a late development. It may
have taken hundreds of thousands of years, or longer, to reach the representational capacity of
"humanity."
From a theological point of view which is compatible, I hope, with my mimetic
anthropology, I would say that the Word or Christ is at work in this whole long process
toward humanity and representation. Representation is still distorted, of course, in that it
distorts or disguises the violence stemming from originary mimesis. This is what I have
called
méconnaissance
, misrecognition, or even "misprision," as Shakespeare and Harold Bloom would say. I think Gil Bailie has expressed this well in his recent paper on the vine
and the branches: the Word was the light accompanying the "mythic darkness of the sacred
violence that accompanied hominization. . . . Humanity generated its own crude forms of illumination precisely by periodically expelling this light."
1.
J.W.:
Another topic not included in the Reader is your hypothesis about the origin of kings
and gods. Would you briefly review it now?
R.G.:
It is very simple. Scapegoating, when it becomes unanimous, affects the whole
community. The crisis has been long; it seems the community is splitting or disintegrating.
Then all of a sudden it's over, and it's over because of the scapegoat. Who or what is
responsible for ending this crisis? Who or what provoked the crisis? Here arises a problem
that is the basis of what must eventually become interpretation and representation, though in
primitive or originary situations the crisis and its resolution are still prerepresentational.
Now since the community is not aware of the mimetic nature of its scapegoating, it must look
for a cause outside of the community. At this
____________________
1. Gil Bailie,
"The Vine and Branches Discourse: The Gospel's Psychological Apocalypse,"
paper written for the annual conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion,
Stanford University, June 27-29, 1996.
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stage the community is humble. It does know its own violence, although it does not
understand its source. Indeed, the conflict and violence are so overwhelming -- so seemingly
"interminable" -- that the community does not believe its powers alone could have ended it,
just as it does not know how it began. The only convincing answer in this situation is the
victim: the victim brought the violence about; the victim ended it. The victim is bad, but the
victim is also good. Bad because he or she is blamed for the crisis, but very good because her
or his death ends the crisis. This is experienced as so effective that the whole chain of events
becomes a mechanism repeated in ritual. In order to repeat the scenario, it is necessary to
have a new victim, a substitute, to whom is imputed the behavior that caused the original
crisis. The killing of this victim we call sacrifice. But let us imagine what could happen. The
repetition of sacrifice is going to evolve, evolve I think in two possible directions. Either the
victim will be sacrificed immediately or there will be a waiting period, the victim being
already earmarked and present in the community. In the latter instance the victim is alive in
the community and already sacred in anticipation of his death. Rather than becoming a god,
which I think is what happens when the victim is killed promptly, the victim whose execution
is postponed, for any reason whatever, has the opportunity to gain power over people, due to
his sacrality. I think the victim in this case eventually becomes what we call a "king." This, by the way, would be a model for how representation evolves out of ritual. You have first the
spontaneous unanimity through the victim, then many sacrificial repetitions of this model,
and then, eventually, representation in the form of new offices, institutions, etc. So here you
have two types of representation: one in which the victim becomes what we call a "god";
another in which the victim's execution is delayed and, in many instances, the victim may be
smart enough to capitalize on the sacred powers ascribed to him. The latter is what we call a
"king," the origin of political power.
J.W.:
What sort of evidence do you think would support this hypothesis? In the case of monarchs we see, of course, that they have been ritually killed, sometimes regularly,
sometimes occasionally, and that has occurred even until very recent days . . .
R.G.:
Sure, and it may still be happening. The main evidence is the structural homologies of
kingship ritual and sacrificial ritual.
J.W.:
So that would be one kind of test of your proposal. But what would you say to
someone who replied, in effect, "Is it realistic to think that someone in this archaic or
prearchaic situation who is the designated victim could gain that kind of power over others?"
R.G.:
Well, for one thing there is evidence from Native American peoples of the not too
distant past that an animal captured or a prisoner taken in battle was treated "royally," or
"divinely," for a period of
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time, then executed. If it is true to say that a king is a "living god," it is just as true to say that a god is a dead king. So the question is whether we can understand the death of the victim in
these situations as shedding light on the beginnings of human culture and as potentially
meaningful in a number of directions, one of them being kingship.
J.W.:
Do you think it's possible that in a situation of originary violence, or of the fear of
imminent violence, a person could come forward as leader, become designated as you say,
but take over due to the force of a powerful personality without being placed in the
predicament of the victim who is to be executed? The leader, of course, is always a potential
victim.
R.G.:
That's true, one can imagine that, but I would prefer not to take the matter outside of
my scapegoat hypothesis. You see, becoming a "leader" is not a natural thing among human
beings. I don't think one can simply appeal to dominant animals in packs and herds, for
example; all the symbols of human leadership are associated with victimage. Now, of course,
there is some evidence, for example, in all the data collected by Frazer, that there are all sorts
of intermediary variations on the spectrum from crisis to kingship. But what appears first is
the victimage.
J.W.:
That's very reminiscent of the story of the selection of Saul as king in 1 Samuel. He
bears various signs of the victim according to 1 Samuel 10:20-24: he was different from all
the others in being much taller than any of them; he was from the smallest tribe, Benjamin,
which had a bad reputation in the biblical traditions and eventually disappeared; and of
course he was "taken by lot." In the three other narratives of someone taken (really captured) by lot -- Achan in Joshua 7, Saul and Jonathan in 1 Samuel 14, and Jonah in the book of
Jonah -it's an obvious victimage situation.
R.G.:
Yes, that is very important, the practice of taking by lot. It reflects some awareness of scapegoating, its randomness.
J.W.:
Would you clarify "randomness"?
R.G.:
Well, there are preferential signs of victimization which I delineated in
The Scapegoat
.
In a crisis communities look for someone to blame for the worst crimes imaginable, and we
see a common pattern of picking on those people who are marginal or different in some way
that doesn't fit the system of differences in the community; perhaps they are foreigners.
Perhaps they have lost an eye like Wotan; perhaps they smell bad like Philoctetes. But these
preferential signs don't absolutely have to exist. In a crisis there will be an inexorable
movement toward finding a scapegoat.
J.W.:
So the one necessary condition is vulnerability?
R.G.:
Sure, you can say that as a generalization, but vulnerability is relative; it depends on
the situation in the community. If the crisis is moving toward a frenzy, a turbulence of
Dionysiac proportions, there
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is less and less need for preferential signs. When a mob is really frantic, the slightest incident
will be interpreted as a sign of someone's guilt. Our approach to collective crises should be
extremely fluid, in keeping with the fluidity of mimesis itself.
Now of course there are clearly features of disability or abnormality that tend to play a role in
the designation of the victim -- Oedipus's limp, for example. This is what I mean by
preferential signs.
On the matter of preferential signs, take the Venda myth of the snake god and his two wives.
2. I
t is the second, younger wife who is accused of witchcraft. So I speculate that it is her second wife status that makes her vulnerable to the witchcraft accusation. The second wife