Selected excerpts from Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World by Rene Girard.
Fundamental Anthropology
“The most we can do is to recognize as the one who produces symbolic forms, systems of signs, and who then confuses them with ‘reality’ itself, forgetting that in order to make reality meaningful he interposes an always particular system of signs between reality and himself.” P.6
The Victimage Mechanism as the Basis of Religion
Acquisitive imitation can be seen in children, as in animals. If you distribute a bunch of identical toys in a room with the same number of children, there is a good chance that a few quarrels will develop. The same is not trye for adults, but that does not mean that mimetic rivalry is absent. It may exist more than ever. But like apes, adults have learned to fear and repress rivalry – at least in its crudest and most obvious forms.
“We are always ‘against’ imitation, though in a very different way from Plato; we have excluded it from just about everything, including our aesthetics. Our psychology, psychoanalysis, and even sociology, accommodate it only grudgingly. Our art and literature take great pains to resemble nothing and no one mimetically. We have little idea of the possibilities for conflict contained in imitation. And neither the primitive prohibition nor Plato gives us any direct explanation of the fear of mimesis.” P. 17
The Process of Hominization
On the idea that there must be something more specifically human in games of chance than in other types of games.
“Caillois is of this opinion. He divides games into four categories and these correspond to the four principal phases of the ritual cycle. I will list these in the order corresponding to the unfolding of the founding process rather than in the order given by Caillois. There are first of all games of imitation: mime, masquerades, theatre etc. Then there are games of competition or struggle (agon), like racing, boxing, etc. These correspond to the antagonism of doubles. There are games of vertigo that Caillois designates with the Greek word ilinx, games that consist in turning very rapidly in one place, like the cabriole, etc. These games correspond to the hallucinatory paroxysm of the mimetic crisis. There are finally games of chance. The only games that are truly specific to man. All the other forms of play have precedents among animals.. The only thing lacking in animal rites is the sacrificial immolation, and the only thing an animal needs to become human is the surrogate victim.” P.101
Myth: The Invisibility of The Founding Murder
“How to diminish this encumberment? How to reduce the excessive crowding of the fiel so that one might get on there more easily? That is the question that is constantly posed. Behind the appearance of the coolest logic we can sense a fear of the spectre of overpopulation, which certainly has many psycho-sociological implications, one can detect it almost everywhere at the present time. It is the greatest fear of the so-called developed countries.” P.125
“The tragic situation of humanity today is stated not only in terms of a total destruction that has to be avoided, but also of the selective destruction that must be based on choice – which is precisely what has become impossible at a time when any selective destruction runs the risk of becoming total destruction. The question, then, is one of reducing the question and surely the ‘topological’ model of Levi–Strauss reflects it. The model also brings to ind the many urban situations of overcrowding, such as those of traffic or of a bus that is so full that ejecting a single passenger eases the congestion. In our own time the question of the scapegoat hides easily behind statistics and the specifically modern anguish caused by excessive growth.” P. 125
“If man acts as he has in the past and abandons himself to mimetic contagion, there will be no victimage mechanisms to save him.” P.137
That is, modern societies have been made aware of the scapegoating process. The resolution, in the form of the victim, is no longer a viable option when conflict arises from mimesis.
The Judaeo-Christian Scriptures
“People have asked why God, although he condemns the murder, responds to the appeal of the murderer. Cain says, ‘Everyone that findeth me shall slay me.’ And God responds: ‘Whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold.’ God himself intervenes and in response to the founding murder he enunciates the law against murder. This intervention makes it clear that the decisive murder, here and elsewhere, has a founding character. And to talk in terms of ‘founding’ is also to talk in terms of ‘differentiating’, which is why we have, immediately afterwards, these words: ‘And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.’ I see in this the establishment of a differential system, which serves, as always, to discourage mimetic rivalry and generalized conflict.” P. 146
“He who loves his brother abides in the light, and in it there is no cause for stumbling. But he who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and odes not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. – John 2, 10-11” P.277
“The love of which John speaks manages to escape the hateful illusions of the doubles. It alone can reveal the victimage processes underlie the meanings of culture. There is no purely ‘intellectual’ process that can arrive at true knowledge because the very detachment of the person who contemplates the warring brothers from the heights of his wisdom is an illusion. Any and every form of human knowledge is illusory to the extent that it has failed to submit to the decisive test, which is the test of the warring brothers, a Nietzsche well showed. It may never confront that challenge and remain intact in its vanity and pride, but that will only result in sterility.
Love is the only true revelatory power because it escapes from, and strictly limits, the spirit of revenge and recrimination that still characterizes the revelation in our own world, a world in which we can turn that spirit into a weapon against our own doubles, as Nietzsche also showed. Only Christ’s perfect love can achieve without violence the perfect revelation toward which we have been progressing – in spite of everything – by way of the dissensions and divisions that were predicted in the Gospels.
The present expression of these dissensions is our increasing tendency to load responsibility for all these divisions upon the Gospels themselves. We can only agree among ourselves in attacking the Gospel, which by a wonderfully revealing symbolism is in the process of becoming our scapegoat. Human beings came together in the first societies of our planet simply to give birth to the truth of the Gospel and now they are determined to deny that truth.
This will to deny the truth acquires a particular force of blindness and insight in Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, which explicitly rejects the epistemology of love set out by the New Testament.
Love is the state in which man sees things most of all as they are not. The illusion-creating force is there at its height, likewise the sweetening and transforming force. One endures more when in love than one otherwise would, one tolerates everything.” P. 277-278
“The more people think that they are realizing the Utopias dreamed up by their desire – in other words, the more they embrace ideologies of liberation – the more they will in fact be working to reinforce the competitive world that is stifling them. But they do not realize their mistake, and continue to systematically confuse the type of external obstacle represented by the prohibition and the internal obstacle formed by the mimetic partner. They are like the frogs who became discontented with the King Log sent to them by Jupiter and, by importuning the gods with their cries of protest, obtained more and more satisfaction. The best method of chastising mankind is to give people all that they want on all occasions.
At the very moment when the last prohibitions are being forgotten, there are still any number of intellectuals who continue to refer to them as if they were more and more crippling. Alternatively, they replace the myth of the prohibition with one that invokes an omnipresent and omniscient ‘power’ and can be seen as yet another mythic transposition of the strategies of mimesis. The greater part of Foucault’s work is erected on that false premise.” P.278
“All modern thought is falsified by a mystique of transgression, which it falls back into even when it is trying to escape. For Lacan, desire is still a by-product of the law. Even the most daring thinkers nowadays do not dare to recognize that prohibition has a protective function with regard to the conflicts inevitably provoked by desire. They would be afraid that people might see them as ‘reactionary.’ In the currents of thought that have dominated us for a century, there is one tendency we must never forget: the fear of being regarded as naive or submissive, the desire to play at being the freest thinker – the most ‘radical’ etc. As long as you pander to this desire, you can make the modern intellectual say anything you like.” P.287
Interdividual Psychology
“In archaic societies, prohibitions are closely interlocked and the different compartments they establish determine the distribution of disposable objects between the members of the culture. We have the impression that if it were possible some cultures would dispense with individual choice altogether and so entirely eliminate the possibility of mimetic rivalry.
In contemporary society, the exact opposite increasingly takes place. No more taboos forbid one person to take what is reserved for another, and no more initiation rites prepare individuals in common, for the necessary trials of life. Modern education does not warn the child that the same type of imitative behavior will be applauded and encouraged on one occasion and discouraged on another, or that there is no way of telling what will happen by simply paying attention to the models themselves or to the objects to which desire is directed. Instead, modern education thinks it is able to resolve every problem by glorifying the natural spontaneity of desire, which is a purely mythological notion.” P.291
From Object Rivalry to Metaphysical Desire
“R. G.: To untie the knot of desire, we have only to concede that everything begins in rivalry for the object. The object acquires the status of a disputed object and thus the envy that it arouses in all quarters, becomes more and more heated.
G. L.: Marxists will solemnly say that capitalism invented this escalation. Marxists hold that the problems we are discussing have been resolved once and for all by Marx, just as Freudians think that they have been resolved once and for all by Freud.
R. G.: As far as that goes, the real founders of capitalism, and also of the Oedipus complex, are the monkeys. All that capitalism, or rather the liberal society that allows capitalism to flourish, does, is to give mimetic phenomena a freer rein and to direct them into economic and technological channels. For religious reasons that are far from simple, capitalism is capable of doing away with the restraints that archaic societies placed upon mimetic rivalry. The value of an object grows in proportion to the resistance met with in acquiring it. And the value of the model grows as the object’s value grows.
Even if the model has no particular prestige at the outset, even if all that ‘prestige’ implies-praestigia, spells and phantasmagoria-is quite unknown to the subject, the very rivalry will be quite enough to bring prestige into being. The mechanical character of pri