Table Of ContentCOWLEPYU BLICATIOisN aS m inistry of the brothers
of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a monastic
order in the Episcopal Church. Our mission is to pro-
vide books and resources for those seeking spiritual
and theological formation. Cowley Publications is
committed to developing a new generation of writers
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DISCOVERING
G I RARD
MICHAEL KIRWAN SJ
A COWLEYPU BLICATIOBNOSO K
Lanham, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Plymouth, UK
To my father
A Cowley Publications Book
Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright O 2005 hhchael finvan
All nghts reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except
by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
Published by Darton, Longman and Todd, London, UK, 2004
Copyright O Michael Kiman
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicat1011 Data:
Klnvan, Michael.
Uiscoverirlg Girard / Michael Kinvan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-L15bLOL-229-9
2. Violence. 3. Imitation. 4. Scapegoat. 5. Philosophy, French-20th
century. 6. Philosophy, Modern-20th century. I.Title.
B2430.G494K57 2005
203l.4-dc22 2005008866
Cover art: DOPQI uixore, 1955 (gouache on paper) by I'icasso, I'ablo
(1881-1973). Private Collection, Peter Willi; x\~i~v,bridge1nan.co.uk.
0 2003 Estate of Pablo Plcasto / Artutt Rights Society (ARS),N ewYork
Cover design: jennifer Hopcroft
em
The paper used in this publication meets the Mnvnum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library hiaterials, ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
1 Desire is Mimetic
2 The Scapegoat Mechanisill
3 Dionysus versus 'The Crucified'
4 Method and Objections
5 The Future of Mimetic Theory
INTRODUCTION
Without publicising it, Sancho Panza succeeded, over the
years, in diverting his de~non( whom he later called Don
Quixote) away from himself. This he did through reading
rnany novels of chivalry and crirne in the evening and
night hours, so that this denlon set out unstoppably to do
the craziest things. However, because of the lack of a pre-
ordained object (which should have been Sancho Panza
himself), these harmed no one. A free man, Sancho Panza
serenely followed Don Quixote on his ways, perhaps out
of a certain sense ofresponsibility, and had of them a great
and edifying entertainment until the end of his days.
(Franz Kafka, The Elith aO~utS anclzo Patiza)
We have no choice but to go back and forth, from alpha
to omega. And these constarlt movements, this conling
and going, force us to construct matters in a convoluted,
spiraling fashion, which eventually runs the risk of being
urlsettling and even incomprehensible for the reader . . . I
think one needs to read [niy xvork] like a thriller.Al1 the
elements are given at the beginning, but it is necessary to
read to the very end for the meaning to become com-
pletely apparent.
(Reni Girard, Celtii par qui le scatzdale arrive, pp. 87-8)
For over forty years the French American cultural critic, Reni
Girard, has been writing a 'thriller' about culture, violence and the
sacred. 111 a dozen books, and in numerous articles and interviews,
he does indeed seen1 to shuffle obsessively back and forth, betlveen
a few key insights - like a detective or a spy-catcher, looking for the
vital clues.
The question which possesses hirn is both ancient and still rele-
2 DISCOVERING GIRARD
vant: what are we to nzake of relkion? This means asking about the ori-
gin and function of religion, and it also means getting to grips with
a curious paradox. The paradox is this: in premodern societies, reli-
gion was accepted as the force which united a society and gave it
cohesion (the Latin word is rel&are, 'to bind'), but in the modern era
religion is largely treated with anxiety and suspicion, because it is
seen as a source of division and conflict. For most people today, reli-
gion is safest when regarded as a matter of purely private concern.
Professor Girard offers a way of understanding this paradox, though
it is a theme which he feels can only be approached in an indirect
way. To many who have tried to engage with his work, his admis-
sion that there is a necessary difficulty and obliqueness about his
style will come as no surprise. Whether things are made any easier
by reading Girard with the same gusto as we might read Tinker Tdilor
Soldier Spy or a classic Agatha Christie novel, is another question.
This intriguing conlparison should not inislead us into seeing
Girard's work as entertainment or literary escapism. Just the oppo-
site is true: the urgency, the 'thrill' of Girard's work is the possibility
of gaining original and challenging insights into some of our con-
temporary world's most agonising problems. Can we learn some-
thing about the complex interrelation between secular modernity
and the religiously inspired terrorisnl which conceived the 11
September atrocity? Or about patterns of provocation and resistance,
entrenched and ritualised in long-tern~c onflicts such as Northern
Ireland or the struggle for Palestine? Or about the bitter polemics
concerning the 'sacredness' of life and reproductive 'rights' in the
United States? Or about the kinds of stigma which attach to people
living with HIV/AIDS? The excruciating questions about religion's
ambiguous relation to different fornls of violence are not new at all,
but in the last four years have literally exploded into our awareness
with a new ferocity. In fact, Girard's work has anticipated this very
recent development by four decades - all the issues mentioned
above have been addressed, either by Girard himself or by thinkers
inspired by him, using the theoretical approach he has been devel-
oping.
In its literal sense, theoria means a 'looking at' evidence from a par-
ticular perspective. Or, to put this another way, a special hnd of
'imagination', as this word is used by Archbishop Cauchon in the
epilogue of George Bernard Shaw's SaintJoall (1924).H ere is a con-
INTRODUCTION 3
versation between two churchmen, one of whom, de Stogumber, is
speaking of the traumatic effect upon him of witnessing St Joan's
martyrdom:
DE STOGUMBER:W ell, you see, I did a very cruel thing once
because I did not know what cruelty was like. I had not seen
it, you know.That is the great thing: you must see it. And then
you are redeemed and saved.
CAUCH0N:Were not the sufferings of our Lord Christ enough
tbr you?
DE STOGUMBER: No. Oh no: not at all. I had seen them in
pictures, and read of them in books, and been greatly moved by
them, as I thought. But it was no use: it was not our Lord that
redeemed me, but a young woman whom I saw actually
burned to death. It was dreadful: oh, most dreadful. But it saved
nle. I have been a different nlan ever since, though a little astray
in my wits solnetinles.
CAUCHON: Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age
to save those that have no imagination?
There is surely a touch of racism here: Cauchon is French, so he nat-
urally feels superior to the less sophisticated, less 'imaginative'
Englishman. And Cauchon does seem to be right, up to a point.
When human beings behave cruelly and atrociously 'man's inhu-
-
manity to man' their actions suggest soinething like a catastroph-
-
ic failure of imagination, a sheer incapacity to put thenlselves in the
place of the victim who is being abused, tortured, or made to disap-
pear. In the worst cases, such as genocide, there is even a refusal to
ackilowledge that the victiills are human beings at all. As for de
Stogumber, there is pathos in what he says about the inadequacy of
even the holiest representation compared to 'the real thing', and
about his capacity for deceiving himself, even about his own expe-
rience: 'I had been greatly illoved as I thought.'
-
Girard is concerned with some of the same issues explored in
Shaw's play: the representation of nlartyrdonl and suffering, the ade-
quacy of the Christian revelation. But there is one important differ-
ence which we can point to straightaway. Shaw's character Cauchon
rather superciliously implies that this 'imagination', the correct and
humane way of looking at things, is somehow an obvious or natu-
ral point of view. Christ has shown us the meaning and reality of
