Rene Girard Benoît Chantre - Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre

Battling to the End

S TUDIES IN V IOLENCE , M IMESIS, AND C ULTURE S ERIES

SERIES EDITOR
William A. Johnsen

The Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture Series examines issues related to the nexus of violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture. It furthers the agenda of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, an international association that draws inspiration from Ren Girards mimetic hypothesis on the relationship between violence and religion, elaborated in a stunning series of books he has written over the last forty years. Readers interested in this area of research can also look to the associations journal, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Battling to the End

Conversations with Benot Chantre

Michigan State University Press East Lansing

Copyright 2010 by Michigan State University
Achever Clausewitz Editions Carnets Nord, 2007

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Michigan State University Press
East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5245

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Girard, Ren, 1923

[Achever Clausewitz. English]
Battling to the end / Ren Girard.
p. cm. (Studies in violence, mimesis, and culture series)
Translation of Achever Clausewitz, published: Paris : Carnets nord, 2007.
Based on discussions with Benot Chantre.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-87013-877-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. War. 2. Clausewitz, Carl von, 17801831. 3. Strategy.
4. Military art and science. 5. Girard, Ren, 1923Interviews.I. Chantre, Benot. II. Title.
U21.2.G52513 2010
355.02dc22
2009031985

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Contents

Mary Baker is the primary translator of Achever Clausewitz . She captured beautifully the rapid back and forth of ideas between Ren Girard and Benot Chantre, producing the primary manuscript. Andrew McKenna, Professor of French at Loyola University, was a graduate student of Girard at Johns Hopkins University in the sixties. He has been the publishers go-to person for reviewing manuscripts on mimetic theory for the last 30 years; he is also the former editor of Contagion (19962006). No one (except perhaps Martha Girard herself) has listened longer and more carefully to Girard work through the mimetic theory in both English and French. McKenna was invaluable in suggesting how sentences in Achever Clausewitz would sound if Girard wrote them in English. I made the final decisions on when to adopt McKennas suggestions and, because Mary Baker lives in Japan, I provided the standard English translations for the references.

William A. Johnsen

Series Editor

Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture Series

This is a peculiar kind of book. It claims to be a study of Germany and French-German relations over the last two centuries. At the same time, it says things that have never before been said with the violence and clarity they require. Its subject is the possibility of an end to Europe, the Western world and the world as a whole. Today, this possibility has become real. This is an apocalyptic book.

Until now, my entire work has been presented as a discussion of archaic religion through comparative anthropology. Its goal was to shed light on what is known as the process of hominization, the fascinating passage from animality to humanity that occurred thousands of years ago. My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without.

Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put in a different way: Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger Gods voice will emerge from the devastation. This is why no one wants to read the apocalyptic texts that abound in the Synoptic Gospels and Pauline Epistles. This is also why no one wants to recognize that these texts rise up before us because we have disregarded Revelation. Once in our history the truth about the identity of all humans was spoken, and no one wanted to hear it; instead we hang ever more frantically onto our false differences.