Girard - Violence and the Sacred (Bloomsbury Revelations)

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Violence and the Sacred , Rene Girard

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Violence and the Sacred

Ren Girard

Translated by Patrick Gregory

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in 1988 by The Athlone Press

English translation 1977 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved

Originally published in Paris in 1972 as La Violence et le sacre 1972 by Editions Bernard Grasset

Bloomsbury Revelations edition first published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic

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eISBN: 978-1-4725-3002-8

Contents

My thanks are due to the Guggenheim Foundation for the fellowship, and to the State University of New York at Buffalo (Faculty of Arts and Letters) for the sabbatical leave that enabled me to complete the present book. I wish to express my appreciation to Martine Bell, not only for typing and proofreading but also for her thoughtful examination of the manuscript and bibliographical materials and a careful preparation of the index. My gratitude also goes to all my friends, and especially to Eugenio Donato and Josue Harari, whose constant collaboration and numerous suggestions have been extremely helpful.

In many rituals the sacrificial act assumes two opposing aspects, appearing at times as a sacred obligation to be neglected at grave peril, at other times as a sort of criminal activity entailing perils of equal gravity.

To account for this dual aspect of ritual sacrificethe legitimate and the illegitimate, the public and the all but covertHenri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, in their Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice, adduce the sacred character of the victim. Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill himbut the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed. Here is a circular line of reasoning that at a somewhat later date would be dignified by the sonorous term ambivalence. Persuasive and authoritative as that term still appears, it has been so extraordinarily abused in our century that perhaps we may now recognize how little light it sheds on the subject of sacrifice. Certainly it provides no real explanation. When we speak of ambivalence, we are only pointing out a problem that remains to be solved.

If sacrifice resembles criminal violence, we may say that there is, inversely, hardly any form of violence that cannot be described in terms of sacrificeas Greek tragedy clearly reveals. It has often been observed that the tragic poets cast a glimmering veil of rhetoric over the sordid realities of life. True enoughbut sacrifice and murder would not lend themselves to this game of reciprocal substitution if they were not in some way related. Although it is so obvious that it may hardly seem worth mentioning, where sacrifice is concerned first appearances count for little, are quickly brushed asideand should therefore receive special attention. Once one has made up ones mind that sacrifice is an institution essentially if not entirely symbolic, one can say anything whatsoever about it. It is a subject that lends itself to insubstantial theorizing.

Sacrifice contains an element of mystery. And if the pieties of classical humanists lull our curiosity to sleep, the company of the ancient authors keeps it alert. The ancient mystery remains as impenetrable as ever. From the manner in which the moderns treat the subject of sacrifice, it would be hard to know whether distraction, detachment, or some sort of secret discretion shapes their thinking. There seems to be yet another mystery here. Why, for example, do we never explore the relationship between sacrifice and violence?

Recent studies suggest that the physiology of violence varies little from one individual to another, even from one culture to another. According to Anthony Storr, nothing resembles an angry cat or man so much as another angry cat or man. If violence did indeed play a role in sacrifice, at least at one particular stage of the ritual, we would have a significant clue to the whole subject. Here would be a factor to some extent independent of those cultural variables that are often unknown to us, or only dimly known, or perhaps less familiar than we like to think.

Once aroused, the urge to violence triggers certain physical changes that prepare mens bodies for battle. This set toward violence lingers on; it should not be regarded as a simple reflex that ceases with the removal of the initial stimulus. Storr remarks that it is more difficult to quell an impulse toward violence than to rouse it, especially within the normal framework of social behavior.

Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons, however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.