René Girard (born 1923) is a French philosopher, the creator of an original comprehensive theory of the origin of religion and culture. He was made famous by the book "Violence and the Sacred" (1972), but it was not until the book "The Scapegoat" (1982) that Girard's theory appeared in its entirety. Using the example of texts about the medieval persecution of the Jews, the philosopher introduces the concept of "persecution texts" – texts compiled by the persecutors themselves, but revealing the truth about the innocence of the victim against their will – and shows that all the mythologies of the world are precisely such texts. Girard's main thesis, which first caused a wave of indignation in the intellectual world, and then gained many supporters, is that people learned to decipher these texts only thanks to the revelation of the Gospel. According to Girard, the liberating and at the same time destructive effects of this revelation continue to this day, and this book serves as one of its tools.

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ru fr Gregory Dashevsky fb2design http://fb2.traumlibrary.net FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 15 April 2012 19CA6008-9237-44E9-AA5B-6E391EA91FE8 2.0 Scapegoat Ivan Limbakh Publishing House Saint Petersburg 2010 978-5-89059-131-9

René Girard

Scapegoat

Preface

René Girard is a complex and controversial author. Combining philology, theology, and philosophy in a harsh and unfamiliar way, his books gained many supporters and opponents. A professor at Stanford and a member of the French Academy, he is not a universally recognized classic. However, there are no universally recognized classics in the world humanities for a long time; the most a scientist can hope for is the controversial, controversial reputation that Girard won long ago. He began in the 1960s with works on Proust, Dostoevsky and Stendhal. They had already formulated his most important ideas about mimetic desire. Success came to Girard with his book "Violence and the Sacred", which formulated a response to the events of 1968. Girard's subsequent books, including The Scapegoat, develop the same discoveries in relation to new texts and areas. In the turbulent, secular, and unfailingly liberal world of Franco-American humanitarian theory, Girard occupies a unique position as a religious thinker, combining political conservatism with a preoccupation with the perennial problems of Christian theology, which he subjects to an unusual, even shocking, revision. Discussing his favorite concepts and images using many examples from ancient, evangelical and literary texts, Girard does not change his themes. The author of many books, Girard continues to write his only work. Its most important theme is the hero of this book, the scapegoat. Girard's main predecessors in the field of cultural theory were de Maistre, Nietzsche, and Freud. But his interests would also seem familiar to Russian authors, from Dostoevsky, to whom Girard often returns in his writings, to Vyacheslav Ivanov, with whom he shares key motifs and concerns.

Girard's work reveals one of the eternal and, practically speaking, the main secrets of human society – the relationship between violence and order. The author's conclusion is simple, and he has the right to be surprised that it was not revealed by his great predecessors. For every blow, you should expect surrender. Violence breeds a bloody circle of revenge. Revenge is an exchange, perhaps the first in history. In the course of this circle, the volume and degree of violence increases. Revenge is the expanded reproduction of violence. Violence is contagious, like an epidemic, and it destroys society. Culture is the most important mechanism of protection against the vicious circle of violence. And like a vaccine that protects against infection in small doses, culture protects society from epidemic violence through mimetic mechanisms that control and limit violence.

Unlike many poststructuralist thinkers, Girard believes in spiritual and social progress, in the power of culture to change and improve social mechanisms, in the responsibility of those who undertake to think, write, and teach people. Those who read this book will have no doubt that it is about the Christian theory of culture. For the author, the highest point of culture, which is subject to eternal and progressive comprehension, are the words and deeds of Christ, as they are recorded in the Gospels. In this sense, Girard's work is retrospective; he constantly projects the truths of the Gospel as Girard sees them, on those who are not involved in them, be it Homer's epic, the parables of the Old Testament, Fraser's anthropology, or Freud's psychoanalysis. The near-shocking surprise that Girard's books evoke is precisely due to the fact that he overturns the well-mastered discoveries of the post-Enlightenment philosophy of Nietzsche, Freud and Derrida, rewriting them in the light of the Gospel stories. Willingly or unwillingly, he also performs the opposite operations, rewriting Christianity itself in the light of poststructuralist theory. Reproaching Voltaire, Nietzsche, Fraser, and Freud for not understanding what Christ understood, Girard shows a new Christ who could hardly have been seen and understood without Voltaire, Nietzsche, Fraser, and Freud. The Gospel of Girard is not for sanctimonious reading. To discover in Christ the herald of one's own theory is heresy. This is what makes Girard interesting.

According to his theory, the universal mechanism of society's self-defense against violence is to focus on the chosen victim. Sacrifice is atonement in the strict sense of the word: a small violence against the victim atones for the great violence of society against itself. Instead of prowling society and devouring it, violence becomes a predictable, local ritual. Society focuses violence in the same way that a shaman focuses disease on a lump of blood that he spits out of his mouth. Outcasts were sacrificed, as in the Greek cults; kings, as in African monarchies and during European revolutions; people of another nation, as in the Jewish pogroms, the medieval version of which Girard describes in detail in this book; and ordinary, randomly selected citizens, as in Stalin's purges. But the scapegoat is chosen carefully. He must not be one of "us," or we must avenge him; But it cannot be "alien" either, otherwise our potential for violence will not be discharged. This means that the scapegoat must be both his own and the other, both similar and unlike us. This is a subtle dialectic, which each society solves in its own way, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. This choice reveals both the long cultural history of this human group, with all its beliefs and hopes, and the nature of this contemporary crisis.

Why do we need scapegoats? Girard invites each reader to ask himself how he himself is doing with goats of this breed. "Personally, I know nothing of the sort, and I am sure, dear reader, that the same is the case with you. You and I have only legitimate enemies." For most modern civilized people, the experience of collective violence against the chosen victim is difficult to comprehend; For many, it is limited to memories of childhood, how they were tortured and how they were tormented at school. It is not for nothing that such situations occupy an important place in many "adult" writers, for example, in Nabokov. Derived from our personal experience, collective violence takes place far beyond our borders, but always in our name. Whenever and wherever you read this book, you know the places where it happens, places that are exotic and creepy, with such familiar names. Collective violence permeates politics, history, anthropology, and, as Girard shows, literature of any genre. For him, it is important whether the stories of collective violence are explicitly analyzed and condemned with the same clarity that Girard finds in the Gospels or in Dostoevsky; or the text tells about persecution and violence with the same hatred with which they were carried out. In other words, is the story written from the point of view of the executioner or from the point of view of the victim? This binary opposition is not subject to deconstruction; but the example of the Apostle Peter, eloquently analyzed by Girard, shows its real complexity. The Gospels, the lives of the martyrs, the memoirs of the Holocaust or the Gulag were written by witnesses rather than participants. By focusing on Christ as the first victim to understand and uncover the cultural mechanism of sacrifice, Girard creates a new apparatus for analyzing all the evidence of group violence that does not understand it. Victims do not write memoirs; But many stories of different genres are written in order to justify violence or call for it. Girard's optics are useful to anyone who reads evidence of crises, wars, and revolutions.

The victim must be the object of our hatred; But in some cases, its role is so important that our gratitude elevates it, deifies it, and makes it sacred. Moses, killed by his fellow tribesmen, retroactively turns into a teacher and a prophet. The goat, the symbol of Dionysus, is transformed into a lamb, the symbol of Christ. It seems to me that Girard could explain in more detail the conditions under which this happens. The stories of the sacralization of the victim are unique and therefore extremely important; But much more often pogroms, persecutions and murders take place in silence and unconsciousness. In those cases that are of particular interest to Girard, religion protects society through successive substitutions: universal violence for sacrificial violence, human sacrifice for the slaughter of an animal, and, finally, blood sacrifice for symbolic violence. The creators of the great religions were able to replace the "constitutive sacrifice" with memories of it that do not require revenge. When this mechanism loses its effectiveness, society indulges in self-destruction, but at some point, frightened or repentant, reinvents sacrifice. According to Girard, history consists of such cycles of aggression, guilt and redemption. In modern times, however, revenge is replaced by judgment. The state cannot monopolize violence, there is plenty of spontaneous violence everywhere. With great success, the state monopolizes revenge. Society as a whole does what is impossible for anyone individually: it takes revenge and avoids revenge. The purple robes of judges and the black masks of executioners (and current special forces) show the mechanism in action: the robes denote the out-of-position of the court, the masks denote the inaccessibility of revenge. But this does not always work out. The lack of legitimacy traps the institutions of the state in a vicious cycle of violence. A century and a half of Russian terror would provide many confirmations and refutations of the theory of the "sacrificial crisis."

Girard is not at all characterized by postmodern self-irony. He is sure that after Sophocles and Christ, no one came closer to understanding history than he did. He crosses Hobbes and Freud, Fraser and Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss and Bakhtin in combinations that are unexpected, if not deadly. None of them would agree with Girard, and Girard disagrees with no one. This book is full of ridicule of the "professorial science" and "cultural schizophrenia" of modern academia. Some readers will be outraged by this, others will like it. I am particularly close to his idea of the political relevance of classical texts and the vital significance of how we understand them: "this is not the idle imagination of our aesthetes," he writes of the medieval author, it is "the murky imagination of <... >, which leads us more reliably to real victims, the more obscured it is."