Discovering Girard PDF
Preview Discovering Girard
COWLEPYU 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 and teachers who will encourage people to think and pray in new ways about spirituality, reconciliation, and the future. 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. X wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishmg Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Ktngdom Distributed by National Book Network 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
The list of books you might like
