Abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com
After his successful writings on modern literature, curious to find out how well his “mimetic theory” of imitative behavior might explain the human past, Girard studied anthropology and myths from around the world. He was struck by another series of similarities: myth after myth told a story of collective violence. Only one man can be king, the most enviable individual, but everyone can share in the persecution of a victim. Societies unify themselves by focusing their imitative desires on the destruction of a scapegoat. Girard hypothesized that the violent persecution of scapegoats is at the origin of the ubiquitous human institution of ritual sacrifice, the foundation of archaic religions. Girard then turned to the relationship between rituals of sacrifice and the many acts of violence recorded in the founding documents of the religions of the modern West (including the secular religion known as the Enlightenment): the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels. Girard interpreted the Bible as a gradual revelation of the injustice of human violence. The culmination, Jesus’s crucifixion, is unprecedented not because it pays a debt humans owe to God, but because it reveals the truth of all sacrifice: the victim of a mob is always innocent, and collective violence is always covered over with a lie.
“A Very Brief Introduction”, Imitatio
The universal mechanism of the scapegoat, whether institutionalized by tradition or occurring spontaneously within a contingent gathering,focuses the repressed violence upon which society is founded onto a convenient individual, who is sacrificed, expelled or simply made the butt of aggressive jokes that bond through shared laughter. The ritual prescriptions and symbolic notations surrounding the scapegoat define, through careful often step-by-step re-enactment, the processes of identification and exclusion that split the embodied consciousness into a subjective self and externalized other. By simultaneously identifying with both executioner and victim, even “mere” spectators are obliged to participate in and thereby confront this innate mechanism of violent othering. This is especially obvious when the victim is believed and even explicitly declared to take on the accumulated sins of the entire community. During the prototypical Jewish “Day of Atonement” (Yom Kippur), this equation was demonstrated by doubling the otherwise single goat: the victim was chosen arbitrarily by lot, whereas the spared other was decked with the insignia of the high priest, who thus conducted what amounts to a murderous self-sacrifice.
The royal consecration (dīkṣā) of the imperial horse sacrifice (aśvamedha) concluded with the Vedic king shedding his sins (i.e. war crimes) onto a deformed brahmin (jumbaka) standing mouth-deep in a pool. The entire community followed suit bathing in that purifying water, before the human scapegoat was expelled or perhaps drowned. The corresponding deformity prescribed for the “great brahmin” (mahā-brāhmaṇa) clown (vidūsaka) ensured the conservation of this now disguised ritual role even within the secularized aesthetic context of the classical Indian theatre. But whereas the bisociated cognition that underlies our incessant laughter relies on at least partially othering the bungling clown, we completely identify with his alter ego, the poor brahmin hero, when the latter is explicitly compared to the sacrificial goat being led in procession, mourned by the entire heartbroken city, to be executed at the stake for the (ontological) crime (that he did not commit). Conversely, the “evil” dictatorial king eventually slain in his stead is not only named “Protector” (Pālaka), he is struck down in the midst of the sacrifice just as he is about to immolate the (brahmin) goat. The Mṛchhakaṭikā thus played the same unifying cathartic role for the segmented Indian caste society as Oedipus Rex did for the democratic polis, for both Greek tragedy and comedy are derived, through their very names, from the preexisting ritual of the scapegoat.
Visuvalingam, “Violence and the other in Hinduism and Islam” (pp. 5-6 in page proofs; 89-90 in published book)
In Sacrifice, René Girard interrogates the Brahmanas of Vedic India, exploring coincidences with mimetic theory that are too numerous and striking to be accidental. Even that which appears to be dissimilar fails to contradict mimetic theory, but instead corresponds to the minimum of illusion without which sacrifice becomes impossible.
The Bible reveals collective violence, similar to that which generates sacrifice everywhere, but instead of making victims guilty, the Bible and the Gospels reveal the persecutors of a single victim. Instead of elaborating myths, they tell the truth absolutely contrary to the archaic sense. Once exposed, the single victim mechanism can no longer function as the model for would-be sacrificers.
Recognizing that the Vedic tradition also converges on a revelation that discredits sacrifice, mimetic theory locates within sacrifice itself a paradoxical power of quiet reflection that leads, in the long run, to the eclipse of this institution which is violent but nevertheless fundamental to the development of human culture. Far from unduly privileging the Western tradition and awarding it a monopoly on the knowledge and repudiation of blood sacrifice, mimetic analysis recognizes comparable, but never truly identical, traits in the Vedic tradition.
René Girard, Sacrifice (Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory), Michigan State University Press, 2011- Amazon
Friends,
Girard’s fundamental error lies in simply equating the (institutionalized) enactment of the sacrifice to the (uncontrolled) scapegoat mechanism, whereas the former is deliberately intended to be the repeated ‘homeopathic’ antidote to the blind automatism of the latter. Though the jumbaka as embodiment of evil focuses the ‘othering’ behind collective violence onto a defenseless individual, the very ritualization contains possible contagion. The likewise deformed vidūsaka, though retaining this scapegoat function, is constant companion and equal to the king, who repeatedly defers to this ‘great brahmin’. "Friendly’ buffoon Maitreya in the Mṛcchakaṭikā, whom the ‘plot’ renders instrumental in condemning brahmin Cārudatta to the stake, incarnates this sacrificial logic. The wholly arbitrary distinction between high priest and demonized scapegoat on the Day of Atonement deconstructs the mechanism of violent othering.
Even the goat to be immolated at Hindu festivals, such as to the Goddess (Durgā Pūjā), has to shake its head three times in assent (when water is sprinkled on its ear) or otherwise set free. Unlike the natural scapegoat, who is always perceived as dangerously evil, the sacrificial victim is typically innocent, precious and wholly willing. It is the beloved son (Isaac, Ishmael), the (biological) extension of (Abraham’s) self that God demands as the ready offering. Just as we read the Gospels scandalized by the crucifixion of the innocent yet submissive Son, so too do the heartbroken townsfolk and engrossed spectators despair at noble Cārudatta’s framed execution and yearn for his vindication. Yet this brahmin victim is likewise complicit and does not seize the repeated legal loopholes offered by the sympathetic and obviously partial judge. Instead, he denounces the culpable ‘powers that be’, collectively, for having sent countless innocents to their deaths. For the royal murderer, who had compared his deception to the sacrilegious “slaughter of a cow (paśu = animal victim) in a holy city,” also proclaimed his earnest wish that his crime be “common to all mankind”! Vedic sacrifice here clearly deconstructs the scapegoat.
At a deeper level, Cārudatta, like the innocent Christ, does not really seek vindication because the (ontological) ‘crime’ he is atoning for on behalf of (even us, contemporary) spectators is that of original sin inherited by every “son of Man” (i.e., common to all mankind).
Sunthar
P.S. We’ll soon look at the related, very contemporary, question whether ‘Christian’ Europe can no longer believe in the (politicized) guilt of the scapegoat…
[Rest of this thread at Sunthar’s post (02 Oct. 2015) at
“Get thee behind me Satan!” - René Girard and the (Christian deconstruction of the universal) Sacrifice]
From: "Sunthar Visuvalingam Abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com
To: “abhinavagupta@yahoogroups.com” ; “ontologicalethics@yahoogroups.com” ; “dia-gnosis@yahoogroups.com”
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Sent: Friday, October 2, 2015 1:54 PM
Subject: [Abhinavagupta] “Get thee behind me Satan!” - René Girard and the (Christian deconstruction of the universal) Sacrifice
Dear Frank,
If universal sacrifice has been simultaneously (controlled) expression of and (unweanable) palliative for our innate violence, the Devil could be understood both as the unredeemable core of human nature and as still inhabiting its institutionalized antidote. It is not just Christian missionaries and Western tourists in Nepal who find the generalized bloodletting of Durga Puja “satanic” and “disgusting,” for the Buddhists and Jains had already denounced even their more rarefied brahmanical template two millenniums ago. Christ’s Passion, however, is inherently ambiguous for the gospel narrative divinizes the crucified Jesus through his (helpless) reenactment even while stigmatizing the (officiating Jewish) high priest as God-killer. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” should therefore be interpreted both as willing assumption of the sacrifice and as repudiating the underlying scapegoat mechanism.
[…] Because he does not allow himself to be trapped within any single tradition, Girard offers instead an (anthropological) ‘explanation’ (i.e., from the outside) that also serves as a singular universalizing interpretation that privileges the Christian scenario. […] The latter’s scapegoat reading of Vedic ritual is also no less convincing than the same by my examiner-mentor FBJ Kuiper’s learned (but incomplete) interpretation of the brahmin clown (vidūṣaka) of the Sanskrit theater […] the French literary critic’s understanding of his Bible was revolutionized through reading Dumézil, S. Lévi, etc. […] it has taken a Western non-Indologist to place Vedic thought at the center of future reflection on the globalizing economy of violence. So Girard was delighted in 1985 when he received my prospectus for a comparative panel around his scapegoat thesis. […]
Though each religious tradition approaches (the archaic) sacrifice in its unique (though multi-pronged over time and across space…) way, the Passion remains so in a double sense, for the ‘enlightened’ debating this question in the (post-) modern world have inherited and remain (mental) prisoners of the Christian transformation (of Europe). Girard’s basic interrogation, whether the definitive abolition of the sacrificial cycle will eventually result in generalized violence being defanged, has been mouthed by George Bataille in the quote that opens the longer online version of my original essay, the conclusion of which still points to its universal interiorization as solution.
Perhaps the publication of “Violence and the Other” this December will facilitate the ‘resumption’ of our (aborted) dialogue…
Regards,
Sunthar
