This week the French literary critic and anthropologist René Girard is being interviewed at National Review Online.  I don’t quite know what to make of Girard, but he is certainly a very interesting and original thinker.  I first encountered him some years ago through a long set of interviews on CBC Radio’s Ideas.  His thoughts are not easy to summarize briefly; we would have to talk about desire and imitation, cultural violence, scapegoating, sacred order, and apocalypse.  But this interview seems to cover the basic ground fairly well.

The interview is in five parts.  Each part is about six or seven minutes long:

Part 1: Mimetic desire

Part 2: Scapegoating

Part 3: “Christianity destroys mythology”

Part 4: Apocalypse

Part 5: The meaning of Christmas

A few months ago First Things published an essay by Girard: On War and Apocalypse.

MAGGI DAWN’S QUESTIONS unerringly get to the  heart of the matter faster than most people’s answers:

The Archbishop is worried.

A new bishop has been elected (though not yet confirmed) in Los Angeles, and she’s “married” to another woman. This will undoubtedly cause another round of bitter rows in the Anglican communion, and there is no solution to the endless disagreement. Andrew Brown says that “Rowan Williams has been forced into an impossible corner by his own diplomacy”; while Ekklesia suggests that the Archbishop making comments that the election of Mary Glasspool is problematic, while refusing to condemn the extreme measures of the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, makes it seem that he is taking sides.

I think he can’t win whatever he says, and in a problem without a solution he has become the symbolic person that takes the flak from all sides. I don’t know what the answer is either. Do you? (my emphasis)

via lesbian bishop – Maggi Dawn.

No, Maggi. I’m sure I don’t know the answer. But as every day goes by I’m thinking that the quicker we move away from religious propositions that front “a symbolic person taking the flak” the better. And René Girard, for example, stands in company with many faithful Christians whose faith does not require that GOD intended for “His only Son” to be scapegoat for the “sin” represented by all that appears wrong, or at least unsolvable, in this world. Those of homosexual orientation are no more to blame for all the ills of Africa than Archbishop Rowan can be blamed for the ills of the Anglican Communion. Outdated theologies of scapegoating – symbolic persons taking the flak from all sides – are at the heart of the matter.

In future, all violence will reveal what Christ’s Passion revealed, the foolish genesis of bloodstained idols and the false gods of religion, politics, and ideologies. The murderers remain convinced of the worthiness of their sacrifices. They, too, know not what they do and we must forgive them. The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough. – The Scapegoat, René Girard, John Hopkins University Press, 1986, p 212

May the angels of God be on hand to comfort and sustain Archbishop Rowan. And may “the thoughts and meditations of all our hearts and minds” together with our prayer, moderation and non-violence, physical or verbal, establish peace.

Intervista René Girard

I was thinking about the consequences of moral influence theories of atonement. Readers probably are aware of my appreciation of Rene Girard’s version of this theory. But I realized that moral influence as a result of Christ’s sacrifice has a consequence I only considered this morning. Now first, I want to clarify what I’m saying – because I really am figuring out what I mean here as I go along.

Girard speaks of our contemporary passion for defending the rights of virtually every minority, of almost universal rejection of slavery by Christian-influenced culture, et cetera, as proof that Christ’s sacrifice was effective in influencing human morality.

However, if this is evident, it is also evident that this did not happen immediately: Minorities were still persecuted at the time of Christ’s sacrifice (his followers included) and still are, and slavery was once as much a Christian institution as it is still one in many countries around the world, and in all but name in many others.

In fact, these influences were barely evident even in the writings of the New Testament: Paul, for example, often treats women as second-class (as was the fashion at the time, and despite many modern believers arguing that he did not), and does similarly for slaves, and, to be honest, a wide selection of sinners.

This may suggest that, despite being in immediate receipt of Christ’s revelation, and being his contemporaries, the Apostles and the early church likely did not grasp the fullness of the implications of this moral influence, which in Girard’s terms is the rejection of tool of sacrificing the minority for the sake of the majority.

And this in turn might suggest a certain flaw in taking this early texts at face value. If the influence of what Christ did had not fully affected the culture at that time (and it has not two-thousand years later, so I don’t imagine that it did), then there will obviously be evidence of the non-Christological aspects of that culture (and there obviously is: Paul on slavery, for example).

Anyway, the point is that the whole thing got me thinking.

At The Mountain Astrologer magazine (12/2009), Kate Sholly interviews Alice Howell–author, teacher, and lecturer. From her precocious early years, when she declared herself an atheist at 12 due to the hypocrisy of the Christians she knew (she even calls her boarding school abusive for its hypocrisy), to her continuing desire to unite science and religion, Howell has had a remarkable life and remarkable lifelong spiritual search. Religion has lost its proof, she says, and science has lost its sense of the sacred.

What struck me most in the interview was her examination only late in life about how we gender the word “wisdom”. The word for wisdom – sophia in Greek — is notably feminine in every language, but

the only problem…is that when the Roman Church fathers translated Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom of the Old Testament, from the feminine into the masculine Spiritus Sanctus, which takes a masculine pronoun, the feminine left the Holy Trinity. As far as I can tell, she’s been hidden in fairy tales as the archetype of the Fairy Godmother ever since.

She’s usually a benign character who mediates between the invisible and visible worlds and always gives the little hero or heroine practical advice — and the adult ones as well. It is the motif of endless tales in all cultures. She is the disowned Mother God within all of us…. So as you can see, one cannot kill an archetype.

That was the beginning of my insight that feminine wisdom is simple enough to look for enlightenment in ordinary things…. So, instead of a serious and wise old man, what if the philosophic archetype is a playful woman of delights, whose name is Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia? (For more, see The Web and the Sea by Alice O. Howell)

Girardian Christianity: The Art of Subversion

How often it’s occurred to me that Christianity is nothing more than a co-opted form of feminism. That is, values traditionally attributed to the Feminine (and female gods)–unconditional love, forgiveness, compassion, love over law, relationship over principle–are now attributed to a Father who created but did not give birth to the world, his Son who delivered this feminine message into history, and a masculine Spirit that brings this feminine life to all believers.

Over the years, I’ve found a lot to appreciate in Rene Girard’s theory about the Scapegoat. But he’s lost his appeal for me; he’s merely the latest purveyor of this patriarchal agenda. Through his critical theory, he and his followers make a claim for Christianity’s culture-stablizing system without acknowledging how Christianity’s power to reveal the Scapegoating process lies in the fact that it resurrects values of the Feminine from the patriarchal graveyard, but only by grafting them on to a “new” version of the Masculine.

Afterall, as N.O.W. feminism has proven, identifying with the Masculine is the the only thing that can give any theory authority within a patriarchy.

No wonder politically progressive thinkers were the first to seize onto his theory: it allowed them to embrace pursuits like peace, gay rights, even women’s rights as essentially masculine pursuits. Liberals can feel the taint of effeminacy leaving now that the revelation of a religion so masculine that the only image of the Mother is a virgin (an unrealized adult and unempowered female) asks all men to share the unconditional love of a father.

Even this “progressive” school of Girardian thought doesn’t delve into the notion of gender as anything but one more scapegoated category, when it is the foundational one. In other words, it isn’t a Christian god that is bringing awareness of the Scapegoat–the innocent victim–into history but the return of the Feminine. And when the Feminine gets too obviously feminine, it’s back to the old dichotomies. This is shown by the ”conservative” school of Girardians, who only prove the theory’s patriarchal myopia by continuing to scapegoat homosexuals. Homophobia is an extension of misogyny.

Girard analyzed great literature and developed his anthrolopogy of religion–the idea that cultures can maintain themselves only by directing aggression externally to a scapegoat (many against one). When that scapegoat is seen for what he is–an innocent victim–escalating violence ensues internally (many against many), and peace can only be restored by finding a new scapegoat that isn’t seen as such. 

Girard won’t call his ideas a “theory”. It’s his followers that have done that. He has always admitted there is nothing new in his ideas. Indeed, even less than he imagined.

Christian theology is spoken in a language of metaphors, and it always has been. These metaphors have always been enculturated, revealing just as much about the people engaging with the gospel as they reveal about the gospel itself. Throughout the history of religion, people have used ideas that they already understand to begin to fathom the unfathomable. Rabbi Elijah, a 10th century Palestianian thinker, records a midrash about the Oral Torah and the Written Torah:

What is the difference between the Written and the Oral Law? To what can it be compared? To a king of flesh and blood who had two servants and loved them both with a perfect love. He gave each of them a measure of wheat and each a bundle of flax. What did the wise servant do? He took the flax and spun a cloth. He took the wheat and made flour. He cleaned the flour and ground, kneaded, and baked it, and set it on top of the table. Then he spread the cloth over it and left it until the king would come.

The foolish servant, however, did nothing at all. After some time, the king returned from a journey and came into his house. He said to his servants: my sons, bring me what I gave you. One servant showed the wheat still in the box with the bundle of flax upon it. Alas for his shame, alas for his disgrace!

When the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, he gave it only in the form of wheat for us to make flour from it, and flax, to make a garment from it.

Seder Eliyahu Zuta, Chapter 2

Rabbi Elijah suggests that God has given to the Jewish people the text, and it is the responsibility of the people to make something useful out of it. For the Jews, this is what it means to be “Israel,” to be those who struggle and wrestle with God. I can resonate with this aspect of Judaism. I think that Christians should also struggle over the text and theologies that are handed down to us, making them our own. It isn’t possible for us to conceive of God without creating idols. This is particularly true for Christians, who worship a crucified, embodied God. To describe the paradox of this crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann quotes H. J. Iwand:

The cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God. We have become far too used to it. We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the cross. That is not the bleakness inherent in it, placed in it by God. Hegel defined the cross: ‘God is dead’ —and he no doubt rightly saw that here we are faced by the night of the real, ultimate and inexplicable absence of God, and that before the ‘Word of the cross’ we are dependent upon the principle of sola fide; dependent upon it as nowhere else… Here God is non-God. Here is the triumph of death, the enemy, the non-church, the lawless state, the blasphemer, the soldiers. Here Satan triumphs over God. Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.[1]

Metaphors are our only hope for speaking of the unspeakable. Moltmann goes on to say: “If faith in the crucified Christ is in contradiction to all conceptions of righteousness, beauty and morality of man, faith in the ‘crucified God’ is also a contradiction of everything men have ever conceived, desired and sought to be assured of by the term ‘God.’”[2] A theology of the cross, on which the idea of God dies, is the event that demands constant re-consideration, particularly for Moltmann, of the “idols of the Christian West.”[3]

There has been a debate in recent Christianity over the metaphors for justification (which I have mentioned on this blog before). Even though saying so has caused some minor drama in my personal life, I’ll say again that I prefer the metaphor of Christus Victor over the metaphor of penal substitutionary atonement. This is, in large part, because of the context in which we live — capitalism, individualism, etc. — as a hindrance to justifiable living by means of promoting only a self-affirming kind of justification. A friend and I were recently discussing this idea. I said, “we ought to look at what theology creates,” by which I meant that the value of a theology is in its ability to replicate the model of Jesus. When I think of penal substitutionary atonement and its effects in my own life, I just don’t see the gospel. I see competition, self-promotion, and legalism. I don’t intend to discredit the penal metaphor for justification entirely but only to insist that it doesn’t work for me.

There are certain parts of the ideas of René Girard’s christology — as I understand it — that appeal to me. For Girard, “humankind is subjected to the power of violence.”[4] “[T]he Gospels,” then, “do not offer a sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’ death on the cross (in the sense that God would need a bloody sacrifice to satisfy his offended honor), the Apocalypse , of which Jesus holds out the prospect, does not concern God’s violence and Jesus does not ascribe any violence to God in his parables.”[5] Girard understands the Gospel to be the only possible escape from the systems of evil that so often define human behavior. “So what must be given up,” Girard says, “is the right to reprisals and even the right to what passes, in a number of cases, for legitimate defence.”[6]

I think that there are certain things about Girard that are problematic (re-reading anachronistically the entire Hebrew Bible with a distinct distaste for the sacrificial system or the fact that his theory is bit of a grand narrative, for example). At the same time, Girard’s understanding of Christ serves as a metaphor that helps me understand what it means to follow Jesus. For me, it gives the gospel a certain demand for embodiment; the good news opens the way for us and requires of us that we live very differently. In this way, Girard’s theory of the cross does not justify us (if by justification we mean the certain declaration that things are settled), but it unnerves and disturbs us. It allows us to see the violence within us and leads us out into a new kind of life.

———
[1]Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 36.
[2]Ibid., 37.
[3]Ibid., 36.
[4]Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 47.
[5]Ibid.
[6]Ibid., 48.

A Lucas, e un po’ anche a Malvino

Sfuggito fra le pieghe della coda lunga di Google (e mi chiedo quali perle siano ancora celate laggiù, nel profondo visibile-invisibile, nell’ubiqua anonimità della moltitudine indistinta, nella massa informe dell’innumerevole, nella suburbia del basso ranking), ecco a voi un blog sopraffino, da cui vi porgo umilmente, dieci, e dico dieci, post tematici su Adelphi. Senza menzionare i commenti.

Adelphi 1: Cesare Cavalleri, su Avvenire, 12 novembre 2008, recensisce La folie Baudelaire.

Adelphi 2: Ogni cogliere è anche un assassinare. Quechcotona (in nahuatl, la lingua degli aztechi, significa al tempo stesso “tagliare la testa a qualcuno” e “cogliere una spiga con la mano”), i mattatoi di Chicago. Violenza, assassinio, sacrificio.

Adelphi 3: René Girard. Il capro espiatorio. Satana-scimmia, omicida fin dal principio. E, nei commenti, Clausewitz, colpire con la massima potenza nel punto più ristretto e più debole del nemico, lo schwerpunkt.

Adelphi 4: Sintesi del Girard di E vidi Satana cadere come folgore. Desiderio mimetico, Cristo ortogonale.

Adelphi 5: Non occorrono il sole, l’oceano, la montagna più alta per innalzare un olimpo di divinità. Bastano le scintille dei falò, l’odore dell’erba, il rumore di una cascata, un sentiero che scollina, lo spifferare di un canneto, il ribollire del mosto. Basta ciò che dura più di un uomo, che va oltre quei giorni mortali. Basta un destino che ripete sordo il proprio destino.

Adelphi 6: Heidegger, l’ontologia medioevale, l’uomo moderno, l’uomo diurno, l’uomo che ulula alla luna.

Adelphi 7: La modernità calcolante, Guènon, San Tommaso.

Adelphi 8: Perché questa serie di post dedicati a Adelphi? Perché è una casa editrice che ha una forma.

Adelphi 9: Ancora Guènon, e Tiepolo pure, e il rosa. Teatro, tradizione, meraviglia falsa e inabitabile.

Adelphi 10: Nietzsche. Nuovamente teatro e Tiepolo, e rappresentazione e Occidente, eternoritornoinfinitoattualeassoluto. Finzione di tempo intermedio, la letteratura assoluta.
Che cosa si dovrà intendere con questa espressione? Tante cose diverse quanti sono gli autori che, esplicitamente o no, la praticano. Ma un presupposto è per tutti comune: si è dato, a un certo punto della nostra storia, un singolare fenomeno per cui tutto ciò che era rigorosa ricerca e acquisizione di un vero – teologico, metafisico, scientifico – apparve innanzitutto interessante in quanto materiale per nutrire un falso, una finzione perfetta e onniavvolgente quale è, nella sua ultima essenza, la letteratura. A questo dio oscuro e severo andava offerto tutto ciò che sino allora aveva presunto di essere giustificato in se stesso.

PS: non sono necessariamente d’accordo con tesi e antitesi offerte in questi pezzi. Ma la forma, lo stile, la pacatezza, la profondità, e l’oggetto vogliono attenzione, e noi gliela diamo, con piacere.

När det kommer till kärlek så har den mellan två människor ofta grunden i ett begär, vilket inte är samma sak som ren och sann kärlek. Vi kan därför säga att kärlek och (psykologiska) begär är två skilda saker, men för den skull inte helt åtskiljda. Inte heller tror jag vi har möjlighet att leva fullt i enlighet med sann kärlek, alltså så som Gud från början måste ha ansett att vi skulle leva (mer om kärlek senare, nu mest om begär).

Men begär är ofta början på vad som kan bli till kärlek mellan människor. Först åtrår man, sedan älskar man. Den man åtrår försöker man, genom olika former av uppvaktning, få att bli uppmärksam på ens existens. Kort och gott, vi uppvaktar för att bli begärda i retur.

Begär gör att vi härmar dem vi har som förebilder, eftersom de redan tidigare har samma begär som vi har. Därför har vi så många berömda historier, myter, dikter, dramer och pjäser, liksom verkliga händelser och personer i invecklade kärlekshistorier där rivaliteten är en central del av dramat.

För begär uppstår ofta av andra anledningar än för det åtrådda objektets egen skull. Begär uppstår gärna när objektet i fråga redan är någon annans, vilket alltså innebär att det redan är eftertraktat. Ett sådant objekt måste naturligtvis vara något som är värt att åtrå! Det kan alltså till och med räcka med blotta tanken på att andra hyser begär efter ett visst objekt, för att ett motsvarande begär skall uppstå hos oss. Allt detta har René Girard förtjänstfullt avslöjat för världen som en ytterst grundläggande princip för det mänskliga. Vi härmar förebilder och våra begär väcks genom dem.

Jag kom på mig själv väldigt tydligt med detta beteende för ett tag sedan i en visserligen banal, men samtidigt mycket typisk vardagshändelse. Jag stod med en kollega i köket på jobbet och diskuterade något. Alldeles bredvid stod en fruktskål med några få frukter (åtråvärda objekt) kvar. En annan kollega kommer och är på väg mot fruktskålen. Då, samtidigt som jag upptäcker denna andra kollega, blir jag själv plötsligt mycket intresserad av fruktkorgen. Speciellt det sista plommonet som ligger där. Girigt hinner jag sträcka ut och ta det innan kollegan hinner komma fram till fruktkorgen.

Alltså, mitt begär väcktes först när jag upptäckte kollegans begär. Kollegan blev min då förebild som jag ville härma, men samtidigt min rival, som jag måste besegra för att försäkra mig om att få plommonet. Jag kom på mig själv med detta sekunden senare, men insåg att ingen skulle förstå vad jag pratade om ifall jag skulle försöka redogöra för René Girards teorier om mimetiskt beteende. Jag åt mitt plommon med en lätt skamkänsla.

Jag tror vi alla känner igen beteendet och att vi både har upplevt det hos andra liksom att vi själva har agerat precis så här. Begäret uppstår ur en mimetisk (härmande) rivalitet, och inte genom ett faktiskt eget begär. Mitt fruktexempel är naturligtvis en struntsak, men detta sker naturligtvis i både stort och smått. Att det händer är ett faktum.

På grund av begäret till objektet kommer vi alltså samtidigt att både beundra och hata vår rival. Vi vill komma åt samma pengar, samma makt, samma kvinnor, samma mark, samma allt, som andra redan har – bara därför att de redan har det, eller till och med bara därför att de kan tänkas ha det. Det är ett evigt triangeldrama mellan den som åtrår, det åtrådda objektet och förebilden/rivalen.

Men, vi kan naturligtvis också skaffa oss goda förebilder som vi inte gör till rivaler. Vars plats vi inte vill ta och ersätta med oss själva, utan i vars närhet vi vill få lov att vara, så vi kan lära av dem. En sådan förebild är våra mentorer, mästare och andra auktoriteter som verkar genom sin utstrålning av visdom och kärlek. Vi kan ha ett begär efter sanning, men vi måste först och främst älska Sanningen, hur den än ser ut och acceptera den. Att bara välja ”sanningar” vi gillar, är inte att älska Sanning, bara att mata egots begär på bekräftelse av sina fördomar.

Men, begäret har en funktion för oss eftersom det kan vara vad som startar igång en process, vilken senare kan leda oss till kärleken. För vi måste upptäcka objektets inneboende egenvärde för att kunna älska det. Alltså älska någon/någonting för dess egen skull. Schuon (från “Echoes of Perennial Wisdom“) igen:

”The beautiful is not what we love and because we love it, but that which by its objective value obliges us to love it”

Men hur skall vi upptäcka någons objektiva värde, vilket gör att vi blir skyldiga det vår kärlek, om vi inte får tid på oss att lära känna det? id att studera, undersöka, umgås och komma in på djupet. En del utav att utvecklas andligt måste vara att lära känna kärleken och finna ut vad som är värt att älska. Vår tid är dock begränsad, medan Gud har all evighet i världen på sig.

The clayboy, Doug Chaplin, recently wrote a thought-provoking post on original sin and evolution. He entitled it ‘No Adam, No Fall’, because it struggled with the Pauline concept that that Adam’s failure was a decisive moment in history. I’ll be quoting exhaustively, because I loved some of what Doug said.

I note Paul’s method. He re-reads the earlier story in the light of Christ. He does this with most things. I wonder what ways are open to us if we take that method seriously and look at ways of re-reading the whole narrative in the light of Christ, an even more thorough-going move from solution to plight, in the knowledge of creation and evolution that we have subsequently acquired.

I think this is an important thing to realize; Paul’s interpretation of Adam in the light of Christ is something we should attempt to imitate in our own interpretation of the Old Testament. Paul writes many letters, all teaching his followers in the churches how to think theologically, and how to be like Christ. These two things are not entirely separate. But, I think because of the goals of these letters (education), if we disagree with how Paul re-reads the Old Testament, we are not negating God’s inspiration in his letters. Paul wouldn’t have minded if we disagreed with him about Adam, so long as we re-read the fall in the light of Christ. I think the rest of Doug’s provisional thesis is best read in this light.

Sin” (if I may be every bit as anthropomorphic and anachronistic as Richard Dawkins is) is not only in the world long before “Adam”, but is the mechanism whereby Adam’s species can emerge and flourish as the one who is able to name the animals (in increasingly sophisticated taxonomies) and tend to the garden of the earth’s ecosystem (or destroy it).

As regular readers know, I’m a thorough supporter of Rene Girard’s memetic theory as a theory of sin; and of Christ’s sacrifice as a miraculous overcoming of that sin, rather than a satiation of a wrathful God. And hence, I think Doug hits the nail on the head with this: Sin is, in fact, something intrinsic and important to not only our daily lives, but our ancestry, and it is what makes us what we are. We are both very good in the eyes of God (Genesis 1:31), and not (Genesis 2:18).

Creation is what God is about, creating order from chaos, drawing conscious forms of life able to love and praise out of the primordial soup, developing those who will come to find their true selves in the image of the one in whom God encounters his creation. The image of God, revealed in Jesus, is God’s intention for men and women, transcending the selfish gene to live in a self-giving love that mirrors and responds to the love of God.

But, most importantly, God drew us out to overcome this flaw that both made us thrive and (perhaps) disappointed him in us. Through Christ, we can transcend the sin that has made us thrive, we can live in a self-giving love mirror and respond to the love of God. A valuable concept, Doug, and one beautifully put.

Why do I say ‘perhaps’ when it comes to God’s disappointment in us?

…there are indeed those other traditions of the origins of evil in the world which go alongside and beyond the account of Adam, Eve and the serpent. [...] Some of them seem to lay the blame more clearly on God, who makes both darkness and light. I think we need to go back to a fuller exploration of those traditions, and see if they can help enrich our understanding.

I culled a little bit, because I wanted to draw attention to laying the blame more clearly on God. There is certainly testament in scripture to God’s control over both good and evil – and how could there not be, and he still be God? It is something we must live with, if we are to be truly monotheistic in our faith. However, to me this suggests that it is unlikely God was disappointed in us, because that sin that helped us thrive was likely something given to us to overcome. We were made in the image of God, and the eternal presence of sin might be a necessary balance to God’s difficult role as Lord over both good and evil. And yet, God’s to constantly transcend this dual character for good: So too, through Christ, we can transcend our sin, and respond to God’s love.

Thanks for provoking thought, Doug

Remember your horror as a kid at the idea of getting caught doing anything that might go down on your — gasp!– “permanent record”?  Now with email, text messages, and FB, it’s all on your permanent record.  All of it.  Every word you share might be even more permanent than you, since it’s theoretically possible that all the online chats, drunken texts, status updates, blogs and emails you’ve authored will outlive you and achieve immortality in cyberspace.

When I was a graduate student at UCLA, I studied Victorian Autobiography for a brief spell.  The challenge there was that only a specific subset of the population–the middle and upper classes–possessed the education, means, and time to write anything down, much less publish what they’d written.  As a consequence, most of our ideas about England in the 1800s came from the middle class, and what we knew of working-class life, by contrast, was only what could be put together from the discovered stash of rare letters in an attic somewhere.  That’s won’t be the case for future scholars of the 21st century.  Everyone writes  everything down anymore.  Imagine: far into the future, a UCLA musical scholar will seek to investigate the twenty-first century preponderance in Los Angeles of bands named after locations.  He’ll simply google “Just Off Turner” or “Astra Heights,” then cross reference the band members’ names.  Et voila.  This scholar will know instantly that Bryan Mounce dated this great chick who did improv, that Phil Metzler wished he had an afro like Jeff Lynne’s, that James Morales mostly wore black and Timmy Morales like to imbibe the $1 beers at Crane’s every Monday night.  That’s a lot of information, compared to what I was able to learn in the archives about 19th-century buskers, which would’ve been nada.

Everything ever known about you now will be known about you forever.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Imagine yourself liberated from the past.  That’s what a truly permanent record does: it says to you, you can’t hide from what you’ve done, you can’t distort it, you can’t put it on anybody else.  It is what it is.  Deal with it.

So you do.

I once read there’s a very good reason memory fades: to ease pain and to make room for new feelings and ideas.  I don’t believe it.  There is no good reason for memory to fade.  Well, I take that back–maybe it’s healthy for emotional memories to fade.  But not the historical record, the things you write to other people that are supposed to mean something.  To the contrary, it’s better to have a record of everything you’ve ever written or that’s ever been written to you so that you can hold the world and yourself accountable ad infinitum for the words that have been committed to paper.  That’s sort of what’s meant by transparency and honesty.

I mean, it’s fine to change your mind, and sometimes what you emailed a week ago is no longer emotionally true for you today.  But if it’s in an email or text message, at least there’s empirical evidence of that emotion having been experienced (unless you’re a liar,  in which case there’s evidence of its at least having been expressed).  And if there’s evidence of that emotion floating out there in the world, it’s much harder to pretend it was never said, or that it doesn’t exist, or that you didn’t involve another person in it.  Somehow or another, even if only internally, you have to acknowledge it and decide what to do with it.  You have to deal in uncomfortable truths.  You have to remain accountable for your permanent record.

We’ve always been told that words are weapons, that they’re so powerful that they can change things.  Use a different word, create a different world.  Maybe in this new era , we’re going to start living like that’s actually true, because all of our words can come back to haunt us.  Either that or treat everything with the gravity of an emoticon.  Said today, gone tomorrow.  A world of meaningless words, where nothing’s ever really as stake.  That’s what politics feel like, right?  Blech.

More personally, I labor under the belief that feelings never really go away, they just get lost.   The permanent record helps you to find them again for a little while.

Which is why I have a gmail address for the girls to which I send things every once in a while: links to the blogs I’ve written about my daughters, outpourings of love typed out late at night, and lots of the emails sent between her father and me the first couple of years. The gmail account was born of the impulse to keep a historical record, in all our original words, of a confusing time in our lives, the time when Djuna’s family underwent cataclysmic transformation. I knew enough from my own experience as a child of divorce–and, granted, I could be projecting here–that one of the most frustrating things about having your life divided in that manner is the mystery that shrouds it.  My thought was this: if someday Djuna and Poppy want to puzzle through the narrative of their parents’ marriage and separation–and they very well may not, and that’s fine, too–then better to draw their own conclusions from the historical record than leave it to the distortions of their parents, the adults too screwed up to keep our shit together and too proud to part amicably on their behalf.

I’ve always been a pack rat, anyway, so even without the gmail account there’s be a lot permanent record.  I kept a daily journal from January to August 1992, which began with Kevin and me first hooking up after a late night at the 500 Club in winter and ended with us moving in together into a little apartment off of Melrose and Fairfax in the autumn. Love letters their father sent me, Mother’s Day cards, birthday cards, photo album after album, boxes of ticketstubs, postcards, brochures, and flyers from all the things we did together.  I’m told it’s important for children to know they were conceived in love, whatever else followed their conception, and there’s plenty of evidence of that in this stash I’m saving for them.  But I’ve often wondered what Paige and Kevin will make of this historical record.  The one time recently I was at Dick and Julie’s house, I noticed that all pictures of me were gone and replaced with pictures of Paige.  Which makes sense, I guess, it just gets me curious. Will that side of the family present to our daughters a history from which my relatives and I have been erased, a history that didn’t begin until September 2006, 15 years in? (Draw your own conclusions from Paige’s account here of how she and Kevin met: http://www.oncewed.com/17437/real-weddings-blog/once-wed/kevin-paige/)

Ah, historical revisionism.  The fine art of scapegoating, of erasing, of distorting to save one’s own ass.  You have to pretend that X never happened, so you replace it with Y.  But it’s a fetishizing game, which means it’s a losing game: the substitute only commemorates the thing it’s meant to hide.  The more zealously you forward the Y, then the more anxiety about X that you betray.  That’s what happens with Paige’s blog.  The old scapegoating version they told was that I drove Kevin nearly to suicide, until Paige rescued him from our marriage.  In this new version, they weren’t even married anymore when they met.  Mark and I have been vanished.  But I would guess from this revisionism that Paige is ashamed of what really happened; which, weirdly, makes her blog an unintentional acknowledgment of guilt even as she’s trying to whitewash it.

Guilt, guilt, guilt.  I’ve begun to wonder if guilt isn’t an even more powerful emotion than love.  I’m sad to say I’ve seen a lot of love thrown away in service of guilt.  In that regard, I acknowledge Kevin’s courage: he loved Paige and so he chose her, despite the social pressure to be a good boy and in spite of the burden of guilt he’d have to struggle with afterwards (or, sadly and less heroically, displace to my shoulders in classic scapegoat fashion).  I’m not sanctioning anything, I’m just saying: they’re obviously happy together, and maybe they belonged together, maybe more than either Kevin and me or Mark and Paige . . . who am I to say what God’s will is for any of us?   But the guilt  . . . it makes people do ugly things.  It’s so painful that it makes them desperate to spread the guilt around, to parcel it out, to bury it, or to pretend it away.  So they start revising history.  And all revisionist history needs a scapegoat.

So I know a thing or two about being scapegoated, or at least about being scapegoated in love triangles.  It’s not a pretty feeling.  A shrink during the divorce explained it to me like this.  In a love triangle, one must choose between the other two and, in order to do so with a clean conscience, he must throw one of those two to the dogs in order to place the other on a pedestal.   So two gang up on one and begin the scapegoating process.  Whether by projection, or blame, or through solidarity, the majority project all the guilt and shame upon the minority, who (ideally) accepts the burden.  Then the scapegoat gets outcast, exiting the triangle and taking all the guilt and shame with them so that the remaining two are temporarily liberated from it.  If the minority won’t accept the burden, if the outcast won’t voluntarily exit the triangle, then there’s an intermediate step, and that’s where revisionist history comes in.  It’s a form of violence whereby the majority in essence forces the scapegoat out of the triangle–by bullying the scapegoat, by isolating the scapegoat, by brainwashing the scapegoat, or by (symbolically) killing the scapegoat.   One way or the other, the minority has to be scapegoated and symbolically sacrificed in order for the remaining majority to live in peace.

It’s a never-ending cycle, because the guilt and shame projected upon the scapegoat have only been symbolically eradicated .  In truth, the causes and symptoms of the guilt can never be magically vanished.  So scapegoating is a vicious pattern that repeats each time the guilt and shame creep back in (which they inevitably do), and one that will continue to repeat until we recognize in ourselves the mechanisms of denial, projection, and psychological violence that necessitate it.   Jesus was the only scapegoat able to break this cycle.  That’s because his resurrection proved something to his community that most scapegoats can’t: “Look at me, here: see, I am entirely innocent of everything you projected onto me.  No arguing with me on this one, is there?  I’ve been resurrected, that’s how innocent I am.  So that means you better take a good look at yourselves, instead, for the real cause of all that guilt and shame.”   And they do, and they see it, and they are reborn.  And the cycle of violence that culminates in a scapegoat is broken.

Maybe a permanent record can serve in a parallel manner, if we pay attention to it.   Because we now have detailed written accounts of so many of the emotional transactions that we engage in on a daily basis, it becomes more and more difficult to creatively revise that record down the line.  Therefore it becomes more difficult to successfully execute the mechanisms of distortion, projection, and denial that scapegoating requires.  The permanent record smacks us upside the head with undeniable evidence of our own accountability, and we are therefore liberated from the temptation to go into denial, to hide from the truth, or to project guilt and blame onto anybody else.  Imagine that.  Ongoing atonement that keeps your slate perpetually clean.  Real honesty.  Real transparency.

So next time some I see some ugly conflict coming down the pipe, or face a big choice, or simply feel I’m misunderstanding somebody, I’ll pull out the emails and text messages and wall postings that we exchanged.  I’ll glance at my status updates on Facebook.  I’ll take a long gander at what was said to get me to this point.  I’ll be true to the moment I’m in, for sure.  I won’t live in the past.  But I won’t hide from it either.  I can’t anymore.   It’s on my permanent record.

Nicolas Deltort (FOOT Interview MHSC, ActuSport34 – oct 2009)

René Girard au stade de la Mosson (photo N. Deltort)

Arrivé à l’intersaison pour remplacer Rolland Courbis, le Gardois, ex entraîneurs de l’équipe de France Espoirs, a séduit tout son petit monde. Y compris les spectateurs qui ont vite oublié son passé au Nîmes Olympique. Ou quand le beau jeu est plus fort que tout…

René, après une période d’inactivité, comment vivez-vous votre retour sur un banc de touche ?
C’est fabuleux, et qui plus est en Ligue 1, dans ma région et avec un club « fait » à ma mesure où on se sent bien et correspondant à mon tempérament de Sudiste. J’y ai trouvé des gens très sains à tous les étages du club. Chacun a tout fait pour je me sente bien ici.

Est-ce que l’aspect familial du MHSC n’est pas le secret de sa réussite dans une Ligue 1 où ces valeurs ne sont pas forcément rependues ?
On peut le dire, oui. Il n’y a pas cinquante clubs dans ce fonctionnement-là et, qui plus est, sont formateurs autant qu’on peut l’être. Par ailleurs, le point commun du foot pro en général, c’est la bonne santé de sa locomotive. C’est elle qui entraîne tout le monde. Mais il faut souligner qu’ici, tout le reste est bien huilé. On n’a pas soixante mille personnes travaillant pour le club et on ne fonctionnera jamais comme Marseille ou Lyon. On a donc encore plus besoin de cette solidarité que tous les gens du club affichent.

Vous êtes arrivé avec des idées, alliant opiniâtreté et esprit de groupe, mais aussi en voulant prôner le beau jeu. C’était culoté, mais cela semble marcher…
Pour avoir un projet, autant faut-il qu’il soit réalisable. J’ai beaucoup observé Montpellier en Ligue 2 et j’avais pu me rendre compte de la qualité qu’il y avait déjà. Après, j’ai trouvé un groupe sein, frais, qui a envie et qui travaille. Ce qui a été une agréable surprise et les raisons du bon fonctionnement de ce qu’on avait élaboré. Après, on peut produire du beau jeu, mais sans la rigueur, cela ne peut pas marcher. Le projet a été accepté par tous les garçons, à partir de là ,pourquoi on n’y arriverait pas ? Même si on connaît parfois des moments difficiles.

Vous semblez avoir été parfois trop joueur, comme à Marseille, alors qu’il aurait fallu peut-être être davantage « salopard » comme vous aimez à le dire…
Il faut garder à l’esprit les limites de la liberté d’expression et ne pas oublier les bases. Quand on aura totalement compris ça et qu’on voit la qualité de l’équipe, on ne peut que passer de bons moments cette saison. Les gens venant au stade ne s’y trompent pas. On tente, on ne réussi pas tout, mais la volonté de spectacle est là.

Le plus grand danger guettant votre équipe n’est-il pas de se laisser griser ?
Si. Il faut être capable de gérer ses temps forts comme ses temps faibles, avec la même discipline. Le football ne se bafoue pas ! Dans toutes les équipes il y a des travailleurs de l’ombre et il faut aussi veiller à ce que les individualités qui se dégagent ne soient pas un danger pour le collectif.

Vous dites qu’il n’y a plus de remplaçants dans le football d’aujourd’hui. Vous avez pourtant un noyau dur de titulaires…
On ne peut pas non plus faire tourner en permanence dans tous les secteurs. Il est important d’avoir une colonne vertébrale et je pense qu’on l’a. Mais si demain Romain Pitau devait être absent, je sais que Jamel Saïhi répondra présent. Dans tous les cas, il faut garder le même état d’esprit et le même projet de jeu sans trop être calculateur, ni avare.

Votre système de jeu demande beaucoup d’efforts, ne risquez-vous pas de connaître un creux physiquement durant la saison ?
Si on gère bien les hommes et la préparation physique, je ne me fais pas de souci. Tous les postes sont doublés, mais si je ressens un besoin de souffler de la part des gars, je pourrai faire évoluer notre schéma de jeu. Pour l’instant on s’appuie sur ce qu’on a mis en place car ça fonctionne bien. Et si souci il y a, je pense qu’il viendra plutôt des blessés et des suspendus éventuels.

(9-18) le premier des cachés [Les films Lidl 2005]
(Sucé sur Erdre – Loire Atlantique)

In my current writing on ‘participatory’ and ‘apocalyptic’ soteriology it occurred to me that Rene Girard offers a crucial link for understanding a key piece of Pauline writing

The majority reading of 2 Cor 5:21 at least in Western Christianity is something like the following paraphrase:

Christ never sinned! But God treated him as a sinner, so that Christ could make us acceptable to God. (2 Cor 5:21 CEV)

This is reinforced by I. Howard Marshall’s comment that: “It is hard to understand this [Christ’s becoming sin for us] in any other way than that in dying Christ exhausted the effects of divine wrath against sin”. However, as Stephen H. Travis (p. 187) argues this is clearly not the only reading of this difficult passage. And, to go beyond  Travis,  this (dominant) reading is also prima facie problematic. It suggests that God acts unjustly or immorally for our sake – namely either punishes or blames someone for something of which he is innocent. Even if that person is in an important sense, God’s self, and even if that person voluntarily undergoes this punishment/blame (and thus there is no rift between Father and Son) it is still counter-factual, and therefore a difficult reading of the text. To treat someone as what they are not, is to act contrary to the truth (whether justifiable or not).

Such problems however, have not stopped exegetes clinging to this reading. I would argue, however, that this reading should at least be compared with another possible way of reading the text (not often considered) to compare its plausibility. Since the passage clearly states (and translators seem to agree) that Jesus wasn’t a sinner (“he knew no sin”) a certain kind of literal reading is ruled out. It would be implausible to read this paradox as a pure contradiction. What then are the alternatives? Here is my presentation of the alternatives, both of which have the subjunctive ‘as if’ quality but in different ways

1. God treated him as a sinner (although he wasn’t) (see the CEV above and the problems associated)

2. God made him to be treated as a sinner (by us – our ’sinner’ or scapegoat)

In respect of moving towards the subjunctive ‘as if’ sense, these interpretations are equivalent. They differ in the way that is achieved. The advantage of the second reading is that there is no problem understanding how human beings can act unjustly and counterfactually. Indeed that is precisely the point of the passion narrative and the proclamation of the early church. It is intrinsic to the vindication-forgiveness structure of the early preaching of Acts that our forgiveness arises in our meeting with our divine victim – the one we treated as a sinner. Those who encounter their victim discover that they are ‘unjust judges’ (see especially Paul’s resurrection experience). I contend then that over and against those who wish to make God the unjust judge, the latter reading has prima facie plausibility. Furthermore, if God is not the unjust judge, it is not even clear that the legal metaphor is the primary one here. As we noted earlier the second clause indicating consequence describes a transformative process (‘becoming the justice/righteousness of God’). Moreover, the verses immediately following do not suggest an imputed righteousness, often associated with the former reading, but suggest rather an emergent active (but grace-dependent) righteousness or justice

As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain… (2Co 6:1 NRSV)

If I am right both of the possible interpretations are not straightforwardly literal readings, since the text itself does not appear amenable to such a reading, it seems then that the second is clearly the more plausible reading in spite of the fact that the dominant tradition has tended towards the former reading. Thus the best rendering of 2 Cor 5: 21 is:

It was for us that God made the one who knew no sin to be treated as a sinner, so that, in him, we as a community might become the justice of God (2 Cor 5: 21 my translation following Michael Gorman for the second half)

However, it is worth asking why this reading or something similar has been a minority one? It is possible that such a reading remains a minority one because of a failure to appreciate the causal link between the first and second half of the verses which it suggests but does not spell out? How does the scapegoating of the crucified bring about the righteousness/justice of those who participate in him? Once the question is put in this way it is clear, to anyone familiar with his thought, that Rene Girard has some crucial insights to offer a participatory reading of Paul. It may even be, that in spite of the overall context of a participatory framework in Paul’s thinking, our reading of 2 Corinthians 2:21 will continue to lack plausibility unless such a girardian account can be offered. Two things should be noted in passing however:

1. The price of reading this text as a kind of counterfactual judgement resulting in imputed unrighteousness for Jesus and imputed righteousness for us is an abstraction from the processes of transformation explicit in the verses preceding and following. It is a juridical insertion into a participatory argument.

2. Both readings are substitutional following the grammar of the text, but in different senses. In the majority reading Christ is substituted into the divine system of judgement. In our minority reading he is substituted (and self-substituted) into the human system of judgement. That this latter reading is a divine judgement on human sinfulness is revealed in the resurrection and vindication of Jesus, however it is first of all a judgement by the principalities and powers of human history.

Provided, then, a (girardian) account can be offered of the link between the apocalyptic event of the scapegoating of the lamb/son of God and human participation in the missio Dei, this classically juridical text looks like it might potentially turn out to be powerfully suggestive of the ways in which our socio-political operating systems ‘in Adam’ (the principalities and powers) are engaged by the salvific action of God in Christ, for the purpose of the creation of a new social expression of the justice of God – church. Thus this text points us in a direction which envisions a central role for the church in God’s mission to the world as an embodiment and enactment of the justice of God. However before we move too quickly, we need to notice that the participatory ‘becoming’ that is made possible by the first clause, presupposes that the substitution or exchange (however we conceive of it) has an objective effect independently of those who participate in it. Although no one is justified apart from participation, there is no justifying participation apart from the fact that this event constitutes the necessary condition of justifying participation. Stephen Travis (p. 199) rightly observes that:

… the formulation of those sentences in the form, ‘Christ gave himself for our sins so that…’ (1 Thes 5: 9-10 etc) implies that in his death Christ achieved something objectively before the fruits of it were available to the subjective experience of those who have faith in him. Our participation in Christ depends on his first ‘dying for us’.

Moreover, if the ‘for us’ is to imply an act of love, or, more precisely, to imply that the death is a necessary part of an act of love, it must be clear how it contributes to our benefit, prior to our participation in it. We love him because he first loved us and gave himself for us. It is hard to see how we can treat the suffering of Christ as an act of love (in and of itself) unless it contributes something necessary to the well-being of the beloved. Otherwise it is mere masochism. There is no intrinsic benefit in knowing that the Son of God suffers. Since Girard’s account of the objectivity of divine love is both apocalyptic in its logic and centred on a scapegoating of God in history according to the universal structures of human psycho-sociality its fit looks too good to be true.

The following reading of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” is re-published by permission from its author, ”Dean,” who submitted it recently for the enjoyment of bloggers on the Reflections on Faith and Culture site. Dean views the film’s story through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory.

In the famous Dawn of Man sequence an ape overcomes his fear and touches the monolith, which has suddenly appeared during the night, a sentinel planted by some unseen and vast intelligence. There is a sense of numinous awe in the film, as the mysterious black basaltic slab appears over and over again throughout the movie. This is the divine agency of the film–the burning bush. The ape in the initial scene then turns bones into tools. He learns how to use his new “tool” as a murder weapon against a rival tribe of apes, and although that was not the intention of the caretakers who imparted the knowledge, the rival apes at the business end of a jagged thigh bone may have thought differently.

A klaxon is sounded, as the sentinel telegraphs its message to the stars signaling the changed status of the apes.  From that point on, the monolith patiently stands as a silent beacon, through aeons of time, in different locations, awaiting the next visitation in the distant future when it will impart a new chapter of knowledge further along the evolutionary path as the unseen caretakers surveil our progress from behind the scenes. The tree in Genesis as well as the cross at Calvary and the Monolith in Space Odyssey are essentially the same: preparations for participation in a grand mystery. But the agency behind that mystery remains unseen, or seen only through a glass darkly, which is the central tension both of the film and of our lives. Each discovery emboldens us to go another step further on our personal and collective odyssey.

As we attempt to move away from our own violent beginnings, we find ourselves returning to them over and over again, which I also suspect was not the intention of our benefactors (if we have any) but the beacon trip wire in anthropological history that signals the next step. In Girardian terms, when the distinctions and boundaries that define culture begin to collapse, the most painful dilemma in that deconstruction is the undermining of the primitive sacred with its cohering mythology of fear and divine justice. The ape overcomes his fear; we do too.  There is an initial sense of relief as the last vestiges of that fear become sufficiently muted to thwart its continuance, and then a subsequent despair as increasingly violent and chaotic challenges to its eroding sense of authenticity are accelerated proportionate to the lack of any discernible resistance from it. People are both pleased that an angry, wrath-laden deity does not exist, but sufficiently enraged at the same time to act as surrogates for the vengeance they believe it would unleash if only it could see what we are doing to ourselves. 

If there is an apocalyptic process or some kind of evolutionary momentum at work, it seems, if I understand it at all, that we are at this stage: We have dispensed with an angry God by creating a scenario in which he would seem to be welcomed; and dismissed the possibility of a loving one who could be perceived as audacious or apathetic enough to conspire in the revelation of his love through such a painful, violent and lengthy process.  A process in which he gives us such apparently complete control over the ultimate, and by no means, optimistically assured, outcome.  In other words, it’s a long way from bone tools to Europa and Jupiter.  Whether Hal chooses to close the pod bay doors on us is anyone’s guess.

Apocalyptic events are neither new, nor perpetually genial if they go unrecognized long enough.  Was the new world Noah helped to create any different in its fallen nature than the one it supplanted?  Jesus pointed to the Noah story as a prototype of the last days.  If Jesus is truly the “lamb of God” shouldn’t he stop pulling the “wool” over our eyes by lending his status and corroboration to a myth that uses violent metaphors as a way of ingratiating us to a “loving” God?  What does this say about Jesus?  What does this say about God?  What does this say about us?!

Lot is another example of a potential victim surviving the culture that would victimize him.  How is that survival to be interpreted, unless it’s at the hand of divine justice?  Again, we have Jesus corroborating it.  If the event described is a mythologized or sacralized account of what actually transpired, it seems that very little of the entire text of the Bible is to be trusted as anything more than a eulogy to the warped religious impulses and sentiments of a perpetually cruel people and the God who they believe inspires them.

Then we have Gideon—a true example of the outsider, who becomes the custodian of mimetic violence against 135,000 Medianites, and dethrones the cult in the “old fashioned” way, with the help of a God who we are told now despises violence?  If these are mythologized texts, what value can they impart to true experience, if our willingness to be moved by them is compromised by the knowledge that they never happened, and therefore cannot happen again?  (I would be relieved to know that they never happened, but then I would be suspicious about the revelatory character of a book that uses as object lessons stories that have no apparent value or relation to the thing they’re trying to convey).  Is this the way God teaches us to love?  By telling us stories that are filled with violence?  Has it worked?  Can He be strong enough to save us, if He’s unable to deliver an uncorrupted message to us?  Why is there any violence in His message at all?  Are we supposed to be shocked into a renewed sensibility by a candid and tedious display of what we already know about ourselves?  Unfortunately, I don’t know.  I’m just an ape at a watering hole with a bone in my hand.  Should I use it as a weapon or a tool?

Before the concept of eternal life was embraced as a religious creed, only grudging and protesting victims were accorded divinized immortality through the transcendentalizing of mimetic contagion and violence.  Yet living on in the memory of those who murder you seems a pitifully cheap legacy which is hardly worthy of comparison with what people long for when they speak of the power of the resurrection.  People turn to Christ primarily because he promises eternal life, not because he possesses a precocious anthropological sensibility. When men become gods, they live only until replaced by other “gods” who are like them; when God becomes man and dies at men’s hands, men live forever through the one they killed.  But the nagging question remains, is this just symbolic speech, invoked to reveal a merely anthropological insight, or is it more?  In light of these ideas, is the good news of the gospel anthropological, metaphysical or both?  And how are they reconcilable?

 If the socio-anthropological reading of scripture is true, then the mystical and metaphysical reading is certainly at odds with it.  Gone is the Jesus who performs real miracles: walking on water, raising the dead, healing the sick and feeding the multitudes.  In its place is a savvy anthropological spiritual genius who diverts scapegoating rituals, reconciles rivalistic combatants and scolds the duplicity and obfuscation inherent in the machinery of victimization. The sick are healed, not because they’re cured of their physical infirmities, but because they’re awakened to their calumny and personal participation in a myth; the multitudes are fed, not because the loaves have been increased, but because their dietary scrutiny has been blunted sufficiently to allow them to share a meal without killing each other; and the dead “rise” not because they are restored to life,  but because everyone recognizes their personal culpability in murdering them in the first place.  To “arise” then, is to awaken to a new revelation, but the revelation is grudgingly sparse in its talk of a literal resurrection of the body, which is Paul’s defining proof for faith, and which he further proclaims is meaningless and foolish without it. Of course, Paul also expected the return of Jesus in his own lifetime, and shaped the urgency (and I would guess the proscriptions) of his letters around that fact.  I wonder what he would have said in those same letters if he knew they would be read 2,000 years into the future?

Gone is the God of anger and wrath who takes vengeance on an uncaring world, to be replaced by a people of anger and wrath who take vengeance on each other in the name of an uncaring God.  Gone is the promise of Heaven and eternal life and the hope that makes life endurable; to be replaced with the rice paper eschatology of scrupulous avoidance and the careful manipulation of mimetic desire as we wend our torturous way to an earthly heaven. In fact, seen in this light, Girardian theory poses the threat of becoming a kind of Christian McCarthyism.  I can see it being used as a litmus for interpreting, defining and adjudicating every suspicion about human nature. It runs the risk of becoming like a Möbius strip, twisted and tied at both ends, and feeding on itself in a hermetic ritual. The measuring process becomes a kind of Heisenburg quantum entanglement on the anthropological level. There is no point of observational distance and imagined immunity and knowledge if you live in a community with other human beings.Trying to reduce every function of human existence to a theory, no matter how prescient and elegant it may be, does not render life solvable in any meaningful way or remove the observer from participation. All these tools for examining life becomes just another method for collapsing the wave function, without bringing us closer to anything that could be called the truth. Diagnosis is not cure.

I don’t know if the gentleman from Avignon [René Girard] believes in a personal resurrection or not, although I know he’s a Christian.  I’m certainly not trying to misrepresent him in any way.  These are my own insights based on what I’ve read both by him and about him.  I’m sorry to say that his anthropological ideas shed very little light on my personal struggles with faith, and I think they would have by now if they were going to. 

How do I wrestle God and Jesus from the clutches of the Bible?  For me, belief in God is my way of saying I bow in reverence before the mystery of the universe. A universe that it is not “solvable” or “reasonable” in any terms that will finally result in our comprehending it in some meaningful and satisfying way as though it were a destination that we had finally reached.  It is a mystery, because like God, we cannot touch it.  But as a Christian, I believe that God can touch us, and by so doing confer on all our questions and doubts the reasonable expectation of some meaning in the silence that reaches the restless din of our own souls and proclaims by the power of love that we are not alone. All I have to do is look into the eyes of people who love me to be assured of that.

I’ll close with words which I think would be great if anyone ever does a cryogenic commercial for Nobel Laureate sperm donors:  “Many are called, but few are frozen”.

Nicolas Deltort ( Football : LE POINT MHSC – ActuSport34 N°14, juil 2009)

Jeunechamp, Pitau et Dernis : trois nouvelles recrues pour le MHSC, en attendant le Bosniaque Spahic (photo N. Deltort)

Un nouveau coach opiniâtre, une moyenne d’âge de l’équipe réajustée, les perles de l’effectif (presque) toutes conservées et des jeunes prêts à éclater : le MHSC semble armé pour faire belle figure dès l’année de son retour en Ligue 1.

Les dirigeants du MHSC se sont voulus pragmatiques au moment de monter la future équipe de la Paillade version Ligue 1. Il fallait recruter expérimenté – pour étoffer un groupe relativement jeune – et pas cher. Cela a été chose faite avec Jeunechamp (Nice), Pitau (Sochaux) et Dernis (St-Etienne). Tous en fin de contrat et… trentenaires.

On entend les supporters des premières heures s’exclamer : « Allez, on se remet à acheter des vieux en fin de carrière ! » D’accord, longtemps la Paillade était spécialiste des transferts d’anciennes gloires du foot français qui réussirent avec des fortunes diverses du côté de la Mosson. Fleury Di Nallo, Christian Lopez, Bruno Bellone… Ok, il y a eu quelques chevilles en “placo” dans le lot, mais ça sonnait déjà mieux que « les sans grades », comme Louis Nicollin appelle les dernières recrues du club. Le Président les a reçues lundi dernier au Mas St-Gabriel pour la reprise de l’entraînement du MHSC et il veut les envoyer « au tampon »…

C’est qu’il faut de la « sanquette » pour jouer à La Paillade, on est bien d’accord. Mais, amis supporters, ne vous attendez donc pas à voir des coups du foulard et des petits ponts à tout bout de champ à la Mosson cette saison !

Pas d’équipe type

Trêve de plaisanteries. De toutes les façons, le temps où le MHSC accédait à la Ligue 1 et recrutait des internationaux brésiliens, colombiens, yougoslaves ou français est bel et bien révolu. Quoi que, si Emir Spahic rejoignait la défense centrale de René Girard, La Paillade compterait dans ses rangs le capitaine de la sélection de Bosnie-Herzégovin. Pas mal.

Au final, le visage de l’équipe de René Girard a plutôt fière allure. D’autant plus que le MHSC a su conserver ses meilleurs éléments à l’exception du défenseur Gary Bocaly, retourné à l’OM d’où il était prêté. La Paillade version 2008/09 devrait être une mixture à haute combustion, un mélange de jeunesse et d’expérience, de joueurs de devoir et d’autres ne demandant qu’à éclater aux yeux de la Ligue 1.

Une équipe type ? René Girard ne semble pas pressé d’en dégager une. Il mise sur la polyvalence des recrues et des joueurs en place. Il en faudra, car il y a embouteillage au niveau des milieux de terrain défensifs avec Pitau, Costa, Saïhi et Marveaux. Il ne serait pas étonnant de voir évoluer ce dernier dans le couloir droit et Costa plus haut sur le terrain.

Qui sait ? On n’est peut être pas au bout de nos surprises. Quand les superstitieux voient un signe du destin du fait de recevoir le PSG pour le premier match à la Mosson le 8 août prochain (comme en 1987 quand le MPSC avait battu les Parisiens 4-1 avant de finir le championnat sur le podium), les dirigeants du club sont moins gourmands : « Je sens bien une place dans les dix premiers, aucun souci ! », déclarait Louis Nicollin lundi dernier…

by Cheryl Maslow

During the course of an extended blog discussion about a wide range of issues, including abortion (see comments following several posts on Gil Bailie’s blog log, Reflections on Faith and Culture, from July through September 2009), I noticed that several writers in the group were describing abortion as murder or as genocide. This is standard pro-life rhetoric, and it is hyperbolic. Both of these words have straightforward dictionary and legal definitions that make them unsuitable for describing abortion. Then, an exchange between two of the participants, Paul and Athos (following the post of 9/6/09), stirred up my thoughts about a book I read over a year ago: Carolyn Marvin’s “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation.” Marvin argues that collective victimage constructs American national identity, and she develops her ideas out of a reading of René Girard and Emil Durkheim. But I sensed that many of her insights have implications for the abortion issue and its weighting against other issues that we discussed on the blog, particularly climate change, income disparity, and health care. Because both Paul and Athos had read René Girard and understood the sacrificial mechanism he illuminates, I decided to spin out my thoughts about abortion as sacrifice and to challenge the notion that abortion is genocide. My motive was less to defend abortion than to develop my intuition that not all sacrifice involves scapegoating. The following paragraphs are a revised and expanded version of a three-part comment that I submitted. A basic familiarity with Girard’s mimetic theory is helpful in reading them.

Athos writes: “When a conventional culture begins to break down, it tries to surcharge its victimary mechanism by either increasing the prestige of its victims or number of victims: regicide or genocide. … We’re in the latter stage, and we’re sacrificing our unborn children.”

The word “genocide” seems misapplied when used to describe abortion. (Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group, according to Merriam-Webster.) This is not just a quibble over definitions. We have a much better chance of understanding both abortion and genocide as sacrificial phenomena if we make careful distinctions.

Athos was of course correct in describing the pre-born as “defenseless, innocent, and voiceless.” I say “of course” because both the pre-born and infants are universally regarded in this way—squalling infants on buses excepted. This doesn’t prevent their being killed in abortions and wartime bombings or neglected to the point of starvation or disease-related death. I am not the first to point out that caring for the pre-born and the newly-born requires caring for the mothers that are carrying or nursing them, for the fathers that support these mothers financially and emotionally, and even for the broader society and ecology that sustains them all. This means that the abortion issue is also the health care issue and the income disparity issue and the environmental quality issue. And it is a part of a vast web of many other issues as well.

How many millions of the unborn or newly born have suffered and died in the Sahel because of water shortages resulting from mismanagement and over-exploitation of resources? These deaths could have been prevented, but tribes and sovereign nations decided that other matters were more important. This is sacrifice, but it’s not necessarily “victimage” in the Girardian sense. These deaths did not restore harmony to a community in crisis as the victimage mechanism does. Rather, the powerful (the state, multinational corporations, tribal leaders, warlords, etc.) decided that these individuals were expendable, and the cause-effect relationship went missing in time, space, and human memory.

Closer to home, corporations continue to dump toxic wastes into our rivers and streams in spite of decades-long warnings about the effects of mercury poisoning on infants and pregnant women who ingest freshwater fish. (In August 2009, the U.S. Geological Survey discovered unsafe levels of mercury in more than a quarter of freshwater fish consumed in this country.) By not enacting and enforcing stringent anti-pollution measures, we are implicitly sacrificing future generations to short-term corporate profits. These unborn generations are considered expendable but, again, there is no animus toward them, only indifference.

Combat troops, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their country, are also considered expendable. Europe sent 8.5 million of its young men to their deaths in the trenches in World War I, and 21.2 million more were wounded. But, once again, they are not “victims” in the (Girardian) sense that there is any polarization of animus against them. (Our animus is directed toward the enemy.)

But genocide requires animus toward its victims, who cannot and must not be regarded as defenseless, innocent, or voiceless. Paul echos the classic Girardian paradigm when he writes, “The victims are always there, and everyone is sharpening his weapon for use against his neighbor in a desperate attempt to win himself a plot of innocence that he can inhabit on his own or in the company of a regenerate human race.” This is animus, and these are victims in the sense that Girard describes.

So we have sacrifice with and without animus toward the sacrificed. In one case (exemplified by both regicide and genocide), the sacrificed are victims in the Girardian sense because their deaths restore social order (by investing the victimizers with their coveted innocence). In the other case (exemplified by abortion and sending soldiers off to war), the sacrificed are considered expendable for the sake of some national, tribal, or societal interest, and the sacrifice is given legal and even moral sanction by the state.

Athos writes about our need to “bow to an External Mediator transmitted and vouchsafed by the magisterium of the Church.” Many pro-life religionists believe the state has no right to sanction violence against the unborn. Some of these individuals would prefer that powers now held by the state should be returned to the Church. But the reality is that the nation-state does have the right to kill and to sanction killing, and it has the right to sacrifice whatever group it deems expendable until it relinquishes that right as the result of a popular vote, a judicial or legislative decision, or a revolution. In our present health-care and insurance reform debate, we’re about to find out who is expendable. The sad part of it is that the state has now become so identified with corporate interests that it has begun to operate like a front for them. Thus, we are now at two removes from the magisterium of the Church that Athos referred to.

I clipped a March 2009 article from The Atlantic Monthly about a Hamas leader who had sent one of his own sons to his death in an attack on an Israeli settlement. He told the writer that he intended to encourage another son to do the same, and that, with four wives, he hoped to have 50 children. (The writer reports that shortly after the interview, this man, his remaining children, and his pregnant wife were killed by an Israeli bomb dropped on his house.) The article is entitled, “Beyond Belief,” as if to suggest that this Hamas leader’s intended serial sacrifice of his children was beyond comprehension to us civilized folks in the West.

This man considered his sons, and perhaps even his daughters, as expendable, but who are we to be so scandalized? We who hold up Abraham as a paragon of faith and have sent our own sons off to be slaughtered by the millions in the trenches?

I see two kinds (or perhaps levels) of sacrifice. In the first, exemplified by regicide and genocide, social order is restored through polarization of conflictual mimesis against the victim. (The victim is vilified in an attempt to force unanimity about his or her guilt.) In the second (e.g., combat death and abortion), no animus is directed toward those who are “sacrificed.” They are treated as expendable because the nation that disposes of them (or, in the case of abortion, allows their deaths) holds what it considers a higher interest. Soldiers are expendable because they are protecting the nation’s fertile center (which is strongly associated with women). Aborted fetuses are expendable because the women carrying them have decided that the fetus’s survival is incompatible with something that they value even more highly, and, in many cases, I should hasten to add, their decision may be entirely altruistic. The nation, with its voting women, has granted women the right to make this decision and, in so doing, has demonstrated its own “higher” interest in protecting its fertile center—associated more with women than with fetuses. (Our sisters, aunts, cousins, daughters, and mothers must be kept safe from back-alley abortionists and protected from prosecution.)

This, to me, is the meaning of the startling title of Richard A. Koenigsberg’s book, “Nations Have the Right to Kill.” There is certainly no other entity that can claim this right, which passed from the Church to secular power centers many centuries ago in the West. International bodies have been trying to wrest some of this authority from nation states and to claim legitimacy for their own declarations of human rights, and this is an encouraging development. Meanwhile, sectarian groups compete with each other and with the state, but it seems unlikely that we’ll return to a theocratic era anytime soon in Western democracies. When Athos speaks of bowing to ”an External Mediator transmitted and vouchsafed by the magisterium of the Church,” he is speaking on behalf of a sectarian group, the Catholic Church. Fine. The problem, however, is that this “vouchsafety,” if I may coin a term, is not believable or acceptable to those outside the Church. Other sectarian groups have similar notions and would hardly allow the Church to gather all authority and legitimacy into itself. And then there are the secularists, like myself, for whom such talk is meaningless. Excuse me, you want me to bow to whom? Pluralism has grown too vast and unwieldy to ever be stuffed back into the little starter pot from which it sprang, so perhaps we need to approach issues of authority from a more universalist perspective. (Hmmm. Maybe the Unitarians can help us here…)

The two sacrificial types that I mentioned (one exhibiting animus toward the sacrificed and the other not) have permeable boundaries, and we need only expand the number of examples for this to become clear. I selected only two from each category (regicide and genocide for the one and abortion and combat deaths for the other). Expanding either one is simple, but let’s take the second category, where no animus exists. Fetuses and combat troops are highly visible, and the spilling of their blood is generally noticed by those who have decided they are expendable. But what of all those other people that we treat as expendable, either through our actions or our neglect? The homeless, the uninsured, children living in poverty in one of the richest countries in the world? Every small decision to turn our backs on a person in need involves a sacrifice, and those of us who live in dense metropolitan areas are perhaps more acutely aware of making such sacrifices every day. We sacrifice others to our convenience, our comfort, our security, and our privilege—all without the slightest animus toward them. We may even feel pangs of guilt, but these are quickly over-ridden by numb indifference. These sacrifices—for sacrifices they are—have real impacts on people’s lives. When we decide to seal our borders against immigrants from poorer countries, we may have the best reasons in the world, but they all come down to preservation of our own comfort, security, and privilege. Impoverished Mexican workers are expendable, and we sacrifice them to a “higher” interest. I am saying this as one who supports immigration controls.

So where’s the permeability between this category and that of the other one, where there is animus toward the sacrificed? Well, I think we see it where groups or individuals that are sacrificed for the sake of what we might consider some sort of higher good become more powerful and begin to resist and to find their voice. Those less powerful who refuse to accept their own expendability—who refuse, in Athos’ words, to remain “defenseless and voiceless”—may be softened up through vilification. In wartime, those able-bodied men who protest the war and refuse to enlist may be labeled as unpatriotic or even treasonous. In our society, the poor are often blamed for their condition, even when many of those poor are small children and pregnant mothers.

Everyone is struggling not to become expendable, and some of our greatest fears about health-care reform are that we will be left out, uncared-for; that our care will be rationed, or that government death panels will decide when we are to die. We all know, on some level, that passive neglect, discrete demotion, or deselection can morph into scapegoating if we don’t go quietly.

But in struggling not to become expendable—and not to become victims—we are also struggling to stay on top, to preserve and enhance our own prestige, our privileges and our security, even if this means treating someone else as expendable. We send our boys off to war because we consider whatever they’re fighting for to be more important than their lives. We seal our borders against desperately poor Mexicans because we consider them a threat to our prosperity and well-being. We lock our doors against the homeless in our cities because the homeless are expendable when balanced against our own interests. The plain truth of the matter is that all of us are in the business of sacrifice, all the time. It’s practically all we do. By giving money to one charity, we withhold it from another.

In such a diverse society, we are bound to have wildly divergent ideas about who is expendable, and we may try to advance and legitimize our choices by declaring them to have some transcendent status. Thus, abortion is viewed not just as a bad choice but as one that is morally wrong and offensive to God. And it is promoted ahead of all other issues. One of the contributors to the discussion offered this: “Abortion trumps all other issues [and] is the moral problem of all moral problems,” and “…we will never solve the other problems we face until we address abortion itself in a better way.” Another contributor writes, “There will be no peace in the world until there is first peace in the womb.” In other words, the abortion issue takes precedence, and there’s no point in dealing with climate change, poverty, substance abuse, or any other issue until we have dealt with abortion. Politically, this often translates into holding all other issues hostage until some goal such as the overturning of Roe vs. Wade is met. Climate change is seen as “someone else’s” issue—in fact, an expendable issue, and Gaia is sacrificed to a human fetus.

We and future generations live with the consequences of our choices.

Sur la Plaine, récemment, l’une des discussions (attention: 110 commentaires!) a dérivé sur les idées de Popper et sa plus grande contribution à la science actuelle, la falsification. En gros, Popper dit que pour être valable scientifiquement, une hypothèse doit être “falsifiable”, c’est-à-dire qu’on doit pouvoir imaginer une expérience dont l’un des résultats serait la démonstration que l’hypothèse est fausse. Cet exercice permet de tracer une ligne de démarcation entre le scientifique et le non-scientifique et d’éviter de polluer la science avec des impostures et des raisonnements qui tournent en rond.

Comme vous le savez, ces derniers temps, je lis quelque peu René Girard (mentions ici et ici). René Girard a une formation en littérature à la base, mais il s’est depuis longtemps tourné vers l’anthropologie, tout en demeurant exclusivement théoricien en la matière. Autrement dit, il ne fait pas de la recherche de terrain qu’on considère habituellement comme la consécration de l’anthropologue, se contentant de lire très largement les travaux des anthropologues de terrain pour élaborer des vastes théories. Ou devrais-je dire UNE théorie? Car chez Girard, tout se rapporte à la violence originelle chez l’être humain. Son origine (le désir mimétique donnant lieu à des crises mimétiques) et sa solution-type (le bouc émissaire). En gros, il estime que les sociétés humaines sont régulièrement confrontées à des crises sociales causées par le fait que les humains désirent tous la même chose et entrent donc en conflit les uns avec les autres pour l’obtenir. Quand la crise devient insoutenable, les sociétés détourneraient leur violence en rejetant la responsabilité de la crise sur un bouc émissaire qui est alors lynché (ou sacrifié); le sacrifice du bouc émissaire réglant la crise sociale, les humains intérioriseraient le processus sacrificiel et construiraient leurs religions et leurs cultures sur cette pierre fondatrice.

Très intéressantes en elles-mêmes, les théories de Girard sont par contre irritantes pour deux raisons: d’une part, elles se rapportent généralement à des faits invérifiables, postulant leur réalité sans bien la démontrer. L’autre raison tient lieu à la personnalité de Girard lui-même, très prompt à affirmer que seule sa théorie explique tous les faits, et tellement convaincu que la vérité de sa théorie est évidente qu’il semble plus soucieux de trouver un moyen de bien la communiquer que de trouver un moyen de la prouver.

Rapportée à la notion de falsification de Popper, la théorie de Girard serait-elle infalsifiable, condamnée à être rejetée du champs de la science, voire de la vérité? Dans Les origines de  la culture, Girard répond à ces critiques dans le style qui est le sien. Plutôt que d’en prendre acte et de confronter le problème de la vérifiabilité de sa théorie, il préfère rejeter la validité du critère de falsifiabilité et revendiquer la vérité scientifique. Il tente une analogie avec la “non existence de la sorcellerie”, qui, à son avis, est une vérité scientifique, bien qu’elle soit infalsifiable au sens de Popper.

Sceptique face à cette argumentation, j’ai soumis l’extrait à Enro, webmestre du Café des Sciences. Enro écrit beaucoup sur son propre blog sur les questions de la méthode scientifique et de la sociologie des sciences, j’étais donc curieux de voir ce qu’il en dirait.

Je retranscris ici les deux commentaires les plus pertinents dans la discussion:

Le mardi 8 septembre 2009 à 23:48, par Déréglé temporel

Mon commentaire n’est pas vraiment lié au sujet du billet, sinon qu’un avantage des blogs est de permettre de poser des questions. J’ai cherché un vieux billet d’épistémologie pour la poser, mais je constate que dans tous les vieux billets, les commentaires sont fermés. Ici, donc, et je m’excuse si ça paraît déplacé.

Je suis en train de lire des entretiens de René Girard, anthropologue théoricien qui s’intéresse aux origines de la culture et de la religion. Aux critiques qui lui reproche d’avancer une théorie invérifiable et infalsifiable, il reconnaît implicitement qu’elle est infalsifiable, mais conteste l’importance de ce critère dans les termes suivants:

“Il y a beaucoup de choses absolument certaines, indubitablement vraies, qui ne sont ni vérifiables ni falsifiables au sens de Popper. La nature illusoire de la sorcellerie, par exemple. L’inefficacité de la sorcellerie est une vérité fondamentale pour notre conception des droits de l’homme et de la démocratie. Nous ne pouvons pas nous passer de cette certitude. Nous ne pouvons pas la qualifier de “religieuse”, puisque nous sommes résolument laïques. Ce n’est pas non plus une certitude idéologique. C’est donc une certitude scientifique. La science nie effectivement la possibilité que certains individus aient sur la réalité un pouvoir occulte qui transcende le savoir scientifique. Le scepticisme au sujet de la sorcellerie doit donc se définir comme scientifique plutôt que religieux ou idéologique. La preuve qu’il en est ainsi c’est que, dans le monde moderne, nous révisons tous les procès faits jadis aux prétendus sorcières et sorciers et nous réhabilitons toutes les victimes. Nous savons qu’en agissant ainsi nous sommes dans le vrai, au sens le plus solide de ce mot, qui pour nous est scientifique: aux yeux de la science, la sorcellerie n’existe pas. Son inexistence a un caractère scientifique.”

Je me suis fait ma propre idée sur cet extrait, mais n’étant pas familier de Popper et d’autres auteurs d’épistémologie, je voulais inviter un vrai scientifique à le commenter. Peut-on qualifier l’inexistence de la sorcellerie de “scientifique” comme le fait Girard? L’exemple est-il valide?

7. Le mercredi 9 septembre 2009 à 11:20, par Enro

@Déréglé : Merci de venir poser cette question ici, ce n’est pas grave si tout n’est pas bien rangé dans des cases ! En ce qui concerne la réfutabilité des théories scientifiques, ce qui est indispensable dans une approche poppérienne de la science ne l’est pas dans toutes — et on ne peut à mon avis envoyer paître les théories de Girard sur ce seul motif. D’ailleurs, on comprend souvent Popper de travers : il ne dit pas que les théories scientifiques doit être réfutables mais qu’on ne connaît que ce qui est faux, et que la science progresse en éliminant le faux et en serrant de plus en plus près le vrai.

Je ne suis pas convaincu non plus par l’exemple que Girard donne pour se justifier. Si l’inexistence de la sorcellerie est “vraie” mais ni vérifiable ni falsifiable au sens de Popper, c’est bien qu’elle n’est pas scientifique au sens de Popper (puisque sinon elle serait soit fausse soit non-fausse). En fait, elle repose sur l’idée quasi-viscérale selon laquelle nature et culture sont séparées, qui caractérise nos sociétés dites modernes. Girard en fait une idée “scientifique” parce que ça arrange sa démonstration mais il me semble qu’on est au-delà de la science, dans une stratégie de civilisation qui a par exemple été décrite et discutée par Bruno Latour dans Nous n’avons jamais été modernes…

Cela dit, au vu de l’ensemble de la théorie de Girard, je pense qu’elle pourrait être découpée en segments potentiellement falsifiables, même si je n’ai pas d’idées bien précises sur la méthodologie qu’il faudrait suivre (je ne suis ni psychologue, ni anthropologue de terrain, ni archéologue, ni paléontologue, toutes des disciplines qu’il faudrait mettre à contribution).

C’est drôle, j’ai eu pas mal de discussions tournant autour de Popper et de l’épistémologie ces deux dernières semaines. Les commentaires sont ouverts pour les intéressés.

PETER SLOTERDIJK

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