Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük – René Girard
In 2008, René Girard gave a keynote lecture at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion about how the dynamics of mimetic desire were playing out thousands of years ago. With a focus on what he called “Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük”, he analyzes the rituals that are contained in humanity’s earliest forms of artwork. Çatalhöyük was a large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 5700 BC. Watch Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük
Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World: Book Launch
Why is human violence the much-neglected key to understanding human emergence and development? How does it differ from animal violence? How was it controlled by the victimary or scapegoat mechanism? How does this stabilize human communities and lead to the creation of natural or archaic religion (‘the sacred’); and then to the development of our culture as a whole? Watch Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World: Book Launch
Imitation, Mirror Neurons, and Mimetic Desire: Convergence Between the Mimetic Theory of René Girard and Empirical Research on Imitation – by Scott Garrels
Scott Garrels, of Fuller Theological Seminary in California, says this: “Psychological mimesis is the tendency of human beings to imitate the gestures, behaviors, and intentions of other persons; it is the very cornerstone upon which the entire work of René Girard is constructed. From this foundation, Girard has made a number of bold claims about human nature and the resulting origin and structure of human culture and religion. The scope of Girard’s work is immense and has far-reaching implications across such diverse disciplines as anthropology, primitive religion, psychology, literary analysis, theology, and philosophy. Check out Imitation, Mirror Neurons, and Mimetic Desire
The Deepening Impasse of Modernity – by Stephen Gardner
University of Tulsa Philosophy Professor Stephen Gardner writes about René Girard’s book Battling to the End. Battling to the End is about Girard’s view on war and how he believes Mimetic Theory plays an explanatory role in human violence. Girard introduces readers to von Clausewitz, an eighteenth-century Prussian military officer and strategist, and reflects on the way he intuited some of the key principles of mimetic theory over a hundred years before Girard. Check out The Deepening Impasse of Modernity
Desired Possessions: Karl Polanyi, Rene Girard, and the Critique of the Market – by Mark Anspach
The market illusion—the idea of an “invisible hand”—perpetuates the idea of “market motives,” or purely economic motives. These do not exist. Social relationships are embedded deeply in the market, and there is no desire that is not social. As Mark Anspach observes, “faith in the naturalness and inevitability of the “economic motive” absolves those who conform to it from direct responsibility for the suffering caused by their treating other people as commodities.” The market, or “market processes,” has taken on a level of being which the market does not possess. So when there is a collapse or catastrophe in the economy, people do not have to shoulder individual responsibility for it. It’s always just “the market” — with its cycles, it’s randomness, its impersonal nature to whom nobody can ascribe any real blame. Check out Desired Possessions
What has Deviated Transcendency: Woolf’s “The Waves” as a Textbook Case – by Simon de Keukelaere’s
From the article, drawing heavily on Max Scheler: “Humankind––according to mimetic theory––is not (as Marx thought) homo economicus but rather homo religious. Mensonge Romantique et Vérité Romanesque, Girard’s first essay (1961), evocatively opens with a saying by Max Scheler: “L’homme possède ou un Dieu ou une idole” (Man has either a God or an idol). If we may believe Girard, the Enlightenment profoundly misunderstood human beings because it naively assumed that doing away with “ancient superstitions” would fully liberate them: “denial of God does not eliminate transcendence but diverts it from the au-delà to the en-deçà” (Girard 1965, 59).” Check out What is Deviated Transcendency
The Evangelical Subversion of Myth – by René Girard
Girard begins this subversive exploration of the evangelical (Gospel) subversion of myth by quoting Sigmund Freud in his famous work, Totem and Taboo. Freud recognizes that long before he intuited the violent origins of human culture, the Gospels had already revealed them. “In the Christian doctrine,” he writes, “men were acknowledging in the most undisguised manger the guilty primeval deed.” The Gospels, according to Girard, were the only text in which the Truth—a truth that had been expelled from human cultures—occupied the central place. The Gospel is true revelation, revealing the “things hidden since the foundation of the world,” including the founder murder of Cain and Abel and the founding murder that is at the heart of every culture but which humans have done their best to hide behind myths, rituals, and taboos. Check out The Evangelical Subversion of Myth
Violence
Violence in mimetic theory is not a discrete event or even an external action. Violence is the consequence of a relationship—always a relationship—and never a “lone-wolf” or “random act”. While the victims may be random, the violence is always the result of a mimetic process that unfolds with its own scandals, conflict, and resentment long before things turn violent. In a mimetic rivalry, violence tends to be the natural result: when two parties are caught up in a dangerous dance of mimetic reciprocation, a conflict must escalate until to the point where there is eventually violence. Many times, the violence is done to a scapegoat, by means of the scapegoat mechanism.
Scapegoat
A person, group, or thing that a community chooses—through a mimetically-driven process— to expel or eliminate in the midst of a mimetic crisis in order to bring about a resolution. The scapegoat absorbs all of the mimetic tension and violence, which had previously been undirected and chaotic, onto itself.
Scandal
From the Greek word skandalon, a scandal is a stumbling block—something which is an obstacle to the fulfillment of a person’s desire. In mimetic theory, the model of desire is always a scandal. The model, by its very nature, blocks the way to possessing the object. Because it’s the model who mediates the objects of desire, the model can never be overcome. Even if a subject were to come to possess the object that the model originally mediated to him, it would be worthless—at that point, the model would simply choose another subject of desire which the subject would then need to pursue, or the subject would feel that the object that he came to possess is completely worthless because of the very fact that he had come to possess it. People need obstacles because obstacles mediate value. In other words, people need scandals. When someone or something is a scandal, it causes offense and indignation, leaving the person “scandalized.” Girard’s book, “The One by Whom Scandal Comes,” is an excellent explanation of the model as a scandal.