Mimetic Rivalry
Second-stage mimesis in which mimetic desire has progressed to unhealthy rivalry—someone takes a model from within their own world or social sphere (I call this world “Freshmanistan”) and covertly competes with them for the same objects of desire, often through negative imitation.
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.
Satan
Satan is the principle that drives discord, chaos, and confusion among humans. Satan is the embodiment and incarnation of mimetic rivalry and violence, the force behind conflict and conflict that operates through mimetic rivalries and the scapegoating mechanism. Whether you view “Satan” in the traditional, incarnate way like a ‘devil with horns’ or in a spiritual way, as a force of disintegration and distortions, the Satanic principle shares one principle: it always divides and causes confusion, agitation, anxiety, and angst rather than peace. Look out for it.
Sacrificial Crisis
Also known as a mimetic crisis or state of chaos, a sacrificial crisis is a point at which mimesis has spread in a community to the point of diminishing or eliminating essential differences among people. The sacrificial crisis necessitates that difference has to be re-established through sacrifice. The types of differences that could be eliminated or diminished in a sacrificial crisis might include differences between the sacred and the profane, the permitted and the prohibited, the inside and the outside of a culture, sexual differences, and many more. The sacrificial crisis usually calls for a re-enactment of the founding crisis in the culture—the founding murder.
Sacrifice
Sacrifice is literally the “making sacred” (sacer facere) of a victim of violent unanimity, the victim who is the effective substitute for the violence of all and whose unanimous destruction ensures social concord. The substitution of animals for human victims only replicates the original substitutive mechanism, while clearly reflecting the need for victims whose destruction will not occasion reprisals from those nearest them.
Sacred
Names what archaic religion considers as both beneficent and terrible, being the name for what both protects the community from without and threatens it from within. The sacred is good to respect at a distance, and to ritually and reverently propitiate in quest of its protection; it is terrible in its proximity, being imagined as the unearthly cause of natural calamities: plague, drought, famine. Ritual propitiation does not allay these scourges, but scrupulous attention, variation and refinement of ritual techniques may advance technologies, affording possibilities of pre-scientific induction in metallurgy, agriculture, and animal husbandry.
Religion
Religion may have its etymological roots in Latin Religare, to bind up or tie together, as a community is united by its devotion to a divinity which it fails to see as the victim of its unanimous, sacrificial violence. Often described as an ensemble of beliefs and practices that organize a culture, religion consists chiefly of prohibitions regarding objects dangerous to desire, of rituals that carefully reenact violent disorder and perform reverence for sacred origins, and of myths that recount origins while disguising the foundational role of the scapegoat victim.
Myth
Myth is a narrative that contemporary parlance rightly alleges to be untrue. As we learn from the study of archaic religions, all myths narrate cultural origins as issuing from a supernatural intervention, the action of a sacred being, a divinity which is to be worshipped and propitiated by ritual sacrifice. For mimetic theory, this god is a mystified transformation of the victim of uncontrolled violence, when the rivalry of all against all streamlines into the violence of all against one, resulting in concord, in harmonious action. Myth hides the communal violence that leads to the unanimous destruction of a victim, which is retrospectively viewed as a god for the unified order which its unanimous destruction occasions.