Abstract
René Girard’s anthropology goes beyond Durkheim and Freud in seeking knowledge in literary, mythical, and religious texts. Girard’s primary intuition is that human culture originated in response to the danger of violent mimetic crises among increasingly intelligent hominins, whose imitation of each other’s desires led to conflict. These crises were resolved by the mechanism of emissary murder: the proto-human community came to focus its aggression on a single scapegoat whose unanimous lynching, by “miraculously” bringing peace, led to its ritual repetition in sacrifice. Because this theory fails to found the signs of human language and worship on the deferral of spontaneous action, Girard can only attribute the internal peace necessary to the human community to the exhaustion of violent aggression. Instead, generative anthropology proposes that, beginning from the premise that the need to control internecine violence was the source of the human, an appropriative gesture toward an object of common desire, deferred out of fear of violence, becomes understood as a sign of the object’s sacred/interdicted status, after which it can be peacefully divided among the group. Following this originary event, the sacred/signifying universe of language and religion gradually comes to include the totality of human activity.
Highlights
René Girard’s signal contribution to anthropology is his analysis of mimetic desire as the root of a human violence that culture comes into existence to control
I believe that the absence of a viable Girardian theory of language can be rectified without taking anything essential away from the originality of his contribution to anthropology, albeit at the price of a more nuanced judgment of the place of violence in the human construction of the sacred
Girard’s problem, here as always, is his failure to thematize this element of deferral that permits the sign to open up a space between us and the world that we previously confronted by means of “instinct”—a space which, from a Christian as well as an anthropological standpoint, is properly sacred
Summary
René Girard’s signal contribution to anthropology is his analysis of mimetic desire as the root of a human violence that culture comes into existence to control. I believe that the absence of a viable Girardian theory of language can be rectified without taking anything essential away from the originality of his contribution to anthropology, albeit at the price of a more nuanced judgment of the place of violence in the human construction of the sacred.
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