Scapegoat Research Articles

On suicide bombings: questioning rationalist models and logics of gender

ABSTRACTThe theories of rational choice have been widely used in analysing suicide bombings. Such a use is here critically examined along three lines. First, the limits of this theoretical framework when applied to sacrificial violence are assessed and especially the internal contradictions which appear with the notion of ‘symbolic posthumous rewards’. Second, differences emerge in the use of rational choice theory when the focus is upon female suicide bombers. Indeed, deprivation theories come then to the fore, the idea of personal crisis and the impact of patriarchal social relationships. This switch in the analysis, which does not seem based on differences in the data, confirms gender studies which underline the specific difficulty to envisage female political violence. Finally, to go beyond both reductionisms, a compared analysis of suicide attacks in Chechnya, Iraq and Israel/Palestine is proposed. It aims at restituting the context of action and the narratives at work, making a clear distinction between two levels of analysis, the one of the organizations, which can largely be understood in terms of their strategic rationale, and that of the suicide bombers themselves, for whom it seems more heuristic to use the concepts of narratives and horizons of expectation.

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

Criticism, Critique, and Crisis in Assessing the Work of René Girard

Perhaps it is time to begin the second stage of René Girard’s passing: the labor of a full critical assessment of his life’s work. In preparation, I thought I might consider some of the misunderstandings to which his work has been subject. After briefly recalling Girard’s three big ideas (mimetic desire, sacrificial violence and the scapegoat mechanism, scriptural revelation of the founding murder), I will suggest the most common misapprehensions: (1) the idea of the innocent victim; (2) the idea that there is a good and a bad mimesis; and (3) the relation between Girardianism and the ethical. Other issues remain to be clarified. Among them are the following ideas: (1) that Girardian thinking is scientific; (2) that it is not an advocacy of any kind but a way of producing knowledge; (3) that the center of gravity remains the process of sacrificial genesis and the scapegoat mechanism, mimetic desire, and their scriptural revelation serve that end; (4) that violence is not a thing or essence but difference gone wrong; and finally (5) that Girardian thinking is not an essentialism; it is not about what is “really” good, true, beautiful, or present but strategies of doing and acting. We best honor the work of our teachers and foremost thinkers by endeavoring to get it right for future generations for whom we, who have known the individual personally, remain a conduit.

Blood Money

Contemporary responses to Plato’s Republic rarely examine its complex relationship to festivals and sacrifice. Recovering the importance of the festival to Plato’s concerns, this article reveals Plato’s displacement of the sacrificial violence of ancient Greek festivals with the language and possibilities (including notions of responsibility) of money. The first section introduces, through the opening scenes of the Republic, the significance of money in Ancient Greece, particularly its affiliation with the ritual dynamics of the festival. The second section focuses on animal sacrifice, developing the central claim that much of the Republic imagines replacing the power of sacrifice to hold a conflicted polis together with the logic of money to organize and maintain the city. To explore the ramifications of this shift, the third section of the essay turns to the problems of visibility and sacrifice, arguing that the shift from festival to monetary political practice obscures the violence of political and monetary life; an obscurity reproduced in Giorgio Agamben’s neglect of ancient Greece in his account of the relationship between sacrifice and political status. This reading provokes an engagement with the contemporary acceptance of monetary violence leading to the conclusion that the violence and death resulting from monetary practice should be considered political violence, not sacrifice.

Le délinquant d’entreprise comme bouc émissaire

Le Département de la Justice prétend que l’entreprise n’est pas un bouc émissaire, car la priorité est de poursuivre les individus coupables et non les entités artificielles. Mais, comme nous le démontrerons dans cette étude empirique, quand les plus grandes entreprises règlent une affaire pénale fédérale, aucun individu n’est accusé la plupart du temps. L’entreprise apparaît comme une sorte de bouc émissaire qu’il est impossible de placer physiquement en détention, mais susceptible de recevoir un blâme ou une sanction tandis que les individus coupables demeurent libres. Dans cet article, nous développerons des données empiriques originales détaillant le parcours des poursuites individuelles accompagnant les accords de poursuites fédérales des entreprises. Les résultats illustrent les défis posés par la complexité organisationnelle des entreprises qui contribue à obscurcir les fautes. Contrairement à ce que d’illustres critiques appellent de leurs vœux, nous démontrerons que poursuivre davantage les individus ne peut pas se substituer aux poursuites des entreprises.

Scandal of Violence Thrown to Scapegoats: Focused on Getting Out

Scandal of Violence Thrown to Scapegoats: Focused on Getting Out

Sacred violence or strategic faith? Disentangling the relationship between religion and violence in armed conflict

Why are religious conflicts more violent than non-religious conflicts? Research has argued that religion pushes partisans toward violence. However, existing research suffers from widespread problems of measurement validity and fails to confront the possibility of endogeneity in the relationship between religion and violence. This article develops a more precise measure of the relevance of religion to conflict based on the use of religious rhetoric by political organizations. With this approach in mind, this article disentangles the causal sequence linking religious rhetoric and violence using annually coded data on the rhetoric of 495 organizations worldwide from 1970 through 2012. The analysis finds a strong general correlation between religious rhetoric and violence. However, past use of religious rhetoric does not increase the likelihood that an organization will participate in violence or the overall intensity of conflict. On the contrary, previous participation in violence makes an organization more likely to adopt religious rhetoric for mobilization. Indeed, religious rhetoric becomes more likely as violence increases in intensity and conflict continues for longer periods of time. These findings suggest that violent actors adopt religious rhetoric to solve the logistical challenges associated with violence, including access to mobilizing resources and recruitment and retention of members. This article contributes to the study of religious conflict by providing evidence of endogeneity in the relationship between religion and violence and highlighting the need for temporally sensitive measures of religious mobilization.

In Defence of the Real: The ‘Pathology’ of Violence in Buddhist Folk Rituals and Statecraft of Sri Lanka: A Psychoanalytic Review

According to Slavoj Zizek, ‘Real’ is the world before it is carved up by the Symbolic. The Symbolic is the big Other that distorts/represses the Real. Fantasy is the mask that covers up this distortion and makes people of necessity live with repressed or sublimated forms of pleasure in different versions of the Symbolic. The discontent that issues from this inhibition constitutes psychic trauma and manifests in clash of denominational and racist fantasies. In this article, I attempt a Lacanaian-Zizekian analysis of the traumatic that inflects the subject positions in violent Buddhist state politics of Sri Lanka and seek to trace its continuity in the (anti)-ethics of Sinhala Buddhist folk rituals practised in the southern (low) part of the country. The psychodynamics of violence that engender the political engagement of the state, the JVP and the LTTE in the 1980s are not dissimilar from that of the sacrificial violence of Buddhist exorcism rituals in vogue in parts of Sri Lanka today. This is a fresh attempt to understand why violence becomes ‘unavoidable’ even in denominational identities that otherwise preach ahimsa (non-violence), and in statecraft that professes to be governed by such principles.

Book Review: Banker, Traitor, Scapegoat, Spy? The Troublesome Case of Sir Edgar Speyer by Antony Lentin

Book Review: <i>Banker, Traitor, Scapegoat, Spy? The Troublesome Case of Sir Edgar Speyer</i> by Antony Lentin

Between illegality and recognition: Exploring sacrificial violence in a Manila brotherhood

This article explores how poor, young men in a Manila relocation site enter into a brotherhood as a means to claim recognition from dominant society. It argues that by joining the brotherhood, which emanates out of a Greekletter fraternity tradition in US and Philippine universities, the young men establish a link to people and networks in power. Drawing on ritual and religious sacrifice theory, the article illustrates how sacrificial violence in initiation rites becomes a performance of worth. This performance of valour and worth do indeed reach dominant society. After exploring the initiation ritual of the young men the article then turns to explore the nature of the Philippine elite. This analysis suggests that while there are several, often competing strands within elite politics (legalistic, moralistic and clientelist), the efforts of the young men end up confirming and reproducing the elite and their own marginalization as unruly, uncouth goons of political machines.

Scapegoat racism and the sacrificial politics of “security”

This article draws on Girard’s general account of sacrificial violence to elucidate the race-thinking that structures contemporary discourses on security in Western security states, particularly in Canada and the United States. With attention to the relation between collective group formation (as we see, for example, in resurgent nationalisms of the era of “terror”) and to the structures and processes of inclusion/exclusion that define them, my discussion unfolds Girard’s figure and analysis of “the scapegoat” within and against contemporary theories of racial violence and group-based persecution. It profiles the specter of race in the assemblages of fear that imbue security discourse, to consider how security “works” to foster and consolidate communities against its “foreign” others, in ways that produce the very race distinctions that they are conditioned on. In doing so, it will elucidate how Girard’s work on sacrificial violence is productive for critically elucidating the affective politics of security discourse, including those that organize and inform the biopolitical formations of race distinctions and racial hierarchy in contemporary security states.

Is Europe a “false truth”? A distinguishing attempt to unmask prejudices concerning Europe and its institutions

European institutions are continuously requested to contribute in solving those problems that States have nowadays to face, but – at the same time – their alleged authority and influence are unceasingly brought into question. Examining 33 “false truths” concerning Europe, Smaghi suggests a new way the current crisis should be dealt with: what matters most is the awareness that European States manage to achieve in regard to their past errors, their present potentialities and their future possibilities, without deeming Europe itself as a scapegoat. Rhetoric, action and credibility: Smaghi aims at making readers deeply ponder over some prejudices regarding Europe and at restoring European citizens’ faith in Europe.

The Reasonable Citizen/The Unreasonable Scapegoat

The Reasonable Citizen/The Unreasonable Scapegoat

The place of space in soul, or re-visioning psychotherapeutic fantasies of space and body

Fantasy of space plays an important role in therapeutic psychology and covers almost anything occurring inside subjects of psychotherapy - we work on the processes which develop inside a family making it dysfunctional; we work through and clarify the primitive mental states which occur in the unconscious of the analyzand; we disentangle the problems happening within the transference-countertransference relation; we help people who find themselves in blind alleys; use analysis in order to aid a client to return projections back into him/herself; we apply body techniques to discover where split up traumas are hiding themselves in the body etc. Concepts so precious to therapists, without which their work in inconceivable - projection, introjection, internalization, withdrawal, wholeness, insight, reflection, embodiment, transference, replacement, substitution, regression, unconscious, subconscious, scape goat, triangulation, contact, phenomenological field, container, growth, real-unreal, subject-object and so forth - are derived from the idea of space or have relied on he idea of space. This work deals with hermeneutics of this dominant fantasy of space, which can then be used to develop an quite different paradigm serving as a phenomenological dwelling to above mentioned processes and contents of our therapeutic.

Debates on the Criminology of Genocide: Genocide as a Technology for Destroying Identities

This article analyses different criminological approaches to modern genocide. It starts from a critical review of authors (René Girard, Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, and Alejandro Alagia) who explain genocide in terms of sacrificial violence; it contrasts these perspectives with Jean Piaget's empirically based distinction between two kinds of social relations: relations of constraint and relations of cooperation, and the different sanctions pertaining to each, developing tools to understand more complex ways of causality. Next, it reviews comparative studies of genocide, ignored in the works of the previous authors. The objective for doing it is to compare different causal explanations of genocide to add complexity to the previous analysis. Finally, it revisits Raphael Lemkin's pioneering vision of the role of annihilation in destroying identity. It argues that Lemkin provided some insights for a new criminological approach to genocide seen as a technology of power seeking to transform the social fabric with the terror of concentration camps.

Religion and Realpolitik

Enduring groups that seek to preserve themselves, as sacred communities do, face a structural contradiction between the interests of individual group members and the survival interests of the group. In addressing existential threats, sacred communities rely on a spectrum of coercive and violent actions that resolve this contradiction in favor of solidarity. Despite different histories, this article argues, nationalism and religiosity are most powerfully organized as sacred communities in which sacred violence is extracted as sacrifice from community members. The exception is enduring groups that are able to rely on the protection of other violence practicing groups. The argument rejects functionalist claims that sacrifice guarantees solidarity or survival, since sacrificing groups regularly fail. In a rereading of Durkheim's totem taboo, it is argued that sacred communities cannot survive a permanent loss of sacrificial assent on the part of members. Producing this assent is the work of ritual socialization. The deployment of sacrificial violence on behalf of group survival, though deeply sobering, is best constrained by recognizing how violence holds sacred communities in thrall rather than by denying the links between them.

SACRIFICE, VIOLENCE AND THE LIMITS OF MORAL REPRESENTATION IN HANEKE'S CACHÉ

:This article revisits Michael Haneke's Caché (Hidden, 2005) as a filmic transformation of the traditional bond between sacrificial violence, morality and community building. By drawing mainly on striking correspondences with Jacques Derrida's view of the “mystical” origin of authority and of the limits of moral representation, the article aims to probe into Haneke's strategies of concealment. In so doing, the article proposes a “postsecular” interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the enigmas of the “ghost director” within the film, and of Majid's theatrical self-sacrifice.

Book review: Sacred Violence, African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, written by Brent D. Shaw

Book review: Sacred Violence, African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, written by Brent D. Shaw

Disabling Excess: Sacrificial Violence and Disability as Divine Punishment in Les Commettants de Caridad

The idea of disability as divine punishment is an enduring myth that French-Canadian author Yves Thériault draws upon in his 1966 novel, Les Commettants de Caridad. The narratologically complex story tells of how a proud but deceitful man acquired his multiple disabilities, all the while unsettling the link between disability and punishment, divine or otherwise. Using narratological analyses, Girard’s theories on violence and scapegoating, and Derridean notions of supplementarity and excess, this article suggests that Thériault’s implicit project is one that mobilizes hyperbolic representations of disability and reactions to it not to shore up stereotypical uses of disability in literature, but rather to undermine

Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice. By Kathryn McClymond. Pp. xii, 220, Baltimore, MD, The John Hopkins University Press, 2008, £36.50.

The Heythrop JournalVolume 55, Issue 2 p. 306-306 BOOK REVIEW Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice. By McClymond, Kathryn. Pp. xii, 220, Baltimore, MD, The John Hopkins University Press, 2008, £36.50. Luke Penkett, Luke Penkett Monastère de la Sainte PrésenceSearch for more papers by this author Luke Penkett, Luke Penkett Monastère de la Sainte PrésenceSearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 January 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.12067_3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume55, Issue2March 2014Pages 306-306 RelatedInformation