Author: staceymeeker

Neither Generative Anthropology nor my own career would be what they are without my teacher René Girard. Although our personalities and thinking styles are very different, he has always served me as a model, above all in the grandeur of his intellectual ambition and in his unshakeable confidence in the superiority of real thinking to fashionable thought-play. As the one true anthropologist, Girard is living proof that the cultural self-reflection of the Humanities offers a better model for thinking the human than the positivism of the social sciences. No one could serve as a better mimetic model for us all.

June 2, 1996

Harold Bloom. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

René Girard. A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Near the end of a 1978 interview that appeared in Diacritics, René Girard was asked to comment on several schools of “modern literary criticism,” a subject toward which in general, the interviewer acknowledged, Girard had in the past displayed “a relatively antagonistic attitude.” Though he could scarcely deny the accuracy of such an assessment, Girard began his comments by admitting that he found parts of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism “admirable” and praising Kenneth Burke’s acknowledgment that a “‘principle of victimage’. . .is at work in human culture” as “an extraordinary achievement.” One other critic, though Girard neglected to mention him by name, was also extended a qualified approval:

I regard the current “intertextual” school as a generally positive phenomenon. It has liberated American criticism from the fetish of the single work; it has made the antiphilosophical stance fashionable. It has popularized a somewhat romantic but interesting notion of the (mimetic) “anxiety of influence,” etc. In many instances, however, under a liberal sprinkling of “deconstructive” terminology, the old neo-critical or thematic cake is still there and the taste is not as uncanny as one might wish (“To Double Business Bound” 221).

The unnamed founder of this “intertextual school” is, of course, Harold Bloom. Girard’s demurrers–that Bloom’s work, though fundamentally mimetic, is romantic and therefore lends itself to formalist thematizing–seem the obvious responses of any neomimetic thinker who encounters intertextualism as it was first laid out in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975). Such objections are harder to maintain, however, with the publication of Bloom’s latest book, The Western Canon. Though Bloom himself admits to being “an aged institutional Romantic,” it is now clearer than ever that his special notion of “influence”–which, as he approvingly quotes Peter de Bolla, “is both a tropological category, a figure which determines the poetic tradition, and a complex of psychic, historical, and imagistic relations” (Western Canon 8), shares important similarities with what Girard calls in the Diacritics interview the literary text’s ability to “become aware of the mimetic effects upon which it is founded and reveal these effects” (“To Double Business Bound” 221). In short, the gap between the anxiety of influence and mimetic desire has shrunk: having evolved over the past twenty years or so, Bloom’s theory may now be differentiated from Girard’s primarily by the latter’s relatively greater willingness to search out and theorize the anthropological bases and implications of conflictive mimesis. Both are, however, guided by an intuition, derived primarily from their readings of literary texts, that (in Bloom’s words) “the aesthetic and the agonistic are one” (Western Canon 6). The anxiety of influence is the form of mimetic desire to which writers are particularly prone, since they are necessarily led by their craft to the existential bases of their compulsion to create.

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That Bloom and Girard start from common ground is made clear by The Western Canon in two ways. First, like Girard’s A Theater of Envy, The Western Canon is really a book about William Shakespeare, whom Bloom identifies as the discoverer and chronicler of the varieties and mysteries of human nature. Second, and most revealing for our purposes, both recognize that Shakespeare’s astonishing cognitive and aesthetic power is, as Girard might say, a representational scandal that has, in turn, stirred a mimetic crisis in the literary academy. This crisis threatens not merely to “dethrone” Shakespeare as the West’s (if not the world’s) consummate literary genius, but for Bloom presages the death of the aesthetic sensibility, and for Girard, shows just how stubborn is the literary critical world’s refusal to acknowledge the relations between imitation, violence, and scapegoating. For both, the measure of academia is taken by its refusal to see how Shakespeare serves as modernity’s locus for the necessary anguish that surrounds all types of mimesis–whether imitation is, in Girard’s view, the obsessively returned-to content of the plays themselves, or, as Bloom would have it, an existential and aesthetic issue with which all writers (especially today’s critics) must, but frequently choose not to, contend.

The mimetic assumptions underlying both Girard’s and Bloom’s work grant their readings of literary texts a necessary polemical cast–perhaps unfortunately so, since polemicism can be dismissed all too easily as defensiveness or crankiness, especially in critics who been around as long as these two have. Their polemicism is, however, an important, even essential aspect of their work, if only for reminding us that a neomimetic approach will not–indeed cannot–succumb to the fashionable skepticisms of our times. As true believers in the cognitive power of the literary text, Bloom and Girard present an attractive alternative to the cynicism and defeatism of certain contemporary intellectual trends. The difference between them–and it is an important one–lies in the extent to which each is willing to make an awareness of mimesis’ conflictive configurations the starting point for an escape from the dead-end of mimetic circularity. Girard’s more systematic theorizing of imitation frees him from an ultimately debilitating fatalism that colors many of Bloom’s conclusions about the applicability of literature’s cognitive insights to life.

Ironically, in both books the attractiveness and vitality of the literary-critical alternative Bloom and Girard offer is principally manifested by the vigor with which both deplore how literature is treated by today’s academy. Both are understandably disheartened by the direction in which literary studies are headed. Bloom begins The Western Canon with “an elegy for the canon,” a sometimes barely civil survey of current trends in humanities teaching and scholarship. What’s wrong with the humanities today? “Our educational institutions are thronged these days by idealistic resenters who denounce competition in literature as in life,” writes Bloom. The anxiety of influence, in other words, has spread from the writers creating the canon to the critics and teachers charged with the task of transmitting the pleasures of reading deeply to the coming generations. The old pedagogical goal of appreciating the aesthetic has given way to expressions of resentment, which are all the more contemptible for hiding behind masks of “adventure and new interpretations” (Western Canon 18). All this leads to a discouraging misapprehension of canonical texts: now “best explained as a mystification promoted by bourgeois institutions,” literature has been reduced “to ideology, or at best to metaphysics.” As a result, a “poem cannot be read as a poem, because it is primarily a social document or, rarely yet possibly, an attempt to overcome philosophy” (Western Canon 18). This kind of an “attack” on literature is, Bloom acknowledges, hardly new: as it was under the “ancient polemic” of “Platonic moralism and Aristotelian social science,” poetry today is either exiled “for being destructive of social well-being” or allowed “sufferance if it will assume the work of social catharsis under the banners of the new multiculturalism” (Western Canon 18). In deserting or exiling the aesthetic, however, Bloom argues that today’s critics only reveal their own fear of mimesis. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom coined the term daemonization to describe one of the means by which a poet evades a potentially paralyzing sense of cognitive and aesthetic indebtedness to strong precursors. The past is simply negated; thus “daemonization or the Counter-Sublime,” writes Bloom, “is a war between Pride and Pride, and momentarily the power of newness wins” (Anxiety of Influence 101).

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Enthralled by the siren song of newness, today’s “lemminglike” (Western Canon 18) academicians hurl themselves from the cliffs in a desperate attempt to evade the guilt that inheres in what Bloom sees as the underlying purpose of Western literature: the expression of an “achieved individuality” (Western Canon 24). The most egregious example of this resentful embrace of the new may be found in Foucault-inspired New Historicist criticism of the works of Shakespeare, whom Bloom identifies as the center of the Western canon for having effectively created modern self-understanding: with “no true precursor in the creation of character,” Shakespeare “has left no one after him untouched by his ways of representing human nature” (Western Canon 524). For “strong writers,” Shakespeare’s prodigious achievement offers an inspiration to strive for greatness; for those whose self-confidence is threatened by the spectacle of aesthetic prominence, Shakespeare is the ultimate skandalon. In the former category Bloom includes practically every canonical writer who has come since Shakespeare, all of whom have had to contend with the astonishing vitality of his characters and the comprehensiveness of his cognitive vision. The latter category includes today’s New Historicist critics, who express their resentment of Shakespeare’s eminence and aesthetic legacy by proposing that his “greatness” is merely putative and explaining his achievement as a byproduct of the “social energies of the English Renaissance” (Western Canon 38). Logically, Bloom points out, this makes no sense:

How can they have it both ways? If it is arbitrary that Shakespeare centers the Canon, then they need to show why the dominant social class selected him rather than, say, Ben Jonson, for that arbitrary role. Or if history and not the ruling circles exalted Shakespeare, what was it in Shakespeare that so captivated the mighty Demiurge, economic and social history? Clearly this line of inquiry begins to border on the fantastic; how much simpler to admit that there is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between Shakespeare and every other writer, even Chaucer, even Tolstoy, or whoever. Originality is the great scandal that resentment cannot accommodate, and Shakespeare remains the most original writer we will ever know (Western Canon 25).

That Shakespeare’s originality differentiates him in kind from all other writers–an opinion which, we will see, Girard, in his own way, shares with Bloom–was apparently evident at the playwright’s first appearance on the London theater scene in the early 1590s. If the Shakespearean School of Resentment had a founder, it was Robert Greene, whose Groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance (1592) branded the young playwright an “upstart Crow,” and warned all who cared to listen that Shakespeare “supposes he is able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey” (Shakespeare 1835). Today’s resenters share Greene’s outrage at the impertinence of Shakespeare’s sense of his own aesthetic singularity. Instead, however, of wearing that resentment on their sleeves for daws to peck at as Greene did, according to Bloom, New Historicists and other Shakespeare doubters disguise their defensive scorn under the insistence that the “death of the author” calls into question the received image of the writer striving alone for immortality. If there are no authors, then the Shakespeare lauded by Ben Jonson as “not of an age but for all time” ceases to exist.

If the real motivation behind today’s critics is the avoidance of guilt, the pangs of which they attempt to keep at bay by exerting theoretical mastery over Shakespeare, then they exhibit a revealing resemblance to Girard’s “mythicizers” of an episode of scapegoating: theory becomes the means by which those who perpetrate Shakespeare’s expulsion from the canon justify themselves and, more important, avoid acknowledging their debt to Shakespeare for the very cognitive tools they use to diminish his achievement. But here, writes Bloom,

they confront insurmountable difficulty in Shakespeare’s most idiosyncratic strength: he is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically, whoever and whenever you are. He renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine, be it Marxism or Freudianism or Demanian linguistic skepticism. Instead, he will illuminate the doctrine, not be prefiguration but by postfiguration as it were: all of Freud that matters most is there in Shakespeare already, with a persuasive critique of Freud besides. . . . Coriolanus is a far more powerful reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon than any Marxist reading of Coriolanus could hope to be (Western Canon 25).

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Bloom devotes an entire chapter–and several digressions in discussions of other writers–to proving his contention that Freud’s work is “essentially prosified Shakespeare” (Western Canon 371). It seems that this task is partly undertaken in self-defense: Bloom has been accused of producing the “anxiety of influence” by grafting Freud’s concept of the family romance onto T.S. Eliot’s conception of literary influence as benign transmission within the self-evident parameters of a stable tradition. The discussion’s deeper purpose, though, is to provide a monumental paradigm of what Shakespeare-resentment looks like when elevated to the status of a comprehensive theory of human nature. Freud was, in Bloom’s view, Shakespeare’s most vital misreader; though our contemporary New Historicists share Freud’s resentment, they cannot come close to matching his creativity. The chapter entitled “Freud: A Shakespearean Reading” begins by reminding us of two strange but ultimately revealing facts: first, Shakespeare quotations appear throughout Freud’s work with an astonishing, one might even say obsessive frequency; and second, late in his life Freud came to believe J. Edward Looney’s hypothesis that the plays and poems were written by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. The concurrence of these symptoms, argues Bloom, constitutes a textbook case of what psychoanalysis terms neurotic repression, and it doesn’t take years of training at the Psychoanalytic Institute to identify what Freud was attempting to repress. The delusion that the “man from Stratford” did not author the plays was motivated not by snobbery, but by a desire for vengeance:

It was somehow a great comfort to Freud to believe that his precursor Shakespeare was not a rather ordinary personality from Stratford, but an enigmatic and mighty nobleman. . . . On some level, Freud understood that Shakespeare had invented psychoanalysis by inventing the psyche, insofar as Freud could recognize and describe it. This could not have been a pleasant understanding, since it subverted Freud’s declaration that “I invented psychoanalysis because it had no literature.” Revenge came with the supposed demonstration that Shakespeare was an impostor, which satisfied Freudian resentment though rationally it did not make the plays any less of a precursor. Shakespeare had played great havoc with Freud’s originalities; now Shakespeare was unmasked and disgraced (Western Canon 60-1).

Freud’s need to repress his debt to Shakespeare not only accounts for the alacrity with which the “best mind of our century” (Western Canon 373) accepted the appropriately named Looney hypothesis. This grand evasion is also behind the misnaming of the centerpiece of Freud’s theory, the Oedipus complex. According to Bloom, the Oedipus complex really should be called the Hamlet complex, since Freud found his paradigm of the “civil war within the psyche” (Western Canon 377) where European romanticism had found it, in Shakespeare’s most compelling play. Oedipus, writes Bloom, was “hauled in by Freud and grafted onto Hamlet largely to cover up an obligation to Shakespeare” (377). In fact, while the “Oedipus of Sophocles may have a Hamlet complex (which I define as thinking not too much but much too well),” the “Hamlet of the man from Stratford most definitely does not have an Oedipus complex” (Western Canon 377).

It is with this assertion that Bloom’s thinking comes closest to Girard’s. In Bloom’s view, Freud overvalued the Oedipus complex, and thus was willing go to any length to protect the claim to “scientific” originality he felt this concept granted him. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard argues that Freud came close to a “mimetic intuition” in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, but in subsequent works “saw the path of mimetic desire stretching out before him and deliberately turned aside” (171). “Why did Freud banish mimesis from his later thought?” asks Girard. The reason “is not difficult to identify”: to embrace the relatively simple mechanism of mimetic desire as an interdividual force is to render the unconscious superfluous, and Freud could not bring himself to give up the mysterious and powerful agency of that region of the mind. In his own way, Bloom asks a similar question: why wouldn’t (or couldn’t) Freud acknowledge Shakespeare as his cognitive precursor? Bloom’s answer is that doing so would have required Freud to relinquish his surest claim to an “achieved individuality”: the pride he took in portraying himself as the man who “discovered” the unconscious and its structuring sex and death drives, which are so conveniently portrayed by the Oedipus myth. “Freud was anxious about Shakespeare,” writes Bloom, because he learned anxiety from him, as he had learned ambivalence and narcissism and schism in the self” (Western Canon 394). Writes Girard, “Freud was dazzled by what he took to be his crucial discovery. Loyalty to this discovery kept him from forging ahead on the path of mimesis” (Violence and the Sacred 183). Though Bloom goes farther than Girard in asking how much bad faith there was in Freud’s decision, for both the awareness that Freud sought to evade was the same. To attain the greatest degree of the scientific economy and precision Freud ostensibly sought in his work would have required a sacrifice he was, in the end, unable or unwilling to make: the self-satisfaction he derived from having pioneered a “new” understanding of the human.

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Today’s critics, writes Bloom, have a “curious affinity with the exasperations that keep creating partisans for the idea of Sir Francis Bacon or the earl of Oxford as the true author of Lear” (Western Canon 60). The mimetic focus of both Bloom’s and Girard’s theories lead them to distrust profoundly the motives and conclusions of Shakespeare’s previous and current critics, though the latter manages to sound considerably less exasperated by these interpretations than the former. The thrust of the polemic in Girard’s A Theater of Envy, though, is the same as in The Western Canon: critics and academics have consistently failed to recognize that the plays and poems will always read us better than any scheme we can devise to read them. Girard’s explanation of this state of affairs starts where Bloom’s does, with an impression of Shakespeare as qualitatively different from all other writers. But Girard goes farther than Bloom in identifying the real source of Shakespeare’s astonishing originality. For Girard, as one might expect, Shakespeare’s achievement is the result of his unprecedented cognitive grasp of the mechanisms and ramifications of mimetic desire, which in the plays and poems is usually, though not exclusively, called “envy.” In none of his other treatments of literary texts does Girard go so far in granting a writer conscious awareness of this essential principle of fundamental anthropology. Shakespeare, writes Girard, “discovered” the “fundamental source of human conflict” so early “that his approach to it seems juvenile, even caricatural, at first” (Theater of Envy 3-4). As Shakespeare’s dramatic expertise grows, however, his understanding of the modalities of mimetic desire and its necessary concomitant, scapegoating, deepens, culminating in the work that has (justly, in Girard’s view), captivated the world: Hamlet.

Girard’s chapter on history’s most frequently performed and thoroughly studied tragedy–entitled “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge” and originally published in another version in Stanford French Review–begins by posing the traditional interpretive question about the play: why the long and painful delay in executing the ghost’s charge of revenge against Claudius? Girard “solves” the problem of Hamlet in a couple of ways: first by reminding his readers that delaying the culminating act was a generic requirement of the revenge tragedy–indeed, many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries found themselves hard-pressed “to postpone for the whole duration of a lengthy Elizabethan play an action that had never been in doubt in the first place and that is always the same anyway” (Theater of Envy 273). From our viewpoint, however, Girard’s more interesting solution of the Hamlet problem hearkens back to drama’s putative origin in sacrificial ritual, an origin intuited by Shakespeare and used as the jumping-off point for a consideration of the ethics of revenge in a non-theatrical context. The very existence of the revenge play as a subgenre of tragedy, argues Girard, prompts someone with as sharp and self-critical a mind as Shakespeare to ponder the wide acceptance of revenge as a “sacred duty.” What strikes Girard, and what has struck critics presumably since the play was first performed, is the extraordinary degree of reluctance with which Hamlet approaches the task to which, he says, he is prompted by “heaven and hell.” For Girard, the play’s length and tedium arise not from Hamlet’s being “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,” but from Shakespeare’s own weariness with the cyclical violence of revenge. As usual with Girard’s work, this chapter stands as a kind of conclusion to a carefully wrought narrative exposition of how mimetic desire leads to violence and scapegoating, a story told in this instance through readings of the plays in (roughly) their order of composition. Girard sees Shakespeare discovering and fleshing out his understanding of mimetic desire as the structure of interdividual relations in the comedies; the histories (particularly those set in Roman and Greek antiquity) and tragedies show how mimetic crisis leads to scapegoating and sacrifice; and the romances present forgiveness as the alternative to mimetic circularity. Hamlet, written at about the middle of Shakespeare’s career (1600) but obviously the play to which he devoted most of his artistic resources, reveals the playwright’s own “ambiguous relationship to the theatre,” which, writes Girard, is “not unlike Hamlet’s relationship to his revenge” (Theater of Envy 280).

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Though this may help to account for the play’s intrinsic linguistic and psychological complexity, it does not explain Hamlet’s unmatched power of speaking to generation after generation of readers and audiences. Freud explained this aspect of Hamlet by inventing the Oedipus complex; for Girard the play’s extraordinary and lasting appeal is not quite so individual a matter. “There must be,” writes Girard, “something in the Hamletian transposition of the author’s lassitude with revenge and its tragedies that transcends the centuries and still corresponds to the predicament of our own culture” (280). That something is, of course, Shakespeare’s insight into the true source of tragic paradox, the double bind of mimetic desire, a process which Hamlet understands not too much but much too well. Girard’s explanation of exactly why Hamlet delays killing his uncle is virtually identical to Bloom’s: Hamlet is justifiably reluctant about repeating the violent and vengeful deeds of both his father and uncle, and hence ambivalent about fulfilling the ghost’s request. “Claudius and Old Hamlet,” writes Girard, “are not blood brothers first and enemies second; they are brothers in revenge” (Theater of Envy 274). Compare Bloom: “Shakespeare was careful to show that Prince Hamlet was a rather neglected child, at least by his father. Nowhere in the play does anyone, including Hamlet and the Ghost, tell us that the uxorious father loved the son. A basher in battle, like Fortinbras, the fractious king seems to have had no time for the child between the demands of state, war, and husbandly lust” (Western Canon 377-8). For both, Hamlet’s delays reflect the desire not to imitate the actions of his father and uncle, rather than (as Freud would have it) manifesting a suppressed wish to repeat their sexual and violent exploits.

The most remarkable aspect of this elegant and seemingly self-evident interpretation, however, is not its refutation of Freud’s influential reading of Hamlet. Rather, both Girard and Bloom see the willingness of critics stubbornly to divert their gaze from the obvious in favor of what Girard calls a “supreme stage of self-deception where the theoreticians join in and the whole enterprise is justified as a superior form of aesthetic responsibility” (Theater of Envy 285) as Hamlet’s most important lesson for our time. According to Bloom, academicians who worship Freud (either in his own name or in his Jungian or Lacanian incarnations) pursue such a deception in order to discredit Shakespeare and thereby to stave off the discomfiting realization that he “largely invented us” (Western Canon 40). Girard’s analysis of the critical blindness toward Hamlet–lengthier and more systematically developed than Bloom’s–redounds to an even more damning indictment of today’s academicians by demonstrating how their pursuit colludes with the forces of resentment to forestall a potentially freeing exposure of the ethical dead-end of vengeance. In this respect, conventional and currently fashionable interpretations of Hamlet resemble “the traditional reading of many Gospel themes” in suffering from “sacrificial distortions” (Theater of Envy 282):

In Hamlet, the very absence of a case against revenge becomes a powerful intimation of what the modern world is really about. Even at those later stages in our culture when physical revenge and blood feuds completely disappeared or were limited to such marginal milieu as the underworld, it would seem that no revenge play, not even a play of reluctant revenge, could strike a really deep chord in the modern psyche. In reality the question is never entirely settled, and the strange void at the center of Hamlet becomes a powerful symbolic expression of the Western and modern malaise, no less powerful than the most brilliant attempts to define the problem, such as Dostoievski’s underground revenge. Our “symptoms” always resemble that unnamable paralysis of the will, that ineffable corruption of the spirit, that affect not only Hamlet but the other characters as well. The devious ways of these characters, the bizarre plots they hatch, their passion for watching without being watched, their propensity to voyeurism and spying, and the general disease of human relations make a good deal of sense as a description of an undifferentiated no-man’s-land between revenge and no revenge in which we ourselves are still living (Theater of Envy 284).

The endless search for increasingly complex and clever explanations of Hamlet’s “unconscionable” delay in executing Claudius demonstrates neither the inexhaustibility of the text nor the limitless ingenuity of its interpreters, but the lamentable extent to which our critics continue to be held spellbound by “an ethics of revenge” (288):

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Should our enormous critical literature on Hamlet fall into the hands of people otherwise ignorant of our mores, they could not fail to conclude that our academic tribe must have been a savage breed, indeed. After four centuries of controversies, Hamlet’s temporary reluctance to commit murder still looks so outlandish to us that more and more books are being written in an unsuccessful effort to solve that mystery. The only way to account for this curious body of literature is to suppose that back in the twentieth century no more was needed than the request of some ghost, and the average professor of literature would massacre his entire household without batting an eyelash. . . . The psychiatrist sees the very thought of. . .[the] abandonment [of revenge] as an illness he must cure, and the traditional critic sees revenge as a literary rule he must respect. Others still try to read Hamlet through one of the popular ideologies of our time, like political rebellion, the absurd, the individual’s right to an aggressive personality, and so on. It is no accident if the sanctity of revenge provides a perfect vehicle for all the masks of modern ressentiment. . . . It is not Hamlet that is irrelevant, but the wall of conventions and ritualism with which we surround the play, in the name now of innovation rather than tradition. As more events, objects, and attitudes around us proclaim the same message ever more loudly, in order not to hear that message, we must condemn more of our experience to insignificance and absurdity. With our most fashionable critics today we have reached the point when history makes no sense, art makes no sense, language and sense itself make no sense (Theater of Envy 287-8).

For Girard, this is not a new message; as far back as the 1978 Diacritics interview he felt it necessary to castigate “fashionable critics” for refusing to acknowledge the mimeticism that really drives the cycles of theoretic change in the current literary academy. Asked if his work required “an imperative for a theoretical reprise comparable to the one that informs Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge,” Girard replied that though at first he felt the need to protect his “hypothesis from being intimidated out of existence by the great theoretical steamrollers of our time,” the danger of competing theories had lessened with the increasing clarity with which one can see that “the day is approaching, I am afraid, when the real but limited achievements of these great machines will have to be maintained in the face of a new unthinking rejection by the same forces of mimetic snobbery that espouse them so unthinkingly at the present time” (“To Double Business Bound” 216). According to Bloom, that day still has not come; indeed, as Foucault’s “shadows lengthen in our evening land” (Western Canon 16), the critical and academic recognition that mimesis can, and frequently does, manifest itself in conflictive or anxious forms may be farther off than ever.

The principal difference between Bloom and Girard with respect to this grave situation is that the former proclaims he “does not deplore these matters; the aesthetic is, in my view an individual rather than a societal concern. . . . Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything” (Western Canon 16). About the best one can hope for in reading well and deeply, Bloom concludes, is “to enlarge a solitary existence” (Western Canon 518). There can be little doubt that Bloom means what he says here; earlier, as we have noted, he confesses to being a romantic, and these sentiments are certainly consistent with such an identity. But if the goal of reading is identical with that of writing–for how much difference can there be between “an achieved individuality” and an enlarged solitude–then what, exactly, is the point of theorizing the anxiety of influence? Bloom’s failure to extricate himself from the mimetic processes he intuits and movingly describes results in a sustained note of pessimism running through The Western Canon, producing dire predictions like “our current English and other literature departments” are destined soon to “shrink to the dimensions of our current Classics departments” (Western Canon 17), replaced by “departments of ‘Cultural Studies’ where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens” (Western Canon 519). Bloom is led to such dismal forecasts, however, not merely by his adoption of what he calls the “true” Marxist criticism, “following Groucho rather than Karl,” and taking as his motto “Groucho’s grand admonition: ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it!’ (Western Canon 520). The real source of his pessimism is the fatalism, always latent but now emerging full-blown, that inheres in the anxiety of influence, a mimetic process Bloom views as not only inescapable, but desirable for its power to goad literary ephebes to great artistic achievement. By expelling competition from canon-formation, argues Bloom, the School of Resentment makes genuine literary accomplishment impossible. In short, great art requires a sacrificial competition; in this respect Bloom comes dangerously close to espousing what many of Girard’s critics have mistakenly accused him of: endorsing the cultural efficacy, and therefore the necessity, of sacrifice.

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Great writers like Shakespeare, argues Girard, go beyond merely intuiting the haunting resemblances between the modes of artistic mimesis they employ in their works and the existential forces that called them to become writers in the first place. What separates the writers that survive from those who do not, in Girard’s view, is that the former know that “mimetic circularity is not a question of ‘feeling,’ of ideology, of religious belief; it is the intractable structure of human conflict” (Theater of Envy 339). When he discovered the anxiety of influence some twenty years ago, Bloom’s faith in the literary text’s power to serve as a means of understanding and negotiating the existential conundrums raised by this mimetic circularity seemed rather closer to Girard’s than it appears today. Just a few years before Girard’s hopeful (but premature) prediction that the “great theoretical steamrollers of our time” would soon run out of fuel, Bloom presented, in A Map of Misreading, a stirring exposition of the relevance of his recently formulated idea to his own profession: I remember, as a young man setting out to be a university teacher, how afflicted

I was by my sense of uselessness, my not exactly vitalizing fear that my chosen profession reduced to an incoherent blend of antiquarianism and culture-mongering. I recall also that I would solace myself by thinking that while a scholar-teacher of literature could do no good, at least he could do no harm, or anyway not to others, whatever he did to himself. But that was at the very start of the decade of the fifties, and after more than twenty years I have come to understand that I under-rated my profession, as much in its capacity for doing harm as in its potential for good works. Even our treasons, our betrayals of our implicit trusts, are treasons of something more than of the intellectuals, and most directly damage our immediate students, our Oedipal sons and daughters. Our profession is not genuinely akin any longer to that of the historians or the philosophers. Without willing the change, our theoretical critics have become negative theologians, our practical critics are close to being Agaddic commentators, and all of our teachers, of whatever generation, teach how to live, what to do, in order to avoid the damnation of death in life. . . . Emerson abandoned his church to become a secular orator, rightly trusting that the lecture, rather than the sermon, was the proper and luminous melody for Americans. We have institutionalized Emerson’s procedures, while abandoning (understandably) his aims, for the burden of the prophecy is already carried by our auditors (Anxiety of Influence 15-16).

Bloom no doubt meant the phrase “the damnation of death in life” in a classically romantic, Wordsworthian-solipsistic sense. His most recent book’s obsessive returns to the question of why today’s educational institutions have obsessively devoted themselves to debunking “the mystery of Shakespeare’s genius” (Western Canon 60), however, demonstrate that one current manifestation of “the damnation of death in life” might be seen in the School of Resentment’s blindness to the double bind of its unacknowledged mimetic snobbery. In light of the similarities between Bloom’s critique and Girard’s, it is, therefore, disappointing that the former ultimately refuses to take up the gauntlet of mimetic polemicism to assert that great writers and their interpreters have, as he apparently once believed, the ability to tell us “what to do.” Bloom has been in higher education long enough to know that modes of thinking which achieve currency at the Yales and Stanfords of our land do not stop at the walls of those august institutions. Resentment, like water, finds its lowest point, and so trickles down through state and community colleges, into high school, and, presumably, even down to elementary school, where, stripped along the way of its theoretical subtleties, it manifests itself in peremptory dismissals of the canonical works to which both Bloom and Girard are cognitively, and whether Bloom likes it or not, ethically indebted. Girard’s interpretation of Shakespeare shows what is missing from Bloom’s castigation of the School of Resentment’s flight from the canonical: the loss of the living presence of texts that have the power still to tell us “how to live.”

9

Eric Gans’ work in developing a generative anthropology is appealing to me, for two reasons. First, it is a stimulating hypothesis about how culture–and specifically language–begins. The emergence of the sign by which the victim is represented carries with it the dawning awareness of the position of those gathered around and against the victim, and this sharing of the sign enables those involved to substitute it for the victim and defer violence. My fundamental question about this originary scene, to be developed in part 4 of the essay, is whether it is necessary to posit a crisis issuing in the actual lynching of a human victim in order to imagine not only the necessary, but also the sufficient condition for the emergence of language and culture (so Girard); or whether sign-sharing and substitution could be accomplished without actual violence. Or is it the case that the emergence of language through the deferral of violence is what defines human being, whether or not the central object for the hypothetical hominids is real or imaginary? And if the central object is real, does it matter whether it is animal, human, or some other object, the gaining or eating of which must be deferred in order for language and culture to emerge?

Second, Gans takes religion with great seriousness in his version of generative anthropology. He says in Science and Faith, “The originary hypothesis is an attempt to understand the birth of the transcendental domain of representation.”[1] The emergence of signs or language is the model for understanding the originary scene, and at the heart of this signifying capacity is a coterminous representation of a central object, deferral of violence through substitution of the sign for the object, and an experience of agreement or consensus which results in collective peace. Language is thus what is distinctively and primordially human, but the event that brings about the human, which is the same as “the transcendental domain of representation,” is revelatory, having the status of sacred reality in the center of things. What we now categorize as “religion” is the ongoing transmission of acts, symbols, and stories associated with that revelation, that opening up of a transcendental domain of representation.

I will return later to Gans’ concept of generative anthropology, for there is an important issue at stake in his concept of language as originary supplement which defers violence. At this point I want to turn to an overview of Girard’s anthropology and the religious, specifically biblical and Christian roots of Girard’s mimetic theory. The upshot of this twofold structure of Girard’s work is the mimetic predicament of humanity and the revelation of this predicament, a revelation which is simultaneously transmission of the power of mimesis as love and divine-human community. Or to put it in traditional theological terms, this twofold structure of Girard’s work may be understood as original sin and salvation, as viewed from the standpoint of the theological implications of mimetic anthropology. After having reviewed Girard’s mimetic anthropology, I will ask whether it is possible to separate the religious and specifically Christian aspects of the mimetic theory from Girard’s own thinking and body of work while still remaining anchored in the mimetic theory. This question will involve a review of the role of religion in the work of three of Girard’s former students, Paisley Livingston, Tobin Siebers, and, as already mentioned, Eric Gans.

1. Mimesis: the Predicament

Interpreters of various perspectives and with varying commitments would agree that Girard’s view of the human condition is radical. That is, if we go to the root of matter along his lines of thinking, we encounter an originary event (or series of events) which marks the transition from pre-homo sapiens, to homo sapiens–the transition he calls “hominization” in Things Hidden.[2]This originary transition is the source of incomprehension or “misrecognition” (méconnaissance) and deception, which is built into every form of representation. Whatever the distinctions made between forms of desire, for Girard all desire is properly speaking mimesis or mimetic desire. He has emphasized the acquisitive aspect of desire in identifying cultural and personal crises, and this acquisitive desire (la mimésis d’appropriation) is the precipitating dynamic in the founding scenario. Its initial functioning is prior to all representations; but since it is, even in its embryonic stage, evoked by the other who becomes the model, it easily becomes unstable when pressures on the human grouping, or any particular relations within it, accelerate an anxious groping for certainty and order. It is in some such situation that acquisitive desire leads to conflict and rivalry, issuing then in violence.

2

The damage control achieved by lynching a victim and preserving this unanimity of the lynchers by repeating the event (the origin of ritual), forbidding the alleged crime that precipitated it (the origin of prohibition), and surrounding and remedying the event through narrative (the origin of myth) is, so to say, a disguising of truth. The truth of ritual and mythical representation, which are the basis of all representation, is mimetic crisis and collective violence. The collective violence in particular may almost be completely disguised–but usually not quite.[3] The moment of sacrifice in ritual and the moment of the “good” violence in myth are both alike the doses of poison that must be taken and properly monitored (enacted, recited, thought) in order to counteract this very poison in its destructive forms of conflict, violence, and social disintegration.[4]

If we turn to Girard’s “interdividual” psychology and focus on the development of the self, we see that he likewise conceives the individual, who is always inherently social or intersubjective (thus “interdividual”), as in a predicament analogous to the predicament of the social-cultural order.[5] The child has no inherent, biogenetic mechanism for distinguishing between good and bad forms of behavior. The behaviors and rules he learns are basically imitations of what adults do and say, although what other children say and do, both older children and peers, undoubtedly has considerable influence. The child has no innate way of knowing that you can go too far with imitation: if it gets too acquisitive it begins to interfere with the model and the repercussions are not pleasant. But one of the most important functions of culture and religion is to furnish differences–roles, rules, institutions, etc.–which will alleviate this potential harm to relationships. In modern Western, as contrasted to archaic societies, these functions have become increasingly weakened, so the child has no sure way of knowing that the imitative behavior applauded on one occasion may be discouraged or even rejected on another.[6]

The master-disciple relationship is analogous to the parent-child relationship and is always influenced by the latter to some extent. Girard points out that the master may be delighted that the disciple is taking him as a model, but “if the imitation is too perfect, and the imitator threatens to surpass the model, the master will completely change his attitude and begin to display jealousy, mistrust and hostility.” He will try to “discredit and discourage his disciple.” But the “disciple can only be blamed for being the best of all disciples.” Precisely because of the mimetic relationship with his master, who is the source of norms and the obstacle he cannot surpass, he is unable to gain critical distance and perspective on the relationship. The disciple’s situation is worsened by the model’s tendency to reinforce his follower’s blindness and “to hide the real reasons for his hostility.”[7]

If I understand Girard correctly, then the potential for conflict in the master-disciple relation is basically a variation on what the child experiences in his relations with models and mediators. That is to say, mimesis is not simply one very important phenomenon and relation alongside others, but the constitutive basis and dynamic of all relations. It is not that it cannot turn persons toward freedom, love, and non-violence, for it is also what constitutes the possibility of salvation or liberation (more on this below). But in whichever direction one’s life turns, it always proceeds in and through mimesis. Learning what to desire from someone else is not a dynamic confined only to the “sick,” to “those who push the mimetic process too far to be able to function normally; it is also, as Freud acknowledged, a feature of the people we call normal.’”[8]

In the New Testament Gospels this universal human predicament is associated with the work of demons, and particularly with the work of the arch-demon, the prince of this world, the arche or principle of the world constituted by mimesis and the scapegoat mechanism. According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus was tempted by Satan or the Devil for forty days in the wilderness. Satan in the Hebrew Bible, shatan or satan, means accuser or adversary. The Greek diabolos means much the same thing, accuser or slanderer. The classical Greek diabole would thus mean (false) accusation or slander. Its use in Socrates’ long defense in the Apology gives us, perhaps, a deeper sense of its connotation. Socrates says, “Now let us take up from the beginning the question, what the kategoria is from which the diabole against me has arisen….” (19 AB). Here the kategoria, from which our word category, is the formal accusation, while the diabole is what supports and exacerbates the accusation. The Loeb translation renders it “false prejudice.” Since the indictment alleged Socrates’ corruption of the youth by calling into question traditional belief in the gods, the ostensible issue was disruption of civic order and tradition, but anxiety–perhaps also envy?–about his influence on a great number of young men informed the charge against him. If we translate this into the mimetic terms of this discussion, then diabole is identified with mimetic rivalry both as its cause and its result.

3

So Satan, as Girard says, “is the mimetic model and obstacle par excellence..”[9] We can see this particularly clearly in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus has spoken of his suffering, death, and resurrection, and Peter rebukes him for saying he will suffer and die. Jesus in turn rebukes Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a skandalon to me….” (Matt 16:23)–you are a scandal, an obstacle, a hindrance to me. Girard observes that Satan is “deconstructed” here in being equated with the mimetic principle, whereas in other texts he is depicted in a personified supernatural role.[10] In this chapter of Things Hidden, entitled “Beyond Scandal,” Girard goes on to argue that the concept of scandal is rooted in the Old Testament and the struggle against idolatry, and that the Cross is the supreme scandal that reveals and exposes scandal and its operation through the scapegoat mechanism.

So it does not matter whether one believes in a supernatural person, Satan, or views Satan as the principle of order working through mimesis and an unconscious scapegoating process which clicks in when the cultural system, through any of its tributaries in society, government, or economy, is threatened or thrown off balance. From this standpoint, the only thing worse than believing in Satan is not believing in Satan. I don’t know whether Girard has ever said exactly that in published writings, but I know from personal conversations that he agrees with it. And this means that all human beings in all circumstances are always either subject to, or close to the edge of, scandal and the relationship of doubles. Those trapped in the relationship of doubles are truly “possessed”; for them, short of a marvelous deliverance, the violence of desire tends toward death, either the death of the model-obstacle through murder or the death of the possessed person through suicide. When Girard speaks of desire tending toward death or says, as at the beginning of the last chapter in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, that the “ultimate meaning of desire is death…,”[11] he is not talking about all desire or desire in all its manifestations. He means rather desire as it so fixes itself on the the mediator’s supposed desire, and more fundamentally on the mediator himself, that it takes on an independent metaphysical reality for the desiring subject. What he is pointing to is not the necessity of desire resulting in scandal and the relationship of doubles, but the inevitability of this development, i.e., there is no absolute necessity that this occur, but the human condition is such that it is practically impossible to avoid. The human achievement on a universal scale has been to overcome disorder by means of limited disorder; or, if you will, to counteract the poison of violence by injecting only a small amount, enough to enable human life to tolerate it but not so much that the sociocultural system becomes fatally ill. The operation of some sort of generative scapegoat mechanism allows most cultures to work most of the time. Put in terms of Satan, Satan the principle of order (the “prince of this world”) casts out Satan the principle of disorder, that great “spirit of self-destruction and nonexistence,” as Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor calls him. So in the sense of the power of Satan as just indicated, we exist either under the sway of the fascinating rival or, in Kafka’s striking image, as those who try to walk along a rope stretched just above the ground. “It seems more designed to cause stumbling than to be walked upon.”[12] This is ordinary human existence, or existence “according to the flesh.” But there is the possibility of becoming “the adherents of non-violent imitation.”[13] To that we now turn.

2. Mimesis: the Release or Redemption

I get these terms, release and redemption, from two Gospel texts. In Mark, followed by Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, “For the Son of Man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (10:45). “Ransom” is a translation of the Greek word lutron, whose root meaning is a “freeing” or release. Ransom, with the connotation of a sacrificial ransom, is probably an accurate rendering. In the Septuagint or Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible it translates typically sacrificial words such as geulah, redemption, and kofer, ransom. However, in the context of Mark it is practically synonymous with the Son of Man’s humbling of himself to become the servant, a model the disciples are to follow. The pronouncement about the Son of Man as a ransom is in response to the disciples’ anger at James and John for asking to become Jesus’s chief lieutenants when he comes into his glory. It addresses mimetic rivalry, in other words. The same quarrel had erupted earlier when the disciples disputed among themselves who was the greatest. There also we find the saying, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” Then Jesus took a child and placing him in their midst, said,”Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me” (Mark 9:33-37). In Matthew the saying includes not only receiving but also being like the child: “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 18:3).

4

So freeing or release from mimetic rivalry has much to do with the freedom of being able to imitate like the child. The freedom, that is, to imitate the Son of Man or to imitate anyone who imitates God the father.

Luke includes the dispute among the disciples, but places it at a different point in the gospel story. Jesus and the apostles are at table for the last supper. After Jesus and the apostles share the wine and bread, a dispute arises as to who among them should be regarded as the greatest. Here also Jesus instructs them that the greatest, the leader, is the one who serves, but he says nothing at all about giving his life as a lutron for many. It is likely that the author of Luke dropped that term from his account, for in general he avoids any obvious indication of sacrificial atonement.

Another important passage for this subject is Luke’s account of the two disciples walking to Emmaus after the crucifixion of Jesus. A “visitor” or “stranger” falls in with them and begins talking to them. It turns out to be Jesus, but they do not recognize him until the end of the journey when he sits down at table and breaks bread with them (Lk 24:13-35). Along the way they tell the stranger that Jesus “was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,” and that they had hoped “he was the one to redeem Israel” (24:19, 21). The verb translated “to redeem” is lutrousthai, rare in the New Testament, but a form of it is used frequently in the Septuagint with a clearly sacrificial meaning. But it should be noticed that although the two disciples use this word, Jesus does not. He interprets the Scriptures to them (24:27), he becomes “known to them in the breaking of bread” (24:35), and before his ascension he “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures,” teaching them again of his suffering and resurrection and that “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations” (24:45-47).[14] The sacrificial word is avoided in this sequence of the story of salvation. The same point could be underscored time and again in Luke and Acts. There is basically nothing about sacrifice and redemption in the classical biblical or universal religious meanings revolving around catharsis and atonement gained through the spilling of a victim’s blood.

So we find in the Gospels not only that Jesus exposed mimetic rivalry, but that he himself is its antidote, the means of release or liberation from this predicament. If Matthew and Mark maintain a language of strong sacrificial connotations, Luke moves away from this kind of language, evidently deliberately, in order to underscore the imitation of Christ, the servant of all, through whose name–the power of the Christ-representation in the apostles–a conversion could occur which begins with repentance and forgiveness of sins . “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

This conversion cannot take place on the basis of a religious or moral choice which is taken by considering rational alternatives. “[N]o purely intellectual process and no experience of a purely intellectual nature can secure the individual the slightest victory over mimetic desire and its victimage delusions. Intellection can achieve only displacement and substitution, though these may give individuals the sense of having achieved a victory. For there to be even the slightest degree of progress, the victimage delusion (méconnaissance victimaire) must be vanquished on the most intimate level of experience….”[15] This méconnaissance, translated “delusion” in the English text, is the unconscious or preconscious refusal of the knowledge of the scapegoat mechanism and one’s own complicity in it. The defeat of this misrecognition must cause to collapse, or at least shake, all interdividual oppositions–“everything that we can call our ego,” our personality,’ our temperament,’ and so on.”[16]

The key to significant human change is therefore a conversionary imitation. The Gospels “recommend imitating the sole model who never runs the danger–if we really imitate in the way that children imitate–of being turned into a fascinating rival.”[17] To follow Christ entails a kind of renunciation, a relinquishing of that mimetic desire which seeks and searches on a path whose outcome is only the dead end of the obstacle, the wager that is always lost, the tomb that contains only the dead.[18]

Of course, Girard can obviously not speak of a healthy, nonviolent imitation and yet hold that it is necessary to give up mimetic desire in all its forms, which is absolutely essential to his anthropology. As he clarifies in an interview with Rebecca Adams, he does not mean “the renunciation of mimetic desire itself, because what Jesus advocates is mimetic desire. Imitate me, and imitate the father through me, he says, so it’s twice mimetic…So the idea that mimetic desire itself is bad makes no sense.” Girard’s use of “mimetic desire” in the negative sense means only the type “that generates mimetic rivalry and, in turn, is generated by it.”[19]

5

All victims of mimetic desire encounter the obstacle of the model-rival, and short of the gift of release from this bondage the outcome is death. “Every obstacle is a kind of tomb.”[20] For the stone to be rolled back and the tomb to be found devoid of a dead body, a conversion is necessary–an overcoming of the victimage delusion on the most intimate level of experience.

3. The Mimetic Theory without Religion

My argument in part 3 of this essay is that to the extent one draws upon Girard’s work but rejects the evident twofold structure of Girard’s thought, the dialectic of mimetic predicament and the conversionary imitation of divine love, it is necessary to modify one’s own thinking in the direction of the principal features of the Enlightenment heritage. In using the term “Enlightenment heritage” I have in mind especially the apprehension about religion or religious transcendence that first emerged forcefully in the 18th century and that had become thoroughly secularized by the 20th century, to the point that religion, particularly Christianity, is dismissed or ignored in intellectual settings and in discussions of public policy in which the claims of “enlightened” reason and morality are upheld. It follows that the Enlightenment heritage results in a certain rationalism, usually of a pragmatic or utilitarian sort. This utilitarian rationalism typically tilts in favor of viewing the individual person as autonomous and as possessing “certain inalienable rights,” to quote a well-known document, but it usually has a corresponding social-political tendency to favor government programs that protect and enhance individual rights.[21] The possibility that this modern notion of the autonomous self has been influenced by the biblical understanding of God as the absolute subject,[22] or that the tradition of individual rights is rooted in biblical anthropology, is ignored or dismissed.

Here I will consider the approach of two critics influenced by Girard, both former students of his: Paisley Livingson and Tobin Siebers. Both, at least in their work as thinkers and scholars, reject the Cross in Girard’s thought. In Models of Desire Livingston proposes to begin the project of gaining a better grasp of desire as it is related to and rooted in human agents, attitudes, and social and historical contexts. Girard, he avers, has engaged in inconsistent discourse about mimetic desire. He tends to conflate all sorts of desire as “mimetic,” although in certain instances he has distinguished a precultural form of desire, la mimésis d’appropriation, but this is not properly speaking mimetic desire. He quotes Girard’s statement, “We might well decide to use the word ‘desire’ only in circumstances where the misunderstood mechanism of mimetic rivalry has imbued what was previously just an appetite or need with this metaphysical dimension.”[23]Livingston’s concern in analyzing and refining the notion of desire is of a piece with his insistence that a psychology of mimesis should include taking into account a subject as moral agent who is not completely subsumed by mimetic attractions which are not conscious and rational, but who has meaningful attitudes and dispositions.[24]

Livingston’s delineation of a moral agent whose reflective input is an important part of life changes that can accurately be described as “decisions” or “choices” is an expression the two fundamental criticisms of Girard’s psychology of mimesis that he proposes: (1) The mimetic system operative in all human societies and cultures is not as closed as Girard thinks. (2) The part of Girard’s model that includes revelation and eschatology is not needed for an adequate psychology of mimesis. “…I do not need Girard’s hypothesis that the scientific project is a byproduct’ of the subterranean’ Revelation being wrought by the Holy Scriptures.”[25] Concerning the first point, Livingston says that it “certainly has not been established that [the error of méconnaisance of scapegoating] was a universal feature of human cognition until the advent of Jesus Christ.”[26] As for the second point, the biblical tradition and specifically the Christian revelation have not brought about the transformation of our mimetic inheritance to the extent that Girard contends. He observes that there are many examples of this very méconnaissance in the contemporary social world, beginning with the economic institutions that are supposed to be a by-product of the Christian revelation.”[27]

6

I have my doubts as to whether Livingston is right about blindness to delusion and deception operative in economic institutions. I don’t doubt that they are operative, but I don’t think they go unrecognized. Not only Girard himself, but Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Paul Dumouchel, Eric Gans, Cesareo Bandera, and others have taken cognizance of the banished object, money as the excluded commodity, and the parallel displacement of desire to other goods, services, and human agents. In other words, we are more or less “onto” the scapegoat mechanism, but this knowledge has spread and informed public life less slowly than, say, the rights of the victim.

What I am most concerned with in Livingston’s approach to the psychology of mimesis is his claim to be able to appropriate the main analytic thrust of Girard’s mimetic anthropology without taking seriously his interpretation of of the relation of the Gospels to mythology. In fact, religion has no place at all in Livingston’s proposal except as a limited social-psychological factor. The result is twofold. (1) He cannot view the existence of societies and individuals as caught up in a mimetic predicament. The individual, when all is said and done, is in principle a rational agent, at least to the extent that a “descriptive and explanatory program of meaningful attitudes” is possible.[28] And human cultures and cultural expressions retain, in principle, a kind of openness which does not necessarily reproduce a victimary mechanism. There is no original sin. (2) Nor is there a need for revelation or transformation from some source outside the human self or the human social order. He evinces a basic trust in our capacity to critique and “forestall the kind of sacrificial error that the [mimetic] theory identifies.”[29]

There is no (original) sin and no need for salvation in any traditional religious sense. That much seems evident from Livingston’s Enlightenment program of thought. Our human situation is somewhere in the middle, operating between problem/irrationality and solution/rationality. The possibility of this solution is immanent within the human species as it evolves and develops. This all seems clear. But so what? That is, isn’t this the way it should be, especially for thinkers and researchers who have honed their particular talents to analyze the human condition and offer reasoned proposals for the good of their fellow human beings? Yes, affirms Livingston, it is the way it should be. Girard’s original insights are logically separate from his theological claims[30] —which is to say, one can have a sort of Girard without the Cross.

The upshot of this is not only to challenge Girard’s version of his mimetic model by saying, in effect, “Our situation is not as bad as you say,” but also to counter that “We can do something about our problems through the analytic and synthetic functions of reason.”

But what does this position actually offer in the face of cycles of desire and revenge? I am not familiar with Livingston’s textual example in Models of Desire, Brennu-Njalls Saga. However, the positive element of moral action that he draws from it has little to offer: Gunnarr refuses to seek compensation, putting a temporary halt to the cycle of vengeance, and Njall voluntarily offers compensation so that his friend would not be dishonored by lack of parity. This is indeed “a cooperative form of mimesis,” but that is the way sacrificial and retributive systems have always worked when individuals act nobly within them. Noble and morally sensitive individuals use the system either to keep its retributive or scapegoating machinery from clicking into motion or to minimize the damage done. But I don’t see a thing in the saga as he describes it that really calls the system into question; there is a certain fatalism about it. And, as Livingston himself notes, the halt in the rivalry, doubling, and revenge is but temporary. There is, in short, a lack of anthropological depth in Livingston’s analysis and a lack of any sense of what would inspire a moral agent to break away from a system, or what would move an individual in a lynch mob not only to drop the stone he is about to throw but to proclaim to others that so-called “good” violence is not the right remedy for “bad” violence.

Tobin Siebers is an interdisciplinary literary critic whose particular forte is to locate himself in the “and” of literature and anthropology, literature and ethics, literature and politics. His thinking is not driven by Enlightenment rationalism in the same measure that Livingston’s is, but he definitely casts a suspicious eye on the specific, and avowed, religious concerns and themes in Girard’s proposals. To be sure, he thinks it is a major mistake for critics to deny the importance of religion and refuse to think about it. To expel religion would be to fail to recognize the “dynamic relation between acts of expulsion and the evolution of the sacred.” He observes that it “is no accident that the metaphysicians of presence, who quest to eradicate the last survivals’ of the sacred in language, place all language under the aegis of écriture, the word for Scripture.”[31] In fact, Siebers goes so far as to affirm that “Literary criticism should uphold a reverence for our inner lives.”[32]

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However, it is precisely the affirmation just quoted that indicates a shift from religion to literature for Siebers–or a shift from the Judeo-Christian tradition to literature approached with a certain secular vestige of religious devotion. He holds that Girard contradicts himself. Girard points out that Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science says humans have murdered God themselves, thus human beings, in this context, have both created and murdered gods. However, in his conclusion to The Scapegoat he holds that the “murderers…believe that their sacrifices are virtuous. They do not what what they do, and we must forgive them.”[33] The contradiction, for Siebers, evidently lies in the affirmation of the possibility of forgiveness, which has a transcendent source and inspiration, while adhering to the anthropological knowledge of human ignorance and guilt. The two cannot really coexist. And for Siebers this means that the religious dimension of Girard’s work is an obstacle which should be bracketed. “Girard’s personal beliefs should not blind us to the enormous power of his intuitions, especially within a community of scholars who advocate free thinking and pluralism.”[34] The general, contextual antidote to Girard, in other words, is a community of “free thinking and pluralism.” And essential to this context, if not the most important factor, is the role of literature and narrative, which Siebers describes religiously. Literary criticism should uphold a reverence for our inner lives. Literature “stirs astonishment, thoughtfulness, and memory,” all traditionally associated with myth and ritual. In the sense of connection to life-experience, there “is no story that is not true.”[35] Literature for Siebers takes over the very definition of Adam/Anthropos, which is rooted in the wellsprings of Western religion and philosophy. “To be human,” says Siebers, “is to tell stories about ourselves and other human beings….The finally human is literature.”[36]

There is no question that literature is important for understanding what human beings are, and the human propensity for telling stories and living in and out of them is especially significant. But literature cannot bear the weight that Siebers places on it. He holds to an ethics of literary criticism which supports a reverence for the life of the individual self within a more or less democratic, pluralistic society. He believes not only that we are story-telling beings, but that “memory and judgment” require us to keep on telling certain stories, such as those coming out of the Holocaust.[37] But Siebers does not offer his own anthropology beyond our linguistic, narrative existence which can so easily break out into mimetic rivalry and violence. He eschews a religious perspective on human beginnings and endings, so he leaves unanswered the question of whether we humans are caught in a predicament or not. He seems to believe not, because he does not propose that we do anything except to tell important stories and examine them critically and ethically for the challenges and possibilities they offer. It is a narrowly circumscribed position. Although he comes across as appreciating the importance of the fact of religion, historically and psychologically, he must finally take a position similar to Livingston’s: there is no human predicament, rather a series of problems, above all the problem of violence; and there is no salvation or liberation, rather a criticism of language and literature that might shed some light and bring us closer together. This amounts of course to a severe dilution of Girard’s mimetic anthropology, which is thoroughly radical in the sense that we humans are mimetic beings who are inevitably and characteristically trapped in mimetic rivalry, but who may be saved through mimesis, the mimesis of conversionary imitation of Christ, or of any model-mediator who reveals and enacts the love of God. There is no way that memory, judgment, and reason can rise above the méconnaissance of their own representations, except if their stories, precedents, and principles are converted to the standpoint of the innocent victim. When Saul/Paul the persecutor of Christians was traveling on the road to Damascus, the voice he heard was not his memory telling him examine and appreciate Christian stories; it was not his judgment asking him to reconsider the cases of those whom he viewed as heretical or blasphemous or “wanna be” Jews; it was not his reason challenging him to become a better critic of his and others’ moral actions. No, it was the voice of Jesus saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). In Paul’s own account of his conversion, he says that the gospel he preached was not one he received from a human source, nor was he taught it, “but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12).

So where is the human source to turn us from our violence? Who will teach a new being, a renewed humankind, and what will this teaching be? Could it be a rationalist psychology of mimesis, or a narrative ethics of criticism? Girard’s mimetic theory is radical, which means it must be religious. And this means that to get at its implications, to consider any alternatives which shed light on the human condition and human freedom, it is necessary to go through the Cross. One cannot go around it, over it, or under it; it is necessary to go through it.

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4. The Mimetic Theory with Transcendental Revelation

Eric Gans takes religion seriously and does not formally dismiss or bracket it. However, whether it amounts to anything other than part of the formal structure of his theory of “generative anthropology” is an open question for me. Although he emphasizes the importance of the “material referent,” the victim,[38] and has referred in his Anthropoetics columns to the diasparagmos or dismembering and dividing up of the victim, I am not sure that this is necessary to his theory.

The scene Gans describes in Science and Faith is that of a group of pre-humans whose appetites are excited by the animal that has just been felled by their blows. They each notice the appropriative movements that all the others are making and so each one aborts his gesture lest a battle among themselves erupt. This abortive gesture is the ostensive designation of the desired object. The ostensive gesture is imprinted in their memories and is the beginning of representation through language. This initial pointing to or showing of the designated object simultaneously contains the seed of the distinction between “it” or “that” and “us,” and so is the first stage of human community properly understood. It implies the two further structural forms of language which would evolve. The designated object implies the imperative, the grammatical form of command, saying in effect that you must cooperate and you must not fight over the object. But for human being as homo sapiens to emerge it was necessary to reach a third structural form, the declarative, the grammatical form of statement, saying in effect that there is something other than the designated object–gods, community, prestige, property, power, ritual, story, etc.–everything associated with representation, that is, with language and culture, by which human beings protect themselves from the originary danger and attempt to find meaning.

This is an interesting and meaningful originary hypothesis, and its structure is the same as Girard’s model.[39] Of course, Gans would certainly not want to restrict the originary scene to a hunting situation. But a reasonable inference from what he says in Science and Faith and many of his Anthropoetics columns is that the designated object could be anything. He has lately mentioned that he will return to focus on the dividing up of the victim, but the material consequences of this for the formal argument of his theory are not apparent. On the other hand, for Girard the originary scene must center on the human victim as designated object. Only this hypothesis would account for the power of the cultural system based on supplements or substitutions. The universal taboos revolve around murder, particularly parricide and incest, the two most threatening dangers to the order and peace of human community. It is simply more hypothetically reasonable and elegant to hold that in sacrifice, for example, an animal could be substituted for a human victim, or that a gift could be devoted in place of animal or human, but the other way around is difficult to conceive. Why would a human community increase the danger to itself by substituting one of its members for a non-human victim or object?

It is significant that Gans predicates two and only two fundamental revelations: “that of the event at the origin of man and that of the burning bush, which gave birth to the conception of the one God that is shared by all Western religions and their secular derivatives.”[40] The revelation at the burning bush (Exodus 3) presupposes the ostensive dimension of language and includes the imperative and declarative. The revelatory advance it achieves is “the separability of the exchange of representations from the exchange of things.”[41] The “big man” had always been necessary in human culture. As the given community’s representation of the designated object as well as the source of imperatives and expressions of sacred truth, he had been the one who, in principle, divided up the goods. He was, of course, both divider and divided, ruler and scapegoat whose power and authority lay in a delayed sentence of execution, as Girard has noted. He was the sacred center of presence and absence, of actualization and deferral. In the burning bush episode a new revelation enters human history: the “big man,” God, or God through Moses, is no longer needed to divide up the goods. My own way of putting this is that the revelation of ehyeh asher ehyeh to Moses (“I am who I am” or “I will be what/who I will be” or “I will become what/whom I will become”) as the one who commissions him to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt is a negative witness against the méconnaissance of the basis of culture. The signs and symbols of Israel would henceforth register a “No!” to all systems of the visible sacred in order to affirm a vision of human liberation and human community based on covenant and law.

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There is a Talmudic story about the role of the sages in relation to revelation and supernatural intervention. As the rabbis were arguing over a topic, some appealled to miraculous intervention. Rabbi Eliezer went all the way and called upon “heaven” (God) to prove he was right, and a heavenly voice said “The Halakah [the oral-Mishnaic law] is always with him.” Rabbi Jeremiah, unfazed, said, “The Law was given us from Sinai. We pay no attention to a heavenly voice. For already from Sinai the Law said, By a majority you are to decide.’”[42] Rabbi Jeremiah’s dictum was a homiletical “stretch,” as we say, based on Exodus 33:2, but its logic is implicit in the burning bush revelation as interpreted by Gans. The separability of the exchange of words from the exchange of things means that there should no longer be a “big man,” the god or hero/scapegoat, charged with sacral power and interfering in human responsibilities. Human responsibilities for Israel are grounded and circumscribed by the Torah.

Thus the Christian revelation centered in Christ and the New Testament Gospels is simply a further working out of what had already been fully revealed. Christ is a reminder of the victim in the originary scene, and through Christianity the disclosure of human equality, understood as mutual access to language, is spread throughout the world. But I am uneasy about revelation in Gans’ theory: it remains at the level of the transcendental. That is, the elegance of “minimality” is based on the a priori of language which is not internally and necessarily connected with what is real. Or to qualify the last statement, the emergence of language is real but it is not tied to human victimization or to any specific object; any object of desire will do, so it seems. The scenario of its emergence simply follows the necessity of reason to supply reasons or principles from language itself. To put it formulaically:

(1) Something means (2) Something is meant (3) Something = (1) Signifier (2) Signified (3) Referent.

Another way to put it: (1) Object (2) Mediation through sign (3) Uttering of sign = (1) Victim (2) Sign as sound-image (3) Utterance which defers desire for object-victim.

The revelation is only in the most formal sense tied to a real event or series of events stemming from a predicament. The revelation of the originary scene reveals the predicament and overcomes it at the same time. The deferral of violence through language already contains the revelation of the detachment of words from things and universal access of all to language; but what is contained in the twofold sense of content, initially implicit, and being kept within limits, is released in the founding revelations of Judaism and Christianity. The problem of mimesis becomes much less significant, although it does help to explain the hold of Christ on Christians, whereas the Jews have had the revelation through Moses and the Torah to enable them to sort out and control mimesis.

******************************************************In my conclusion concerning the work of Livingston and Siebers I asked whether the perspective and implications of Girard’s own development of the mimetic model could be properly understood and appreciated apart from a real engagement with its religious foundation. It is a radical theory, i.e., religious. Although Gans is a critic of religion who has very constructive things to say about the history, texts, symbols, and ideas of Judaism and Christianity (e.g., the doctrine of the Trinity), I wonder whether his generative anthropology has lost the really powerful roots of Girard’s mimetic theory by transcendentalizing, in effect, the originary scene. The dialectical poles of Girard’s thinking are mimetic predicament and mimetic liberation. Has Gans supplemented them with the signified as imagined object of desire and the signifier as word-concept which points to absence and defers desire and violence? For him too is there no salvation because there is no predicament, but simply a series of problems to be solved against the backdrop of language?

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