Author: staceymeeker

In December 2014, the Association recherches mimétiques held a one-day colloquium on Girard and Sartre at the (new) Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Preparing my paper gave me the opportunity to reread after many years the passages of L’être et le néant in which Sartre introduces the categories of being and especially, nothingness.

Sartre’s fundamental object of investigation is the post-phenomenological, “existential” concern of Heidegger: the state of (human) being-in-the world, and what the human and the world must be in order that the relationship between them be possible. The main point of my talk was to point out the anthropological implications of Sartre’s conception of nothingness, which like all “existential” concepts remains nominally metaphysical while becoming an instrument for exploring the scenic, intentional human world. This is particularly true of Sartre, whose emphasis on pure negativity, in contrast with the more richly experiential concepts of Heidegger, makes him more attuned to the fundamental paradox of the human dependence on representation, which can best be expressed in metaphysical terms as the addition of “nothingness” to what had previously been the compact fullness of the world.

I have always been struck by the anthropological aptness of Sartre’s notion that we are separated from being by nothingness and that only humans experience nothingness or any other form of negativity. There is no primordial absence from which either being in general or the human for-itself emerges; l’homme est l’être par qui le néant vient au monde; man is the being by/through whom nothingness comes into the world (60). No doubt being-in-itself precedes nothingness, but this being—of whose preexistence to us only we are conscious—is “massive,” without negativity or absence—in a word, unthematized by thought (or rather, we would insist, by language). “If nothingness founds negation, it is because it holds within it as its essential structure the no.” (54) It is curiously characteristic of Sartre that even no, French non, is presented as a concept rather than a word that one speaks, or even thinks. Sartre recognizes as our experience of nothingness only what he calls négatités (negativities), negations of specific human expectations, such as “the absence of Pierre,” “insufficient money to pay the fare.” The concept of nothingness is our generalization from such experiences; it is not an anti-substance in itself.

Rereading Sartre’s text confirmed my sense that his ontology is anthropologically sharper than Heidegger’s, for whom the source of our experience of negativity was our relationship to time, and the key to the human, our awareness of death. As Sartre points out, Heidegger’s notion of nothingness is, unlike his own, suffused with a ghostly substantiality that infects man with a tragic incompleteness. “Heidegger . . . makes of nothingness a kind of intentional correlative of transcendence [that is, the transcendence inherent in consciousness with respect to its content, what we call the situation of this content on the scene of representation] without seeing that he has already inserted nothingness into transcendence itself, as its originary structure.” (55) That is, consciousness itself supplies negation; there is no need to postulate it in the world that consciousness encounters.

This Chronicle attempts to sharpen my Parisian analysis to make clearer where Sartre does and does not anticipate the anthropological understanding of being that has been at the root of GA. I will concentrate my remarks on the passage at the beginning of L’être et le néant following the Introduction, where Sartre engages in a preliminary exploration of man’s relationship to the world.

Sartre has already made clear that, in contrast to being-in-itself, the en-soi, human being for-itself or pour-soi is defined as “being what it is not and not being what it is” (33), a paradoxical formulation that insists on the quality of consciousness as a transcendence of its content, since “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” But next we must understand how this relationship manifests itself in reality. Thus we must begin from some form of behavior (conduite) that allows us to examine the man-world relationship in action. It is here that Sartre will introduce non-being, not as a metaphysical a priori, but as an element of experience.

Seeking for a behavior that might reveal our relationship with Being, Sartre observes that since his discussion of this topic is the result of his having asked a question about it, he is already engaged in a behavior the analysis of whose characteristics might lead him to an answer: that of interrogation, which term supplies the heading of the first section of the first chapter entitled “The Origin of Negation” (pp. 37-40 in the original French edition).

Sartre discovers in his questioning three kinds of non-being. First: an interrogation, he notes, must be able to receive a negative response. Although asking how a given behavior reveals man’s relationship to the world does not allow of a yes-no answer, the question can receive the broader negative response that this behavior simply does not reveal the relationship he seeks. Sartre’s point is that whatever information an interrogation seeks, there is no guarantee that one’s need will be met by the response.

From this possibility, he derives a second negation, the absence of knowledge implied by his asking the question in the first place. One might think that since the question must precede the response, this negation should come first, and that Sartre’s exposition is faulty, but it is justified by the fact that his order follows that of the philosopher’s discovery of the possibilities of non-being inherent in our relationship to being. For if interrogation always succeeded, then the subject would not be aware of his ignorance as a mode of non-being, since to ask the question would be immediately to produce its response. (For example, today, given our access to the Internet, we know we can immediately find the answers to myriad simple questions, and therefore tend to consider ourselves no longer as lacking this knowledge, but as possessing it in a virtual state.) Sartre’s subject discovers the non-being of his not knowing only when his interrogation fails.

Readers of The Origin of Language will recall that a quite similar sequence describes the emergence of the declarative from the (failed) imperative: the subject, having learned the ostensive sign that accompanies the presence of its (originarily sacred) object, uses the sign imperatively to “produce” this object. If this imperative is always satisfied, as a baby’s cry makes “Mommy!” appear, then the sign appears indeed to produce the object, just as Sartre’s always-successful questioner would appear to “produce” a satisfactory answer. In this case, the subject need not consider the imperative as a different form from the ostensive, since one way or another, the sign is always accompanied by its referent, even if in the imperative case it precedes rather than follows it on the scene of representation. It is only when the object is not produced that, in our derivation, declarative language itself takes the place of the otherwise magical fulfiller of the ostensive aim of the imperative; instead of supplying the cat, we merely say it is “on the mat.”

The most important of the three non-beings that Sartre discovers on the way to understanding our relationship to the world is the third, that of limitation. The answer is “limited” in the sense that it may be stated “this, and not otherwise”; determinatio est negatio. In the penultimate paragraph of this section, Sartre sums up his quest and reformulates this response as our fundamental relationship to being:

We went on a search for being and it seemed to us that we were led into the heart of being by the series of our interrogations. Now, it appears that a glance at our interrogation itself, at the moment when we thought we had reached our goal, reveals to us all at once that we are surrounded by nothingness. It is the permanent possibility of non-being, outside us and in us, that conditions our questions about being. And it is again non-being that will circumscribe the answer: what being will be will necessarily stands out against a background of what it is not. Whatever that answer may be, it can be formulated thus: “Being is this, and outside of this, nothing.” (40; emphasis the author’s)

Sartre’s being surrounded by nothingness is a metaphysical version of Durkheim’s sacred surrounded by the profane. In our hypothesis this opposition defines the referent of the originary sign: the participants point with their aborted gesture of appropriation to the central object, the appetite for which is too great to permit its undeferred appropriation by any one or all. This object is the sacred referent of the sign; everything else is “profane,” without significance. And in this most general of respects, nothing in the world of human representation has changed since the origin. A declarative sentence today is about a subject/topic that, for the space of that sentence, is the sole criterion of significance. As far as that sentence is concerned, the rest of the world does not exist; its existence is not denied, but it is simply irrelevant, absent from the scene of representation.

Thus Sartre’s existential discovery procedure follows on a purely conceptual plane the series of linguistic forms that GA derives from the originary hypothesis. Yet this “return to the origin” is not conceived as a temporal retrogression, but a voyage of discovery within the metaphysical realm of mature language. The interrogation of our relationship to being is conceived as a purely conceptual one that forecloses any search for the pre-historical origin of the human relationship to being. The third non-being, “this, and otherwise, nothing,” is not understood as the originary one that underlies the others. Sartre’s remains a metaphysical, not an anthropological humanism. For the latter to be the case, Sartre would have had to justify anthropologically humanity’s choice of being, which is to say that the being that comes into being surrounded by nothingness would have to be motivated by a condition in the prehuman world.

This point having been made, Sartre’s more abstract version of the free human for-itself inspires us to reflect on the preconditions of our hypothesis. On the one hand, the heightened level of mimesis that makes the pecking-order hierarchy impossible is also the precondition for a universe of shared representations where the latter can be guaranteed of sufficient “imitation” from one mind to another on the basis of common appetitive interest. But on the other hand, what makes human intentionality possible is the dense non-significance of the “profane,” the rarity of the sacred/significant that lets us experience it in our world within a protective surrounding of nothingness. We can look around us today and name everything within sight, even write about it in our novels and poems; but our existence as humans is dependent on the fact that our appetites pick out for us a few rare objects as truly significant, objects that are susceptible to become the foci of rivalry, but are also sufficiently detached from their surroundings to lend themselves to the deferral of this rivalry by means of the signifying contemplation whose origin our hypothesis seeks to describe.

Sartre’s understanding of negation is deep enough to be called prelinguistic, in the sense that the exclusion of the non-significant is a precondition of significance. The existence of a scene of representation implies the exclusivity of its content; Durkheim never reflected on the fact that the sacred exists only “surrounded” by the profane. Put another way, if signs were merely “substitutes” for things, as folk semiotics would have it, we would still be in the natural world of Pavlov and Skinner—and of the present-day apostles of “neuromania” denounced by Raymond Tallis. The first purpose of the sign is to pick out from its surroundings a unique being whose election places it in a space of interdiction.

In prefiguring, albeit in the solitude of the isolated pour-soi, the scenic nature of human attention, Sartre anticipates Derrida’s différance— which itself, let us not forget, still retains too much of its metaphysical grounding in the givenness of language to account for anthropogenesis. Both le néant and la différance are modes of non-immediacy that create the space for the scenic intentionality of human consciousness. The difference that moves Derrida into the anthropological domain of the sign, while Sartre remains behind in that of metaphysics is expressed in the first word of the title of Derrida’s first book: La voix et le phénomène. It is the voice, the instrument of speech, that remains absent throughout all of Sartre’s meditation on being. His thinking subject, even when on occasion he engages in conversation, never comes to reflect on the communicative, collective nature and origin of this central human behavior.

Both Sartre and Derrida agree that in order to intend the being surrounded by the non-being of limitation, the subject must forgo the immediate, prehuman connection to it that the originary gesture of appropriation would have attempted to enact, and which even in the absence of such an act would have existed between perception and “reflex” action in the animal brain. The consciousness-of that excludes the rest of the universe (“this, and otherwise, nothing“) is not a mere detection mechanism driven by reflexive tropisms; the nothingness that surrounds meaningful being and that defers its appropriation in reality is already an instrument of deferral in the mind of the human subject.

Sartre brings nothingness and negation into metaphysics not merely, as does Hegel, as logically necessary aspects of being, but as the mark of the human. Sartre purges Heidegger’s metapsychology of its naturalistic haze; negation/non-being is not death, it is not “time,” it is, in effect, a linguistic category. In Sartre the existential (in fact, anthropological) turn taken by Heidegger acquires the rigor of a semiotic, as illustrated in the two originary values of being and nothingness, opposed in Sartre’s title as being and time are not in Heidegger’s. Hence I think it fair to say that L’être et le néant represents the summit and the endpoint of classical metaphysical reflection.

I first heard the expression “digital humanities” when the UCLA Humanities Computing Facility changed its name a few years ago to the Center for the Digital Humanities. I was naive enough to think of this as an awkward attempt at originality, as though any use of computers, even as word-processors, to study the humanities had somehow created a new category of being. It took me a while to realize that this had become a standard term, and that although it did not imply quite the transformation of the substance of either computing or the humanities that the adjective-noun concatenation suggests, it nevertheless (in the manner of Barthes’ écriture, recently described in Chronicle 475) presupposed a transformation in the manner in which they might, and perhaps should, be studied—and in some cases, created.

There is no a priori rule as to what information we should seek to extract from cultural objects and the uses we make of them. The term “digital humanities” nonetheless raises hackles because it cannot avoid suggesting that the humanities “themselves” are digital, that the essence of esthetic experience makes it reveal more via statistical computations than through the traditional holistic interpretative procedures that in literature are called “close reading.”

One should no doubt expect that partisans of a new approach will make propaganda for it, especially since computer-intensive research is a far more attractive magnet for grants than the kind that requires only reading and writing, with an occasional trip to the library for items not yet in Google Books. The idea of DH seems to embody a newly objective, mathematical approach, in contrast with the traditional analog humanities that sought to grasp through esthetic intuition the overall unity—the “wovenness” or textuality— of the individual elements of a work. The esthetic consumer sees the separate signs that compose a work of art as iconic analogues of a reference-world that he imaginarily constructs as real, as a painting is seen as an analog of a real landscape. No doubt one wouldn’t want to prevent people from experiencing artworks in this way, but using this experience as the basis for one’s analyses is to rely on individual subjectivities with all their prejudices, whereas treating the work’s minimal components and/or our reactions to them as raw data allows the researcher to build an extensive data set that can reveal statistically significant patterns.

Whatever DH’s potential accomplishments as the basis of a critical methodology, I think it is far more important as a stimulus to reflection on the sense in which the digital is in fact the originary form of human culture, whose trace can be found in all its “analog” creations—and whose underlying presence has permitted the revolutions of modernism and post-modernism. For the art world was only able to demonstrate that its mimetic structures were not limited to the naiveté of the iconic because the “analog” iconicity of art as a mode of human representation is in fact a secondary accretion on its originarily digital essence.

No one familiar with generative anthropology will be unaware that Durkheim’s fundamental binary, sacred-profane, the anthropological equivalent of metaphysics’ being and nothingness, is the basis of human representation and thus of all human culture. The sign that is the kernel of language and all more complex cultural structures is founded in the first place on the 1-0 distinction between what is significant and what is not. Animals and even plants make such distinctions in practice, moving/growing toward some objects and away from others, and physicists can cite many kinds of polarities such as electric charge, magnetic poles, up and down quarks, etc. But whatever it may mean to speak of the digital nature of reality—and any such blend of physics and metaphysics strikes me as dangerously naïve—it is only with the human that the digital becomes an object of thought. There is less conceptual distance between a flower growing toward the light and an ape choosing a fruit than between the latter and the human designation of an object as the originary referent of the first word, which I have proleptically called the name-of-God. And, precisely, the solemnity we associate with the sacred, the reverence for the originary deferral of violent conflict that defines us as human, is something unknown in “nature.”

For those of us who have been around long enough, it is striking how much, within a relatively unchanged political configuration, attitudes toward textuality have changed. Where anti-capitalists spent the seventies reading Derrida and Althusser and Deleuze and Foucault and combing through the West’s foundational philosophical and literary texts for evidence of oppression—of women by men, “orientals” by occidentals, writing by speech, distance by presence, darkness by light…, all avatars of the originary “oppression” of the profane by the sacred—all this has now been simplified into a victimary mentality that retains the same fundamental oppositions but detaches them from their textual integument, claiming in fact to find them in the most minimal uses of signed interactions as “micro-aggressions.”

In other words, it is no longer necessary to engage with textuality, the “weaving” within which the oppressive bad faith of metaphysics lay concealed from the naive eyes of the masses until it was ferreted out by deconstructory minds of great power and subtlety. Now that “we” have all become aware of this bad faith, like the fabled emperor’s nakedness, it shines out for all to see in every deceitful word uttered by the oppressors, and is denounced by every authentic word uttered by their victims. If indeed conscious cultural reactions are limited to the two fundamental categories of oppression and liberation, it follows that we can only gain objective information about the esthetic effect of artworks by studying the subconscious effects of aggregates. And herein lies the other great advantage of the “digital humanities.” The digital humanist need not espouse victimary thinking in any active sense; DH provides a convenient haven for neutrals, conservatives, and those more numerous who, whatever their personal politics, are just tired of the ever more strident and pervasive victimary politics of the academy. Even if you agree with the principles of victimary thinking, there is little pleasure in obtaining the same results in article after article. If statistical analysis alone can be empirical, so be it.

Hegel might have enjoyed following the dialectic of literary study as it emerged as a discipline in the late 19th century and especially after WWI. The interwar practitioners of “close reading,” notably the so-called New Critics in the US, were generally speaking politically conservative, even reactionary (“Southern Agrarians”). Their interest in close reading was to reaffirm in not-quite-yet-empirical ways the essential complexity and problematicity of modernist culture—in contrast with the “Victorian” culture of the pre-war era—as both a substitute for and a subliminal illustration of the sacred. The “twisted” or “woven” aspect of the “text”—and reading modernist poetry confronts the reader with plenty of weaves and twists—which in the deconstructive era, journals like the 70s-vintage Tel Quel (a title taken from Paul Valéry) would never tire of reweaving into their critical discourse—was a sign of its creative paradoxicality, its ability to bootstrap itself into reality from nothingness, which is indeed the way language, and all culture, self-generates. To return to my original point: the work’s overall potential for abandoning the iconic to become a kind of fetishized thing-in-itself, as a whole as well as in every one of its details, depends on the “digitality” of the creator’s fundamental decision, whether a propos of a detail or of the entire project, simply to posit its significance. As the modernists discovered, the plastic artists most prominently, it is the potential sacrality of the work itself that ontologically precedes and permits its creation. I’m not very impressed with Malevich’s White on White (is it really more of an artwork than Duchamp’s urinal?) but it certainly illustrates the principle that the important thing about esthetic significance is that one can postulate it: this white-on-white square is an artwork, the artwork—the core of human culture itself.

None of this was understood anthropologically; for one thing, New-Critical literary study, in the context of a still relatively confident classical-analytic philosophy, retained the metaphysical tradition’s blind faith in the eternal neutrality of (mature) language, which never needed to be discussed in originary terms. The point of interpreting a poem was to show how the poet’s use of words created a new cultural entity, which we from our perspective might well consider, as the New Critics did via religious models, as a model of the originary creation of culture. For these critics (mostly poets themselves) were very much aware that their admiration for literature and its paradoxes was, at the very least, a kind of displacement, and indeed, a transfiguration, of our reverence for the traditional religious repositories of the sacred.

“Close reading” for the New Critics was essentially a search for and a demonstration of each individual author and work’s implementation of paradox, whose illogic embodies and exemplifies the bootstrapping function of language to create meaning while presenting it as already there. The anti-model of such criticism was banal literalism, the scholastic reading of texts as essentially propositional statements—the model for which had been the traditional study of classical texts, where the difficulties of Greek and Latin made it above all important simply to understand their vocabulary and syntax. Today we might have more tolerance for literalism even in one’s native language, now that the bulk of young people read little if at all in school such writers as Dickens, Fielding, the Bronte sisters, Austen, Melville, Hawthorne, Scott, writings once called the “classics” in an English-language context. I very much doubt that the average high-school student today would be able to read a Dickens novel on any level without spending a good deal of time with a dictionary and perhaps a grammar-book (or website). In any case, the New Critics assumed that students had enough literal understanding to appreciate the inherent paradoxicality of all cultural products. Seen as bringing to light the creation of human culture ex nihilo in a given literary or artistic work, this kind of analysis eschewed any but the vaguest “theories of literature,” but lent itself to systematization through its concern for detail, leading to the stylistic syntheses of European writers such as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Georges Poulet, or in the study of Western art, Wölfflin, Panofsky, Gombrich….

Deconstruction, the beginnings of which we can trace to Barthes’ écriture in the 1950s, was the victimary heir of close reading in what Nathalie Sarraute called the ère du soupçon. It too sought paradox in the workings of the text, but the point was not to celebrate the rich layering that culture built up from its bootstraps, but to denounce the whole construction, necessary and inevitable as it was, as fraudulent. We were, in sum, always already in the domain of Frankfurt’s BS (see again Chronicle 475, or 429). The act of deconstruction was from an anthropological standpoint both admirably subtle and immensely naive, a kind of emperor’s-new-clothes denunciation of a naked body that was only thus once all its cultural integuments had been “deconstructed” away, leaving it to perish in the cold. Since deconstruction remained in the domain of metaphysics, never conceiving that mature language had to be generated out of something simpler, but assuming that it was always already there for all its constructions to be denounced, it had no inherent respect for the paradoxical self-constructions it ingeniously discovered. Derrida’s greatest intuition, that of différance, was in fact not “deconstructive” at all; deferral is precisely what we need in order to construct; it is ultimately the (temporary) interdiction of violence. But Derrida’s adherence to what with all due respect one can only call the imbecility of latter-day European-leftist politics, making heroes of such as Abu Mumia-Jamal, was reflected in the victimary turn of deconstructive thought, which made not just the “West” but all civilization, all language, even that of “Rousseauean” noble savages (cf Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes tropiques and its famous leçon d’écriture—see Chronicle 388), dependent on oppression—and not just of women by men, for Derrida’s world was always already hierarchical; “big-men” haunted the very beginnings of humanity.

What is relevant to our present subject is the draining-away of textuality by a radically close reading that, rather than seeking each text’s uniqueness, sought rather the common ground of all texts in the authorities’ self-promoting pseudo-demonstration that the oppression from which they benefited was inscribed in nature. Deconstruction in its better moments is indeed a mode of close reading that allows for genuine insight, even if always associated with a negative valence. But once one had shown that texts A, B, C, … are despite their ostensible variety all agents of a societal écriture, in their contempt for which the deconstructors went far beyond (and in the opposite direction from) Barthes’ denunciation of Stalinist rhetoric in Le degré zéro de l’écriture, there seemed little point in continuing to cultivate the exacting practice of close reading for so little gain.

The era of deconstruction, which retained a European (or as they now say, Eurocentric) focus, was succeeded by the post-colonial or poco era, in which the high cultures of Europe surrender their cultural energy to their former colonies, subordinating any attempt at literary or artistic evaluation to the considerations of victimary politics. I am not without sympathy for this undertaking, however much posturing it gives rise to, for there is indeed something of interest in attempts at creating new national cultures—if only in judging whether the new can become more than a resentful double of the old. But by its very “sociological” nature, post-colonial literary study can rarely afford the luxury of close reading. There is just too much cultural alienation to be overcome for there to develop the mutual confidence between author and reader within which the confident creation of an original “textuality” can take place, and a critical clerisy arise to interpret it on the example of the symbiosis between the New Critics and modernist writers in the inter-war Anglosphere. The French-African or -Caribbean author is generally writing in a non-native language and primarily for a non-local audience. However subtle his own sense of language and culture, he cannot share it confidently with his readership in the manner of the founders of the great literatures of Europe (and, presumably, of Asia). Or to put it in other terms, there is too much to tell, as opposed to construct out of language alone; before we can witness how well African writers create edifices of words, we have to know what life in Africa is all about. The result is that literary study becomes more sociological than textual; form is demoted to the handmaiden of content.

It is in the final stage of this draining away of textuality that we reach the “digital humanities.” If all interpretation, all unraveling of the mysteries of textual intricacy has been shown to lead to the same set of “phallogocentric” myths, and yet we all continue nonetheless to obtain esthetic pleasures from artworks, then the only empirical realities with which we have been objectively in contact, the words and syntactical structures of the text itself (or the forms and colors of a painting, the notes and chord progressions of a piece of music…) can alone reveal to us the authentic roots of what we experience as the “unity in variety” of esthetic pleasure. And since as necessarily analog-iconic consumers of the artwork, we lack conscious access to the effect on us of these elements, the only means to discover the authentic human (anthropological?) core of our esthetic experiences is by treating these and other “objective” textual elements as so much data to be processed. This perspective accepts that there is indeed something in the text worthy of anthropological interest, but that only digital methods can bring it into objective focus.

I hope this discussion makes clear that, however caricaturally reductive its scholarship has often been, it is unfair to accuse the digital humanities of disrespect for their subject-matter. On the contrary; rightly understood, the instinct of the digital humanist is to preserve the sanctity of the artwork by removing it from the reader’s overt, conscious judgment, which in an academic universe dominated by victimary thought can only arrive at a predictable, and generally negative, political conclusion. By “bracketing” textual consciousness, corrupt even at its most subtle, the digital humanist becomes able to examine how texts and artworks in general interact on an unconscious level with our psychological and even physiological mechanisms. And although such studies are admittedly best carried out through laboratory analyses of human subjects, experiments are costly and time-consuming, subject to IRB restrictions, and generally unavailable to those with humanistic training. For humanists, the alternative option is to study the texts or other artworks themselves, but as aggregates of minimal signifying elements whose variation over various parameters—nation, era, author, genre, gender…—allows the analyst to ferret out, not “meanings” exactly, but correlations of these elements with historical moments, social classes, genders, national cultures, that provide information about humankind as a whole.

But the faith behind such studies remains that of all semiological systems: that a work of art, like any cultural object, is a complex of binary choices between what is significant and what is not, whether it be a word, a phoneme, a pixel, a timbre… We take this for granted, and indeed can find “choice” mechanisms in nature that operate on what appear to be similar principles; but the colors of a bird’s wing are not “chosen” but selected, whereas the artist or poet chooses the elements of the artwork in an effort to infuse it with sacred Being, now as at the moment of human origin.

A subsequent Chronicle will discuss more concretely the theory and practice of the “digital humanities.”

Whatever the details, the central lesson René Girard teaches us is that the sacred is humanity’s way of controlling its own potential violence, and in the process, becoming human.

In the everyday life of the “West,” which in its better moments includes virtually the totality of human activity, in Nairobi or Bamako or Mumbai or Shanghai as in New York or Paris, the world of work and commerce (and generational ambition and the cycle of life) functions peacefully according to apparently reasonable rules, and violence is not something we have to think about outside “the media” that showcase symbolic instances of it. There are parts of the world that witness violence every day, but if the West is anything, it is the absence of expected daily violence, the more or less successful functioning of more or less democratic market society. This is a society whose history I will not trace here save to point out that its civilizational basis is Judeo-Christian, and that the tension between, very quickly, Jewish firstness and Christian anti-firstness has been the source of its unique political and economic organizational strength.

But the West’s insulation from violence weakens its understanding of the sacred. The instances of violence that frequently dominate the media are irruptions of the sacred into daily life, and our reaction to them often seeks to sweep them aside as merely pathological rather than religious phenomena, as though the presence of the former made it indecent or “superstitious” to include the latter.

1. Let’s begin with a semi-comic example: “Sony Pictures Cancels Holiday Release of ‘The Interview’ After Threats.” It ensued that after Obama’s chastisement of Sony, there was a limited opening of the film, and given all the supplementary publicity, most of us are likely to see a paid or free copy of it within the next few months.

Nonetheless, the one country in the world that would seem to be the richest target for satire was placed temporarily off limits because of its ability to retaliate, just as the famous Muhammad cartoons were not reproduced in the Yale volume on the subject. Hitler was a pretty nasty guy, but he didn’t prevent Chaplin from making The Little Dictator, and mockeries of the Soviet world were not uncommon during the cold war and even before; Ninotchka was a gentle satire of Stalinism but a satire nonetheless. But the interconnected world of the Internet is a world of universal liability and potentially universal terror.

It is also, and not coincidentally, a victimary world where the West, and its “hegemonic” figures: straight white males, the institutions they dominate, police forces, Christianity, European nationalism, fossil fuel energy generation, and of course Israel and the Jews, are singled out by their enemies as objects of unrelenting hostility, precisely because, as agents of Western Civilization, they can be relied upon not to react with the kind of thuggish violence to be expected from the forces arrayed against it. Ironic that on the same day that Sony pulled its NK satire, Obama decided to open full diplomatic relations with Cuba, one of the uglier tyrannies of our age. Try showing a Castro satire in Havana.

I’m not sure that this is precisely what Girard meant in Things hidden… by the return of the sacred upon us, but it certainly functions like it. What else is the sacred than our means of controlling human violence? But to take it seriously, it must be enforced by human violence. If I want to “persuade” you that Allah is the One God and that Muhammad is his Prophet, or that Kim Jong Il shot eleven holes-in-one the first time he played golf, the simplest way is to threaten to kill you if you disagree. (NK can’t exactly kill us, but it can certainly mess up our web sites.)

2. The semi-farcical NK-Interview saga nearly coincides with the lamentations over the “revelation” of the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques or “tortures” inflicted on prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere. What most strikes me in these discussions is not the moral posturing, as though it would be a morally unambiguous decision not to waterboard (let alone really torture) someone whose information might save a few thousand, or indeed, billion lives (because even to save the entire planet from destruction, torture can never be justified). It’s the utterly nonsensical line that’s constantly repeated, no doubt by people who never met a Mexican drug lord, a Gestapo interrogator, or a member of the good old Mafia, that physical torture doesn’t generate useful information. Why then do criminal and police-state operatives without exception make use of torture to obtain information? I guess they just aren’t sophisticated enough to realize that the best method is to gain the confidence of their potential informants through friendly conversation over a cup of tea.

What really amazes me is not only that this obvious point is not simply taken for granted, but that it is never even mentioned. Never have I seen this analogy brought up in the media, no doubt because we don’t want to be identified with Nazis and criminals. And given that torture is never effective, one wonders why any other exercise of force should be any more so. For from a truly sophisticated perspective, violence is never really productive, war is never the answer.

Except when North Koreas or jihadists are powerful enough to scare people into obeying their desires. Outing emails and financial records shows the North Koreans and their cyber-allies could perhaps do even worse; chopping off heads and massacring school children shows the Islamists are utterly ruthless. Such considerations have been good enough for Sony, for Yale Press, and for many other institutions in the West.

If this all sounds terribly simplistic, it’s because it is; that’s what the sacred is really about. Kim Jong Un is potentially as sacred as Muhammad; neither can be attacked with impunity. No doubt these are not summits of religious subtlety; and it is no accident that the modern world, with its cyberspace and nanotechnology, is the product of the rather more subtle Judeo-Christian approach to the sacred, which has not always eschewed physical coercion but does not put it at the center of its religious practice. But as a result, we in the West—not to speak of the Christians in the Middle East—are increasingly less in a position to enforce even a modicum of respect for what we have traditionally held sacred.

3. The Sony-hacking exploit by NK and friends was a refreshing change from the unending stream of Islamist violence, which the “mainstream media” still persists in refusing to connect to Islam. Thus the New York Times and other mainstream news media long failed to indicate that the recent killer of two NY policemen was a Muslim who (as one could learn from “alternate” media) posted a page of the Koran on his Facebook page.

No doubt this kind of low-key violence in the West, coupled with massacres in non-Western countries such as Pakistan, Nigeria, and Yemen, is not about to bring down Western Civilization. Isolated incidents get more publicity than they “deserve,” and inspire new incidents. Yet an increasing number of these incidents, however otherwise “overdetermined,” combine two major ingredients: victimary resentment and Islam. If the papers downplay the second, their justification, feeble as it is, is that the resentment is the active element, and Islam provides ideological support but rarely if ever the primary motivation—in Brinsley’s case, desire to “avenge” Brown and Garner. Even if the “caliph” tells his followers to kill Christians, Jews, etc., those outside the Middle East who obey his command must harbor deep personal resentments, knowing that they will almost certainly be killed or jailed for long periods—or commit suicide, as did Brinsley. Nonetheless, it is the combination that is essential because, in contrast with individual malcontents and mental cases, those who could be said to make Herostratus their model (see Chronicle 177) by seeking fame in the destruction of what others hold sacred, the Islamist “lone wolf” acts as part of a worldwide movement that he has at least some reason to hope will be ultimately successful. Where Herostratus could merely deface the sacred he rejected, the Muslim terrorist affirms a sacred of his own.

In response to this latter point, some are tempted to see Islamism as a mimetic doubling of Western modes, whether of the romantic “nihilist” or, in another vein, Guy Debord’s société du spectacle, pointing to ISIS’ brilliant exploitation of Western publicity techniques in its skillful creation of highly sophisticated videos of beheadings as well as of recruitment materials and protocols. No doubt it is not useful to understand the current challenge posed by Islam to the West in terms of Samuel Huntington’s Spenglerian notion of the “clash of civilizations.” Islam’s opposition to the West is not, and never was, that of an “external” civilization. Islam began in the seventh century not as a “civilization” but as a marginal excrescence on the (Judeo-Christian) “West.” A glance at the Koran will tell you that most of its religious material is derived at a few removes from the Judeo-Christian Bible. But so what? Instead of claiming to “supersede” the Old and New Testaments, Moslems just say that the others were inauthentic copies and the Koran the “uncreated” original. No textual analysis can infirm such a claim. However crude we may find the trumping of history by the ahistorical, it is effective in its way, for the sacred is in the first place a matter of faith. Islam is mimetic of Judeo-Christianity, yes, but not uncreatively; it is mimetic by a bald-faced denial of the mimetic that is proof against any psychanalyse existentielle.

In the contemporary world, a young man of the Herostratian variety is indeed a “romantic,” with all the negative connotations of such a thing in the Girardian universe of the mensonge romantique. But if this “romantic” can quote a page of the Koran while killing a couple of policemen then, whatever his personal drama, he has contributed to the glory of Islam as the one true solution to such Western “romantic” anxieties. We can note the “romantic” traits of a Brinsley, or a Nidal Hasan for that matter, but what is important is that they are integrated into a movement that is not romantic at all; one that, as we see in the territories controlled by ISIS, is not imitating the West but following its own, brutal laws. Of course the Islamic offensive takes place within an economy and culture defined by the “West.” But just as in the seventh century, that makes it more, not less powerful.

Islam is not a truly exotic import such as Buddhism or Yoga. It is the vehicle, as it was on its creation, of the resentful outsiders of Western civilization, a vehicle that, after becoming wildly successful, could for a time put away its resentfulness and become a source of legendary plenty and generosity, as in those thousand-and-one “orientalist” tales that we are now told to feel guilty about. But with the creation of Israel in particular we are seeing reemerge the resentful impulse that created Islam in the first place. Its singular aim is conquest, entailing destruction or utter subordination of what was there before. It will exploit Western military and communications technology, and every other aspect of modernity it finds useful, but we should beware of thinking that it is in any way “mimetically” beholden to these technologies.

In a recent discussion, Matthew Taylor (to whom I apologize in advance if I am misconstruing his point) suggested a sharper comparison between the Islamist opposition to Western market society and that of the nineteenth-century Romantics. In the latter’s hostility to the market we can observe a “transcendental” attempt to in fact dominate the market; with the Romantic Soul, as with the outrageously overpriced courtesans of the same period, the priceless always costs a little more. But the Romantics were indeed part of market society, the genius of which is precisely that it can indeed encompass the “cultural” transcendence they sought—and even, with great violence, that of Romanticsm’s twentieth-century political heirs, Fascism and Communism. But whether or not this be the case for individual Islamists, it is emphatically not the case for Islamism as a whole.

As Girard in his final work describes Islam, that of the seventh century as that of today,

Certes, il y a du ressentiment dans son attitude à l’égard du judéo-christianisme et de l’Occident. Mais il s’agit aussi d’une religion nouvelle, on ne peut le nier. [No doubt there is resentment in its attitude toward Judeo-Christianity and the West.But it is also a new religion, one cannot deny this. (My emphasis.)] (Achever Clausewitz 360)

I share with Daniel Pipes, who knows far more about these matters than I, a guarded optimism that Islam is not ultimately incompatible with a humanistic, ecumenical compromise with its fellow “Abrahamic” religions. But this is not going to be accomplished by putting together “interfaith” conferences. It can only happen with the defeat of Islamist fanaticism, and for this to happen, the West is going to have to assert its own values with real conviction. We are going to have to recall, in practice as well as in theory, that the Judeo-Christian tradition embodies not a forgetting of the originary relationship between religion and violence, but a superior understanding of this relationship.

To give Girard the last word:

Il faut donc réveiller les consciences endormies. Vouloir rassurer, c’est toujours contribuer au pire. [Hence we must awaken the sleeping consciences. To act reassuring always makes things worse.] (364)

Preamble

The rules of logic and mathematics are not guarantees of anything more than their own consistency. They have no weight in ethical arguments, not even against illogic. The greatest achievement of human organization, one whose fragility is once more becoming apparent, is the possibility in liberal democracy of organizing a political marketplace in which ideas can be discussed and disputed in a more or less rational fashion, after which groups of citizens decide at different levels on who will represent them, on what laws to enact, and how the various powers shall be distributed.

We all know this, of course, but when the system works badly, there will always be those who long for a more decisive one, that of China for example, or that of ISIS. But although I find disturbing the rapidity with which the dominant voices in our intellectual world have turned their backs on compromise and demonized their adversaries, I also find encouraging that democratic means remain to right the balance. The November 2014 elections clearly showed that the public repudiates, if not all Democratic policies, then certainly the principle that those who stand by these policies should dominate the government. We have grown to expect the poor-sport reaction of the president, not to speak of the outright denial of such as Rep. Wasserman-Schulz, but sore losers are losers nonetheless, and we can hope that the damage so far done by the administration’s victimary stance to America’s international standing and influence remains repairable.

Yet I still have doubts about the long-term viability of our political marketplace. In the last Chronicle I alluded to the asymmetrical relationship between left and right as described by Charles Krauthammer: the right thinks the left is stupid; the left thinks the right is evil. Except that the first part of the sentence isn’t really true; conservative critics of the left see it not as stupid but as dogmatic and fanatical, not incapable of justifying evil acts in its moral arrogance. Let farmland be ruined for the sake of a protected fish, let Iraq be ruined for the sake of ending our interference in its affairs. The left-right opposition is that between morality and firstness, and since the two are not simply different values of the same parameter (e.g., “more or less government/regulation/taxation”) but two orthogonal values, compromise is always problematic. The victimary are moralists; they tend to see their adversaries as morally insensitive, or simply evil. In contrast, because the partisans of firstness, or “freedom,” are reacting against an excess of morality, their hostility is tempered by the impossibility of rejecting morality altogether.

Moralists revel in rejecting firstness, and not always hypocritically: think of the excesses of racial guilt described in the Dec 1 Weekly Standard article by Joseph Bottum, “The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas.” Bottum is correct, of course, to see the Left’s passions as caricatural fragments of Christianity, but as with other conservative critics of the victimary, he is satisfied with the analogy without grasping the unity of the phenomenon, with its symmetrical hostility to Israel and to fossil fuels. The powers of antisemitism and victimary moralism in the West seem to be constantly on the rise, in tandem with the rise of militant Islam. Thus I cannot help wondering whether November’s election is a step on the path to sanity or just another pendulum swing within an overall movement toward self-destruction.

1. BS

In some recent Chronicles (see especially Chronicles 429, 453, 454) I discussed the relevance of Harry Frankfort’s concept of bulls*** (hereafter BS; the text is online at http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf and elsewhere) to understanding the function of language in general. As I pointed out, while the very idea of identifying a variety of language whose use is fundamentally indifferent to its truth-value is a stroke of genius, the purview of this mode is much greater than its creator makes it out to be. Rather than seeing BS as a parasite on “healthy” language that, whether in the real world or a fictional one, normally makes a claim of verifiable truth, perhaps the simplest way of understanding how GA differs from “philosophy” is to realize that BS is the fundamental mode of language, and that the idea of determining truth-values along Parmenides’ “way of truth” is one of humanity’s great achievements. (Not the greatest, however; as Girard has taught us, we are Jews before we are Greeks, and the Oneness of God—even for those of us who don’t believe in God—defers our conflicts and provides the anthropological basis on which truth-seeking can lead to science and modernity. For if language is BS before it tells the truth, then we have to respect its non-truth element a bit more… than is implied by calling it BS, a dismissive term whose paradoxical relationship to the sacred is reflected in its obscenity.)

What Frankfurt seems to hint at but never makes explicit in his discussion of “BSing” is that BS works because instead of either trying to correspond with worldly truth or falsify it in a lie, it creates its own truth. As our increasingly cynical politics realizes a bit more each day, the important thing is the narrative. Language isn’t just a passive means of reflecting reality; we are not usually in a science lab where every assertion must be unambiguously verified. In situations of any complexity, language helps shape human reality to the point where it’s no longer clear what the “reality” would have been without the language. BS in our everyday social context is aberrant only in relying, whether cynically or naively, on its reality-shaping power to the point that the listener is led to believe it, at least for a moment, despite a lack of evidence and even an awareness of improbability. Whence various forms of “truthing,” Holocaust denial, and as I mentioned in a previous Chronicle, accusations of flying on broomsticks or bleeding children to make matzos.

Like all cultural categories, BS is both rooted in a particular social context and revelatory of the human in general. It is the double nature of such categories that inspired Hegel’s historical system in which the virtual becomes the actual, although there is no justification for assuming, as Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama and other Hegelians do, that there can ever be some final point when all of “being” or “the human” has been revealed that we can call the “end of history.”

In a transhistorical sense, BS refers to language’s primary function, deferring conflict by affirming shared meanings, “telling people what they want to hear,” collectively or individually. But the birth of this particular term, its easygoing and depreciative vulgarity implying no particular political position except a vague hostility to the normality that BS promotes, could only have taken place in an era of relatively uncontested normality, such as obtained toward the end of the Cold War. Frankfort’s essay dates from 1986, toward the end of Reagan’s presidency. It is doubtful that such a concept would have emerged in the more politically fraught 60s and 70s, and inconceivable that it would appear after 9/11 and the increasingly critical threat from Islamic supremacism.

The purpose of BS, in the broadest sense, is to tell people what they want to hear, that is, to achieve social harmony, or what Durkheim called “solidarity”—the point being, as Durkheim never points out, that this solidarity is not a steady state but that it is perturbed by our tendencies toward conflict, tendencies that may be summed up by the Girardian notion of mimetic desire. There are more or less anodyne forms of BS, and it is no accident that for his single even remotely concrete example, Frankfort chooses the particularly anodyne one of patriotic banalities at a Fourth of July speech, which evoke our shared American heritage. Such an attempt today would be likely to arouse in “progressive” circles an opposing discourse in which the American heritage is defined by slavery, dispossession of the Indians, etc. But clearly this oppositional language was not conceivable in Frankfurt’s scenario, where there is nothing controversial about the patriotic content.

As a mode of political discourse, BS in its basic sense presupposes a liberal-democratic system of government, the kind that for Fukuyama characterizes the “end of history.” In such circumstances, those of a near-universally accepted normality, the requirement that the expression of common values be uncoercive and give every appearance of reflecting sentiments already universally shared makes their official enunciation seem banal and superfluous, repeating expected clichés rather than either stating facts or imposing articles of belief. In order to generalize this lack of verified truth to a universal feature of cultural language, we must extrapolate from the specific “lightness” of such discourse, an artifact of the relative lack of social tension in classical liberal democracy, a point we might make more specific in reference to the conditions of American society in the immediate postwar period when such tensions were perhaps at their lowest. The success of the civil rights movement in the South, energized by postwar victimary consciousness, was a triumph of this national unity over the post-Civil War regionalism that had survived in “Jim Crow” and that those in the larger society could be made to see without much difficulty as fundamentally incompatible with its view of normality as embodied in the nation’s founding documents.

The normality that political BS expresses, which was introduced to those of Frankfurt’s and my generation in elementary school with Thanksgiving pageants, the Pledge of Allegiance, etc., seems to have gradually been all but eliminated from public discourse. Once the society as a whole no longer shares such core values, the category of (political) BS as in Frankfort’s example loses its viability and is transformed into something else.

2. Ecriture

BS falls from its naive state into the bad faith of what Barthes baptized back in 1953 as écriture (which is just the French word for writing, but also translates as scripture, as in les saintes écritures), where the presuppositions that unitary BS merely reinforced become specific items of propaganda that the BS’s function is to impose on the potentially recalcitrant. In contrast with BS, écriture, which Barthes associated above all with communist rhetoric, is not merely unconcerned with demonstrating its conclusions but dishonest in presenting as conclusions what are in fact presuppositions. Whereas BS’s reaffirmation of normality is typical of political discourse in a democracy, écriture (as Barthes’ original examples bring out) is characteristic of autocracies where the regime sets its opposition beyond the pale of common humanity. In totalitarian regimes, this establishes what presents itself as a realm of normality and is actually a reign of terror, the polarity of course admitting of intermediate degrees. The difference between the boring Independence Day speech and the boring article in Pravda is that although neither conveys real information, the second seeks to impose as universally accepted the values of the regime that its subjects are not likely to accept on their own, but to perceive themselves as obliged to affirm for their own safety. The left in recent times has tended to assimilate the old normal to this state, and by this means to undermine and largely eliminate it.

Whereas BS creates solidarity mostly by emphasizing the positive, écriture‘s evocation of a spurious solidarity is characterized by an emphasis on combating the society’s enemies, or in Girard’s terms, its scapegoats. Although in both cases one is using apparently empirical discourse to comfort an audience, what is comforted by écriture is chiefly resentment. The old totalitarian regimes, Fascism, Nazism, Communism, engaged in écriture on a grand scale; Orwell’s 1984 saw “doublespeak” as these regimes’ essential mode of communication. As indeed it was, even affecting the natural sciences, as in the disastrous application of Trofim Lysenko’s “materialist” Lamarckian theories to Soviet agriculture. Meanwhile, these societies slaughtered those designated as “enemies of the state” on the basis of the same kind of murderous BS as the old accusations of Jews poisoning wells. To the extent that BS is “language you want to hear,” its accusations do not obey the laws of evidence: the BS-accusation is welcome, its refutation is not. Which is to say that although we can call it BS, those affected by it cannot; they are imprisoned in a world-view that cannot admit its arbitrariness—which is the effective definition of écriture.

Whereas the historically specific aspect of BS marks it as an expression of the terminal self-consciousness of a “naive” state of normality, historically best embodied in the 1950s, since the breakdown of normality in the late 1960s, the political debate in the US has moved increasingly into the domain of écriture, reflecting the lack of consensus as to its fundamental presuppositions. The two sides are not simply symmetrical; the right continues to assert the traditional norms with their prima facie acceptance of firstness (“freedom”), whereas the left extends its critique of difference ever farther into the previously unregulated domains of civil society. In the era of victimocracy, the old discourse of normality with its clichés has lost its legitimacy in the public forum (whence the contempt heaped on the “Tea Party” for continuing to defend it), and the “debate” such as it is pits an increasingly aggressive victimary écriture, for which virtually any interaction between hegemonic and subaltern groups constitutes at least a microaggression, against a defensive rhetoric of common sense. To the aggressive programs of agencies such as the EPA or the Holder-Perez plan to apply “disparate impact” theory to housing configurations, the right proposes inaction rather than a contrary plan. Disparate impact and microaggression may be taken as model forms of victimary écriture, since they imply that every disadvantage suffered by groups designated as victimary is a form of oppression, either collective or local.

3. Scripture

The only real alternative to écriture today, one that is coming to attract an increasing number of adherents among the disaffected in the West, is that of dogmatic assertion as practiced by radical Islam. The non-empirical discourse of the sacred is the origin of BS and of all discourse, but insofar as it retains for the believer an explicit scriptural guarantee, it can be treated as BS only at one’s peril. Radical Islam’s popularity comes from its uncompromising insistence on the sacred provenance of its assertions, and on the duty of every Muslim to impose them on the world to the fullest extent of his ability. Of the three “Abrahamic” religions that rely on scripture, Islam in its radical, jihadist form is the most dogmatically scriptural in that its commands are not subject to the external interpretive criteria of “natural religion.” The “ten commandments” are part of scripture, but they are also part of an ethical discourse of universal human equality; this is not the case in Islam, where, for example, various injunctions to slay unbelievers, Jews, etc., are often quoted as absolutes, at the antipodes of the Christian explicit extension to all humanity of the Bible’s universal ethic.

“Normality” is not a well-defined category; it is a state of mind, real or enforced, and the past few decades lead me to think that the end of the quasi-consensus of the 1950s that allowed for the emergence of the category of BS marks the end of politically significant BS as well. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Can Western liberal democracy survive if even such corrective events as the recent national elections fail to restore the balance between difference and uniformity, firstness and moral equality, that it is the primary task of democracy to mediate? Faith in the system implies confidence that a way will be found, that new modes of “dialectic” will emerge to permit fruitful discussion and compromise.

As Marx (or Lenin) might have said, the swings of the historical dialectic are unpredictable, but the real question is whether their overall movement is in the right direction. As a Fukuyamist, I have seen no reason not to believe that liberal democracy in the broadest sense is the most advanced conceivable human social system; neither China nor ISIS is likely to prove me wrong. The real challenge to the West is not that Islamism threatens to build a more advanced society, but that it threatens to destroy advanced society, and if it can acquire sufficient weaponry, human life itself. The West cannot afford the complacency of being the “most advanced” civilization; we should not forget that the scientific and technological modernity we enjoy (as Marcel Gauchet has emphasized) is itself the product of a renascence from a previous decline and fall. A second such rebound seems unlikely.

Dreams of technological utopias and “personal immortality” tempt us to take our eyes off the ball. Whatever their greatness, civilizations, like the humblest human societies, survive only so long as they are able to outrun the resentment they generate, both within and beyond their physical borders. The Christian and Jewish societies in the Levant and North Africa learned this lesson the hard way in the 7th century of our era. Let us hope we don’t have to learn it again on a planetary scale.

If you Google victimary you will find that virtually every use of the term can be traced to the Anthropoetics website, mostly to these Chronicles. (Victimocracy has a somewhat wider range.) But it is not just a matter of the viral quality of a neologism. The fact is that it is the notion of the victimary, not just its name, that is absent from contemporary political discourse.

I have devoted many of these Chronicles to the victimary and to the White Guilt that drives it, and I don’t want to rehash this material here. It is obvious why the victimary Left, which under Obama more than ever deserves the name of victimocracy, cannot accept the legitimacy of a category that denies its raison d’être. But the lack of more than anecdotal reflection on the victimary by conservatives, despite their sensitivity to the difference between combating discrimination and denouncing “victimization,” deserves comment and correction. Conservatives reject arguments of the “disparate impact” variety, but they fail to remark that seeing every group disparity a priori as a form of victimage is not a tactic but the essence of the contemporary Left, its unique moral argument, which since the fall of the Soviet Union has replaced the Marxist postulate of the historical inevitability of communism.

Blaming the victim is the key polemic accusation of victimary thinking. It participates in that tautological rhetoric that Barthes defined back in 1953 as écriture or “writing” in Le degré zéro de l’écriture, when the important thing was to point out the self-confirming (and thus fundamentally unscientific) nature of scientific socialism as preached by the Communist Party, then and for quite a while afterward the largest party in France and Italy. Écriture referred to a mode of discourse that presupposes what it pretends to assert empirically. This can be done in ways more or less crude, but always fallacious. Blaming the victim is a step up from off the pigs! or haters gotta hate because its presuppositional element doesn’t simply denigrate its opponent; it presupposes rather a two-place structure that would otherwise be problematic. No doubt to call my opponent a “hater” implies a (presumably innocent) object of hatred; even calling him a “pig” implies that his porcine acts have an undeserving object—in a word, a victim. But blaming the victim has the advantage of foregrounding the word victim itself as the necessary element in the binary; and the stigma placed on blaming also makes clear the victimary system’s requirement that we assess an interaction not between two subjects (who would prima facie share responsibility for the outcome) but between an agent and a patient, an oppressor and a victim, only the second of whom can be named explicitly. It is notable, for example, that in the recent denunciations of “sexual assault” in the military and on campus, the “epidemic” nature of which reflects the generosity of the criteria used to determine its prevalence, the perpetrators remain almost entirely implicit. Not only is the idea of due process, innocent until proven guilty, set aside, but what one might expect from those incensed by the prevalence of sexual assault, the desire to punish the guilty, is brought up only in the most general terms, as if the least personification of a perpetrator would be to risk allowing him to bask in the victimary glow that surrounds, for example, the murderers on Death Row. All attention is focused on the victim, the object of outraged sympathy.

Hostility to blaming the victim is morally tautological: if one is a victim devoid of agency then one shouldn’t be blamed. When one is accused of blaming the victim, one is in fact objecting to this unproblematically univocal attribution of victimary status, modeled on the opposition between the Nazis and their (archetypically Jewish) concentration camp prisoners. The idea of blaming the Jews in the gas chamber for their fate arouses the indignation that is the source of the power of “blaming the victim”—and arouses as well the indignation the accusation provokes in those who see through it.

The right resists the victimary, but is reluctant to understand it as such. One continually reads in its critiques that PC operates on the principle that “one must not offend anyone.” Yet this definition is more than half false; one can in fact offend almost anyone so long as that person is not a member of an established victim group. One can insult Christians but not Muslims—all the more when Muslims are slaughtering Christians all over Africa and the Middle East. Those Christians, victims in the normal sense of the term, are not victims in the victimary sense, since they belong to the West’s hegemonic religion. Similarly, one can offend with impunity whites (but not “minorities”), men (but not women), “straights” (but not more exotic sexualities), Jews/Israelis (but not Arabs/Palestinians), and of course, Republicans (but not Democrats). No doubt some observers of PC are more considerate than others of members of the “hegemonic” side of the binary. But there is nothing particularly political about merely being considerate of others; it only begins to be called PC when it is indeed victimary. And what makes it victimary is the unspoken assumption that a given disparity of a victimary group (in income, in representation in a prestigious role, in life expectancy…) is to be blamed on their victimary status, that is, on their oppressors and not on themselves.

One would think that the right could understand the left; know your enemy. But conservative thinkers tend to perceive the left essentially as do-gooder totalitarians. Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism (Doubleday, 2008) emphasized the parallel between the current left and not communism but fascism, which was after all a self-declared form of socialism, opposed to the traditional European monarchist-landowning right. The Left is seen as the party of governmental authority, which it would bend to the end of “social justice” by restricting the freedoms of “capitalists,” the 1%, etc. The Left’s style of government involves increasing taxes, creating greater dependency through welfare benefits, decreasing the role of the military, increasing regulation of the economic sector, and today, drastically reducing the role of American power on the world stage, while increasing its power base by letting in more potentially Democratic Latin American immigrants, providing free contraceptives to young women, etc. But the single rule of thumb of progressive ideology that in principle determines all these policies is that when groups are unequal on some point of comparison and the inferior one has historically been less privileged, then the inferior one collectively and its members taken individually are the victims of the superior. The contrast with Marxism, whose political discrediting should not be taken as a refutation of all its insights (as residual European post-Marxists recognize better than Americans), means that whereas even today one defines the European left in ideological terms, the American Left is just seen as “progressive,” as indeed it sees itself.

“Progressive” policy, one might reply, whether it resembles fascism, socialism-communism, or both, is victim-focused by definition; the Left is the party of the less fortunate, tending to look with more sympathy than conservatives on those who claim to need help—or in GA terms, emphasizing the reciprocal moral model over firstness. But to understand the process of victimary thinking is to become sensitive to its radicalization, which began with the New Left in the 1960s and reached its critical mass after the end of the Cold War. What was in the days of Roosevelt and Truman a tendency within the liberal-democratic political polity that implicitly realized that it would be checked by opposing forces and therefore could not avoid compromising its ideological purity, has gradually become a dogma—one that strangely complements the very different dogma espoused by radical Islam in considering those who disagree with it as not merely mistaken, but as Charles Krauthammer puts it, “evil.”

To call the political motivation of the Left victimary is to recognize, not that the Left has a coherent ideology on the model of Marxism, but that it has something yet more powerful, a single dogmatic criterion for resolving all issues of human interaction, a single-valued ethic. Of course as a real-world institution in what is still a democracy, the Democrats cannot act entirely on the basis of this single criterion. But it informs their world-view as a whole and their actions wherever possible. To view the world in victimary terms, with the West and especially the US (and Israel) as the oppressors of the rest, poses a danger to the survival of not only what is left of the post-WWII Pax Americana but the very fabric of Western liberal democracy—modern Western Civilization itself.

IS is merely the most aggressive of a number of radical Islamic movements seeking to impose on the entire world the rule of the one true religion. The beginning of what appears to be a long-term global struggle between Islam(ism) and the West offers an occasion to reflect on the dangers of victimary thinking for us as participants in this contest.

Victimary thinking is for all but victim groups themselves a product of White Guilt, and for those afflicted by this guilt, strict Salafi Islam offers a refuge from it. The secret of the attractiveness of radical Islam even for those with no desire to saw off heads is that it is the one social form that is totally free of victimary thinking. Someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata in the halls of our universities because she presents herself, however nobly and courageously, as a victim of Islam. Islam has many victims, but it does not admit their seeing themselves as such. The West’s victimary Left respects this. Those whose heads or hands are chopped off, those who are stoned, let alone girls married off before puberty and made to wear niqabs and burkas, are not victims; their punishment or confinement is according to God’s law. And for members of the West’s (non-sexual) victimary groups themselves, the attraction of Islam is even greater; fighting for Islamic world domination is a fitting response for a victim of Western oppression.

Western victimary dogmatism considers criticism of any aspect of Islam as an act of cultural oppression. While it refuses to recognize the nastiness of Islamic radicalism as very much a part of Islam that many otherwise peaceful Muslims are attracted to, it unquestioningly accepts the Palestinians’ victimary status regardless of their violence and refusal to accept Israel.

In contrast with that of the past, today’s renewed European antisemitism is a form of victimary hostility to the West itself. Whereas the Nazis thought to purify Western culture by purging it of Jews, today’s antisemites want to purge the world of Jews because, at a time when Western nationhood is eaten away by White Guilt, they are the last bastion of the national values of Western culture. The current demographic decline of Europe had clear parallels in the “decadence” of the late Roman Empire: many Western nations are not so gradually committing suicide. In contrast, as I pointed out in my previous Chronicle, an Islamic State will have no problem in keeping up the birth rate.

As readers of these Chronicles will recall, the Hebrews as the discoverers/inventors of monotheism are the archetype of firstness in the West. Christianity liberated monotheism from the historical link with the Hebrew nation by relocating firstness in God himself as Jesus, at the cost of making human firstness always problematic.

Today’s Western world seems increasingly to impose a binary moral choice. Victimary thinking is a radical caricature of Christianity that suspects every instance of firstness of being an act of oppression. Islam, in contrast, rejects the very notion of firstness; it presents itself as the timelessly true religion, not a better or more perfected one. More than ever these two symmetrical moralities agree that the Jews, Western culture’s exemplars of firstness in the naked form of historical priority, are the world’s chief source of discord.

Victimary thinking was born in the Holocaust, and now appears to be leading inexorably back to it. Let us not forget that for the Nazis, the Jews were not innocent victims, but the major source of evil in the world—they were the “Nazis.” And now, faced with the innocent followers of Hamas, the Jews in Israel have become the Nazis once again.

But let us not accuse antisemites of blaming the victim. In human interactions between those beyond the age of reason, there are only agents, whose guilt or innocence, wisdom or stupidity, status of victim or oppressor can be determined only after the fact. A word to the wise should suffice.

Moral equality and firstness, the values that define the human, are implicit in our use of signs, since we can all share them, but only occasionally create new ideas with them. The course of human history has sharpened our anthropological intuition to the point where the current political division between the major parties in the US and generally elsewhere opposes just these two values. True, the Left is cluttered with quasi-religious cults: green energy, “climate change” (the weasel-wordiness of the term must be itself an article of faith; “global warming” expressed a hypothesis; now its believers feel they can express it with greater assurance by deliberately refusing to express it), dietary cults such as anti-gluten, treating homosexuality and transgenderism as genetic reality but ordinary sexuality as “socially constructed,” the war on “micro-aggressions… but such are the inevitable results of a single-valued victimary morality, the hammer for which everything looks like a nail, which never relaxes its vigilance toward those who dare deny it (although not toward those who promote it).

But perhaps this focus on victims is what in fact allows (even in our currently weak economy) for the most productive forms of firstness; most billionaires, I imagine, vote Democrat. This is just a way of saying that the intellectual debate has become increasingly irrelevant; the point is to score rhetorical points that win elections, make people feel good or resentful, reward friends and punish enemies, and meanwhile the system works well or badly for reasons not explicitly dealt with in the debate. This might be considered a “higher” proof of the greater intelligence of the market than of any of its participants and thus a paradoxical demonstration of Hayek-like principles turned against their creators. Imagine a society where any violation of victimary dogma aka PC is severely punished without regard to due process—a world anyone on today’s university campuses already knows—but where the technologically driven economy flourishes, and stigmatized activities such as fracking nevertheless produce great profits. Isn’t that already a fairly good description of our economy? The middle class suffers, but their sufferings lead to votes for a party that excoriates Wall Street while raising stock market values, fights to raise the minimum wage while encouraging Latin American immigration, denounces racial disparities while fighting charter schools in black neighborhoods, and so on. There is a certain cynicism here, but no more than normally in politics. The difference with the past is that the political economy has become too complex to allow for reasoned debate on policy—which explains why the Republicans, who should have all the good arguments against victimary politics, have nearly nothing to say except to denounce their opponents’ lapses into malfeasance and incompetence. Republicans argue with Democrats about the size of government, not about the victimary nature of their politics. For no one in either party can allow themselves to be accused of blaming the victim.

Yet we are not all by ourselves on the planet, working out our problems in a vacuum. Whence the following (hopefully counterfactual) meditation.

While our “national leaders” are still telling us, in the face of nuanced scientific findings (eg, http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/25/study-climate-models-overestimated- global-warming-for-the-last-55-years/ , not to speak of the inexplicable “interruption” in warming over the past 15 years), that “climate change” is the most serious problem facing the world today, the Islamic State has been expanding its frontiers. Large swaths of the Middle East, as our wisest pundit, David P. Goldman (“Spengler”), reminds us, have become like Europe over the course of the Thirty Years’ War that ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, with millions of refugees and thousands of hapless young men with nothing else left to do but join a militia, except that an outcome analogous to the resulting European system of Christian nation-states is not to be expected when the goal of an increasing number of combatants is the establishment of a world-wide Caliphate.

The other day the New Republic had a piece instructing us to eschew the term Islamic extremism; Islamic extremists are just an Islamic version of the extremist-in-general, for any belief system can be taken to extremes, say by those who cling to their guns and religion—a pretty good description of IS, when you come to think of it. The point is to emphasize that Islam, the “religion of peace,” is in no way responsible for any of the evils committed in its name. It’s rather extremism that should shoulder the blame; and along these lines we would do well to recall the late Republican jihadist Barry Goldwater’s remark that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

Assuming our victimary fecklessness is likely to continue at least until 2017, what then assures us that the doomsayers are wrong and that Western Civilization will indeed survive?

Western Civilization, and this is a point that Goldman-Spengler too has made, less theoretically but more historically than I, is a product of the national concept originally discovered/invented by the Hebrews as a means of exit from “compact” societies like that of their Egyptian enslavers. It defines an always tense and paradoxical covenant between a people, by definition particular, and a God who is universal but whose relationship with that particular people is colored by the quality of having been first to recognize God’s universality. Had it been left to the Hebrews/Jews, the national concept could probably not have been generalized and risked being lost. Even had the Jews survived in exile the destruction of their temple and their expulsion from their land, as they in fact did, the national concept once created needed another vehicle to make it flourish among other peoples, and eventually to give birth to the modern world. This new vehicle was Christianity, which, although it may be criticized for glossing over the essential anthropological problematic of firstness, has otherwise both in theory and in practice considerable advantages over Judaism as a “universal” religion.

We’ve all been hearing recently about Sykes-Picot and its ultimately unsatisfactory attempt to bring the Western national concept to the Middle East. IS is the apparent final demonstration that there are no “nations” in this area, no peoples who can conceive on the model of the Hebrews a covenant with God. On the contrary, these are Muslim territories, and for Muslims, particularly Sunnis, God’s covenant is not with peoples but with the Muslim umma that in principle includes the entire world. For we are all “really” Muslims; those who deny this truth may be dealt with more or less severely, but never as equals nor even as stable partners in a “balance of power.” Such doctrines are moot when their believers lack the power to enforce them, but no law of nature prevents the “junior-varsity” Al-Qaedaniks of IS from acquiring this power. Even a serious attempt to acquire it would put the fat and lazy world of Western Civilization in serious jeopardy.

A useful yardstick for the triumph of IS over the West is the power of organized crime. Crime groups such as the Mafia are bound together by a brutally enforced ethic of omertà. Such groups are not nations but subgroups dependent on the larger society; the Sicilian Maffia was originally an “anti-colonial” resistance movement. But despite their limited manpower and antisocial functions, these groups can be very successful. Recent Mexican history has shown how gangs of drug criminals can acquire sufficient power in many parts of the country to become the de facto governing authority, dominating the scene by their willingness to use force. The Islamists’ hardness and brutality should be able to obtain still better results; unlike the criminals, they are held together by a real religion with an elaborate legal code that has shown its ability to organize large social groups in the past. An Islamic State serious about taking over other parts of the world can energize their coercive tactics with a conviction of righteousness and a willingness to sacrifice their lives for the cause. Suicide bombing is a very effective tactic that criminals would never think of using voluntarily.

Thus far, Islamists don’t seem to have begun planning the overthrow of Western Civilization (though I’m sure they’ve been thinking about it), but if as it appears they are allowed to keep their State and consolidate its gains over the next months and years, why should they stop at the Middle East? There is already a large and restive Muslim population in Europe, even whose “native” young people show little patriotism and even less enthusiasm for defending the ethos of their civilization. Indeed, their societies do little to win their loyalty, preferring to let them languish without decent jobs in order to keep money flowing to the pensioners of older generations. A recent survey quoted in the Tablet article “Why the Teenaged Girls of Europe are Joining ISIS” (http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/186397/teenage-girls- europe-isis) shows that ISIS is much more popular in Europe than in the Middle East: fully 27% of French young people aged 18-24 declare a favorable opinion of it, a figure that must include a good number of “racial” French or souchiens—maybe even a few Jews. Even if the favorable answers are mostly provocation, that is already frightening enough. How about 27% declaring a favorable opinion of Hitler? Indeed, in today’s Europe, Adolf might well do better than that.

Spengler’s hopeful solution to this crisis in his 2011 How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) (Regnery) is that Islamic countries are experiencing a radical decline in birthrates, whereas Israel (and some sectors of the United States) are not. But on this point, I find his view of the future too optimistic—admittedly, his book was written before our Iraq-Syria policies had led to the current debacle. His title’s parenthesis takes note of the rapid decline in birth rates in Muslim countries where the women have been touched by modernity, the most striking case being that of Iran. No doubt educated Muslim women will tend to evolve toward the same below-replacement natality as European women, while Israeli women consider it a patriotic duty to maintain an above-replacement level. But in the kind of society run by IS, women will not be “modern”; heavily veiled and barred from receiving more than a rudimentary education (boko haram, as they say), they will be married off young and expected to bear children “for the cause,” and heaven help those who find this fate unfulfilling. A self-confident Islamic State will return women to the role they played in traditional societies of the past, and given the advances in modern medicine in which they will share, it can easily grow its population at will at a time when Europe, Japan, and even the United States increasingly find producing children, particularly more than two per family, more trouble than it’s worth. Nor will all the women in question be unwilling captives; let us recall the title of the Tablet article quoted above.

I probably won’t be around for the final debacle, but I am beginning to think of it as a serious possibility. The spectacle of Iraqi army units throwing down their weapons, tearing off their uniforms, and running away from militia bands a fraction of their size makes me wonder about the fate of a future assault on a European capital. After all, it is just when IS is becoming powerful that the US has been slashing its military and that our all-but-demilitarized European allies, rather than increasing theirs, have begun recognizing “the Palestinian state.” Just when militant Islam in its most brutal form is on the march, “Western Civilization”—although I hesitate to associate the current state of Europe with this noble concept—decides to promote “peace in the Middle East” by delegitimizing-demonizing Israel and promoting the egregious fiction of a “Palestine” that could fulfill Shimon Peres’ dream of living peacefully side by side with Israel—presumably without having to recognize its right to exist or the historic connection of its territory with the Jews. After all, given that Hamas’ Gaza rockets are just a form of (nearly) peaceful protest against a brutal “occupation,” extending this mode of protest to the West Bank and the area of Lod airport would not prevent the “two nations” from peacefully working out their differences.

But my point here is not about Israel; it is about the fecklessness of the European nations, and without Europe, what exactly is “the West”? One even wonders if Putin, the destroyer of Grozny, the ally of Assad but not of the Islamic State, is not our last hope as a defender of at least an approximation to Western civilization.

Perhaps before the West goes down the tubes it will turn itself around by finally grasping the basic point that my GA colleagues and I have been trying to promulgate for the past thirty+ years about the origin and nature of the human. Western Civilization, based as it is on the Hebrew idea of the Nation, is founded on a delicate balance between the moral model of reciprocity and the necessary ingredient of firstness. The latter continues to function; innovation is anything but dead in the West. But what has been brought near death by the ever more toxic victimary atmosphere is faith in the system itself, in its moral legitimacy. A civilization too obsessed by its internal micro-aggressions to take the trouble to defend itself, that apologizes ever more cravenly to the rest of the world for its superior achievements, will sooner or later generate from among the many who resent its undefended superiority those who will overthrow it.

To conclude, I can do no better than paraphrase Spengler, the old and the new: when civilizations die, it is rarely as a result of conquest from without; most commit suicide. If our so-called civilization had the will, the Islamic State would be crushed in a few weeks. Look at the abject spectacle of Mosul and then think of Stalingrad. If our grandchildren wind up memorizing the Koran and wearing veils, the explanation will be suicide, not conquest.

The original idea behind Generative Anthropology before it was called GA was to provide a minimal, or in other terms, a maximally parsimonious theory of the origin of human language, and thereby of the human itself. But in the beginning I emphasized this minimalism above all as a feature of the theory, and given that all theories strive to be parsimonious, the application of minimality to language itself was not as salient as it might have been. Nonetheless, the most important feature of this minimal theory was that it began with a minimal construct of language.

Minimality has not been a feature of the latest trend in “explanations” of language. Since Terrence Deacon’s 1997 The Symbolic Species, it has been generally recognized that human language is not a development of animal signals but something entirely different. But the current studies of the connection between words and motor neurons, etc., make no real attempt to understand what specific feature distinguishes human language from animal signals. In all this “empirical” study, no one seems to consider the obvious idea that the first language must have been minimally simple, one step removed from animal signals, and could not have depended on a “language module” for its implementation. But if this is true, then studying language in the 21st century to find out the essence of human language is about as far from parsimony as one can possibly get.

Alas, this point has the vast disadvantage of being purely logical, “analytic,” inherent in the problem rather than in its “empirical” solution. Instead of doing experiments to find out what parts of the brain light up when different ideas are expressed, a research mode that Raymond Tallis never tires of mocking, it would pay those who study the question of the origin and nature of human language to close up the lab and sit down at their desks and THINK for a moment about what specifically it is that distinguishes human language from animal communication—even before, as in GA, concocting a hypothetical scenario to explain how this development might have come about.

Let us reflect on the kind of animal interactions that I assume led to the originary scene. Ethologists may correct me, but it seems pretty clear that an animal has an essentially linear relationship to objects in the world, on a gradient of highly attractive to highly avoidable. Attractive does not mean desirable; it means inducing me to attempt to appropriate it. Thus if I’m not hungry, I won’t recognize the desirability of a piece of food. This does not exclude behaviors for storing up food for later, as do squirrels, but it would be inappropriate to attribute such behaviors to an intuition of desirability (“if I hadn’t just had dinner I’d really like to eat that acorn”) rather than to conditioning either inherited or, occasionally, individual.

The need to avoid conflict promotes, as we have seen, pecking-order hierarchies of food (and sex) distribution. But the presence of an inhibiting rival is part of the overall scene in which the object is located. Until, in our “Girardian” schema of hominization, the contravening factor of mimetic attraction overcomes the inhibitory power of a stronger rival, leading to the breakdown of the Alpha-Beta hierarchy, the object’s attractiveness is necessarily diminished by the rival’s presence, as it would also be diminished by the presence of a dangerous member of a rival species. An animal needs no “theory of mind” to experience a fellow as an obstacle.

What kind of “language” is necessary to such encounters? Perhaps the higher-ranked animal will make a gesture such as beating its chest that signals its higher status to its inferior, who may respond by a gesture of submission. Here the interaction between the two individuals does not involve the object that occasioned their potential rivalry. The point is to assert dominance, and whether it be with an end to food or sexual favors or a better sleeping place is for the moment immaterial. There is no true ternary relationship, no “joint attention” to the object. I don’t deliberately show my rival that I’m interested in the object; indeed, to do this (as opposed to signaling the presence of an object, attractive or dangerous, as do the famous vervet monkeys with their varied vocabulary of signals) would require language. This is a point easy to miss, and when Tallis talks about pointing as a step beyond animal behavior, he is mistaken only to the extent that, I think out of a kind of sacred modesty, he presupposes an unnecessary and indeed concretely inconceivable tertium quid between the animal and the human, a “pointing-but-prelinguistic” stage. Détrompez-vous: language doesn’t need “words”: a gesture of pointing to initiate joint attention is already (and not “always already”) linguistic, even if etymology suggests that linguistic “utterances” must be verbal.

I think that once one takes this in, the originary hypothesis is just common sense, even if in “empirical” reality it is understood by something like 0.0000002% of the world population. (Which should, I think, make those of you who really take GA seriously feel pretty good about yourselves.) The only way we can assume that pointing will be initiated rather than grasping or withdrawing (which is not the same as deferring) is out of an inhibitory fear. But in the absence of any Alpha to defer to, and in the absence of conflictual movement toward the object, the configuration is meta-stable, and pointing-to the object would become a sign in the service of reinforcing that stability by showing, in effect, that the configuration has a “value” in itself, not simply as a stage toward the object’s appropriation. The sign, in other words, makes itself the matter at hand.

And that, very simply, is what language is and does: it makes itself the point of behavior that previously had no “point” since it did not exist as a theme for anyone to point to. Tallis’ thatter is what-is-the-point, and although reference to pointing here is a pun, it is justified by the catachretic trace of the parallel between (I imagine) the point of a sword and of a finger; if I stick you with either one, I get your attention. All of a sudden, the members of what was previously just a crowd with a hierarchy are all simultaneously motivated to maintain a communal configuration in which absence of conflict around a desirable object (which for the first time we can actually call desirable) has become a value in itself, a “pleasure” in the absence of pain, but also, we should imagine, a sense of numinousness in the non-instinctual contemplation of the object, a state that the intentional sign embodies in what we may call a memory-trace.

I could go on, as I have elsewhere, but I think this is pretty close to explaining the difference between language and pre-linguistic states, between the prehuman and the human. The space between the participants and the object is an empty space, a néant, that is traversed only by language but not in reality. Thinking the object, thematizing it, thatting it, charges that space with an interdictive energy that we call the sacred. It is this space that by deferring the appetitive presence of the object allows us to intend it in a human, signifying way.

Thus the famous deconstructive critique of presence is both productively and disastrously ambiguous. Presence in the human sense is precisely not the kind of presence that obtains in an animal’s field of sensual awareness; it exists only as deferral, whereas presence in the sense of “immediacy,” whether controlled as in ritual or occasioned by loss of control as in Girard’s scenes of lynch-mob violence, is always accomplished by filling in and effectively abolishing this space of representation—a space that elsewhere in the animal kingdom simply does not exist. The human scene is a scene of representation, of which language is the most universal, least energy-consuming form. And thus we can define violence— in its exclusively human form, not the mere aggression of “nature raw in tooth and claw”—as the breakdown of the scene of representation, the overwhelming with action of the néant in which the sole expense of human energy should be that of the sign.

Perhaps this is a good moment to formulate a proper response, after a two-year delay, to Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s showing of a provocative mob scene from Fritz Lang’s Fury in a session at the joint COV&R-GASC meeting in Tokyo in 2012. The clip began with the sheriff facing down the mob gathered with the intention of breaking into the jail to lynch a murder suspect. At first he cows them with his legitimate authority, but then a rock is thrown from beyond the group gathered immediately around the sheriff, and this gives the signal for the mob to attack.

At the time, I reacted as though this was being proposed as a kind of Girardian originary scene, which wasn’t really the point. On reflection, I was struck by the fact of the stone’s thrower being outside the “stage” of the event, making it essentially different from the adulteress-stoning scene in John 8 where Jesus prevents the throwing of the “first stone.” In the Lang scene, the “first stoner” is anonymous and not accountable, the scene is open, not closed, and we have a “mimetic crisis” that is the inverse of the orderly, ritualized execution that Jesus’ gesture paralyzes.

The more general point I would make now is that the breakdown of order comes as the result of a violation of the néant that is figured here by the empty zone between the sheriff and the immediate crowd. This physical violation is precisely not that of a human but of a projectile. Although apes occasionally throw things, they do not use projectiles as weapons in a systematic way. This use (and Tallis would no doubt agree) is itself a product of human intentionality; it is not an instinctive movement toward the object nor an example of animal “tool” use. In order to take aim at something, we must first stand back from our appetitive movement toward it; we intend it. The possibility of peacefully intending the sacred object via the sign is also the possibility of violently intending it through a missile. My difference from Girard on this point is “merely” to insist that the latter intention is dependent on the former.

Jean-Pierre’s scene thus illustrates the dark underside of human intentionality and the deferral that occasions it. The scene of representation is the sacred space in which the new dimension of the sign originates and is shared and internalized as a cultural memory within a universally maintained history recallable by each individual as the memory of the sign. But this same space is by the same token a potential space of violence. Deferral is not demise; to defer violence is also to accumulate it, just as in the originary hypothesis the final sparagmos releases the deferred appetitive energy. More specifically, the space of deferral is vulnerable to its deliberate violation from “outside,” that is, from the profane world that inevitably surrounds the sacred inner space—and that is ritually excluded in the stoning scene in John. Just as the erotic exists only as a transgression of the néant, so does mob violence. These uniquely human categories all exemplify the power of the paradigm manifested in the originary hypothesis.

If as a result of this discussion, another 0.0000001% or so can be brought to this realization, it will have accomplished its object. Let no one say we lack either faith or patience.